Prose Painters

Although each of these painters has an entirely personal style, there is a similarity of approach which gives the exhibition the unity which has caused the interest in their work to be collective as well as individual.

They might perhaps be called ‘prose-painters’, for they work slowly, referring to the authority of the observed fact before making each statement. They do not deliberately set out to describe their emotions or allow their attention to be diverted from the visual appearance.

Their methods and approach are such as to allow them to work with deliberate clarity and some detachment; and the excitement of their work for the spectator lies in their ability to throw new light on plain subjects and make us as interested in them as the painters themselves.

The above opening three paragraphs are not my words, but those of Sonia Brownell (future wife of George Orwell), written in 1941 for Horizon Volume III (No. 17, May, 1941), almost 85 years ago, reviewing an exhibition of the Euston Road School of painters at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The school only existed from 1937-1939, before the outbreak of WWII ended their nascent project, but their importance rests in their personal response to stimuli of the ‘real’ – observed, felt, tangible subjects/objects, filtered through individual lived experience. This approach is just as relevant today as it was then, as this exhibition explores.

The core elements of painting (looking, interpreting, making) were embraced by the Euston Road School with what Victor Pasmore, one of the school’s three founders, declared as ‘the tripartite equation’, where a good painting encompasses distinct, separate entities:

1. The object – the observed subject/content of the painting.

2. The eye – the artist’s personal interpretation/relationship to 1.

3. The painting itself – a stand-alone object as its own entity outside of 1. and 2.

The twelve artists in Prose Painters have been selected as contemporary counterparts to the twelve main figures in the Euston Road School – founded by William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers in 1937.

Teachers and students associated with the school included Rodrigo Moynihan, Graham Bell, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Lawrence Gowing, Thelma Hulbert, Helen Anrep, Graham Tibble and Adrian Stokes.

This exhibition is not meant to document an accurate historical understanding of the Euston Road School, nor is it to celebrate their achievements – numerous exhibitions have already covered that ground. No, this is a show that allows this often overlooked, marginal group to be seen as the touchstone they deserve to be, demonstrating that many contemporary painters quietly oppose the current art world malaise of art-fair spectacle, auction records and hot-new-things, for they have the depth and painterly experience to express what they feel makes a good painting for themselves, outside of market or fiscal forces.

The ‘tripartite equation’ between subject, artist’s eye, and the painting itself may well be over 85 years old, but it’s still driving a number of exceptional contemporary painters (unbeknown to themselves, perhaps) to make the new work that they believe in – because they believe in themselves, and they believe in painting, just as the Euston Road School painters did.