Henry Cliffe, Plant Study, 1960s, Pencil on Paper, Framed

Henry Cliffe
(1919 Scarborough – 1983)
“Untitled (Plant study)”, c.1960
Pencil on paper
Unsigned
138 × 186 mm | 5 3/8 × 7 1/4 in
241 × 293 mm | 9 3/8 × 11 1/2 in (framed size)
In period frame

Small abstracted still life study, probably derived from observation of plants and garden forms

Acquired with a collection of similar works (including some signed) from the studio of the artist

Henry Cliffe was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and studied at the local art school and at Bath Academy of Art. He was later invited to join the staff and became an influential teacher there alongside William Scott, Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Bryan Winter, Howard Hodgkin and Adrian Heath.

In the decades after the war Cliffe was hardly less well known than his Corsham colleagues. He was chosen for the British Pavilion at the 1954 Venice Biennale with Ben Nicholson, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. He returned there in 1960 in the company of Pasmore and Paolozzi.

He ran the lithography studio at Bath from 1950 until his retirement in 1981. His early works seemed derived from both Surrealism and the neo-romantic English landscape school of the 1940s. Throughout the 1950s Cliffe’s work became more concerned with the relationship between the human figure and the landscape and in 1959 a suite of lithographs on this theme was published by the St George’s Gallery, London.