Sir Gerald Kelly (1879-1972) Lord Reith of Stonehaven, circa 1969-1971

oil on canvas 66 x 51 cm

Private Collection, UK

Lord Reith was appointed Director-General of the BBC in 1923. Some years later the BBC commissioned an official portrait of Lord Reith from the Sir Gerald Kelly, for which this work is a preliminary sketch. Ploddington Art Advisory is pleased to have acquired a work of such insight by a portraitist of such renown.

Throughout the work, Kelly uses varied brushstrokes to evoke the figure of Lord Reith. The collar and shoulders of his dark jacket are defined by swift and dramatic brushstrokes, and whilst his likeness is more deeply painted, it is no less economical. Kelly uses the canvas’ base colour to model Reith’s face, particularly visible around the temple and eyes. Lord Reith’s nose is brought to the foreground with bold impasto. 

Though this work is testament to Kelly’s fluency, Reith’s right shoulder shows some pentimenti - brushstrokes which have been changed. His right shoulder exists in three iterations, executed as Kelly thought through the composition. Whilst this sketch differs much from the final portrait, now in the BBC’s collection, Kelly clearly thought the work important as it remained in his personal collection up until his death. 

RICHARD SMITH (1931-2016) Cowboy Boots, circa 1969-1971

collage on card 52 x 64 cm

Private Collection, UK

Richard Smith’s Cowboy Boots is one of Ploddington’s recent purchases. Smith completed the collage as a design for a pair of boots to be made by the work’s original owner. At the ankle, the boots feature a pattern derived from Smith’s Kite Paintings, first exhibited in New York in 1971.

From the early 1960s Smith was at the forefront of British Pop Art and abstraction, merging the aesthetics of cultural consumerism and high-modernism. Smith’s Kite Paintings garnered particular acclaim for their extension into the third dimension, not unlike Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases two decades prior. In keeping with his interest in both abstration and Pop Art, it is significant that here Smith reintegrates motifs of high-modernism into the everyday boot.

  • Keith Vaughan

    Untitled Sketch

  • Ben Nicholson

    Fragment of a Tuscan Cathedral,1966

  • Allan D. Mainds

    Portrait of a Lady, 1920s