Price on request

Signed with initials and dated; oil on canvas, 24 X 14 ins. (61 X 35.6 cms)
Provenance: the artist's estate
Exhibited: Harris, Preston; Canterbury Museum & Art Gallery; FAS 2000 (109)

Mahoney's unbridled enthusiasm for plants was shared with Edward Bawden, Geoffrey Rhoades, John Nash and Evelyn Dunbar, with whom he swapped cuttings by post. Auriculas - deeply unfashionable at the time - were one of his particular passions. He loved the sumptuous colour combinations and formal arrangement of the leaves and petals.
Price on request

Watercolour and pencil, 18Q X 11E ins. (47 X 29.8 cms.)
Price on request

Black Prince pencil and watercolour, 18Q X 11E ins. (47 X 29.8 cms.)
Price on request

Signed and dated
Pen and ink over pencil, squared in red chalk, 15½ × 19¼ in. (39.5 × 49 cm.)
Literature: Paul Liss, Charles Mahoney, exh. cat.,The Fine Art Society, London 2000, p. 47

In 1922, on the strength of a Royal Exhibition in drawing, Mahoney enrolled at the Royal College of Art, where he spent four productive years under the
guidance of the College Principal and Professor of Painting,William Rothenstein. Contemporaries at the college with whom he formed life-long friendships included Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, Percy Horton and Gerald Ososki. The influence of Samuel Palmer, whom Mahoney greatly admired, is much in evidence in this drawing.
We are grateful to Elizabeth Bulkeley for assistance.
Price on request

Oil over pencil on board, prepared with a pink gesso ground, 15 × 12 in. (38 × 30.5 cm.)
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist’s daughter (ref. no. N21a III)
Literature: Martin Postle, The Art of the Garden, exh. cat.,Tate Britain, 2004, p. 118

Mahoney’s unbridled enthusiasm for plants was shared with Edward Bawden, Evelyn Dunbar, Geoffrey Rhoades and John Nash, all of whom swapped cuttings with each other by post. The artist’s daughter recalls that he ‘particularly liked to grow and paint tall, statuesque plants;Annual Sunflowers excelled in this respect. In addition they had handsome heads, with great twisted necks resembling a Celtic torque’ (Elizabeth Bulkeley, email to Paul Liss, 2 February 2007).
£2,600

Oil on paper, 11 3/4 x 3 ins. (30 x 75 cms.)
Provenance: the artist's estate

£300

Pencil and pen and ink
6 1/4 x 6 7/8 in. (15.8 x 19.7 cm.)

In a black wedge section frame with distressed gold knull and silver inner slip

Mahoney took great pleasure in children's stories, which he loved to read to his daughter Elizabeth. These stories often formed the subject of pen and ink sketches and sometime more elaborate oil paintings.

Provenance: Elizabeth Bulkeley, the artist's daughter
Not for sale

12 x 29 1/2 ins.
Oil on paper

Provenance: The Artist's Estate
Not for sale

oil on canvas board

Provenance: Barnett Freedman; thence by descent.
Not for sale

Oil on board
Not for sale

Oil on canvas
Not for sale

Charcoal on tracing paper squared in red

Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale

Oil and watercolour over pencil, on paper
Arched top
Not for sale

Watercolour over pencil

Not for sale

Thinned oil over pencil
Not for sale

Oil on paper
Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale

Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale
Not for sale

Not for sale

oil on paper
7 1/2 x 30 in. (19 x 76.2 cm.)
This is a study for the final composition of the wall panel above the altar
Not for sale
Sold

Oil on board, 11 x 14¾ ins. (28 x 37.5 cms.)
Provenance: the artist's estate
Sold

nscribed on the reverse by the artist Peter Greenham, 'Scene at Wrotham'.
12½ x 16 ins. (31.8 x 4.8 cms.)
Provenance: given by Dorothy Mahoney to the artist Peter Greenham in 1969; Jane Dowling, Peter Greenham's wife

These two panels, of near-identical size, are from a series of views that Mahoney did from his house, Oak Cottage, Wrotham, and its immediate surroundings. The garden at Oak Cottage was a constant inspiration for Mahoney. He lived there from 1937-40, during which period he renovated it, and again from 1945 until his death in 1968. Once the garden that he planted had matured, he seldom worked anywhere else.

His daughter noted that these paintings were a 'celebration of the beauty that lies in ordinary back gardens, and the place that we occupy in the natural world. Humans and plants blend together, the figures always subordinate to the surrounding plants.'

