BILLY-SUR-ALLIER
signed Albert Rutherston 05 lower right
oil on canvas
54.5 x 74cm; 21 1/2 x 29 1/4in
74 x 92cm; 29 1/4 x 36 1/4in (framed)

Property from the Artist’s Family

Provenance:
Capt. R. Gordon-Canning (purchased at the Leicster Galleries in 1953)

Exhibited:
London, Leicester Galleries (Ernest Brown & Phillips), Albert Rothenstein, 1953, no. 17

Albert Rutherston (born Rothenstein), was the younger brother of better known painter William Rothenstein (see lots 34 & 35). He joined the Slade School of Art in its late 19th century heyday, when Fred Brown was professor, assisted by Henry Tonks, Philip Wilson Steer and Walter Russell. Aged just sixteen, he was the youngest student by far, but he soon fell in with a gilded set of artists, befriending Augustus John (see lots 38 & 39) and William Orpen. His elder brother kept a watchful eye over his considerably younger sibling, and dubbed the trio the 'Three Musketeers'.

John, Orpen and Albert first holidayed together in France in the summer of 1899, staying in Vattetot, along the Normandy coast from Etretat, where they were joined by William and the older painter Charles Conder. The following summer Albert was in Dieppe where he met Walter Sickert with Max Beerbohm. In 1904 he visited Billy-sur-Allier near Clermont-Ferrand on a painting trip with Spencer Gore, returning with Gore the following year when he completed the present oil. Rothenstein painted the town from the east beneath a threatening sky, its defensive fortress dominating the surrounding landscape.

In the years that followed Albert thrived at the very heart of the avantgarde. Living at 8 Fitzroy Street in Bloomsbury, he shared a space at 19 Fitzroy Street with Sickert, brother William, Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman and Walter Russell. There they held open days to show their work on Saturday afternoons. The combined aim, as Sickert recounted, was 'to create a Salon d'automne milieu in London'. Other artists soon joined, among them Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis and J.D. Innes, and their Saturday afternoons attracted the interest of a wide range of cultural luminaries, among them Hugh Lane, Ottoline Morrell and Jacques Emile-Blanche.