Notes

Merlyn Evans, whose Surrealist and abstract pictures can now be seen in numerous national and municipal collections across Britain, trained at the Glasgow School of Art. He made frequent trips to Paris in the 1930s, where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Mondrian, Kandinsky, Giacometti, Ernst and Hayter, and exhibited with many of them at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. Two years later he took up a teaching post at the Durban School of Art, before joining the Signals Company of the South African Army in 1942. The present lot, Umhlanga, made in 1940 during his teaching tenure, and built up with full-blooded strokes of lime green, crimson and azure blue, was composed to an enormous, seemingly pre-historic scale. The little figures on the shore are dwarfed by the wild, impenetrable tropical forest behind them.

Evans returned to London after the War.