John Minton 1917-1957

The Artist
George Dix, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent
Private collection, Virginia
Osborne Samuel, London

University of Virginia Museum of Fine Art, February 1949

A major figure in the neo-Romantic movement of the 1940s and 50s, English painter John Minton was also an abundantly gifted graphic artist and prolific illustrator. His commissions spanned book illustration, dust-jacket design, illustrations for magazines and journals, advertising, commercial posters for film, wallpapers, theatre design and importantly a large canvas commissioned for the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain. Notable projects also include illustrations for food writer Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Alan Ross’s Time Was Away, and Kay Dick’s An Affair of Love.

Minton was clearly influenced by the previous generation of Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland. As Gerard Hastings wrote in his essay for our exhibition in 2018, the impulse was to preserve picturesque scenery and to locate a poetic vision among our home-grown hops and thistles. A distinct nostalgia for something familiar that might soon disappear. The Fisherman is a wonderful example of this.

This drawing previously owned by George Dix who was stationed in London during the Second World War and remained there for a time afterwards. During this period in England, he befriended many of the luminaries of mid-century British culture, among them Minton, Wells, Vaughan and Piper, along with the famed sculptor Henry Moore. He maintained these relationships even after his return to America, where he worked as a partner in the New York office of the bi-continental gallery Durlacher Brothers. In Manhattan, Dix remained part of the intelligentsia, enjoying the company and friendship of Gore Vidal and Leonard Bernstein, among others.

The Artist, who gifted to Peter Mackenzie-Young
Thence by family descent
Osborne Samuel, London

In Paris, in 1939, John Minton eagerly tracked down the Russian painter Eugene Berman (1899-1972), whose work he and his fellow student, Michael Ayrton, had encountered in James Thrall Soby’ s After Picasso . The result, as Minton ruefully admitted, verged on the obsessional. As he immersed himself in Berman’ s moonlit squares, strewn with shattered columns and often charged by an intense blue, he became mesmerised by their ‘ tense, theatrical melancholy’ .

Returning to London, Minton channelled his response to war through the filter of Berman’ s vision. He found his familiar haunts of Limehouse, Wapping and Poplar devastated by the German bombing campaign. Yet his paintings, for the most part, depicted not real but archetypal settings, peopled with characters imagined from the margins of society. In London, 1941 a young couple poses idly in the shadows; centre-stage, and illuminated uncannily from above, are two children in rags. The composition suggests a vast architectural ruin, at the crossing of which unfolds an unspecified human tragedy.

Private Collection, London
Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath

On two sides