Summary
This is one of a pair of paintings, neither of which is titled, which James Boswell painted in London based on his wartime memories of Iraq. Both this work and its partner (Tate T07600) consist of a restricted palette of red, black, white and grey. Both use unmodulated areas of these non-naturalistic colours, and a stark and spikey mode of representation, to conjure up a sense of isolation and of the uncanny.
Here, the grey foreground rises steeply to a black stone building with an undulating roof-line that may indicate a corrugated iron covering. The starkness of the scene is exaggerated by the full-frontal view of the building and the compositional emphasis on strong horizontal and vertical lines. The red corrugated iron broken away from the roof, the austere building, and the telegraph poles without wires all suggest a feeling of abandonment. The rug and the dilapidated palm leaf are more enigmatic, though the leaf's spikey fronds have a certain anxious quality that they share with the contemporaneous work of Lucian Freud… (read more)
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