ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 24th September 2025

30 13 MAINIE HARRIET JELLETT (1897-1944) Cubist Male Nude in Landscape (c.1921) Oil on canvas, 61 x 46cm (24 x 18¼’’) € 20,000 - 30,000 Mainie travelled to Paris in early February 1921 to study with the French painter André Lhote. She would remain under his tutelage for ten months and during that time filled numerous sketchbooks with life drawings, studies of old master paintings, landscapes and portraits. Her work of this period is infused with an intense focus on the human form, movement of the body, while also adopting the angular and geometric cubist inspired compositions. From the sketches she made, she would work them up onto a stretched canvas. Evidence of the square grids used to help with scaling up the image can be seen in this present work in the sharp lines of the tree branches, vegetation and the pedestal on top of which the figure sits. A very similar example to this work, sold in these rooms (Important Irish Art, May 2006, lot 105) depicted a female nude figure in a cubist landscape. The background scenes are not identical; the female study employs sharper and more geometric angles while this example has a softer appearance. In this present work the male nude sits playing a violin, the bow held in his right hand. Instruments appear regularly in cubist works of the period, figures playing gui- tars, lutes and mandolins. Here Jellett has maintained the integrity of the object, rather than fracturing it into multi- ple facets and perspectives. Her sketches from this period reveal a strong grounding in anatomy which is clearly evi- dent in both works where Jellett depicts the figures posed in traditional life model stances. She renders the bodies of figures in a more muscular and defined manner, drawing inspiration from the distinctive nudes painted by Picasso and Braque. The handling of the background is very reminiscent of the landscape scenes painted by Paul Cezanne in the modula- tion of the tone and colour. The use of quick short brush- strokes setting the composition into motion as the light shifts and moves across the canvas. Lhote was fascinated by the work of Cezanne and was determined to explore, through his own paintings, the problems of how to present a representational scene, the natural world, a human figure within specific constraints of the picture plane. The tension between nature and pictorial construction is evident in his work Paysage au Cheval Blanc , 1912, (Private Collection). Jellett, along with Evie Hone would eventually leave the Lhote academy to study with Albert Gleizes, becoming aware of the limitations of Lhote’s practice and desiring further progression of an abstract cubist style which also had essential social and religious convictions attached to it. Their shared relationship as artists working in Paris in the early 1920s was highlighted in the recent National Gallery of Ireland’s exhibition, The Art of Friendship . Niamh Corcoran, August 2025