A Sense Of Place

JULIAN TREVELYAN made a major contribution to 20th-century British art. ROSEMARY WAUGH explores the work of this overlooked painter of everyday life

- Rosemary Waugh

Something interesting happens when you spend time looking at a Julian Trevelyan painting. The images, often landscapes filled with multiple figures and features, start as a blurry overlap of shapes and colours. But keep looking and, all of a sudden, the patterns rearrange themselves, perspective clicks into place and what was a perfectly pleasant haze becomes a razor-sharp depiction of, say, Hammersmith Bridge, or two oxen yoked to a caravan.

The experience is similar to watching the clouds clear on the horizon or seeing morning fog slowly lift to reveal the city skyline beyond. But, most of all, it’s an entirely fitting way to experience the work of an artist who specialised in capturing an exact sense of place. You can see for yourself at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which is showing a thorough survey of Trevelyan’s prodigious artistic output in painting, printmaking and collage. The exhibition is separated into the different working periods of his life, starting with his early forays into surrealism (kick-started by travelling to France and mixing with the artists based around Atelier 17), through to his mature work in localities across the globe and his involvement with the early stages of the Mass Observation movement.

Co-curator James Scott, who organised the exhibition with Ariane Bankes, is a long-standing admirer of Trevelyan’s art, and a friend of the artist and his wife, the painter Mary Fedden. A retired orthopaedic surgeon, Scott might not be a typical exhibition curator but his passion in describing Trevelyan’s work is infectious. Moreover, he and Bankes have a personal connection to the artistic couple.