Tristram Hillier

Harness

1944

On loan

Museum of Somerset (Taunton, UK): Painter Pilgrim: The Art and Life of Tristram Hillier

Artist: Tristram Hillier 1905–1983
Medium: Tempera on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 603 × 813 mm
frame: 835 × 1035 × 103 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by Sir Edward Marsh through the Contemporary Art Society 1944
Reference: N05567

Catalogue entry

N05567 HARNESS 1944

Inscr. ‘Tristram Hillier, Bayford, Wincanton’ on an envelope in the centre.
Tempera on canvas, 23 3/4×32 (60·5×81).
Presented by Sir Edward Marsh through the Contemporary Art Society 1944.
Coll: Purchased by Sir Edward Marsh through Arthur Tooth & Sons for presentation to the Tate Gallery.
Exh: Worthing Art Gallery, September–October 1960 (11).
Repr: Mervyn Levy, Drawing and Painting for Young People, 1960, facing p.72.

Painted in 1944 after the artist had been invalided out of the Royal Navy. He writes in Leda and the Goose, 1954, p.174: ‘The remaining months of the war I spent in a furnished cottage in Somerset. Here after the three years in which it had been impossible for me to paint, I worked, I think during every hour of daylight.’ A companion picture, ‘The Bridle’, painted in 1943, is in the National Gallery of Canada and is reproduced in Leda and the Goose, facing p.45.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I