Patrick Caulfield, R.A. (1936-2005)

You'll be sick if you spend all your time indoors takes its title from a line in a poem by Franco-Uruguayan poet Jules Laforgue. Blending oblique observations and associations, Laforgue's poetry was an important influence on later poets such as T.S. Eliot. In the late 1960s Caulfield was commissioned to make a set of 22 screenprints to illustrate a limited edition book, using Laforgue's poetry as his inspiration, and the present work inspired one of these prints. Caulfield observed: 'They are not illustrations but complementary images. There are few visually descriptive lines in Laforgue. The images suggest the things I have imagined the poet seeing when he wrote the poem'.