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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 14m

The window became a prominent symbol in 19thC art, representing a threshold between the interior and exterior, and a space for contemplation and longing. 'View of Rome from the Artist’s Room at the Villa Medici,' by Constant Moyaux was painted in 1863.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 5h

'The Parish Bazaar,' (c1947) Norman Blamey was a consummate draughtsman; his early work specialised in capturing everyday events. This painting is based on a Christmas sale, which took place annually in the Parish Hall of St Pancras Old Church in Crowndale Road.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 12h

I'm a huge fan of Hubert Finney’s portraits, all of which have a similar graphic charge to this oil from around 1940. It's for sale at £2000 pop me a line if you're interested. The dimensions are 49 x 39 cm; the framed size is 66 x 55.5cm. email me at richard@richardmorris.org

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 13h

The fourth child of Augustus and Ida John, Edwin was born in Paris. After a brief career as a middleweight boxer he became a watercolourist. He inherited the estate of his aunt Gwen and did much to secure her posthumous reputation. This portrait by his father, is from 1927.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Claude Francis Barry’s paintings of WW1 are amongst the most accomplished of his works, with his images of searchlights across London being the most evocative - here (1918) he used small concentrated dots of colour to create an atmospheric haze of light.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Dorothy Hepworth was involved in one of the strangest deceptions in British art history. Her work was passed off as that of her lover, Patricia Preece. Even Augustus John was taken in, praising Preece’s talent. Hepworth continued signing Preece’s name long after her death.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

One of the painters I’ve written about in my book on obscure British 20thC artists is Brian Hatton, a friend of John Singer Sargent, who was killed in WW1. This portrait from 1908 is of his sisters Ailsa and Marjorie.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

'A Man with a Scythe, Mowing,' was painted by Harry Becker in Wenhaston, Suffolk around 1913. For the next 15 years, Becker observed the slow turn of the agricultural year to emerge as one of the most remarkable interpreters of the English countryside.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

A Lady in Blue,' (1916) Around five years before this picture, Harold Gilman had been influenced by Edouard Vuillard and his use of close-up, intimate portraits. Here Gilman has used strong colour, blushing skin tones and impasto to create an almost claustrophobic feeling.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

'Blackberrying.' (1917) Harold Harvey used the theme of fruit picking throughout his career; the women and girls in the work of this period are absorbed in their own thoughts, something which reflects the preoccupations of the time with the ongoing war across the water in France

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Brighton Front (1964). The years 1962–64 were crucial in Mary Potter’s career. She was offered a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, prompting her to create new work of greater scope and scale while retaining the unemphatic quality characteristic of her painting.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The sea always played an important role in Richard Eurich’s art. He later described it as ‘a symbol of a certain loneliness which I have always desired; the sight of the sea has always brought that constriction of the throat caused by something of almost indescribable beauty.'

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This painting was a result of Francis Cadell being turned down to join the British army in 1914. He worked on a farm in Dumfries, Scotland (depicted here) in an attempt to improve his fitness - he later passed the medical board's examination and joined the Royal Scot's Guards.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

John Lavery’s 'The Hall, Argyll House,' (1925) depicts the home of society hostess Sibyl Colefax and her husband Arthur, on the corner of King’s Road and Oakley Street. It is one of Lavery’s 23 portrait interiors.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

In the 'The Lustre Bowl,' (1908) William Nicholson plays with the shining contrast of the bowl against a dark black background. He would set up a still life and leave it untouched for days, absorbing every element. The flash of light lifts the picture out of the ordinary.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

In 1951 Gerard Dillon stayed at a house on Inishlacken, a mile off Roundstone in the Atlantic Ocean. This work shows two men, the one of the left identified as Dillon, bartering with another in Roundstone Harbour, perhaps negotiating the loan of a boat to go lobster fishing.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

'Young Fisherman, Valencia,' fits into Sorolla's canon of sun-filled optimistic pictures he painted between 1904 and 1909 which expressed everything he loved about Spain, its historic grandeur, regional colour, the promise of its youth at the dawn of a new century.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

'The Arrival of a Leave Train,' was completed a year after the ending of WW1 and in it Bernard Meninsky depicts group of British soldiers (a Scottish regiment by the look of their khaki Balmoral bonnets) standing at the canteen on a platform of a railway station in 1918

