Oil Painting by Georgette Rondel
Daniel Goddard, Head of the Pictures Department, discusses oil painter Georgette
Rondel (1915-1942) and The White Stag Group, a shared, geographical and cerebral
collective that based itself in Dublin ahead of the sale of an oil painting by the
artist.
Georgette Rondel (1915-1942): St Stephens Green, Dublin; signed bottom right oil
on board 60.5 x 73cm; Estimate £3,000-£5,000.
Oil painting of St Stephens Green, Dublin, by Georgette Rondel for sale on 19th
April.
Georgette Rondel (1915-1942) was a member of The White Stag Group, which
took its name from the family shield of a patron of the group, the critic and writer
Herbrand Ingouville-Williams. From France originally, Rondel moved to Dublin
in 1939 with her German husband Rene Buhler, and another of her friends,
Nick Nicholls (1914-1991).
Nicholls was born in Salisbury in Wiltshire, the son of an English father and an
Irish mother. As a child he spent time with relatives in County Cavan and in 1935
he turned to painting, in which he was self-taught. His early pictures are conventional
watercolours, but later he embraced surrealism and other forms of abstraction, being
influenced by Cezanne, Picasso, Klee and Miro.
With the approach of war, Nicholls moved to Dublin along with Georgette Rondel and
remained there until 1946. He was introduced to The White Stag Group by Basil Rákóczi
whom he met in Dublin. Meanwhile, Rondel worked in Dublin as a commercial artist
and produced theatre designs until 1942, at which time she moved to London, where
she died at the age of 27.
The White Stag Group centered around a number of British artists who based themselves
in Ireland in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The main protagonists, Basil Rákóczi
and Kenneth Hall, worked closely together drawing stimulation from each
other and during the 1930s shared a number of exhibitions at the Fitzroy Street
Studio and the Spectrum Gallery in London. In the autumn of 1935,
they established The White Stag Group 'for the advancement of subjectivity in art
and psychological analysis'. They brought with them the artistic vitality of the
Bloomsbury Group, of which they were fringe acolytes in the years preceding
World War II.
The group represented and encouraged a move from the academic to modernism, and
their subjective art strongly influenced the work being made at the time by Irish
artists such as Louis le Brocquy, May Guinness and Patrick Scott.
The White Stag Group was not held together by a stylistic or formulaic theme, it
was more a shared, geographical and cerebral collective.
Rákóczi and Hall both extrovert, soon gathered around them in Dublin a small circle
of friends who shared their interests. As in London, they arranged lectures and
discussion groups under the patronage of The Society for Creative Psychology
and held exhibitions of paintings under the name of The White Stag Group.
Judging by the names of those who were drawn into their company such as Evie Hone,
Mainie Jellett, Georgette Rondel, Nano Reid, Doreen Vanston,
Thurloe Conolly, Bobby Dawson and Paul Egestorff, they
were indeed the centre of the then avant-garde in the Irish capital.
Dublin clearly provided the sort of atmosphere in which they could thrive and being
the capital of a country neutral in the war, there was a certain intrigue to which
Rákóczi and many of his associates with The White Stag Group were not entirely impervious.
In 2005, a major retrospective exhibition of The White Stag Group was staged at
the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, with an accompanying catalogue.
The Georgette Rondel view of St Stephens Green, Dublin is included in the
Major Picture Auction
on 19th April 2016. For more information about the sale, please contact
Dan Goddard
or
Martin Scadgell
The provenance of the painting is Michael Scott, a patron of the arts, chairman
of the Royal College of Art and recipient of the 1975 RIBA gold medal for architecture,
thence by family descent, the main collection being sold at Christies in Dublin
in May 1989.
- Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood
- Fine Picture Auctions
- Georgette Rondel (1915-1942)
- Herbrand Ingouville-Williams
- Nick Nicholls (1914-1991)
- Basil Rákóczi
- Kenneth Hall
- Louis le Brocquy
- May Guinness
- Patrick Scott
- Evie Hone
- Mainie Jellett
- Nano Reid
- Doreen Vanston
- Thurloe Conolly
- Bobby Dawson
- Paul Egestorff
- The White Stag Group
- Bloomsbury Group
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