Christopher Wood
Painted Brittany and Cornwall with a deliberate naivety, and was dead under a train at twenty-nine.
Christopher Wood was born at Knowsley in 1901 and went to Paris in 1921, where he moved with remarkable speed into the circle around Picasso, Cocteau and Diaghilev. With Ben and Winifred Nicholson he discovered Alfred Wallis at St Ives in 1928, and the encounter confirmed the direction he was already taking: a deliberate, sophisticated naivety applied to harbours, fishing boats, Breton churches and Cornish villages. He was addicted to opium and increasingly unstable, and in 1930 he died under a train at Salisbury station, at twenty-nine, in circumstances recorded as suicide.
A career of under ten years, so the body of work is small and finite and the Brittany and Cornwall pictures of 1928 to 1930 are the part the market concentrates on. Paintings are unique and are frequently on board. Because he worked fast and died young, a good deal is unsigned or only initialled and dating is often inferred, which puts weight on provenance, exhibition history and the standing literature. Drawings and gouaches are more numerous. Attribution questions arise against contemporaries working in the same manner.
If you own a work by Christopher Wood
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