John Banting (1902-1971)
Hand and Leaves was shown in Banting’s first solo exhibition at the Wertheim Gallery. Lucy Wertheim was a highly influential collector and patron. In 1930, she opened the Wertheim Gallery in Burlington Gardens, opposite the Royal Academy, and quickly established a reputation for showcasing the most modern and radical British artists. She gave Banting his first solo exhibition in 1931, and it provided for many their first experience of Surrealist art in Britain. In her memoir, Adventure in Art (1947), Wertheim described the exhibition as one of the outstanding exhibitions of the early days, adding that ‘Surrealist painting at that time was so rare in London as to create a sensation’.
This was one of two paintings that were purchased by Banting’s friend, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. Lehmann subsequently commissioned the artist to paint a mural at her Oxfordshire home, Ipsden House which included six panels for the entrance hall, depicting human-like silhouettes, as well as a ceiling decoration. Banting also designed a curtain in a Surrealist style made in honey- coloured hessian with an enormous appliquéd male figure outlined with giant fabric tape-measures. Lehmann and her brother, John (who joined Leonard and Virginia Woolf as managing director of the Hogarth Press) were important patrons to Banting during these early years, and he was, in Rosamond’s words ‘a true bohemian lovable eccentric’.
With its muted palette and flat, pared-back composition, Hand and Leaves signals something of a departure from Banting’s style. And yet within the tender curves of the foliage, or the pop of colour from the painted thumbnail, one discovers details that are incredibly characteristic of the artist’s mature work.
Provenance
Collection of Rosamond Lehmann, thence by descent
Exhibitions
Paintings by John Banting, Wertheim Gallery, London, April 10 – 29, 1931, cat. no. 15