Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Vernon Ward (1905-1985) was a painter of extraordinary talent whose sole crime consisted of painting popular subjects against the whole trend of modern art and its proponents. Already a skilled painter at an early age Vernon Ward was accepted at the Slade when only fourteen years old. His father who had encouraged his work and taught him many skills died in 1926 when Vernon was twenty-one and at the end of his art school training. Albert Ward’s death had a dramatic and lasting effect on Vernon’s personality and subsequent career as an artist; when Josephine Walpole began to compile his biography after his death she discovered that he had begun his autobiography many times but had always stopped abruptly and sadly at his father’s death. Much of the imagery of his paintings is locked into the time capsule of his youth in the Edwardian era. His overriding necessity to support both himself and his widowed mother turned him towards commercial art in order to earn a living although he still continued to paint unashamedly escapist non-commercial subjects for pleasure. As a result he saw his commercial work indifferently reproduced on such every- day items as chocolate boxes and ladies’ scarves yet its very popularity precluded him from exhibiting his own works in certain galleries. Ironically it was his connections with the commercial world of art that later enabled his paintings to be reproduced in large numbers as quality prints and cards through pub- lishers such as W.R. Royle The Medici Society and Solomon & Whitehead. (SP)