A Composition, Sea Rhythm – Mainie Jellett Art Print

A Composition, Sea Rhythm by Mainie Jellett

Oil on canvas, 44 x 144 cm, painted in the 1920s. Everything here is cool - deep cobalt and navy behind sweeping curves that roll across the width like swell, with sea green and teal wedges cutting in as distant hills or headlands. At the centre a scrolling spiral opens onto a stippled field of cream dots, reading as foam or spray, and stepped angular forms break against the curves. Only a low band of ochre and brown along the bottom edge interrupts the blues.

Title, long horizontal format and rhythmic colour work together to make this semi-abstract painting read convincingly as a seascape. It anticipates the wave and waterfall pictures Jellett later made in gouache, and the interest in Chinese art that shaped her Achill paintings. Its companion piece, An Abstract Composition, treats the same idea on land.

Works like this show Jellett applying cubist principles to landscape in the 1920s, well before her mature treatment of the Irish countryside. It is in the National Gallery of Ireland, bequeathed by Miss R. Kirkpatrick in 1978.

Mainie Jellett (1897-1944), born in Dublin, studied under William Orpen before training in Paris with Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes. With Evie Hone she exhibited the first abstract paintings shown in Ireland in 1923, and went on to found the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Her work hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.

Sizes & Format

• 25x60 cm / 10x24" - panoramic landscape format
• Printed image area 60x18 cm with a clean white border on all sides
• Sold unframed - the border is sized to sit inside a standard panoramic frame

Print Details

Archival matte paper, acid-free, with fade-resistant pigment inks. Printed to order and shipped flat in rigid protective board packaging.

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