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Kenneth Rowntree:
Morning Garden
Framed (ref: 6776)
Gouache
19 3/4 x 25in. (50 x 64 cms).
Tags: Kenneth Rowntree gouache
Provenance: Miss Wissler, 1978
This painting is accompanied by a letter from Kenneth Rowntree to Miss Wissler, thanking her for the purchase of ''Morning Garden'' from the 1978 exhibition at Heslington Hall, North Yorkshire.
Ravilious had been one of Rowntree’s tutors at the Ruskin School, Oxford, in the early 1930s and was to remain the single most enduring influence on his figurative work.
Rowntree first met Ravilious when he enrolled as a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford, where the latter was teaching part-time, and his example remained an enduring influence throughout the younger man’s life. Their friendship prompted the Rowntrees to settle in Great Bardfield at the beginning of the Second World War and it was memories of Great Bardfield that inspired the School Print, Tractor and Landscape, which proved to be one of the most popular exhibits in the ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibitions at the V&A in 1946 and continues to have enduring appeal. Peyton Skipwith, Country Life, Stylistic Switchbacks, August 2015
Rowntree designed his own frames, often using, for works on paper, a moulding favoured by Ravilious with a wooden slip. For oil and acrylic paintings he favoured a tray-frame within which images would float over a hessian ground. In a letter to the Tate Gallery Conservation Department (dated 12 March 1985), the artist records that he designed and refinished the surface of his frames many of which were made by Mr Davey, joiner and undertaker of Great Bardfield'. 'The painted slips', he added, 'are part of the original frame'.
