23rd Apr, 2026 10:00
John Tunnard – The Brian Whitton Collection: Their Lives and Work
§ John Tunnard - Plant | oil on gesso prepared board
John Tunnard
(1900-1971)
"Plant",
signed, dated 1959 and inscribed 'TR0.10',
oil on gesso prepared board,
39.5 x 57.2cms, 45 x 62cms in frame.
Exhibition:
- McRoberts & Tunnard, Curzon St, London, November, 1959, No. 11.
- Rome, 1962,
- Redfern Gallery. 'John Tunnard 1900-1971, Paintings and Gouaches', 8th March-2nd April 1977, No. 7;
- Grey College Durham 29th September 2000-22nd October 2000, No. 36.
Provenance:
- Author's family (according to Phillips catalogue). Phillips (London) sale, 10th November 1987, No. 106, E £3,000-£5,000 (unsold);
- Phillips (London), sale 8th March 1988, No. 55, E £2,500-£3,500.
- Gordon Hepworth Galleries, 19th June 1993.
Information Source:
Tunnard ledger TR0.10: "powerhouse'.
Notes:
This was one of fifty works shown at McRoberts and Tunnard in 1959, his first one-man exhibition in many years. This work hints at the Goonhilly radio transmitter on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall. His fascination with rockets and space is shown in this work, as it was in many works throughout the next decade or so.
David Nicholson, writing in Arts News and Reviews, commented on the exhibition:
"His mind belongs to the space age, and amazingly, he has found his own kind of formula for articulating space in an easel picture (Paul Nash, in one of his mannerisms, could also achieve this). John Tunnard’s pictures in Curzon Street are tremendously stimulating. They have, to indulge the awful idiom - architectonic qualities, and at the same time they have imaginative flights into a realm of dimensions other than our own."
In the same edition, assistant editor and art critic Jasia Reichhardt reviewed the exhibition. Reichhardt had spoken to Tunnard, and her comments are illuminating:
"The fact that one can find in a Tunnard painting an image of a future scientific instrument, a geometric pattern, a piece of machinery, is as puzzling to the viewer as to the painter himself. He is fascinated by forms: static and moving - the permutation of their shapes created by a slow-moving object. His attention is arrested by the relationship of an object to its surroundings; he absorbs the effects of changing light, the chiaroscuro of falling night, and all that he has seen and felt, which is later transferred into his paintings."
Reichhard also offers an exciting glimpse into Tunnard‘s working methods:
"John Tunnard does not plan his picture in detail - he says he has a general idea, but the final result, the growth of the composition, is sometimes so unexpected that the artist himself may even be taken aback. Whereas a painting is the result of a considerable time spent on it, John Tunnard, when actually putting the brush to the canvas paints rapidly; nevertheless he may spend days in front of the painting he had begun, moving a dry brush in front of the canvas like a conductor button before he feels the direction that the mass, line and movement ought to take".
Sold for £13,000
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Auction: John Tunnard – The Brian Whitton Collection: Their Lives and Work, 23rd Apr, 2026
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