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| Edward Bawden, My heart, untravel'd, fondly turns to thee (aka Derelict Cab), 1933, Kettering Museum & Art Gallery (© artist estate) |
Widely admired today as an illustrator and printmaker, Edward
Bawden (1903-89) is hardly a ‘forgotten artist’. Yet one aspect of his career
has been neglected until now: his role in the 1930s as a critically-acclaimed
modern painter.
The purpose of The
Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden is to set the record straight by
bringing together the largest collection of the artist’s pre-war watercolours
ever assembled. Most were originally exhibited at one or other of Bawden’s
major solo shows – at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1933 and the Leicester Galleries
five years later – exhibitions that impressed critics and delighted collectors.
It has taken three years to assemble this remarkable
collection of pictures, many of which were, as the title of the book suggests,
lost. Privately-owned artworks can be hard to find after eighty years, but in
this case even paintings in public collections were sometimes hidden thanks to
Bawden’s choice of obscure fragments of verse or concise descriptions of time
and place as titles for his work. These were often replaced by descriptive
names. Thus (for example) ‘My heart, untravel’d, fondly turns to thee’ became ‘Derelict
Cab’, making the researcher’s task rather tricky.
The remarkable quest to find and identify Bawden’s pre-war
watercolours is described by publisher Tim Mainstone in an amusing, informative
essay, which forms the third part of this richly illustrated volume. The Mainstone Press has
once again teamed up with James Russell, author of the popular series
‘Ravilious in Pictures’ (and curator of the 2015 blockbuster ‘Ravilious’), who
sets the ball rolling with an introductory essay exploring Bawden’s life and
career in the 1930s. Scholarship is leavened with humour here, as it is in the
wide-ranging captions accompanying the most important element of the book: the watercolours
themselves.
These are grouped by exhibition, with additional sections of
works from the mid-30s and from the decade’s end. Having photographed many of
the watercolours in high resolution specifically for the book, we have chosen a
format that allows us to maximise the size of the images. There’s a good reason
for this. As one critic observed in the 1930s, these are paintings that deserve
more than to be looked at. They deserve to be looked into.
The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden will be available soon from
The Mainstone Press. For further information, please contact the publisher.
