John Minton

Street and Railway Bridge

1946

© The estate of John Minton

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Not on display

Artist
John Minton 1917–1957
Medium
Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions
Support: 457 × 610 mm
frame: 591 × 747 × 65 mm
Collection
Tate
Acquisition
Purchased 1957
Reference
T00162

Display caption

Minton’s melancholy paintings of London during and shortly after the Second World War often include displaced people and the bombed out shells of buildings. A pile of rubble fills the foreground of this picture of a deserted London street.  Whether it is the wreckage of a bomb, a slum clearance or simply a building site is not clear, but the generally run-down character of this desolate scene compares bitterly to the quintessential Renaissance image of civic order in The Ideal City, by an unknown artist.

Gallery label, September 2004

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Catalogue entry

T00162 STREET AND RAILWAY BRIDGE 1946

Inscr. ‘John Minton 1946’ b.r.

Canvas, 18×24 (46×61).

Purchased from Mrs Helen Forbes through the Lefevre Gallery (Knapping Fund) 1957.

Coll: Mrs Helen Forbes 1947–57.

Exh: Lefevre Gallery, December 1946–January 1947 (9); Arts Council, October–November 1958 (9).

Repr: Tate Gallery Report 1957–8 , 1958; Sir John Rothenstein, British Art since 1900, 1962, pl.79.

One of a number of London scenes painted in the 1940s.

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

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