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| Gilbert Spencer Blackmore Vale from Compton Abbas 1942 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Robert Buhler Carlyle Square, Chelsea 1946-47 oil paint on board Tate Gallery |
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| Victor Askew The Studio, St John's Wood 1948 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Askew used The Studio, St John's Wood as a model to describe his method of working. He wrote: The greater part of this painting was produced with the palette knife alone. Further details were added with a sable brush when the painting was near completion. I have always tried to exploit the potentialities of the palette knife fully, thereby giving a considerable variety of textures to the painting according to its need. In this example it was used to express both atmosphere and the solidity of shapes. By atmosphere I mean the sense of light and the space around the building and even through the windows. This is especially in evidence in the sky behind the building in contrast with the solidity of the cement and brick of the building."
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| John Minton Street and Railway Bridge 1946 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Minton's melancholy paintings of London during and shortly after the Second World War often include displaced people and the bombed-out shells of buildings. A pile of rubble fills the foreground of this picture of a deserted London street. Whether it is the wreckage of a bomb, a slum clearance or simply a building site is not clear, but the generally run-down character of this desolate scene compares bitterly to the quintessential Renaissance image of civic order."
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| Ivon Hitchens Damp Autumn 1941 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"In 1940 Hitchens and his family evacuated their bombed-out London home for Lavington Common near Petworth, Sussex, where he had often painted in the late 1930s. The woods there became the main subject of his art. While such works clearly follow the tradition of Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable, Hitchens was also interested in modern artists, in particular the Cubist Georges Braque. He wrote that his new 'more settled life, with permanent roots in this soil, has led to a deeper search for the more abstract elements of a given subject.'"
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| Duncan Grant Garden Path in Spring 1944 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"While such Neo-Romantic artists as John Piper, Graham Sutherland and John Craxton were creating Arcadian landscapes inflected by nostalgia, anxiety and fantasy, Duncan Grant's primary concern in works like Garden Path in Spring was with colour, harmony and unity of design. In addition, while they sought to define a distinctly national style, Grant's treatment of landscape was consistently influenced by the European aesthetics of Post-Impressionism and was strongly anti-nationalist, even when the subject-matter was most conspicuously British. The garden depicted here was part of the estate at Charleston, a remote farmhouse at the foot of Firle Beacon in Sussex where Grant lived and worked with the painter Vanessa Bell from 1916 until his death. . . . The detached, carefree and luxurious world of Charleston, enjoyed by its inhabitants and visitors, was to appear increasingly out of tune with modern British life, and in the post-war era of austerity and rationing Grant suffered a decline in his reputation. His solo show at the Leicester Galleries in June 1945, in which Garden Path in Spring and other Charleston scenes were exhibited, received a poor critical reception."
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| Victor Pasmore Interior with Reclining Women 1944-46 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Josef Herman Evening, Ystradgynlais 1948 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The dominant theme of Josef Herman's art was 'Man as labourer and the surroundings of his working life'. From the mid-1940s, the daily routine provided the gritty details for depictions which suggested the greater cycles in which the individual was subsumed: sunrise to twilight, labour to rest, birth to death. In the recurring depiction of Ystradgynlais, the Welsh mining village where he established himself in 1944, these cycles come together in the conjunction of labour and natural patterns. This is clear in Evening, Ystradgynlais. The time of day, which lends the red hue to the sky and ground alike, signals the end of the shift in the mine, and the miners return home in an enveloping atmosphere."
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| Alberto Giacometti Interior 1949 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Muirhead Bone Torpedoed Oil Tanker 1940 charcoal, chalk, ink and watercolor on paper Tate Gallery |
"In spite of extensive damage the tanker not only reached port but complete another voyage before being properly repaired. One of the officers remarked to the artist: 'Looks as if the rats had been at her – more like mice the other side.'"
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| Paul Nash Totes Meer 1940-41 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"This painting, the title of which is German for 'dead sea', was inspired by a dump of wrecked aircraft at Cowley in Oxfordshire. Nash based the image on photographs he took there. The artist described the sight: 'The thing looked to me suddenly like a great inundating sea . . . the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. And then, no: nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead.'"
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| Francis Gruber Job 1944 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Gruber was committed to realism and to Communism. Job was painted for an exhibition which opened shortly after the liberation of Paris in 1944. Gruber uses the Biblical story of Job's suffering as an allegory for the survival of hope under the Occupation. The inscription, which comes from the Book of Job, translates as: 'Now, once more my cry is a revolt, and yet my hand suppresses my sobs.'"
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| Keith Vaughan Cain and Abel 1946 watercolor, gouache, crayon, charcoal and ink on paper mounted on board Tate Gallery |
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| Charles Murray Bathers 1940 oil paint on panel Tate Gallery |
– quoted passages based on curator's notes form the Tate Gallery