Shoal of Fish
Watercolour and gouache on paper. Signed and dated '53'.
380mm x 540.5 mm
(14 3/4 x 21 1/4 inches).
Literature: A. Peat & B. Whitton, John Tunnard, His Life and Work, Aldershot, 1997, cat. no. 618, Pl. 40, p.184.
Exhibitions: I Surrealisti, Palazzo Reale, Milan, 15th May-17th September, 1989; Sea, Sail, and Shore, Chichester, The Tudor Room, The Bishop’s Palace, Festival Exhibition, June-July 1991, No. 25.
Sandy, Bedfordshire 1900 ~ 1971 Penzance
John Tunnard studied design at The Royal College of Art from 1919 until 1923. From 1923 to 1929 he worked as a designer and adviser for textile and carpet manufacturers. However, in 1929 he took up painting and became a part-time teacher of design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London. He also moved to Cornwall where he set up a hand-block silk printing business with his wife. His early landscapes were romantic but from the mid-1930s, under the influence of Klee and Miró, his work became more abstract and began to demonstrate his interest in plant and animal life and geology. He joined the Surrealists in 1937 and became a great friend of Peggy Guggenheim's, exhibiting with her at Guggenheim Jeune, London, in March 1939. At the end of the show Peggy bought his oil painting entitled PSI, executed in 1938. Apparently, years later, Alfred Barr wanted to buy it from her for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, but Peggy would not part with it!1 Paintings done at this time, such as PSI and Fulcrum, Tate Britain, London, included shapes reminiscent of both Surrealist sculpture and modern technology.
He settled on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall in 1933 where he became an expert field botanist and collected rare insects for the British Museum. During the Second World War, Tunnard worked for a while as a coastguard and after his move to the tiny Cornish fishing cove, Cadgwith, darting fish, sea birds' eggs and decaying sea weed feature prominently in his work. His passion for nature led him to form the Grumbla Club, in the early 1950s, with three like-minded friends - Sir Samuel Hoare, Rudolph Glossop and Neil Treseder. Their geographical excursions together inspired Tunnard's work of this period: groups of wheeling birds and underwater subjects such as our shoal of fish.
In our watercolour, the lively, abstract surface pattern of the waves combines with the vibrant movement of the seemingly very large fish gathering around two partially submerged and leafless trees. One's eye is caught between the opposite extremes of pattern and reality and we are instantly reminded of the artist's early career as a designer of textiles. It has been suggested that his rhythmical designs were in part due to his experience as a jazz musician.2
1. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, exh. cat., Arts Council, Tate Gallery, 31 December 1964 to 7 March 1965, p.36, cat. no. 40 illus. and Mary V. Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim, Mistress of Modernism, London, 2005, p.137.
2. Ann Jones, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2005, under Tunnard, John (Samuel) and John Tunnard, ed. M. Glazebrook, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1977.
