Reality and Dreams 1920–1940

Grace Pailthorpe, April 20, 1940 (The Blazing Infant)  1940

Peter László Peri, Rush Hour  1937

Rush Hour 1937 is a work in low relief that depicts men and women boarding a double-decker London bus which is full of seated passengers. They crowd around the pavement and ascend the spiral staircase at the back of the bus as the conductor looks on. The street scene also includes a cyclist passing the bus on the right-hand side and another bus further in the distance. The scene combines realism and abstraction in its precise observation of the actions of people in everyday situations set against the simplified rectangular shapes of the two buses. The work is executed in coloured concrete low-relief, the grey, blue and terracotta forms of the people and buses set against a pale grey background. Peri developed a method of modelling concrete directly rather than casting it; keeping it moist and malleable, he gradually built up his compositions using different colours of concrete. His use of concrete was both utilitarian and egalitarian and his work had a conscious political agenda intended to broaden the social reach of art by representing ordinary people and by appealing to a wide public.

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

Sir Stanley Spencer, The Woolshop  1939

This work was inspired by Spencer’s visit to a wool shop with his friend Daphne Charlton while staying in rural Gloucestershire at the end of the 1930s. It originates in a series of drawings of Charlton and himself and was made in the wake of his turbulent relationship with his second wife, Patricia Preece, and after leaving his former home at Cookham in Berkshire. Spencer later recalled that ‘Stonehouse had several of these small local shops such as I remembered years ago in Cookham. The Cookham ones must have emigrated there.’

Gallery label, November 2016

James Boswell, The Cinema  1939

When Boswell joined the Communist Party in 1932 he gave up painting and began to produce graphics for mass reproduction. The prints shown here were made as a result of the many evenings and weekends that he spent exploring the streets and pubs of working-class London, especially in Camden where he lived.

Boswell was a founder member of the Artists International Association. This group of artists and designers was formed in 1933 in response to the increasing threat of Fascism and the economic crisis in Britain.

Gallery label, September 2004

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

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

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

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

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

Frederick Cayley Robinson, Pastoral  1923–4

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

Albert Houthuesen, Painted in a Welsh Village  1933

Albert Houthuesen painted this portrait while staying in Trelogan, a mining town on the north coast of Wales, near Liverpool. He recalled meeting the sitter, stating: ‘one day I saw a really fantastic figure carrying a great bundle of wood on his back, and later this young man, Harry Jones … he sat four times.’ The quietly empathetic portrait of Jones in a smart yet rumpled three-piece suit shows the artist’s engagement with the lives of people in the area surrounding Welsh collieries in 1930s. During his time in Wales, Houthuesen also painted portraits of coal miners and sweeping scenes of the landscape.

Gallery label, December 2025

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

Alfred Wallis, St Ives  c.1928

Wallis had worked as seaman, ice cream vendor and scrap merchant before he took up painting as a hobby in his retirement. He lived in St Ives, Cornwall, a fishing community and artists’ colony. There he encountered the painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood and his work was shown with theirs in London. Most of his paintings are of his local environment or of places and events remembered from his past.

Gallery label, July 2017

Julian Trevelyan, A Symposium  1936

Trevelyan became interested in Surrealism while at Cambridge, and came to know many of the movement’s leading artists when he lived in Paris in 1931-4. Influenced by Klee and encouraged by his friendship with Miró and Calder, he gradually developed his own mode of abstract Surrealism. In A Symposium Trevelyan combined painting and carving and attached parts to the wooden panel. He later recalled: ‘I had invented a sort of mythology of cities, of fragile structures carrying here and there a few waif-like inhabitants.’

Gallery label, December 2005

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

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

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

Max Ernst, Dadaville  c.1924

Ernst was a key figure in the anarchic circles of Cologne Dada before moving to Paris and the emerging Surrealist movement. This strange work dates from that moment of transition. The use of rough cork is typical of Ernst’s inventive exploration of materials. By making the walls of the Dada city from this unexpected substance, he may offer a wry reflection on Dada’s temporary, but resilient, nature.

Gallery label, July 2008

Winifred Nicholson, Flower Table  1928–9

In the 1920s, Winifred and Ben Nicholson lived a simple, rural life at Bankshead in Cumberland. This work shows pots of flowers wrapped in white tissue paper and arranged on a white table, or butcher's block, in that house. The sunlit table and domestic plant pots take on the appearance of mystical objects on an altar and reflect the craving for a new spirituality and peace that followed the First World War. The sense of a higher reality beyond the mundane is further suggested by the dots of silver paint across the surface of the image.

Gallery label, July 2001

Eileen Agar, The Autobiography of an Embryo  1933–4

Agar made this work as 'a celebration of life, not only a single one, but life in general.' Here she evokes the development of an embryo. Each of the four sections mixes symbols of life and death, and images of marine plants and animals. These images seem to suggest collective memories that the embryo carries into the world. This reflects the increasing focus on the unconscious in European art at the time. Agar saw this interest as establishing 'the dominance of a feminine type of imagination over the classical and more masculine order'.

Gallery label, August 2020

Peter László Peri, Building Job  1937

During the 1930s Peri made a number of sculptures of labouring men, based on sketches he’d made in London. This relief shows two workmen supervising the lowering of an I-beam metal girder. The man in the foreground is signalling to the man in the distance to show how the girder should be lowered.

Peri moved to England from Budapest in 1933 and began to exhibit with the Artists International Association. He wrote that his interest was ‘in people, the way they live and their relationships’.

Gallery label, August 2004

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, Jacob and the Angel  1940–1

Here Epstein depicts a passage from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Jacob wrestles through the night with an unknown attacker, who eventually overpowers him. In the morning, he realises he has been fighting God and his own conscience. Epstein shows Jacob exhausted, being held up by an angel. The sculpture divided opinion when it was first exhibited. The Daily Mail newspaper asked: ‘Is this a miracle or a monstrosity?’

Gallery label, September 2019

J. Oppenheimer, Piccadilly Circus  1902

This drawing shows the hustle and bustle surrounding the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus (a model for Eros can be seen in this room). Horse-drawn vehicles intersect with motorised buses and swarms of people crowd into the heart of the

West End.

The building on the left of the picture is the London Pavilion which was built in 1885 as a variety hall. In 1923, giant electric billboards were set up on the façade and in 1934 it was converted in to a cinema.

Gallery label, September 2004