Evening Party an original pen, ink and watercolour by Tony Wysard 1927

WYSARD, Tony (1907-1984). "Evening Party". Venice, 1927.
 
Original mixed-media drawing, 380 x 455mm, executed principally in pen and ink and watercolour over pencil, with touches of opaque colour, on heavy textured artist's paper. Signed and dated at the upper right "Tony Wysard / Venice 27", and inscribed in pencil beneath the image "Evening Party". A large, early group caricature by Tony Wysard, showing five men crowded by the canal in Venice, with a sixth on a gondola. Some light handling and marginal wear consistent with an unframed working sheet, but the image itself remains strong and the colours fresh. Very good.
 
Wysard was only nineteen or twenty when this drawing was made, but was already developing the distinctive society-caricature style for which he became known. During the late 1920s and 1930s his work appeared in publications including The Tatler, The Bystander and The Sphere, while the National Portrait Gallery now holds a substantial group of his drawings from this period.
 
The drawing appears to record or caricature a particular Venetian social gathering, suggested by Wysard's own pencilled title, "Evening Party". An unusually large and very early example of Wysard's work, produced at the beginning of the period in which he established himself as a caricaturist.