05/10/2025
Isabel Codrington (British artist) 1874 - 1943
Wild Thyme Farm, s.d.
oil on canvas
63.5 x 76.2 cm. (25 x 30 in.)
signed with monogram (lower left) and inscribed 'No.2 Wild Tyme Farm/£50/Isabel Codrington/Wistlers Wood/Woldingham, Surrey' (on a label attached to the reverse)
private collection
© photo Christie's
Catalogue Note Christie's
As a landscape painter, active at a time when artists such as Allan Gwynne Jones, Ethelbert White, Charles Edward Cundall, along with the Spencers and Nashes were seeking to re-invest the English countryside with emblematic power, Codrington occupied a central place in British art during the Twenties. Wild Thyme Farm in particular, with its foreground field of hay-stooks, recalls Gwynne-Jones' Fields near Ruan Minor, 1919 (Manchester City Art Galleries) and John Nash's Gloucestershire Landscape, 1914 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
With Ash Tree Farm (lot 123), Wild Thyme Farm typifies a series of downland landscapes painted by Codrington on the estate surrounding her home at Wistler's Wood in Surrey. Rolling hills lit from the left, casting long shadows, convey the atmosphere of early morning or late afternoon. The Westminster Gazette found these landscapes 'singularly joyous', while Frank Rutter went further, stating that art consisted in the ability to 'transmute the commonplace into an unfamiliar transcendence', and,
'...since her art is based on simple domestic commodities and the homely landscapes and barns of the southern counties, Isabel Codrington has little need of an interpreter. Her pictures speak for themselves, and speak simply but eloquently.'
K Mc
* * *
Isabel Codrington Pyke Nott was born at Bydown, Swimbridge, in Devon, the daughter of the local squire. Her parents were artistic; her mother wrote and painted and her father was an amateur playwright. In 1883 her family moved to London and two years later Isabel and her elder sister, Evelyn Eunice, were sent to the Hastings and St Leonard's Schools of Art, where their drawing talents were nurtured. This was followed by a year at St. John's Wood School of Art, in preparation for the Royal Academy Schools, which Isabel entered in 1889, at the age of fifteen. Codrington won two medals at the school for her work and began to exhibit. Around this time, Codrington met the ambitious young art critic, Paul George Konody (1872-1933), editor of The Artist, and later a regular reviewer for The Observer and Daily Mail. They were married on the 27th October 1901 and had two daughters. Codrington continued to paint miniatures and imaginative watercolours, for which she won a medal at the Exposition Internationale d'Arte in Barcelona in 1907. The Konodys had a wide circle of friends such as the poet Ezra Pound, the illustrator Dudley Hardy, the portrait-painter Philip Alexius de Lásló and the artist-traveller Mortimer Menpes.
Codrington and Konody divorced in 1912 and the following year she married Gustavus Mayer, a director in the London art dealership, P & D Colnaghi. Her success escalated when she secured a commission to paint the Cantine Franco-Britannique, Vitry-le-Franois, 1919 and simultaneously began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. Throughout the 1920s she showed regularly at the Academy and after 1923, at the Paris Salon. She had two solo shows at the Knoedler Galleries in Paris and the Fine Art Society in London in 1926 and 1927. She was an honorary member of the Campden Hill Club, a society established by former Academy students in memory of the painter Byam.
Source: Dublin City Gallery
