Julian Trevelyan

Interior, Hammersmith

1946

© The estate of Julian Trevelyan

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Not on display

Artist: Julian Trevelyan 1910–1988
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 603 × 813 mm
frame: 722 × 932 × 77 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1981
Reference: T03226

Catalogue entry

T03226 INTERIOR, HAMMERSMITH 1946

Inscribed ‘Trevelyan 46’ bottom right and ‘INTERIOR 1946 TREVELYAN’ on stretcher
Oil on canvas, 23 3/4 × 32 (60.4 × 81.3)
Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1981
Prov: Purchased from the artist through the New Grafton Gallery by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1977
Exh: La Jeune Peinture Anglaise, Galerie de France, Paris, June 1947 (31, as ‘L'Atelier’); Julian Trevelyan Retrospective, New Grafton Gallery, April–May 1977 (7)

The artist has written of this picture:

'“Interior” was, I think, painted in 1946, and is of the room in which we live by the Thames [in Hammersmith Terrace]. In it I was trying to get across the feeling that the river pervades everything, sailing boats seem to come in at the windows, and the ripples on the water at high tide are reflected on the ceiling. With this end in view, I consciously painted the river and trees across spaces in the wall. The round table, the old piano, and the carved fish that we were housing for Gertrude Hermes, were all there; the two girls and the man were invented. An island with swans is near our house, and was a feature of several pictures that I painted at that time.

'The picture was shown in the Galerie de France in Paris, where I had a room full of pictures. In the next room were pictures by Colquhoun and MacBryde and Jankel Adler. The painter Braque called, whom I had met before, and I remember that he singled out this picture for praise; on the strength of it he asked me to tea.’ (Letter to the compiler, 24 November 1982.)

Trevelyan showed eight paintings at the Galerie de France exhibition in June 1947, four of them interiors. The catalogue had a brief introduction by Herbert Read who remarked upon the new ‘expressionism’ of Trevelyan's style. The carved wooden fish suspended from the ceiling in T03226 belonged to the sculptor and woodengraver Gertrude Hermes (1901–83), some of whose possessions were housed by the Trevelyans during the war, when Hermes went with her children to live in Canada.

Another in the same series of interiors was shown at Blond Fine Art in March 1984 (British Paintings 1901–1950, no.34 ‘Durham Wharf’).

The above entry has been approved by the artist.

Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1980-82: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1984