Composition 1930

Across the Modern British and Irish Art Evening and Day sales, Christie’s are delighted to be offering a group of works by Edward Wadsworth, which are being sold directly from the artist’s family. This group demonstrates Wadsworth’s skill and diversity, and is led by his striking early Self Portrait in a Turban of 1911 (please see lot 14 in the Evening sale), painted the year he won First prize for Figure Painting at the Slade School of Art. In the Day sale, works from all decades of his career are represented: from the earliest work of 1912, a rare oil painting depicting Gran Canaria where he and his wife Fanny spent their honeymoon; to a 1944 tempera painting Straight from the Tap I, which came about as part of a war-time commission from the ICI in which a stylised female figure occupies her domestic environment. These works have remained in the artist’s family since they were painted, and not only do they confirm Wadsworth’s position within the avant-garde of the time, but they also document the more private life of the artist and his family.

For works from this collection please see lot 14 in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening sale on 18 October, and lots 103-108 in the Modern British and Irish Art Day sale on 19 October.


Wadsworth enjoyed close associations with the European avant-garde, mainly through the Parisian dealer Léonce Rosenberg, and he would contribute to the Parisian journal Abstraction-Création, as well as being a founding member of the avant-garde British group Unit One. At the Galérie de l'Effort Moderne exhibition of November 1929, Rosenberg included Wadsworth alongside the leading French artists of the time, including Fernand Léger, which greatly flattered Wadsworth as he admired the painter tremendously. Works by Léger such as Les Clés (Composition), 1928, which Wadsworth himself had acquired (now in the collection of Tate, London), echo his work of this period.

Composition 1930 belongs to a series of paintings in gouache and tempera that took their inspiration from everyday objects, such as protractors, paper clips, clasp knives and screwthread gauges. Wadsworth enjoyed their shapes and forms, and gradually his depictions of them became more and more abstracted, becoming a series of dense decorative patterns. By painting these humble objects from a close perspective, 'the small and undistinguished becomes important and strikingly weighty ... Perhaps Wadsworth is intimating in this series that although so easily and readily overlooked, the clasp knife and the bulldog clip are splendid examples of accomplished industrial design in miniature' (J. Black, Edward Wadsworth, Form, Feeling and Calculation: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, London, 2005, p. 80).

Wadsworth described this painting as 'one of the best, if not the best. Another arrangement of "flying knives", black, grey and white against a red (not pink) background. It comes off absolutely and for the first time this month I am pleased' (letter to Kathleen Dillon, August 1930, cited in J. Black, Edward Wadsworth, Form, Feeling and Calculation: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, London, 2005, p. 80).