Additional Images

Provenance:

Gift of the artist;
Rosendo Loriente, Madrid, Spain;
By descent to private collection, Spain

Note:

Jack Chambers left his hometown of London, Ontario, for Europe in the autumn of 1953 with the intention of studying art. The following October he began studying at the Escuela Central de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. He graduated in 1959, then began to build a career there until he returned to London in 1961, and remained there until his death in 1978.

Chambers was always ambitious. He was terrifically so when his formal training was concluding and the fuel of collegial support and early exhibitions propelled his artistic, personal and professional development. In the summer of 1958, he and Rosendo Loriente, his classmate from the Escuela de San Fernando, participated in a residency and exhibition in Segovia, after which Chambers gave View from a Window to Loriente. This painting remained in his collection for the rest of his life and passed by descent to the present owner.

View from a Window is a lively exploration of the gap between perception and depiction. In the three zones of foreground, middle-ground and distance, Chambers broke down vision to something precise and seemingly unreal. The angle of the window sill, the volume of the laundry and the space in the distance register as more dream-like than objective. A decade later, after a detour into Pop-influenced paintings and constructions, Chambers returned to views through windows in his London home on Lombardo Avenue, such as Sunday Morning No. 2 (1968-1970) in a private collection, Lilacs (1976) and Diego Reading (1976-1977), both in the Art Gallery of Ontario. These mesmerising views extend his metaphorical and perceptual contemplation of in and out, near and far, and intimacy and alienation that took hold in Spain as he conceived View from a Window.