DAVID FORRESTER WILSON R.S.A. (SCOTTISH 1873-1950)
PASSING DAY
£57,700
Auction: 26 September 2024 From 18:00 BST
Description
Signed, oil on canvas
Dimensions
102cm x 102cm (40in x 40in)
Provenance
Presented by J. A. D. McKean, Esq., 1923.
Footnote
Replete with sinuous lineation and compositional flair, Passing Day is a sensational example of David Forrester Wilson’s early Symbolist work, which earned the artist favour with generations of collectors – including none other than Andy Warhol.
While the precise meaning of Passing Day remains elusive, it might be interpreted as an allegory for the transition from day into night. On the banks of a woodland stream we find a languorous androgyne, possibly representing the ‘Day’, whose russet gown is in tumbling disarray. Their head tips back in a state of ecstasy, slumber - or death. Certainly, they appear to submit to the pallid figure shrouded in black who hovers in the air, possibly representing ‘Night’. The androgyne appears ready to be lifted out of the waking world below, where bright, gem-like wildflowers sprout along the riverbank, and borne into the shadowy world above, where the diminishing twilight transforms the trees and hills into dark indistinction. Between the two worlds, the sentinel heron looks on impassively.
Wilson was an acolyte of the eminent Belgian Symbolist Jean Delville, who had been his tutor at the Glasgow School of Art. Professor Delville encouraged his students to continue their studies on the continent, and accordingly in 1905 Wilson visited Belgium, Italy and France, as well as London. By the time Wilson returned to Scotland word of his prodigious talent had spread, and he was invited by Fra Newbery, head of the Glasgow School of Art, to return to the School as a member of staff. By 1931 Wilson had been appointed Professor of Drawing and Painting, a role he maintained until his retirement from teaching in 1938.
Wilson was commissioned to execute a lunette for the banqueting hall of the Glasgow City Chambers in 1911, alongside other eminent Glasgow painters such as Sir John Lavery, E. A. Walton and George Henry. Wilson’s lunette, titled ‘Time and History’, remains one of his most important works. His Royal Scottish Academy obituary recorded that ‘his painting is characterised by refined drawing and colour and a strong sense of decoration. It is poetical in feeling which he often expressed through allegory. All his work is founded in the best historical traditions’.
When Andy Warhol’s estate was offered posthumously at Sotheby’s in 1988, several works by David Forrester Wilson emerged from Warhol’s personal collection. One particularly significant Symbolist composition went on to sell for $110,000, ten times its pre-sale estimate. Titled ‘The Wind’, the piece portrayed two girls struggling to lead a goat home as the wind pulls at their clothes and hair. Wilson’s unorthodox take on the pastoral idyll must have appealed to Warhol’s tastes, for the painting hung in the boardroom of ‘The Factory’ in New York, and was said to have been one of the Pop Artist’s favourites.