Reality and Dreams 1920–1940

Sir Jacob Epstein, Portrait Bust of Paul Robeson  1927–1928

Dora Carrington, Farm at Watendlath  1921

Carrington was part of a successful generation of graduates from the Slade School of Art in the early 20th century. She was associated with the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, who lived, worked and studied together in London. This painting shows farm near Keswick in the Lake District, where the newly-wed Carrington spent a summer holiday with her husband and their friends. Critics have suggested that the landscape was distorted to reflect the curves of the female body. The two small figures gaze towards the landscape, possibly contemplating their own femininity.

Gallery label, February 2019

Augustus John OM, A Jamaican Girl  1937

Unknown artist, Tropic Reveries by Una Marson  Date not known

Cliff Rowe, Street Scene Kentish Town  c.1931

Clive Branson, Selling the ‘Daily Worker’ outside Projectile Engineering Works  1937

Selling the Daily Worker outside the Projectile and Engineering Works shows a man and a woman, probably the artists’ wife (Interview with the artist’s daughter, Rosa Branson, 5 November 2004.), selling copies of the communist newspaper, Daily Worker, outside a munitions factory in Battersea where Branson was then living. The message ‘For Unity’, promoted by both sellers on their aprons, presumably refers to the communist campaign for a united front against fascism. Branson became a member of the Communist Party in 1932 and remained an active member throughout his life. Harry Pollitt (1890-1960), the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, described him: ‘Nothing was too much for him: selling the Daily Worker at Clapham Junction, house to house canvassing, selling literature, taking up social issues, and getting justice done – all those little things which go to make up the indestructible foundations of the movement’ (British Soldier in India: The Letters of Clive Branson, London 1944, unpaginated). In the centre of the picture is the red glow of the factory’s furnace, from which the workers seem to spew out onto the street. In the upper left, figures peer out from the window. The subject of a munitions factory in the pre-war years resonated widely, particularly within the communist constituency which saw the main victims of a future war as being working class people killed in the defence of capitalism.

Dame Barbara Hepworth, Figure of a Woman  1929–30

Hepworth was one of a number of sculptors who returned to the handcraft of carving. The resulting immediacy of the artist’s relationship to her material was crucial. She described her process as an ‘effort to find a personal accord with the stones...I was fascinated by the kind of form that grew out of each sculpture, and by the kind of form that grew out of achieving a personal harmony with the material’.Like others, she sourced a wide range of indigenous British stones. This figure is made of Corsehill stone, a red sandstone quarried in Dumfriesshire.

Gallery label, July 2007

Giorgio de Chirico, The Melancholy of Departure  1916

De Chirico painted The Melancholy of Departure after he returned from Paris to Italy to serve in the First World War. The window and the map with a traced route evoke ideas of travel, suggesting escape from a cluttered, claustrophobic studio. Even as a child in Greece, de Chirico felt detached from his surroundings and identified with the voyaging Argonauts of Greek mythology. He imagined their journey across ‘measureless oceans’, an atmosphere which the Paris Surrealists saw as anticipating their own concerns.

Gallery label, January 2022

Paul Nash, Equivalents for the Megaliths  1935

‘Megaliths’ are great standing stones, the remains of ancient temples in places such as Stonehenge; this work was inspired by the stones at Avebury, on the Wiltshire Downs. Here Nash brings together Britain’s most advanced cultural objects with its most ancient: the geometric forms are similar to those found in contemporary abstract sculpture, but are also ‘equivalents’ for prehistoric standing stones. Nash had an enduring fascination with the mystical qualities of inanimate objects. The abstract forms draw on the emotional presence of ancient monuments, integrated with the landscape, but also provide a powerful element of abstract design.

Gallery label, September 2004

Frank Dobson, The Man Child  1921

Dobson trained as both a painter and sculptor, but concentrated on sculpture after active service in the First World War. Like many of his contemporaries, he found inspiration for his work in the ethnographic collections of the British Museum. He particularly admired carvings from the Congo in Africa. Such interest in what had been considered ‘less civilised’ cultures became more widespread after the ‘sophisticated’ destruction of the war.Here, in the wake of conflict, Dobson returns to fundamental human relationships. The manchild of the title melds with two female figures who seem to embody maternal protection expressing both joy and fear for the new life.

Gallery label, July 2007

Eileen Agar, Marine Object  1939

For Agar, the unexpected juxtaposition of found objects was ‘a form of inspired correction, a displacement of the banal by the fertile intervention of chance or coincidence’. In Marine Object she brings together part of a Greek amphora that she retrieved from a fisherman’s net in the south of France with crustaceans and flotsam gathered on a beach two years earlier, and a ram’s horn from Cumbria. Agar described the making of Marine Object as ‘short work... though it took me and the amphora a long time to attempt such a conjunction!’

