Last week, one of the finest pieces in the Rye Art Gallery’s permanent collection, Edward Burra’s enigmatic watercolour Black Mountain, Wales (1968) was packed up and transported to Tate Britain’s Edward Burra exhibition (June 13 to October 19). This is the first London retrospective for 40 years of one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century.
Burra (1905-1976) who lived most of his life in Rye, is best known for his paintings of the hedonistic nightlife of 1920s London, Paris and the south of France, the jazz clubs of Harlem in the 30s and his later darker and more macabre images of dancing skeletons, monsters and masked soldiers.
Black Mountain, Wales is included as part of the artist’s late and less exhibited landscapes. It is a large watercolour using bright and brooding areas of colour and features sinister, hooded figures, a tractor and Shell diesel cans, intruding on the dramatic and wild countryside.
The gallery has in its collection items loaned from the Burra family including letters, photos, ephemera, paintings, prints, drawings and designs by Burra.
As further recognition of the importance of the gallery’s permanent collection, another of its paintings has travelled to an exhibition, this time to the Clark Art Gallery in Williamstown, Massachusetts in America. Laura Sylvia Gosse’s painting, Seamstresses (1914) is included in A Room of her Own: Women Artists/Activists1875-1945 (June 14-September 14). It features work by women artists working around the same time as Virginia Wolf, carving out spaces for themselves to work, create and take part in public and political life.
Laura Sylvia Gosse (1881-1968) was an English painter and printer, a student of Walter Sickert, who went on to teach at and run, an art school in Hampstead with him. As part of the New English Art Club and the London Group her subjects- domestic interiors, women at work, and street scenes- and her thick, loose brush work are also seen in the work of Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore.
The permanent collection, founded by the painter Mary Stormont in 1957, holds about 700 works of art along with photos and archive material, all held in trust for the benefit, education and enjoyment of the people of Rye and, as these loans show, its importance is increasingly recognised locally, nationally and internationally.
Image Credits: Donated by the Friends of the Rye Art Gallery and the National Art Collection Fund 1970 , Julian Day/Rye Art Gallery , Rye Art Gallery .