Bernard Meninsky Art

An English Post Impressionist gouache of trees in a landscape by noted artist Bernard Meninsky. The painting is signed bottom right and presented in a very fine custom patinated and gilt frame with cloth insert, under glass. There is an exhibition label to the back of the frame, giving the painting's location 'Cookham Dean' in Berkshire near the home of noted contemporary of Meninsky, Stanley Spencer. Provenance: The Boydell Galleries, Liverpool. A charming work when Meninsky was clearly showing the influence and his love for the paintings of Cezanne. The simplification of forms, as well as the flattening of landscape and the use of colour to give perspective. An earlier work by Meninsky but important in his artistic journey to his evolving style. Bernard Meninsky (25 July 1891–12 February 1950) was a British painter of figures and landscapes in oils, watercolour and gouache, a draughtsman and a teacher. Meninsky was born in Konotop, modern-day Ukraine, where his father was a tailor and the family were Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian Jews. They moved to Liverpool when Bernard was six weeks old. Although Meninsky left school at the age of eleven, his talent for art was demonstrated by the sale of a drawing to a local comic postcard business. While working as an errand boy during the day, he attended free classes in art in the evenings, and these enabled him to gain a place at the Liverpool School of Art. He studied there from 1906 to 1911, being financed by a succession of scholarships. He attended summer courses at the Royal College of Art, London, in August 1909 and August 1910, and in 1911 he won a scholarship to study at the Académie Julian in Paris for three months. With financial support from the Liverpool Jewish community and the Jewish Educational Aid Society (JEAS), Meninsky studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1912. His contemporaries there included David Bomberg, Isaac Rosenberg...