Gallery label, January 2016

Stanley William Hayter, Murder  1932–3

Murder 1932–3 is a painting that is read as both an abstract composition of shapes, lines and colour, and a semi-figurative scene. The title ‘Murder’ encourages the viewer to associate its forms with the violent act of killing, and so parts suggesting the human figure take on added narrative and emotional significance. Further detail of the narrative content (who is involved in the murder, as well as when and where it takes place) remains unspecified.

Walter Richard Sickert, Variation on Peggy  1934–5

Sickert loved the theatre. He had admired the actress Peggy Ashcroft from one of her earliest stage appearances, as Desdemona in Shakespeare's tragedy Othello in 1930. This portrait was painted when Sickert was in his seventies; at this stage he often chose his subjects from newspaper images, in this case a photograph from the Radio Times of the actress on holiday in Venice. The painting's dry, grainy texture, and non-naturalistic, shadowless colouring puts a distance between background, figure and viewer. This painting combines two of Sickert's favourite themes: Venice and theatre.

Gallery label, August 2004

Sir Jacob Epstein, The Visitation  1926

This life-size figure was intended to be one of a pair, never completed, called 'The Visitation'. This was an event recorded in the Bible, where the Virgin Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth to share with her the news that she is to give birth to Jesus. Epstein described this figure as expressing ' a humility so profound as to shame the beholder who comes to my sculpture expecting rhetoric or splendour of gesture'. When he first exhibited it he called it 'A Study' so as to diguise its content.

Gallery label, August 2004

Meredith Frampton, Portrait of a Young Woman  1935

Frampton painted the sitter, Margaret Austin-Jones, standing next to a cello. He noted that, as she was very musical, the cello was an 'appropriate symbol.' Frampton said that he made this painting 'to celebrate an assembly of objects... beautiful in their own right’. Frampton's mother made the dress Margaret is wearing in the painting. The white vase on the table in the background was designed by Frampton. This painting relates to full-length portraits of women, associated with the work of earlier artists. However the clarity and precision of Frampton’s painting style gives this work a modern feeling.

Gallery label, August 2020

Graham Bell, Dover Front  1938

Bell painted this picture on a trip to Dover in 1938 to fulfill a commission for the International Business Machines Corporation. The finely-observed detail of the hotel on the left, the chalk white cliffs and castle ramparts is typical of the realism of the Euston Road School, with which Bell was closely involved.

Although the artist painted on the spot, he may have used the photograph shown to the left to work on the details in his studio.

Gallery label, September 2004

Christopher Wood, The Fisherman’s Farewell  1928

Traditionally, this has been seen as a portrait of Wood’s friends Ben and Winifred Nicholson with their first child. They are shown against the backdrop of the harbour of St. Ives, then a fishing village and an established artists colony. It was painted the year in which Wood and Ben first met Alfred Wallis, the untutored painter whose instinctive style endorsed their own consciously ‘naïve’ mode of painting. To cast Nicholson in the role of fisherman was to invest him with the sort of rooted authenticity to which they aspired in their painting.

Gallery label, July 2007

Paul Nash, Landscape at Iden  1929

This mysterious picture shows the view from Nash’s studio in Sussex. The dramatic perspective and strange juxtaposition of rustic objects creates a sense of the uncanny. It has been read as a statement of mourning. While the young fruit trees may suggest the defencelessness of youth, the altar-like pile of logs may be a symbol of fallen humanity; the fallen tree as a symbol for the dead was common in the art and literature of the war, not least in Nash’s own paintings.For many, an idea of the timeless and enduring English landscape seemed to displace the violent destruction of the war.

Gallery label, July 2007

Sir Jacob Epstein, Esther  1930

During the 1930s Epstein modelled over one hundred portraits ranging from commissions of eminent men to uncommissioned busts of favourite models. Esther was a nightclub entertainer and a professional artist's model. The vigorously modelled surfaces of this bronze bust are an example of the great vitality Epstein managed to infuse into his work at this time, whether modelled portrait busts or imaginative stone carvings.

Gallery label, April 2021

Winifred Knights, The Deluge  1920

Knights was one of several British artists who participated in a revival of religious imagery in the 1920s, while retaining some elements of a modern style. The theme of this work is the Old Testament Flood. In the foreground, people flee the rising waters towards the high ground, while Noah's ark floats calmly in the distance to the right. The frequent use of the word 'deluge' as a metaphor for the all-engulfing First World War would have given the painting a contemporary resonance.

