Raymond Sheppard showed an early interest in both art and nature and aged 15 enrolled in the Elementary Course of John Hassall's Correspondence Art School where he was complimented on "his remarkable understanding of the correctness of drawing". Sheppard's talent for drawing wildlife gained recognition with the success of the first of his three books for The Studio Publications How to Draw Series. How to Draw Birds, published in 1940, not only ran to four reprints during WW2 but a further two reprints afterwards in 1948 and 1955 - a remarkable feat for a 27 year old artist. This not only provided Sheppard with a secure, if modest, financial income but put him on a stage alongside the highly regarded draughtsman of this genre John Skeaping (How to Draw Horses) and C.F. Tunnicliffe (How to Draw Farm Animals) both of whom were 12 years his senior. In parallel to his work as an illustrator of wildlife, Sheppard, along with Jack Merriott as President, became a founding member of the Wapping Group. Limited to 25 members, The Wappers, as they were known, comprised artists from the Langham Sketching Club, (which did not meet in the summer months,) who convened along the river between Westminster and Gravesend, in the East End of London, to paint scenes along the Thames. If Raymond Sheppard's drawings are to been seen as something more than illustrations the key is here: "An outlook at once poetic and intimate, whose technique was developed from a habit of contemplation".

Raymond Sheppard: Master Illustrator

Arts & Photography

Liss, Paul

LLEWELLYN, SACHA

History & Criticism

Liss Llewellyn Fine Art

Walter Bonner Gash (1869-1928) Edwardian artist known for his works in oil and pastel. Primarily interested in landscape, still life and especially portraiture.

Walter Bonner Gash: Unsung Edwardian Hero

Moore-Gwyn, Harry

The murals that were produced in this country in the twentieth century remain as one of the great inventive achievements in modern British art. Highly original in their approach to design, balancing varying degrees of modernity or tradition, they demonstrate the creative drive of their makers and contain singular expressions of the aesthetic, personal and social concerns that typify the ages from which they come. Some are celebrations of simple human pleasures, perhaps to decorate a refreshment room, an ocean liner or a dining room. Others are intended to be the highest expressions of their art, ambitious allegorical or decorative compositions that like the frescoes of the Renaissance would speak through the ages to later generations. The individuals and committees who commissioned them similarly believed they would both represent the best that Britain had to offer and mark the high accomplishment of contemporary society, elevating the public and private spaces they occupied and inspiring moral purpose. This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition 'British Murals &amp; Decorative Painting 1910-1970' which took place at the Fine Art Society - London (13 February - 9 March 2013) in association with Liss Llewellyn Fine Art. It coincided with the Sansom &amp; Co publication British Murals &amp; Decorative Painting 1920-1960.

British Murals & Decorative Painting 1910-1970

This catalogue presents a view of the First World War through a multifarious record of two and three dimensional works of art: paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, reliefs, posters, postcards, photographs, silhouettes and ceramics appear in the following pages. The material has been grouped into 14 subsections under the general headings of Combat, The Home Front and The Aftermath. These groupings highlight the themes that inspired both the fine and popular arts, although some are looser in association than others, and none are mutually exclusive. The introduction gives a more general survey of the underlying factors that influenced or determined the visual responses to the First World War.

The Great War: As Recorded through the Fine and Popular Arts

During his lifetime Brangwyn made large donations of his works to museums in the United Kingdom and abroad, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the William Morris Gallery, the Albertina in Vienna and the Gruuthuse in Bruges. As a result of this munificence, substantial drawings by Brangwyn, especially his celebrated large sheets in red and black chalk, only rarely appear on the market. Milestones in the collecting of Brangwyn drawings include the Christie's sale of William de Belleroche's collection (1961), and Edgar Horn's sale of Edgar Peacock's collection (2000). The recent discovery of works belonging to Brangwyn's admirer, Father Jerome Esser, presented in this catalogue, marks a further watershed for collectors. The drawings that became Esser's collection, which have lain hidden for over half a century, were made up of works that Brangwyn, with characteristic modesty, had left in his studio with a written instruction, 'most of this lot destroy'. Never intended for presentation, they explore and resolve alternative compositions and the relation of figures to each other and to the space they occupy. Esser, himself a gifted artist, would have appreciated these sheets, complete with folds, scuffs and splodges of paint, as true working drawings. Brangwyn himself believed that 'sketches show the most intimate side of an artist's career ...[studies] are usually the best thing an artist does.'

