- Artist
- John Wainwright active 1845–1873
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Support: 662 × 559 mm
frame: 745 × 645 × 60 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Bequeathed by Mrs Bessie Gornall 1982
- Reference
- T03378
Catalogue entry
T03378 FLOWER-PIECE 1867
Oil on canvas 26 1/16 × 22 (662 × 559)
Inscribed ‘John Wainwright 1867’ on stone ledge towards b.l.
Bequeathed by Mrs Bessie Gornall 1982
Prov: ...; Mrs Bessie Gornall
Very little is known about John Wainwright. He exhibited flower pictures and other still life subjects at the British Institution and the Society of British Artists in 1861, giving his address as 6 Hemmings Row, London. A picture of ‘Partridges’ was submitted to the British Institution from an address in Teignmouth in 1865 and a flower-piece to the Society of British Artists from Skerton, Lancaster in 1869. Paintings by him seen on the market in recent years have all been flower-pieces similar in character to T03378, bearing dates between 1859 and 1869. Otherwise his life and work appear to be unrecorded.
The central urn in T03378 with its bacchic figures reappears in a flower-piece by Wainwright dated 1869, the pair to which, also dated 1869, includes a figurated urn similar to the one seen at the top left of T03378 (the pair: sold Sotheby's New York 20 April 1983 lot 71). Another version of the second of these 1869 pictures, also dated that year and called ‘Summer’, was with Frost and Reed, Bristol in 1979 together with its companion ‘Winter’. Wainwright seems to have played many variations on the same theme, itself derived from the eighteenth-century Dutch still-life masters.
Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1986