Christopher Wood An English Painter

Christopher Wood, aged 29, killed himself on a sunny afternoon in August 1930, at Salisbury station. He sat reading until the train was pulling into the station when he got up and threw himself in front of it, dying instantly. It was a sad and muddled end for a man who nine years before had set out for Paris with a very specific intention -- to become a painter. That he should have killed himself when he had succeeded remains an unsolved mystery. The legacy that Wood left includes, it has been said, "some of the most magical works in modern European painting" and in this, the first biography written about this complex man, Richard Ingleby, drawing extensively on previously unpublished material, tells how he strove from inauspicious beginnings to find his voice as a painter.