Photograph: Peter North, 1930 John Christopher Wood (7 April 1901- 21 Aug. 1930) also known as Kit Wood; English painter born in Knowsley, near Liverpool. Christopher Wood was born in Knowsley to Doctor Lucius and Clare Wood. He was educated at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, then briefly flirted with medicine and architecture at Liverpool University before pursuing an artistic career. At Liverpool University, Wood met Augustus John, who encouraged him to be a painter. The French collector Alphonse Kahn invited him to Paris in 1920.... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Wood_(painter) ) ...a turbulent young painter who held an important position in the British art world during the 1920s. Along with Ben and Winifred Nicholson Wood developed a self-consciously unsophisticated style inspired in part by the untrained Cornish artist Alfred Wallis. However his understanding of naïve art was also uniquely influenced by his early exposure to the work of modernists in France such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, who all drew upon Non-Western art and so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. His addiction to opium, encouraged by his friendship with the writer and artist Jean Cocteau, doubtlessly fed into the direct and visionary quality of his later paintings. (http://pallant.org.uk/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/2016/christopher-wood/christopher-wood/about) After leaving Paris for England in August 1930, Wood met his mother in Salisbury to show her his newest works, including Zebra And Parachute. Tragically, Wood was suffering from the effects of opium withdrawal, which caused paranoia and the belief that he was being followed by a mysterious entity. In a desperate attempt to escape his imagined pursuer, Woods jumped in front of a train that very same day. To avoid upsetting his mother, the death often referred to as accidental by the contemporary press. (http://listverse.com/2015/07/18/10-final-paintings-by-artists-who-committed-suicide/) undefined

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