April 7th Christopher Woods (Birth)


Christopher Wood (1900 – 1930) became a member of the Newlyn Group of artists.

Brought up in near Liverpool he was educated at Marlborough College and then began to study medicine before changing track to pursue his art career having met Augustus John (January 4th) at Liverpool University, who encouraged him to be a painter.  He travelled extensively in France at the invitation of the French art collector Alphonse Kahn, co-founder of the Galeries Lafayette, and trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he met Jean Coctaeu, Pablo Picasso, the composer Georges Auric and the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev.

When working in Cornwall, his mother’s home county, Wood, having become a friend of Ben Nicholson (February 6th) and Winifred Nicholson and through their friendship met Alfred Wallis (August 29th) on a trip to St Ives, and whose primitivism influenced Woods’ own style, encouraging him to paint coastal scenes partly also since, as he claimed, he had got his love of the sea and boats from his Cornish roots.

After an unsuccessful exhibition in London, Wood threw himself under a train.  His death though judged to be ‘suicide whilst of unsound mind’ was, in deference to his mother, recorded in the press as accidental.

 

 

 

   
 



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