About this artwork
This is the largest and most important of Lewis's satirical 'Tyros' paintings. 'Tyro' means a novice or beginner, but Lewis expanded on this definition, calling him 'a new type of human animal like Harlequin or Punchinello...The Tyro is raw and underdeveloped; his vitality is immense, but purposeless, and hence sometimes malignant.' Lewis was often critical of his artistic contemporaries. He described the 'Tyros' series of paintings as a challenge to the 'Arts-for-Arts-sake dilettantism' that he saw in French painting and in the work of the English Bloomsbury group, such as Duncan Grant.
Updated before 2020
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artist:Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957) English
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title:A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
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date created:1920 - 1921
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materials:Oil on canvas
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measurements:165.20 x 90.20 cm; Framed: 181.00 x 107.00 x 8.00 cm
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object type:
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credit line:Purchased 1977
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accession number:GMA 1685
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gallery:
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subject:
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artwork photographed by:Antonia Reeve
Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Lewis was born on his father's yacht off the Canadian coast. His father was American, and his mother British. The family moved to England in 1888 and he studied at the Slade School of Art, 1898 - 1901. Painter, poet and polemicist, Lewis founded the Vorticist movement in 1914, a British hybrid of...