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2 John Tunnard (1900-1971)Figure at Garden Window
Gouache and body colour, 27 x 37cm (10½ x 14½”)
Signed and dated ‘48
€3,000 - €5,000
Now recognized as an important English Surrealist,Nancy first met JohnTunnard around
1960. She was taken to his house in Lamorna Cove by fellow artist Michael Canney, after
Tunnard had admired one of her paintings she had shown in Newlyn.
Tunnard studied at the Royal College of Art while also playing in jazz bands in his youth.
He came to Cornwall in the early 1930’s and it wasn’t long before his first solo exhibition
in the Redfern Gallery in 1933, where his early work showed a strong influence of the
Neo-Romantics such as Graham Sutherland.
Both Tunnard and Nancy Wynne-Jones were inspired by the writing of Herbert Read.
In Nancy’s case is was Read’s
Art Now,
while Tunnard seems to have found a greater
affiliation with
Surrealism
, both published in 1936. Among his many early supporters
was Peggy Guggenheim, who collected Tunnard and gave him a show in her London
Gallery in 1939.
As a conscientious objector, he became an auxiliary with the Coast Guard for the dura-
tion of the War. He later taught periodically at the Penzance School of Art from 1948 to
1965. As well as a painter, Tunnard was a keen observer of natural history and collected
entomological specimens for the British Museum, examples of which can be seen in the
imagery of his painting, especially in his later abstract works. A near recluse in later life,
Tunnard died in Penzance in 1971.
Figure at Garden Window
is a rare example of Tunnard’s early work, which combines both
Neo-Romantic and surrealist elements of painting and is even more unique in that it pre-
sents a figural element in the composition. As is typical for his early painting the present
work rendered in gouache, which according to Read, was the artists preferred medium, as
it gave greater scope for spontaneous and organic forms.
Adam Pearson, May 2015