John Luke RUA (1906 - 1975) The Bathers Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed and dated 1929 Provenance: From the collection of Ms. Pauline Nixon Exhibited: ''John Luke Exhibition'', Arts...

John Luke RUA (1906 - 1975) The Bathers Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed and dated 1929 Provenance: From the collection of Ms. Pauline Nixon Exhibited: ''John Luke Exhibition'', Arts council of Northern Ireland 1978, Cat. No. 13 Literature: ''John Luke'' by John Hewitt, illustrated p11; ''Unlocking John Luke'' by Dickon Hall; Irish Arts Review, Winter 2011, full page illustration p.100/1 ''The Bathers'' was painted in 1929, while John Luke was still studying at the Slade School, although it appears not to have been exhibited until 1938 at the Ulster Academy of Arts, where it was on loan. The few surviving works from Luke's time in London demonstrate a remarkable technical skill and inventiveness; arguably, they alone would secure his place as one of the great modern Irish painters. ''Judith and Holofernes'', which won second prize in the Slade's 1929 annual Summer Prize Competition, and The Bathers, both treat classical subjects in a contemporary setting and reveal Luke's engagement with modern painting. While ''The Bathers'' has less of the psychological acuteness of the other painting, it is a highly ambitious work. Luke creates a modern idyll, a vision of leisure set in a landscape that draws on various locations within Ulster to create a composite landscape, a formally perfect arrangement that already hints at the stylised, rhythmic treatment of the landscape that was to become synonymous with Luke. ''The Bathers'' recalls near contemporaries of Luke, such as Stanley Spencer and Thomas Monnington, but it is also likely, while he was studying in London, that Luke had studied Georges Seurat's ''Une Baignade, Asnières'', which the National Gallery had purchased in 1924; in his Bathers, Luke has replaced Seurat's young male factory workers with a group of girls on a day out, asserting their independence by bathing and dressing in public. The poses of the three girls, one drying her feet, another her hair and the other arranging her hair, also recall Degas' many depictions of women after they have bathed. Luke creates a dialogue between contemporary painting and the classical tradition, as Seurat and Degas themselves had done, achieving a timeless monumentality in his figures and setting. ''The Bathers'' is an exuberant and fully resolved work, the result of numerous detailed studies, but it also is more revealing of Luke than much of his later work. -Dickon Hall, March 2013

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