(Beneath oil) Study for Merry-Go-Round; (Verso) Study of Gilbert Cannan. This wooden panel contains not just one, or even two, but three remarkable works by Mark Gertler, all executed between 1915 and 1916, the year of his most important work, the strident and iconic, anti-war painting, Merry-Go-Round (1916, Tate). On the surface is an intriguing landscape in oils painted in situ in July 1916 at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s celebrated Garsington manor in Oxfordshire, from where Gertler wrote to the Russian translator S S Koteliansky that he had started a picture ‘from the lawn looking on to the fatal pond’ (so-called after he almost drowned there). This particular composition with the rectangular pond at its centre bounded by trees, and with an upright yew on the left grounding the composition, was a favorite of Gertler’s. It relates closely to a larger, square painting of the same view in Leeds City Art Gallery with which... (https://www.piano-nobile.com/exhibitions/14/works/artworks20/)