In the last decades of Barns-Graham life there was a joyful outpouring of energy and creativity in her work. Her vocabulary was pared down to the essentials of brushwork, line and colour; experimentation and risk-taking were executed with the confidence and freedom of an experienced artist. Spanish Elegy was painted in this latter part of her career and is typical of her mature work with its lyrical, expressive lines, confident brush strokes and bold command of colour. The title likely refers to the series Elegy to the Spanish Republic of 1949-65 by the American Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell, whom Barns-Graham admired, intended as lamentations for those who died during the Spanish Civil War. Barns-Graham transformed the series' stark rigidity into a free-flowing design that is altogether more lyrical and hopeful.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE HRSA HRSW, 1912-2004

Born in St Andrews, Barns-Graham went against her father’s wishes to study at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1930s. In 1940, on the advice of the principal Hubert Wellington, she travelled to St Ives and settled there, becoming part of the circle which included Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. Visits to the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in 1949 and to Spain in the 1950s were important in the development of her abstract style, key to the St Ives group, although she kept up representational painting throughout her life as well.

In 1960 Barns-Graham inherited a family home in St Andrews and from then on divided her time between the two coastal communities in Scotland and Cornwall. Scotland and its landscape offered new inspiration to Barns-Graham and re-established her presence in the Scottish art scene, where she was one of the few of her generation to favour abstraction. Despite a period of impasse in her mid-career, her later life brought a productive period in which her paintings and screenprints were full of colour and movement, leading to a retrospective of her work at Tate St Ives in 1999. Her contribution to modernism and abstraction in Britain has been increasingly recognised in recent years.