Jerwood Gallery

Christopher Wood (1901-1930), The Bather (c.1925-6). Purchased in 1993
Image © the artist’s estate.

Born near Liverpool, Christopher (‘Kit’) Wood first showed an interest in drawing while bedridden during his recovery from septicaemia from 1915 to 1918. As an Architecture student at Liverpool University he met Augustus John who encouraged him to be a painter and in 1921 he studied at the Academie Julian in Paris. He immersed himself for some years in Paris’s fashionable artistic scene, meeting artists such as Picasso and Cocteau through his lover Antonio de Gandarillas (Wood was bisexual). In 1926 he formed a friendship with Ben and Winifred Nicholson which opened up new artistic paths and with them he joined the 7 and 5 Society and shared his first major exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1927. An opium addict, he tragically died in 1930 after falling or throwing himself under a train at Salisbury station.

The Bather, reclining attractively in her striking red swimsuit, is remarkably similar in pose and attire to the figure on the left hand side of a six-panelled screen, Beach Scene with Bathers, Pier and Ships which Wood painted in 1925. The background of the painting appears to show the lighthouse, harbour wall and outlined houses of St Ives. In August 1926 Wood had travelled to Cornwall with Gandarillas, visiting the Isles of Scilly and Penzance before reaching St Ives in early September, where Wood stayed on alone until October. He wrote, ‘Cornwall is beautiful, rather austere, but I think that if I am here long enough I shall paint good things’.

A few years after Christopher Wood’s tragic early death an ‘Exhibition of Complete Works’ was held at the Redfern Gallery in 1938 in which The Bather was included. Other major works by the artist, including A Fisherman’s Farewell (1928), also featuring the harbour of St Ives, are in the collection of the Tate in London.