- Artist
- Ceri Richards 1903–1971
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Support: 1518 × 1518 mm
frame: 1590 × 1590 × 70 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with assistance from the Contemporary Art Society 1956
- Reference
- T00083
Catalogue entry
T00083 CYCLE OF NATURE 1955
Inscr. ‘Ceri Richards 55’ b.r.
Canvas, 59 1/2×59 1/2 (152×152).
Purchased from the Contemporary Art Society Exhibition The Seasons (Grant-in-Aid) with the assistance of the Contemporary Art Society 1956.
Exh: C.A.S., The Seasons, Tate Gallery, March–April 1956 (28), and provincial tour.
Painted for the C.A.S. exhibition of works dealing with The Seasons. The artist wrote of this picture, and of a second later and more abstract version shown at the Redfern Gallery in March–April 1956 (10), that they were ‘two attempts to include the sequence of all four seasons - Birth, Life, Death Cycle - if you like...interpreted figuratively and by the sonority of colour [in the Tate version]’, whereas the other, now in the collection of F. E. McWilliam, ‘expresses this cycle more obscurely (maybe) and more interestingly by colour’. The second painting, which is slightly smaller, measuring 50×50 in., is reproduced in colour in Marcel Brion and others, Art since 1945, 1959, pl.117.
Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II
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