An independent painter across several forms
Alan Keith Henderson was born in London in 1883. Aberdeen Art Gallery describes his training as largely independent, with occasional study at the Slade and in Paris. He rejected aspects of the established portrait-painting world and developed a practice that included landscape, illustration and writing.
His travels supplied subjects for watercolours, including restrained views of Spain in which unpainted paper and a limited palette establish the forms. He also published books such as Letters to Helen and Palm Groves and Humming Birds. In 1940 he worked as an Air Ministry artist; a wartime exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art included his painting of an aircraft undercarriage test. He lived for many years at Spean Bridge and donated work to Aberdeen in 1971. He died in 1982.
Darkness and ornament in an invented world
The retained Worm Ouroboros is the 1924 New and Cheaper Edition. Henderson supplies the illustrations to Eddison’s novel, giving visible form to selected scenes and figures. The narrative and its elaborate speeches remain the novelist’s contribution.
The Carcë image places a leaning figure at the edge of a dark tower, concentrating tension where the building meets the night. The Lords of Demonland have a more ceremonial presence: repeated upright forms, patterned garments and elaborate headgear create an assembly while distinguishing its members. Those contrasting arrangements correspond to different kinds of attention in the prose, from menace to displays of rank. Henderson makes each immediate without reproducing the novel’s full sequence of encounters.
