This striking female nude set in a semi-abstract, Cubist landscape was painted by Mainie Jellett in 1941. It is part of the small body of work Jellett made between 1939 and 1943 that is rightly seen as the consolidation of many of the ideas she had grappled with throughout the previous two decades. It seems likely that it is the painting entitled Nude included in Jellett's final solo exhibition held in Dublin's The Gallery in November-December 1941. The show contained just eight oil paintings and included several major late works such as Achill Horses (National Gallery of Ireland), The Land, Eire (formerly owned by Ernie O'Malley, now in The O'Brien Collection), The Ninth Hour (Hugh Lane Gallery) and Nativity (Private Collection), as well as several preliminary studies in gouache.

Jellett drew and painted numerous female nudes throughout her life. Generally these date from about the time of the First World War to the early 1920s when she was sketching from life models as part of her studies in Dublin, London and Paris. She worked up several such sketches into large compositions of single or grouped figures, often under the supervision of her principal teachers: William Orpen, Walter Sickert and André Lhote. The most significant of these were made under Lhote. His method of reducing natural objects, such as a landscape or a human figure, to a series of interlocking geometric shapes, built from the example of Cézanne and the theories of Cubism, left a lasting impression on Jellett. By the early 1930s after a decade or so of working with Albert Gleizes in the development of 'abstract Cubism,' recognisable images of people and places became pronounced again in Jellett's work. This was stimulated by Gleizes's desire to make the religious images, which were the exclusive basis of his painting, more accessible, but also by her visit to the large exhibition of Chinese art held at the Royal Academy in London in 1935, and the publication of the Cézanne catalogue raisonné by Lionello Venturi and Paul Rosenberg that Jellett eagerly read in 1936.

Landscapes and 'nude studies' would appear regularly in Jellett's various solo shows and in her submissions to group exhibitions throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. As an image Nude by the Sea, shares some features with these such as the flattened landscape painted in greens and blues, colours Jellett identified with the West of Ireland, as well as colours associated with early Cubism - yellows, ochres, browns - unified by arcs of grey that were used to activate an image's inherent rhythm by Gleizes and his circle. But in contrast the monumental, flame-haired female nude is painted in fleshy pinks and creams in the tradition of Cézanne's grandes baigneuses. As an image of potent sensuality, it offers a striking rebuff to the various religious and nationalist tropes of femininity that dominated Irish visual culture by the early 1940s. Compositionally closest to Land, Eire (they are exactly the same size), Nude by the Sea might be read as a companion piece, but one that registers something of Jellett's resistance to women's increasingly subordinate position within the new Irish state.

Dr Joseph McBrinn, Belfast School of Art
August 2026