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Untitled (Seated female nude at a dressing table in a room)

Artist: Johnstone, John, ARSA · 1937-2001

Untitled (Seated female nude at a dressing table in a room)

The date, 1963, on the stretcher cross bar may indicate a re-used stretcher. On the back of the work there is a poly-pocket with a hand-written note…

The date, 1963, on the stretcher cross bar may indicate a re-used stretcher. On the back of the work there is a poly-pocket with a hand-written note from Johnstone to a Mr & Mrs Alexander noting a size of a painting (again not mentioned by title) which relates in size to the actual work in question. This letter is dated February 1967. Along with this note there is a newspaper article about the 141st Annual RSA exhibition (April 1967) in which John Johnstone’s name is circled as a recipient of a Latimer Award. [the painting was consigned to auction by Mrs Alexander on her moving into a care home].

The press cutting for the 1966 RSA AX simply states; “John Johnstone perseveres in still, sterile fantasies.”

Reviewing the 1967 RSA Annual Exhibition, Cordelia Oliver wrote that Room 3 was dominated by 4 large canvases (by Gear [the only non figurative one of the 4], Callender, Evans and Johnstone); “But in David Evans’ ‘Diary of a Round Room’ with its Baconish figures, and even more in John Johnstone’s big interior that makes potent emptiness and subject in itself, colour, though subdued, is of tremendous importance.”

If the 1967 letter indeed refers to the present work, and if that is one and the same as the work referred to in Oliver’s review, then it is cat 194, ‘View of an Afternoon from Midnight’ £70.

A letter was sent to the previous owner, Mrs Alexander, c/o Ramsay Cornish by R H Rodger, RSA Docuamentation Offcier followingfthe acquisition of ther work, seeking further clarification on how and when she and her late husband acquired the painting. Sadly no response was ever received.

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