Edwin Maxwell Fry's largest known painting, this impressive frieze with architecural ambition was made as a private commission and has remained in place until now.

The Painting

Edwin Maxwell Fry's Forest with a Herd of Deer (1977-78) is a panoramic frieze made up of four vertical panels. Across the painting the palette is predominatly the greens and earth tones of nature, from the grasses and tree trunks to the deer. The soft forms of the grasses and deer provide a contrast with the structure provided by the repeating forms of the tree trunks whose thin forms and wintry lack of foliage emphasise their verticality.

Art Historical References

The composition, with its extended horizontal format and frieze of silver birch trees, contains strong echoes of the Ashmolean's most famous painting, Paulo Ucello's celebrated The Hunt in the Forest (c.1470).

Maxwell Fry's use of four extended vertical panels also suggests a non-Western source, something that would be very much in keeping with his internationalism as an architect. Each panel echoes the extended form of a Chinese or Japanese scroll and in particular there are echoes that can be found in another celebrated work in a British collection, Wen Zhengming's Wintry Trees (1543), which was acquired by the British Museum in 1965. This work by one of the greatest artists of the Ming dynasty's Wu School, similalrly combines tall trees with an extended format to empahsise verticality.

Architect and Painter
Architect as well as artist, Maxwell Fry was a pioneer of mid-century modernism and the form of the frieze has a direct relationship to his architecture. As an architect, Maxwell Fry worked extensively across the world and became famed for his "tropical modernism". This form of architecture in which the rigours of international modernism are combined with a sensitivitiy to local styles, saw Maxwell Fry work closely with local experts to create pioneering buildings. It was the subject of a major recent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Along with his wife Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry ran an important architecture practice, winning major commissions before and after World War II. They worked closely together and travelled extensively internationally and, perhaps most famously, in the 1950s collaborated with Le Corbusier on the masterplan and buildings for the new capital city of Punjab at Chandigarh, India. Maxwell Fry's buildings included the government press building (1953), which is credited as being the first building in India to have a glass facade. First introduced to Le Corbusier's architectural principles by Canadian designer Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry incorporated many of his ideas into his own designs, including his 'five points' of architecture.

Pilotis and Trees
One of Le Corbusier's dictums was the inclusion of pilotis (thin columns) into the structural support and composition of a building. An emphasis on the verticality of multiple columns also became a feature of Maxwell Fry's work, as with Capel Crallo, Coychurch Crematorium, Mid-Glamorgan, and has a counterpart in the thin vertical tree trunks in the frieze. Perhaps closer still to the structure of the frieze is the Sultan Bello dining hall, University College, Ibadan, Nigeria, which marries thin colums with a dome above them in ways that echoes the trees and curved view of sky in the frieze.

Provenance
The painting comes from the family of the celebrated Iranian film-maker, Ebrahim Golestan (1922-2023) and only came on to the art market for the first time following his recent death. Golestan was friends with Maxwell Fry from whom he commissioned the painting. The four panel frieze hung at Wykehurst Park House, West Sussex his home until he died, just short of his 101st birthday. It's rich, woody colours and curve of the sky reading symmetrically with the interior with its wooden floor and ceiling. An Iranian film maker and writer, Golestan was closely associated with the poet Forough Forrokhzad, 1934-1967. He produced her acclaimed film The House is Black in 1963, the same year that he made the Iranian classic Brick and Mirror. The last film he made in Iran was Ghost Valley's Treasure Mysteries in 1974. It's not known whether the two men met in Iran in the 1950s or whether they became aquanited following Golestan's move to England, but Golestan may have known of Fry from the architect's work on the planning of the Gach Saran New Town in 1959.