206 / 272
204
154 HARRY PHELAN GIBB (1870-1948)Coastal Landscape
Oil on canvas, 51 x 76cm (20 x 30’’)
Signed
Exhibited: ‘An Exhibition of 18th-20th Century Paintings’, The Gorry Gallery, March 2007, Cat. No.65.
Born in Northumberland to an Irish mother, Phelan Gibb went to Paris in the early 1900’s. He moved in the same circle as Picasso, Matisse and
many of the Fauves, while Gertrude Stein was his friend and foremost patron. In 1909 Gibb became a Sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and
had a studio off Boulevard Raspail, where he taught Canadian artist Emily Carr.
Gibb exhibited fourteen works in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, alongside artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Cézanne, Brancusi and Jack
B. Yeats. Later that year Gibb was to replicate in Dublin a successful one man held at the Bernheim Jeune gallery in Paris. Organised by Count
Casimir Markievicz and Oliver St. John Gogarty, the exhibition was closed by the police and his pictures were confiscated, no doubt deemed as
blasphemous due to his tendency to paint nudes.
Returning to England with the outbreak of the Great War, Gibb created his own pottery and continued to exhibit in London, while in 1926 he
illustrates 1830, a French novel by surrealist Rene Crevel. Falling on hard times during the 1920’s, he is noted as living in a house marked as
‘Desolate’ on an ordinance survey map. Gibb’s luck changes in 1931 when he meets art dealer Lucy Wertheim, who promotes artist called the
“Twenties group” which included artists such as Christopher Wood, Norah Mc Guinness, Elizabeth Rivers, Kenneth Hall and Basil Rakoczi.
Examples of Gibb’s work can be found at the Tate Britain, the Salford Museum, and the Towner Gallery as well as in the Auckland Art Gallery
in New Zealand. His work was included in the very successful “Moderns” exhibition at IMMA Autumn 2010/Spring 2011 and later that year an
exhibition of his work took place in The Pepper Canister Gallery, Dublin.
€ 1,500 - 2,000