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| René Magritte The Annunciation 1930 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"The objects in this painting appear to be a metal sheet with bells, a paper cut-out and two balusters (Magritte referred to similar objects in his paintings as bilboquets, a French stick and ball game)."
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| Harold Jones The Black Door ca. 1935 gouache Tate, London |
"A drawing of this picture was used for the back cover of This Year, Next Year by the artist and Walter de la Mare, a book for children published by Faber and Faber in 1937, which included a poem by de la Mare related to the picture and entitled Farewell:
Ah me! That pen should be where mine is –
That F. I. N. I. S. spells FINIS!
It means – oh sad! – our book is over,
And all its pictures, excepting one
You'll find, dear Reader, on the cover –
Of starlings feeding in the sun.
There, open stands a shining door;
To let us out – but in no more.
There glides a stream. A linden tree
Dreams of the Spring. The distant woods
Hear the gentle wind sigh, 'This is she!' –
And into leaf unfurl their buds.
Listen! that far, faint clarion!
. . . Farewell! All blessings! I am gone.
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| Francis Bacon Figures in a Garden ca. 1935 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"This painting stands as a rare record of a period in Francis Bacon's career in which the artist destroyed most of his work. . . . In a 1935 letter Bacon described what may have been an earlier version of this painting: 'a figure in a garden which I think has come very well. It has some how by accident got a rather strong feeling of the Webster lines about the fish in the garden and the sunlight, at least I don't think it is purely something I read into it'. This may refer to a section of John Webster's tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (1614) in which the Duchess's brother reflects guiltily on his role in her murder. . . . Figures in a Garden was first displayed in an exhibition titled Young British Painters at Thomas Agnew and Sons, London in January 1937. It is the only one of the four Bacon works included in the exhibition to have survived Bacon's regular purges and reworkings of his paintings, probably because it was purchased from the show by the artist's second cousin, Diana Watson."
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| Matthew Smith Peaches 1937 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Matthew Smith Still Life with Clay Figure I 1939 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Still Life with Clay Figure I was painted in Aix-en-Provence, where Matthew Smith lived between the years 1936-40. When France fell in June 1940 the artist was evacuated to London and this was one of a number of canvases left in Aix during the war years in the care of Madame Monay, the wife of the artist Pierre Monay. In 1946-47 Smith returned to Aix to recover these works and subsequently took them to Paris, where he was joined by Richard Smart, who had agreed to help him transport the works back to England."
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| Alexandre Jacovleff Neptune and Andromeda ca. 1937-38 tempera on canvas Tate, London |
"On the left is Neptune, with his trident, and on the right a naked girl seated on a rock amid a raging sea; she raises one arm in an attitude of distress. It has been suggested that she is Andromeda, daughter of the Aethiopian King Cepheus and Cassiope. Neptune inundated her father's kingdom and sent a sea-monster to ravage the country because Cassiope boasted of being fairer than the Nereides. After the oracle had been consulted, Andromeda was tied naked on a rock and exposed to the sea-monster; she was rescued by Perseus, who slew the monster by showing him Medusa's head, and obtained Andromeda as his wife. There are possible indications of the sea-monster on the right."
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| James Cowie An Outdoor School of Painting 1938-41 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"In its processional format, no less than in its thin dry paint texture and use of pale colours, An Outdoor School of Painting resembles a fresco. The original title of the picture was Frieze. Cowie greatly admired quattrocento painting and would frequently try to emulate its technique. In 1950 he was commissioned by Edinburgh Corporation to paint a mural (something he had always wanted to do) for Usher Hall. The project appears to have come to nothing."
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| André Derain Still-life ca. 1938-43 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"The unusual size and monumental quality of this painting can be seen as reflecting Derain's interest in seventeenth-century Baroque still lifes. Especially notable, however, are the stark contrasts of black and white, and the inclusion of drawing instruments, symbols of the artist's craft. These speak of Derain's belief that the definition of lit surfaces was central to drawing, and that light was a physical manifestation of the spirit."
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| Hans Feibusch 1939 painted in 1939 oil on panel Tate, London |
"The stiff contorted body at the left is dead, held up by the central figure who, with his stricken companion, is transfixed with grief. The painting drew on Feibusch's own experiences of war as a German soldier on the Russian front in 1916-18, but the dead figure relates also to his memory of identifying the body of his only brother, following his death in an avalanche while skiing at Klosters in Switzerland in January 1929. The winter was bitterly cold and when called upon to identify his brother's body in a railway carriage in Frankfurt, Feibusch was struck by its exceptional stiffness, ever afterwards associating death with this pronounced rigidity."
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| Duncan Grant The Hayrick 1940 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"In his youth Duncan Grant had been a leading avant-garde painter and designer, a key member of the Bloomsbury Group and a co-founder of the Omega Workshops. He produced an enormous body of work in a variety of styles and subjects. This was painted in the rick-yard at Charleston, home of Grant and Vanessa Bell in Sussex. The hayrick is depicted as a tall, elegant but fragile structure, which harmonises with its natural environment. In the 1930s a number of societies were founded to oppose the destruction of the English countryside. During the war rural England became central to national identity."
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| Graham Sutherland Devastation 1941, East End, Burnt Paper Warehouse 1941 gouache and pastel Tate, London |
"Sutherland was one of several painters commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to record the devastation of the London Blitz. Having first studied the wrecked buildings in the City, in May 1941 he was sent to the badly bombed docklands area of the East End. In Wapping, close to Tower Bridge, he saw great rolls of paper in the wreckage of a warehouse, and made drawings on which this painting was based."
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| Graham Sutherland Furnaces 1944 oil and gouache on paper Tate, London |
"Furnaces shows part of the process of arms manufacture at the Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London, one of the three historic Royal Ordnance Factories in Britain, along with those at Enfield and Waltham."
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| David Bomberg Tregor and Tregoff, Cornwall 1947 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"In 1947 Bomberg spent six weeks camping near Zennor in west Cornwall. This view of a stormy sky hanging over two moorland peaks is characteristic of the area, as is the orange and ochre colouring of the dead gorse and heather."
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| John Piper Yarnton Monument 1947-48 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Jacobean and Georgian church monuments are a frequent subject in Piper's sketches and paintings, and this work is an excellent example of his use of colour and light to create a 'romantic' portrait of them, in which the figures almost come alive. The monument is in honour of Sir Thomas Spencer (died 1684), at Yarnton Church in Oxfordshire."
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London