Wilhelmina BARNS-GRAHAM

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was a draughtsman of considerable talent. Her drawings were admired by Ben Nicholson, with whom she shared a similar approach to the depiction of landscape in her works on paper, and the two artists often went on sketching expeditions together. As an obituary of Barns-Graham claimed, ‘As a draughtsman she was second only to Nicholson himself, and was more versatile. Her crisp drawings of rocks, landscapes and buildings continued to underpin all her other work.’ As the artist herself stated in 1989, ‘I have always been interested in drawing and have spent considerable time constructing my compositions…After sessions of drawing, I turn my back on the experience and return to painting in the abstract, where there is a meeting point of abstracted ideas. This swing between outward observation and inward perception, or vice versa, has always increased my awareness.’ A few years later, she added, ‘There is a great excitement and tension before beginning a drawing. The element of shock from the blank paper, the choice of medium, different kinds of pencils on various makes of paper, use of charcoal or chalk, pen and ink or a stick dipped in indian ink. I have always been interested in drawing – it is a discipline of the mind.’

Drawn in 1949, the year that Barns-Graham resigned from the more traditional St. Ives Society of Artists to become one of the founders of the Penwith Society of Arts, the present sheet depicts the 17th century coaching inn known as the Gurnard’s Head, situated near the rocky promontory of the same name on the north coast of the Penwith peninsula in Cornwall, just north of Porthmeor and about six miles west of St. Ives. (The name apparently derives from the headland’s resemblance to the head of a gurnard fish.) A comparable gouache study of the Gurnard’s Head, dated two years earlier in 1947 and of slightly larger dimensions, was recently acquired for the Penlee House Gallery and Museum in Penzance. An oil painting of Gurnard’s Head, also dated 1947, is in the collection of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust in Edinburgh.

A recent owner of the present sheet was the Cornish businessman, Labour politician and collector Paul Myners, Baron Myners CBE (1948-2022). A trustee of the Tate, the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Academy, Myners assembled a fine collection of paintings, sculptures and ceramics by artists who worked in St. Ives and Cornwall.