Robin Guthrie, Christ Healing The Sick (1928)

ROBIN GUTHRIE (1902-1971)
Christ Healing the Sick
1928
Oil on canvas
104 x 215 cm
Exhibited New English Art Club, 1929
With the Goupil Gallery, 5 Lower Regent Street, London, until 1931
Frame made by James Bourlet & Sons Ltd

Rare and important work by the English painter Robin Guthrie. Guthrie trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London where he won several prizes for figure and history painting. On completing his studies, he established a studio in Hampstead, North London, and in the 1920s exhibited at the New English Art Club and at the Goupil Gallery. In 1931 he moved to the United States to take up a position as director of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (today School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts).

This moving and visionary painting, with Christ, the Magdalen and Saint Lazarus, which combines biblical figures with other figures taken from across time, is one of the artist’s masterpieces, and it compares favourably with the Sermon on the Mount (1922) in the Tate Gallery.

The original frame bears the label of the New English Art Club and the painting was reviewed in the February 1929 issue of The Connoisseur. The back of the frame is also inscribed with the name and the address of the Goupil Gallery, a long-established French gallery with a branch in London where Guthrie exhibited in the late 1920s. It seems likely that when Goupil closed their doors in London in 1931, that the painting was shipped to France. This would explain why this large and unusual English painting is on this side of the Channel. Overall, the painting and frame are in good condition, there are however some abrasions to the paint surface.

Robin Guthrie’s Christ Healing to Sick is a major work of English painting of the 1920s.