Notes

Peter Clarke frequently painted embracing lovers, but whereas in Love in a Bleak Landscape (lot 768 on this sale), the lovers are fully clothed in an abstracted outdoor setting, as in other works on this subject in the artist’s oeuvre, in the present lot they are naked, under the covers, in a vividly coloured bedroom. The bright sunny yellows, sky blues and cherry reds, the arrangement of the furniture, and the flattened perspective showing the artworks on the walls, all recall Vincent van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in the Yellow House in Arles, painted in 1888. While the mood in the Clarke is positive, even humorous, with the lovers’ feet cheekily emerging at the bottom of the blanket, Van Gogh’s sojourn in the south of France ended badly – friends found him in his bed, bleeding profusely after having cut off part of his ear, and he was institutionalised; the community of artists he had hoped to form with Paul Gauguin in Arles never materialised.