Frank Brangwyn: Drawings from the Collection of Father Jerome Esser

Individual Artists

Kenneth Rowntree has always been highly regarded by those familiar with his work. The essays in this catalog, which embrace new research and scholarship, reveal him to be an artist of great scope and variety. His early work reflects the inspiration and creative dialogue that came out of his friendship with Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) on account of whom Rowntree moved to Great Bardfield during the 1940s. During this period he was particularly preoccupied with Kenneth Clark's Recording Britain project. At the end of the war he joined the teaching staff at the Royal College of Art. In 1951 he was commissioned to undertake murals for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion for the Festival of Britain. As Professor of Fine Art in Newcastle (1959-1980) he was at the epicenter of an important northern school of modernism that revolved around his friends Victor Pasmore (1908-1988) and Richard Hamilton (1922-2011). Even in retirement, his work, in its return to figuration from abstraction, displays his consistent qualities of humor and inventiveness. Rowntree's oeuvre is both influenced by and anticipates a wide variety of artistic styles, from Ravilious to David Hockney, from the Euston Road School to the Dadaism of Kurt Schwitters. His work, however, remains unmistakably his own. This catalogue is published on the occasion of the centenary of Rowntree's birth, and accompanies exhibitions at The Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden and Pallant House, Chichester. This is the first substantial reassessment of Rowntree's work since John Milner's monograph (2002). It is hoped that this current initiative will contribute further to ensuring Rowntree the significant place he deserves within the history of 20th century British art.

Kenneth Rowntree: A Centenary Exhibition

Moore-Gwyn Fine Art & Liss Llewllyn Fine Art

This book is published on the eve of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the launch of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and the iconic War Pictures by British Artists series. The scheme, devised by Kenneth Clark, played a vital role in both how the war was perceived at the time and how it has been perceived by future generations. The WAAC initiative also changed the course of the careers of the 400 artists whom became involved, 37 of whom were salaried. Brian Foss’s introductory essay gives a fascinating account of the origins of the scheme and its aims and evolution. Using the format established in the War Pictures by British Artists’ publications the chapters are organized into 8 sections, (as per the eight books in the original series). Alongside the work of the better known Official War Artists this publication will also include examples of work by less well-known (unofficial) war artists adding resonance to the remarkable story of War Pictures by British Artists. The book is completed by an appendix providing a statistical analysis of how many artists were involved, who they were and what they produced, an account of Morley College London during the war and a description of the ICI’s commissioning of portraits of its employees for a prestigious advertising project.

WWII: War Pictures by British Artists

Andrews, Elaine

Foss, Brian

Bear, Margaret

David Evans’ death in a road accident in 1988, at the age of 59, bought to an abrupt end the career of one of the most distinguished watercolorists of his generation. The recent discovery of pictures remaining in his studio, nearly thirty years after the memorial tribute staged by the Redfern Gallery in 1988, provides the opportunity for a new generation to discover his work, though the publication of this first ever book on David Evans and the accompanying touring exhibition. Evans’ strikingly large watercolors, (typically they measure over one meter in height or breadth), span two decades from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, evoking a vision that is still surprisingly potent today. They have all the period charm of the glam rock era they so powerfully evoke but at the same time they are highly charged with the political energy of the period and mirror Thatcher’s Britain, with its Industrial unrest, its towns and country undergoing transformation, the Faulklands war and threat of the Evil Empire, the building of nuclear power stations and the dawn of awareness about Climate Change as a political issue. Evans was an ardent campaigner and environmentalist. The landscapes, (a homage to his native Suffolk) are peppered with industrial plants, landfill, scrap heaps, and encroaching roads and army maneuvers. Urban subjects, similar in some ways to the compositions of Lowry, show factory plants, spectators’ sports, cafeterias, the interiors of museums, city centers and beach scenes.

David Evans (1929-1988)

Hicks, Alistair

Gage, Pete

In January 2013, Dunbar's painting 'Autumn and the Poet' (1960) appeared on the BBC Antiques Roadshow, leading Ro Dunbar, a relative of the artist, to explore the extraordinary hoard of over 500 paintings, drawings and studies hidden in the attic of her Kent home. The unrecorded works were identified with the help of the artist's nephew Christopher Campbell-Howes, who had been tracking contents of the 'lost studio' - dismantled in its entirety after Dunbar's death in 1960 - for over 20 years. The discovery doubled the known body of Dunbar's work overnight. The book highlights a selection of these unrecorded works and examines them in the context of Dunbar's life and work as a whole.

Evelyn Dunbar: The Lost Works

Portrait of an Artist

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