Derek Latymer Sayer - A Nude Study of a Female

A Nude Study of Nude Females, dating to the mid 20th Century, this nude study was drawn by Derek Latymer-Sayer who studied at 'The Chelsea School of Art' under Henry Moore. Composed using pastel and brown wash on paper. Signed and framed.

Sayer had a distinguished start to his career, having studied at the Chelsea School of Art in the early 1930s under Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore. In 1936 he founded the Mousehole Group Art School in Cornwall with fellow painters George Lamborn and Guy Allen, and for the next few years he exhibited at a number of small local galleries, while also executing commercial advertising work for major companies such as Shell Oil. The 1940s and 50s were a period of widespread travelling, teaching and experimentation for Sayer, as he founded the Army Art Centre in 1945, worked in the South of France in 1949 and displayed works at the Leicester, Redfern and Winton Galleries across the 1950s.

In 1966, he took up the helm as the Head of Art at the Chelsea Westminster Adult Education Institute, a position he held until his retirement in 1982. The majority of the works in our collection date from later in this period, in the 1970s and early 1980s, with the latest dated 1981, a year shy of his retirement. Ten of Derricks works can be found at the Chelsea Westminster Hospital Arts Project, hung alongside a permanent collection that includes Patrick Heron, Howard Hodgkin, and Sian Tucker.

Sayer was known for his studies of female nudes, particularly the examination of the nude in nature, where he contrasted the curving line of the form with the more angular patterns and textures found in the organic environment. He is noted as a member of Neo-Romanticism, a term applied in 1942 to such landscape painters as Paul Nash and Keith Vaughan, whose style harnessed the spirit of the nineteenth century British landscape tradition with the unnatural colouring and abstraction of postwar modernism. Though a number of works in this collection are particularly evocative of the 1960s Pop art and design, the majority of our nudes embody Sayer's even late dedication to this kind of artistic tradition, particularly Old Master nude studies executed in sanguine and white. Despite these stylistic variances, Sayer renders his manifesto with a repeated emphasis on the flow of pure line, with the curvature of the body made visible regardless of medium, generation and composition.

Condition : Very Good
Materials : Paper
Origin : British
Manufacture Date : c1960