Jane Dowling, who was taught by Mahoney, recalls that 'months before starting a work, the artist would prepare his panel with a white oil ground (coverine being his favourite choice). He would start as Cezanne did, in thin paint almost like watercolour, a little egg-white slowly being introduced. The white ground only became coloured gradually, some white areas remaining untouched till almost the end. The range between light and dark was quite close. Enormous subtleties were striven for in the relationship between these muted colours. At the end of the day, the work was carefully scraped down ready for a fresh start the next day. Scraping was done with a sharp tip of a palette knife until the values became mysterious and subtle.'

These panels can be compared to Outhouses, circa 1940, in the collection of the Tate Gallery (accession number NO5227). We are grateful to Elizabeth Bulkeley and Jane Dowling for their help in cataloguing these entries.
Sold

Oil and pencil on paper, 18 x 14 ins. (45.7 x 35.6 cms.)

Mahoney was particularly fond of the giant sunflower, Helianthus annuus, capable of outgrowing a man within a season. He made many colour and black and white studies of this species, capturing the convoluted energy of their rough stems and massive heads, and the ragged angles of their great leaves.
Sold

Oil on canvas, 18 X 14 ins. (45.7 X 35.5 cms.)
Provenance: the artist's estate

'His friends recall that he even referred with a shade of disapproval to "beauty".' (John Rothenstein, Charles Mahoney: A tribute on the occasion of a memorial exhibition, London 1975, p. 9.)

Mahoney had initially purchased Oak Cottage with his brother as a home for their widowed mother and himself; this shows the kitchen as it was circa 1937. After the Second World War, when Mahoney returned from evacuation bringing his wife and daughter to settle at Oak Cottage, the kitchen was altered by enlarging the window and introducing a deeper sink (hot water did not arrive until the 1970s).

We are grateful to Elizabeth Bulkeley for her assistance.

Sold

Inscribed with title on label to reverse
Oil on paper, 20 X 30 ins. (50.8 X 76.2 cms.)
Provenance: the artist's estate

The label on the reverse suggests that this oil sketch was a proposal for a mural. Elizabeth Bulkeley, the artist's daughter, remarks, 'This painting is similar to others in which a scene is framed by a window and seen through the eyes of a child (e.g. the Tate's painting of Adam and Eve). The small girl, who looks much as I did at that time, observes a world of Fairy Tales. All were favourite stories that my father loved to read to me; Beauty and the Beast, the Witch beside her gingerbread house from Hansel and Gretel, Jack with the fallen Giant wreathed in the Beanstalk, and the Tale of the Very Fat Man, the Very Tall Thin Man, and the Very Short Man.'
Sold

Watercolour over Black Prince pencil, 18Q X 11E ins. (47 X 29.8 cms.)
Provenance: The artist's estate
Sold

Watercolour over Black Prince pencil, 18Q X 11E ins. (47 X 29.8 cms.)
Sold

Watercolour over Black Prince pencil, 18Q X 11E ins. (47 X 29.8 cms.)
Sold

Watercolour over Black Prince pencil, 18Q X 11E ins. (47 X 29.8 cms.)

Thumbnail panels:

Charles Mahoney 1903-1968

Painter, muralist, draughtsman and teacher. Born Cyril Mahoney in London - his fellow-student Barnett Freedman re-christened him Charlie at the Royal College of Art, which he attended 1922-6 after a period at Beckenham School of Art under Percy Jowett. Early on, Mahoney established a reputation as a conscientious teacher. He was at the Royal College 1928-53, from 1948-53 as a painting tutor, and was noted there for his concern for academic discipline. His portrait is included in Rodrigo Moynihan's celebrated Teaching Staff of the Painting School at the Royal College of Art, 1949-50. From 1954 to 1963 he taught at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting and from 1961 to 1968 at the Royal Academy Schools. He painted murals at Morley College 1928-30 with his colleagues Eric Ravillious and Edward Bawden. Unfortunately these murals were destroyed during World War II. The work led to further murals: at Brockley School, Kent, with Evelyn Dunbar; and at Campion Hall Lady Chapel, Oxford. His oil paintings are frequently of a religious nature. He was a skilled botanist, and many of his drawings depict his garden at Wrotham, Kent. He exhibited at NEAC and the RA, being made an RA elect in 1968. He is represented in the Tate Gallery and other public collections. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, held a memorial exhibition in 1975. Exhibitions were held in 2000 at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, Royal Museum and Art Gallery, Canterbury, and the Fine Art Society plc in association with Liss Fine Art.

Mahoney is now increasingly recognised as an influential figure alongside his better-known contemporaries, Bawden and Ravillious.

Selected literature: Paul Liss, Charles Mahoney, The Fine Art Society plc.