This is the first exhibition of an extensive archive of works now attributed to Casement which have come to light following the sale in 2010 of ‘Sarita’s Castle’, the vast estate of Herbert Ward and Sarita Sanford Ward overlooking the Seine at Rolleboise 80 km outside of Paris. The paintings were discovered crated up behind a false wall in outbuildings of the extensive property when developers moved in after it was acquired by a Chinese hotel group. Apparently undisturbed since the late 1910s many have survived in remarkable condition. Correspondence between Casement, Herbert Ward and Sarita Sanford reveals how Casement, without any permanent address of his own, had papers and canvases routinely shipped at first to the Wards’ homes in England and Paris, and after 1908 directly to the sprawling Rolleboise Estate, where Herbert had established his studio and an extensive collection of African artefacts (eventually comprising over 7,000 items) now on display at the Smithsonian. Herbert Ward took up art soon after meeting Casement in Africa, and is best known for his realistic bronzes and illustrated adventure story’1

Following his estrangement from Ward in 19142

Casement continues to send canvases directly to Sarita Sanford. In his final letter of August 1st 1916 enclosed with his last self portrait, he begs her to burn the lot, luckily for us Sarita decides instead to brick them up into the walls of one of the enormous storehouses, destroying all other records of their existence.3

Roger Casement grew up in Antrim, orphaned early and brought up by relatives as a teenager he moved to Liverpool, and from 1883 to Africa where he worked on various rail and infrastructure projects and eventually as a British Consul based in Boma, now DRC. He became a prominent anti-colonial activist knighted in 1911 by King George for his reports exposing atrocities in the Belgian Congo and the virtual enslavement of indigenous rubber workers of the Putumayo in Peru. He was executed for treason at Pentonville for his role in the Easter Rising in Dublin of 1916, and is widely regarded as the author of the controversial Black Diaries.

The earliest known work, signed on the reverse Rod Casement and dated 1883, is of Kelp Harvesters in Antrim, and was probably painted in Liverpool, and the last ‘Self portrait on the gallows at Pentonville’ executed in August 1916, just days before his death.4

In the thirty five years between these terminal works, on canvases ranging from the intimate to the monumental Casement proves a unique and original observer of the imperial colonial project.

He also appears to have been familiar with the advanced art movements of his times, and many of its prime movers. Some of his later African works seem to preempt cubism, and incorporate collage-like effects. He strays briefly into symbolism at the turn of the century. Other subjects include informal scenes from colonial life, a portrait of Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski in Boma before he became Joseph Conrad, Arthur Rimbaud with coffee grinder in Harrar, Claude Monet repairing a bicycle, Jean Cocteau as a harlequin.5

Casement was an accomplished draughtsman and colourist, although in some cases his experimental use of unstable organic pigments has led to eerie effects of colour hue migration. There is also evidence that he used his own and other photographs as source material. Researchers anticipate that these discoveries will shed new light on Casements’ many undocumented years, and his role in the explosion of interest in African art in the first decade of the 20th Century, while offering us a glimpse of an unseen world through the eyes of their mythic author.

Deftly weaving fact and fiction the artist becomes the ghostwriter of an autobiography in paint, while co-opting the popular art tropes of the secret lost masterwork, which may be a fake or a copy, and the idea of contemporary and modern art as a con.

With artistic creation increasingly popular for public figures and private individuals alike, and historical attribution in many cases at best provisional, the exhibition hangs on the intersection of these paradigms. The artist by creating retrospectively an oeuvre in early modern painting for Casement makes the performance of subjectivity the first of many conceptual folds animating the works.