Edward Burra

Alex Reid & Lefevre, London, where acquired by the present owner, 17th May 1971

Andrew Causey, Edward Burra, Complete Catalogue, Phaidon, Oxford, 1985, cat. no.253, illustrated.

The sheet is fully laid down to a backing card, with deckled edges throughout. There is very minor surface dirt and a slight spot of possible light staining in the upper right hand side of the sky, with a further area of very slight staining to the extreme upper right edge, not visible in the present frame. Elsewhere there is a tiny spot of studio detritus to the centre of the composition, only visible upon very close inspection, but this excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition, with bright, vivid colours throughout. Housed behind glass in a gilt wooden frame, set within a red linen-textured mount. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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It is with a truly English eye that Burra turned towards the perculiarity of the humble cabbage, a motif that the artist returned to at several stages throughout his career. Burra adapted this simple and very basic vegetable to suit the development of his style and surroundings, for, as Andrew Lambirth remarks ‘there is something inescapably vulgar about the cabbage and the enduring flatulent reek of its cooking when it was the staple winter vegetable in England – a vulgarity that Burra would have relished’ (Andrew Lambirth, ‘Burra: The Landscape’, in Simon Martin et.al., Edward Burra, Lund Humphries in association with Pallant House, 2011, pp.137-165, p.142). Seen as early as his 1937 work Cabbages, Springfield, Rye (Private Collection), drawn from his home at Springfield Lodge on the outskirts of Rye in East Sussex, the almost too vivid greens of the plants sing in the foreground with the vibrancy of a semi-hallucinogenic oasis. The familiar sight of these big green, heavy heads in the fields around his home must have stuck in his memory for he returned to them in his later work The Cabbage Harvest (1943, Government Art Collection), reflecting the menacing impact that war was having on the peaceful and once bountiful surroundings of East Sussex. The scene shows Italian prisoners of war harvesting cabbages in the fields around Rye, the bulging bags taking on a dark and sinister appearance which make the viewer question whether it is really just the cabbages crammed inside, or something far more gruesome. 

The present work belongs to an engaging body of work that Burra produced from the mid-1950s that turned away from the primarily figurative and instead cast a characteristically dark light on the still life and landscape genre. Here, as in his pre-war depiction of the vegetables, the colours are just that tiny bit too vivid, perhaps over-ripened and reaching towards the stage of rotten. They have grown eerily tall, un-harvested and forgotten. Despite the lack of a figure, human presence is certainly hinted towards with the discarded and partially buried pipe and pot hidden in the foreground, perhaps a leftover reminder of the Italian prisoners of war that once worked the fields, now long-gone. Executed on a monumental scale, the present work displays not only Burra’s adept technical skill, with his delicate brushwork and masterful handling of colour, but also his ability to award these plants with very human characteristics.