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Design Review: Volume 3, Issue 3 (November- December 1950)

Book Review — Edward Bawden

Book Review
Edward Bawden

By Robert Harling (Art and Technics—London).

This book is one of the splendid series of English Masters of Black and White. The book is in two sections, a biographical account and the drawings. The latter, reproduced as they were intended as line blocks in black and white, are excellent and the former, written by Robert Harling, presents an intimate picture of Bawden as a man and as an artist.

Edward Bawden, C.B.E., R.U.I., A.R.A., F.S.I.A., is unique in many ways. He is a leading painter in watercolours, a mural painter, a lithographer and engraver, a designer of posters, book jackets and book illustrations, and the was one of the first to realise the possibilities of the humble linocut. This most versatile artist seems to be able to work with distinction in any medium. His work is always personal and inimitable. He is modest, shy, tall, slim, full of nervous energy and a tiger for work.

At the age of seven he attended Braintree High School. At about eleven he had drawing lessons from the daughter of a Congregational Minister. At thirteen he went to the Friends' School at Saffron Walden. At fifteen he spent a day a week at Cambridge Art School, becoming a full time student in the following year. At nineteen a Royal Exhibition for Writing and Illuminating took him to Royal College. He arrived at the College in 1922, on the same day as Hric Ravilious and the two became friends, and friendly competitors until the latter's death in Iceland in 1942.

E. W. Tristram was Professor of Design and Bawden says that he is more indebted to him than to any other artist. After three years he was awarded the Travelling Scholarship in Design and went to Home, Venice, Padua, Florence and Naples. He discovered the Baroque as “the most deliriously beautiful style ever invented”.

And then he started his career in earnest — but it's all in the book and it's fascinating reading.

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