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'The Wild Beast Show,' Edward Seago. An early work based on Seago's experience of joining Bevin's Travelling Circus aged 18. The striped canvas in the picture cleverly forces the eye to the cages where the lions and tigers are housed.
Jacqueline Morreau's 'Under the Sea, Three Fates' is rendered in swift strokes of pen and wash. Figures that are both fragile and substantial, floating in water in which the destiny of a recumbent woman is being decided by drifting deities.
Another good example of Edward Bawden's Merrie England sentimentality for a cover of Ambrose Heath’s Good Food series. The figure on this cover was based on a one-eyed farmer named Frederick Mizen who was fined for stealing 40 pounds of jam from a local greengrocer.
Virginia Woolf' by Vanessa Bell. Bell's career started gathering pace after Roger Fry’s Manet & the Post-Impressionists show at the Grafton Gallery in 1910. In Paris she had seen the work of Cézanne, Seurat & Degas all of which had an electrifying effect on her world and her art
The female nude was Rose Hilton's chief subject, building on the legacy of Bonnard and Matisse, the 90s saw abstracts, layered fields and veils of deliquescent colour, pointillist dots & dashes & dancing forms, her postmodernist homage to Patrick Heron.
Stanley Spencer 'The Apple Gatherers.' This picture was painted in Wisteria Cottage in Cookham, an empty house which Spencer used as a studio. He said it was here he experienced an intense sense of connection with nature and an almost ecstatic self-awareness.
'The Nuremberg Trial,' Laura Knight. Flown to Nuremberg as an official war artist, Knight's portrait of the defendants departs from her usual realism: the back of the courtroom merges into the smoky ruins of the city. 'Death and destruction had to come into the picture,' she said
'Portrait of Stanley Spencer,' Unity Spencer; she wrote her father 'needed to be alone a great deal,not because he had a ‘monkish’ temperament but simply that he had to go into himself, rummage around,walk about inside himself; this was his source of strength and conviction.'
Norman Cornish 'Self Portrait.' The most famous of the pit painters. He was once described as a 'mystic with a total grasp of what makes matter vibrate, from coal to colliery rows, from the workings 1,500ft below ground to the bus stop and the chapel at the end of the street.'