The Pond

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

The branch of a tree extends like an arm pointing to the silvery pond in the mid-distance, amid a patchwork of overlaid paint strokes. Mark Gertler uses an abstract arrangement of colours to capture the lush greenness of this quiet spot, emulating the dappled effect of light and colour reflecting on the still surface of the pond.

Gertler briefly abandoned painting for sculpture in 1916. Eventually returning to painting, works such as The Pond reveal the impact of his work with three-dimensional form. Gertler creates a palpable sense of depth by building up his composition with blocks of colour, creating the impression of standing beneath the tree, overlooking the scene.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Gertler was one of many artists and writers associated with the Bloomsbury Circle invited to Garsington Manor, the Oxfordshire residence of renowned literary and artistic patron Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938). By 1916, Gertler had declared himself as a conscientious objector and he spent the rest of the war working on the farm at Garsington. His painting A Merry-Go-Round (1916), expressed his repulsion at the futility of the conflict with its chilling vision of mannequins riding a carousel. The Pond (1917) almost certainly was based on the fish pond at Garsington. The same subject features in the artist’s more geometric composition, The Pool at Garsington (1918), also in the Government Art Collection.

Born in Spitalfields, in London’s East End, Mark Gertler was the son of Polish Jewish immigrants. Encouraged by his parents, he attended art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic and in 1908, won a national art competition. His success attracted financial assistance that allowed him to enter the Slade School of Art where he studied from1908 to 1912. There he befriended artists including Dora Carrington, with whom he had a brief affair. Gertler exhibited in London up to the 1930s, and acquired several aristocratic patrons most notably, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Suffering from depression for much of his life, Gertler committed suicide in his studio in Highgate, London in 1939 and was buried at the Willesden Jewish Cemetery.

Places

Subjects

landscape C20th, grass, tree, pond

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Mark Gertler (1891 - 1939)

Title

The Pond

Date

August - September 1917

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 51.20 cm, width: 61.20 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Leicester Galleries, June 1963

Inscription

verso: THE POND = / Mark Gertler / Aug - Sep, 1917.

Provenance

Collection of Bernard Wilson; from whom purchased by Leicester Galleries, London; from whom purchased by the Ministry of Works in July 1963

GAC number

6134