THE UNIVERSE IS INFINITELY WIDE
signed and dated Edward Bawden 1932 twice lower right; also numbered 28 lower right
watercolour, gouache and wash on paper
45 x 56.5cm; 17 3/4 x 22 1/4in
57 x 68cm; 22 1/2 x 26 3/4in (framed)

Provenance
The Zwemmer Gallery, London (1933)
Montague Shearman Esq, London (purchased from the above; Montague Shearman, 1886-1940, was a barrister, art collector and connoisseur. A posthumous exhibition of his collection at the Redfern Gallery, London included works by Dali, Vuillard, Monet, Matisse, Renoir and Utrillo)
Acquired by the father of the present owner in the late 1940s

Exhibition
London, The Zwemmer Gallery, 1933, no. 26

Literature
James Russell The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden, Norwich, 2016, p.159, illustrated

The present work is a re-discovery, a rare example of Bawden's work from the inter-war years, and the period which is the subject of the recent book by James Russell (ibid).

At the time, Bawden was in his 30s, living and working in the rural idyll of Great Bardfield, Essex which he found to be a welcome escape from the bustle of London that he loathed. He initially took rooms in the Brick House there with his friend and fellow artist Eric Ravillious (1903-1942). After marrying Charlotte, his father purchased the house for the newly-weds and it became their permanent home.

Bawden’s work that decade was the subject of two important exhibitions, at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1933 (the exhibition in which the current lot featured), and then the Leicester Galleries in 1938. Both exhibitions focused on works produced within a few miles of Great Bardfield. The 1933 exhibition was reported in glowing terms in The Times while the reviewer in The Week-End Review said of the present work 'Mr Bawden has also a delightful sense of humour, which, in a painting like The World is Infinitely Wide, goes deeper than many men's solemnity.' (The Week-End Review, October 21, 1933)

It was Gwyneth Lloyd Jones, a close friend of Charlotte Bawden and academic at Girton College, Cambridge who selected the literary titles for each work before they were exhibited at the Zwemmer Gallery. The gallery cut out the line titles from their catalogue and pasted them to the backboard as can be seen on the reverse of the present work. The title is the sixth line of Sonnet XIV by William Wordsworth composed in 1833, one hundred years before the work was exhibited:

Desire we past illusions to recall?
To reinstate wild Fancy, would we hide
Truths whose thick veil Science has drawn aside?
No, - let this Age, high as she may, install
In her esteem the thirst that wrought man's fall,
The universe is infinitely wide;