Gallery label, September 2004

Nina Hamnett, A Gentleman with a Top Hat (George Manuel Unwin Esq)  1921

L.S. Lowry, Coming Out of School  1927

Like many of Lowry's pictures this is not a depiction of a particular place, but is based on recollections of a school seen in Lancashire. Lowry's combination of observation and imaginative power often produced images which capture a deeply felt experience of place, with which others could identify. For example, in 1939 John Rothenstein, then Director of the Tate Gallery, visited Lowry's first solo exhibition in London and later wrote: 'I stood in the gallery marvelling at the accuracy of the mirror that this to me unknown painter had held up to the bleakness, the obsolete shabbiness, the grimy fogboundness, the grimness of northern industrial England.' This work was then purchased by the Trustees.

Gallery label, April 1994

Frances Hodgkins, Flatford Mill  1930

Hodgkins was a New Zealander who came to Europe in 1901. Based mainly in Britain, she also spent time in Paris. She was a member of the Seven & Five Society. In the 1920s, its members developed an art that was both modern and returned to traditional motifs such as landscape and still life. A strong fascination with British landscape and traditions was evident. This is signalled, perhaps, by the fact that this scene was closely associated with John Constable who painted Flatford Mill in 1816.

Gallery label, September 2016

Henry Moore OM, CH, Girl  1931

From the mid-1920s Moore had advocated the abolition of the 'Greek ideal' in sculpture in favour of non-European sources, which he felt had much greater vitality. This work reveals his fascination with the Mesopotamian sculptures in the British Museum, especially solemn standing figures with clasped hands. He reviewed a book on Mesopotamian art for 'The Listener' in June 1935. Around 1931-2 Moore also turned his attention to the study of natural forms, such as shells, bones and pebbles. He then brought together his studies in natural forms with his admiration for non-European 'primitive' sculpture and began to introduce a rhythmic and non-naturalistic approach to the depiction of the human figure.

Gallery label, August 2004

Ceri Richards, Two Females  1937–8

The International Surrealist Exhibition was held at the Burlington Galleries in the summer of 1936, and for a brief moment, in the words of André Breton, London was ‘the centre of the Surrealist universe’. Richards exhibition gave him an opportunity to study important works by Ernst, Picasso and Miro, among others. Subsequently a pronounced erotic sensibility became apparent in Richards’s own loosely surreal work. Two representations of the female form are contrasted in this relief. On the right, virginal, though budding and seductive, and on the left, fulsome and latently sexual.

Gallery label, September 2016

William Roberts, The Cinema  1920

Roberts’s early work was abstract and he joined Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist group. After the First World War, he made a name as the painter of everyday modern scenes. While film had been invented in the late 19th century, it reached new heights of sophistication and popularity in the 1920s, the age of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the rise of Hollywood. Movies were silent until 1927 and were accompanied by live music. Many music halls, traditional places of popular entertainment, were adapted to show films.

Gallery label, September 2016

Ithell Colquhoun, Scylla  1938

The title of this work refers to the female monster who, according to ancient Greek mythology, inhabited a narrow channel of water and fed on passing sailors. Colquhoun explained that the image could be understood in two ways, both as a seascape and as an image of her own body. ‘It was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath…it is thus a pictorial pun, or double-image’. The rock formations can also be seen as knees, with seaweed in place of pubic hair. This work was painted at a time when Colquhoun was exploring surrealist ideas such as the double image.

Gallery label, January 2019

John Tunnard, Fulcrum  1939

An advocate of surrealism in Britain, Tunnard was interested in experimental techniques that summon an imaginative world. He developed a unique vision of quasi-mechanical structures in deep space that remain mysterious. Tunnard was taken up by the American collector Peggy Guggenheim and shown in her London gallery in 1939. The story goes that he crossed the private view to introduce himself to a prospective collector by turning three somersaults.

Gallery label, September 2016

Sir William Coldstream, On the Map  1937

In this picture Coldstream shows fellow-artist Graham Bell standing holding a map, and his friend Igor Anrep sitting on the ground. Seen from behind, they look out across the landscape, apparently unaware of the painter’s presence. This conceit recalls such paintings as Degas’s Femme à sa Toilette, which Coldstream had praised for its ‘unbiased observation’. Such observation was to be a fundamental part of his painting from 1937 onwards.

Gallery label, September 2004

Humphrey Jennings, Swiss Roll  1939