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In a seemingly innocuous picture, Stanley Spencer's 'Crossing the Road,' is imbued with a subtle Christian message. Here, it is as if the young girl is a disciple, leading the old man through the streets of Cookham to the gates of St Peter, and to enter heaven itself.
'Tying Down the Rick.' Of the four Scottish Colourists, Francis Cadell was perhaps the most adept at drawing; his sketches stand out as a strong body of work in their own right.
This picture by John Nash resembles a small number of works he did of the moat at Grange Farm in Kimble. Instead of a sense of bleak desolation, this work is more optimistic and has less of Nash's introspection which showed in his work some years after WW1.
'Early Morning, Waxham Beach.' Edward Seago was largely self-taught and was mentored by leading landscape painters of the day including Alfred East and Bertram Priestman who advised him not 'to be unduly governed by what you see in art, but by what you see in nature'.
'Hairdressing.' (1947) The decade in which this work was painted, Geoffrey Tibble was strongly emphasising the surface arrangement of colours. The art critic Raymond Mortimer, then writing for the Spectator, placed him 'in the front rank of living English painters.'
'Blast Furnace,' (1948) was created as part of a commission from Everetts Advertising Ltd on behalf of their client, the Imperial Smelting Corporation and is one of several studies John Minton made in their industrial plants at Avonmouth and Widnes.
Walter Sickert's 'The Gallery at the Old Mogul,'(1906).is thought to be one of the earliest paintings in the world of a cinematic performance. The Old Mogul was the original name for the Middlesex Music Hall in Drury Lane variously known as 'The Mogul Tavern' or 'The Old Mo.'
This watercolour sketch from 1913 of a man ploughing autumn fields by George Clausen was painted at a time of great unrest in the countryside. Labouring families had been drifting to the burgeoning industrial centres for several generations and the crisis of WW1 was a year away.
Writing about the children she painted, Joan Eardley said they would not keep still: 'I watch them move about and do the best I can. They are completely uninhibited . . . full of what’s gone on today, who’s broken in to what shop and who’s flung a pie in whose face.'
William Scott painted exceptional nudes and landscapes, but the tabletop bowls and pots and pans remain his trademark: the subject of his pictures towards the end of the Second World War, they were still there in his more minimalist work of the 1970s.