Isabel Codrington (1874-1943)

As a landscape painter, active at a time when artists such as Allan Gwynne Jones, Ethelbert White, Charles Edward Cundall, along with the Spencers and Nashes were seeking to re-invest the English countryside with emblematic power, Codrington occupied a central place in British art during the Twenties. Wild Thyme Farm in particular, with its foreground field of hay-stooks, recalls Gwynne-Jones' Fields near Ruan Minor, 1919 (Manchester City Art Galleries) and John Nash's Gloucestershire Landscape, 1914 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

With Ash Tree Farm (lot 123), Wild Thyme Farm typifies a series of downland landscapes painted by Codrington on the estate surrounding her home at Wistler's Wood in Surrey. Rolling hills lit from the left, casting long shadows, convey the atmosphere of early morning or late afternoon. The Westminster Gazette found these landscapes 'singularly joyous', while Frank Rutter went further, stating that art consisted in the ability to 'transmute the commonplace into an unfamiliar transcendence', and,

'...since her art is based on simple domestic commodities and the homely landscapes and barns of the southern counties, Isabel Codrington has little need of an interpreter. Her pictures speak for themselves, and speak simply but eloquently.'

K Mc