Julian Trevelyan

Alex Reid & Lefevre, London (as Kilns at Burslem), where acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill December 1943 for £21.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

Hampstead, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Catalogue of the Greater Portion of a Collection of Modern English Paintings, Water Colours, Drawings and Sculpture Belonging to W. A. Evill, March 1955, cat. no.104 (as The Potteries);
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part IV- section 4) cat. no.7 (as Scene in the Potteries);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.270.

Original canvas. The canvas undulates slightly in the lower right corner. There is a small fleck of paint loss above the signature lower right. There a few discoloured spots of varnish but the surface has recently been cleaned. There are some minor lines of craquelure to a few areas upper right. Ultraviolet light reveals spots of fluorescence which correspond with the aforementioned spots of varnish, but no apparent signs of retouching. Held in a painted wood frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Trevelyan became involved with the anthropological Mass Observation movement when he travelled to Bolton in 1937 to photograph, talk to and make art based on the local workers. On his way home from Bolton, Trevelyan made a detour to the potteries on the insistence of his wife who had been staying with a Wedgwood relative. The subject matter he found there was strange and surreal. He would execute sketches on the spot before working them up. 'I settled into a commercial hotel at Burslem, and spread out my canvas and painted my pictures, much to the chambermaid's horror' (The Imaginative Impulse: Julian Trevelyan 1910-88, Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames, 1998, p.46).  

The 'naive' style of these paintings certainly owes a debt to Christopher Wood and Alfred Wallis. Perhaps more significantly, however, were the Ashington Group, a self taught collection of Northumbrian miner artists Trevelyan spent a week with in Northumberland in September 1938. Trevelyan went on to organise an exhibition of 'Unprofessional Art' in Gateshead where thirty of the Ashington Group and other untutored artists including Henry Stockley (a bus driver) and David Burton (a pavement artist) exhibited alongside Alfred Wallis and Trevelyan himself (Ibid, p.15).

'It was a landscape full of drama and pathos, very much after my own heart. At that time there were thousands of bottle kilns, stuffed with saggers full of pottery and pouting their black smoke into the air. Sometimes I could see flames leaping out of their chimneys.' (Julian Trevelyan, unpublished memoir, circa 1934, quoted in The Imaginative Impulse: Julian Trevelyan 1910-88, Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames, 1998, p.48)