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Property from The David Jacobs Collection of Paintings by Richard Eurich Richard Ernst Eurich (1903-1992) received his art education at Bradford School of Arts & Crafts (1922-1924) and subsequently at the Slade (1924-1926). Born and brought up in Bradford, his father was of German descent and his mother English. Among his forebears was a single ancestor, August Eurich, who was a limner, but otherwise Richard’s artistic gifts were a mystery to his family. The stone buildings and monumental factories of Bradford, together with the people and the customs of the town, made a deep impression upon the young Richard. In middle age he regularly referred back to his childhood, creating many richly detailed and imaginative paintings, a number of which are now in this country’s leading art galleries. Two such paintings which have hitherto been in a private collection are the York Festival Triptych (1956) and Scenes of My Childhood (1957). Richard held his first solo exhibition at London’s Goupil Gallery in 1929, where he had a brief conversation with Christopher Wood who advised him to 'paint what you love and damn all fashions which come and go', advice which he took to heart. In the late 1930s he was chosen to represent Great Britain at the Carnegie International Biennale in Pittsburgh, USA. In 1942 he was appointed an Official War Artist to the Admiralty, and also in 1942 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, becoming a full Academician in 1953. As the years passed, Richard evolved as an artist, moving almost imperceptibly from one style of figurative painting to another. He was fortunate not to experience a dry period, as some artists do, but in continuing to paint what he loved and to disregard fashion his market gradually deserted him during the 1950s and into the 1960s. It is ironic that his paintings from this period are, today, some of the most sought after and appreciated by collectors. After his retirement in 1968 his paintings moved into another phase, with the shores of the Solent and the woods and heathland of the New Forest being his chief subjects. Where earlier in his career he had revelled in painting complex and highly detailed works, he now began to whittle them down so that their compositional strength and balanced colours alone held them together. Evening, Lepe (1971) is just such a fine painting. His slightly later work, Spithead Jubilee Review (1977), is even more daring in its minimalism, with a vast sea beneath a vast sky and its main subject matter populating the rim of the horizon, and yet despite this he has managed to balance all the elements of this painting into a harmonious whole. His ancestor August Eurich was a painter of miniatures, and Richard, too, could also have been a limner because of his ability to capture minute details without ever making his paintings fussy – as can be appreciated in all four of these paintings – and this was one of the many distinguishing gifts that rank him among Britain’s finest figurative artists of the twentieth century. We are very grateful to Christine Clearkin for preparing this introduction and the catalogue entries for lots 178-181.

Richard Eurich, R.A. (1903-1992)

Scenes of my Childhood

Details

Richard Eurich, R.A. (1903-1992)
Scenes of my Childhood
signed and dated 'R. Eurich. 1957.' (lower left), signed again and inscribed 'NORTHERN LANDSCAPE/RICHARD EURICH. R.A.' (on a label attached to the stretcher)
oil on canvas
40 x 50 in. (101.6 x 127 cm.)

Provenance

with Ash Barn, Petersfield, where purchased by the present owner in 1969.

Literature

Exhibition catalogue, The Edge of All the Land: Richard Eurich 1903-1992, Southampton, City Art Gallery, 1994, pp. 30, 48, no. 57, illustrated.

Exhibited

Southampton, City Art Gallery, The Edge of All the Land: Richard Eurich 1903-1992, January - March 1994, no. 57: this exhibition travelled to Manchester, City Art Gallery, March - May 1994; Bradford, Cartwright Hall, May - July 1994; and Ipswich, Christchurch Mansion, July - August 1994.

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

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Anne Haasjes

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Lot Essay

Richard Eurich's Yorkshire childhood, growing up in the mill town of Bradford, provided him with a rich source of visual imagery which he explored in many of his paintings from the 1950s. Scenes of my Childhood is just such a painting, recalling an occasion when a steam engine pulled a giant boiler up to a hilltop mill, with the workers throwing sacking beneath its wheels to prevent it slipping backwards on the granite setts. The painting is typically full of incident, with interested crowds watching the spectacle, while others work or play in the semi-rural landscape of a northern town. A horse draws a barge along the canal, the river runs over a weir, a railway line issues out of a tunnel like a torrent, and a viaduct strides across the distant landscape; the painting is quietly busy, subtly colourful and beautifully composed.

C.C.

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