Christopher Wood

Christopher Wood (1901–1930) was one of the most original British painters of the interwar period. In a career lasting barely a decade, he developed a highly personal style combining the influence of modern French painting with the directness of folk and naïve art, creating landscapes, harbour scenes and figure paintings of remarkable intensity.

Born near Liverpool, Wood briefly studied architecture and medicine at Liverpool University before deciding to become an artist. He moved to London in 1920 and soon afterwards to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. Through his friendships and social circle there he encountered many of the leading figures of the European avant-garde, including Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Serge Diaghilev.

Wood travelled widely through Europe and North Africa during the early 1920s, while continuing to divide his time between France and Britain. By the middle of the decade he had begun to establish himself in London and in 1926 joined both the Seven and Five Society and the London Group.

The Redfern Gallery was connected with Wood from an early stage in his career. He exhibited at the gallery in 1925 alongside Paul Nash, beginning an association that would become especially important after his death.

Wood became particularly close to Ben and Winifred Nicholson, with whom he exhibited and travelled. In 1928 he joined them in Cornwall, where he and Ben Nicholson encountered the self-taught painter Alfred Wallis in St Ives. Wallis’s uncompromisingly direct depictions of boats and harbour life had a profound effect on both artists and helped Wood move towards the simplified, deliberately naïve language for which he is now best known.

Wood painted extensively in Cornwall and Brittany during the final years of his life. Harbours, fishing boats, churches and small coastal settlements became recurring subjects. His paintings from this period combine compressed perspective, flattened form and muted, often chalky colour with a strong underlying emotional charge.

His first one-man exhibition was held at Arthur Tooth & Sons in London in 1929, followed in 1930 by a joint exhibition with Ben Nicholson at Galerie Georges Bernheim in Paris. Wood died at Salisbury in August 1930, aged only twenty-nine.

The Redfern Gallery played a major role in establishing Wood’s posthumous reputation. In 1938 it organised the first large-scale retrospective of his work at the New Burlington Galleries, bringing together hundreds of paintings, drawings and watercolours. The exhibition was accompanied by Eric Newton’s substantial monograph on the artist and was seen by tens of thousands of visitors.

That same year Wood’s work was shown in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Redfern continued to exhibit him over subsequent decades, including solo exhibitions in 1941, 1948, 1959 and 1965, helping to maintain and reassess his reputation long after his death.

Wood’s work is now held in major public collections in Britain and internationally, and his paintings of Cornwall and Brittany remain among the most immediately recognisable images of British modernism between the wars.