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Paintings Pre 1900 » Post-War British Figurative Painting by LF Herbert
Ref: 5036
A chance to buy a large & interesting original work of post-war British 20th century figurative art by the little-known Oxford painter and poet, L.F.Herbert. Herbert’s work covered religious and mythological subject matter but placed within a humanistic reflection on British society in the aftermath of the 2nd world war. This you could call a major work and brings together some of his key motifs. In the foreground is a pieta, Christian but the dress recalls Classical times, so too the cypress trees in the mid-ground. The theme is renewal, a return to origin, first principles & fresh beginnings, the youth has fallen, his mother’s face is in shadows, her dress one of mourning, but the young and etiolated slightly Gothic figure of the young woman, not unlike the bride in the Arnolfini marriage, is full with child, her gesture one of piety & love, while the children play, another woman in mid-ground plants trees in the wasteland, the city scape with stormy sky counterposes this pastoral of renewal with the grime & graft of ordinary Northern industrial England in a time of austerity.
English c.1950s
H: 80cm (31.5in)
W: 97cm (38.2in)
D: 4.25cm (1.7in)
SOLD
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