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

'Our Blacksmith,' was George Clausen's major exhibit at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1931 - the scene was painted in a forge in Essex where smithies were still active in the early 20thC and is arguably his most dramatic painting of human industry.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

An astute observer of human comedy, Mabel Dwight instilled her scenes of New Yorkers riding the subway, shopping, and visiting parks and other popular entertainments such as aquariums. 'Queer Fish,' is from 1936.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

John Lavery's painting of Chiswick lido (c1929) is an early depiction of the new wave of swimming pools that emerged in London at the turn of the 20thC. They coincided with a relaxing of social formalities, it was a place to show off and even enjoy a smoke by the poolside.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

90 years ago, the Jarrow Crusaders marched nearly 300 miles to London in protest at unemployment and poverty. Thomas Cantrell Dugdale’s 1936 painting captures their arrival from a Piccadilly interior (possibly the Ritz).

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

'The Brothers.' (1928) A child prodigy, Joan Manning-Sanders was aged 15 when this work was painted and was the youngest artist to have shown at the RA Summer Exhibition in the late 1920s.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

'Venetian Reflections.' In 1879 Whistler travelled to Venice, a move which instigated a period of great artistic productivity with an increasingly minimalist approach, more abstract and dependent on a minimum of lines.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

In this work from 1912, Édouard Vuillard depicts his mother reading the morning newspaper, at one with her surroundings, it constitutes a demonstration of Stéphane Mallarmé's notion that 'one must express the effect something produces rather than the thing itself.'

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Benjamin Haughton was a landscape painter who studied under Sir Hubert von Herkomer. This painting. 'Man Crossing a Field at Dusk,' (1908) depicts the last light of a rainy autumn day and was made at Ottery St. Mary in Devon not far from Haughton's birthplace in Dawlish.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Painted in 1887, 'A Flower Meadow at Veierland,' is one of Edvard Munch's final paintings before his style was influenced by Hans Jæger, an anarchist and bohemian in Kristiania who convinced him artists should take a new approach in their work and have relevance in peoples' lives

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Like his friend Francis Cadell, John Maclauchlan Milne saw the landscape of Iona in terms of pure colour. His paintings of the island (this is c1937) use a palette of bright greens, pinks, blues and mauve with touches of yellow, to capture the light.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

William Rothenstein's portrait is of the artist Barnett Freedman who once said: 'There’s nothing I hate more than fresh air and wide open spaces. I love London and the people who live in it.' His landscapes are sublime and have the interior feeling that pervades most of his work.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

'Kensington Interior,' (1912) depicts the hallway of 67 Ladbroke Grove, London, W.11, the house which belonged to Frank Emanuel's parents and where he lived from about 1890 until around 1920.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Stanley Spencer depicted all the members of the Frank family including the family dog. This portrait is of Andrew Frank from 1954 when he was two and a half years old. The work started as a pencil drawing on plywood but as he sat still, Spencer decided to paint the work in oil.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Herbert Gunn's picture is titled 'The Eve of the Battle of the Somme,' which dates it to 30 June 1916. At the outbreak of WW1, Gunn initially joined the Artists Rifles before receiving a commission in the 10th Scottish Rifles.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

'The Dirty Plate.' (1940) During WW2 Elsie Gledstanes worked as an auxiliary ambulance driver and as a driver for the Women's Legion. During both wars she painted and sketched individual and group portraits of other women active on war duties such as here.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Mrs Mounter was Harold Gilman’s landlady at 47 Maple Street, just off Tottenham Court Road in London. Here, she is pictured at the breakfast table. According to Gilman, breakfast was often shrouded in a haze of smoke, thanks to Mrs Mounter’s forgetfulness. This is from 1916.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

'In the Drawing Room.' (c1922) Despite Doris Zinkeisen's success in theatrical design, she was also a commercially successful artist and later served as an official war artist in WW2, witnessing the appalling conditions revealed by the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

During WW2, Olga Lehmann's decorative murals enlivened the dour interiors of the nationwide chain of state-run 'British restaurants,' requisitioned hotels, the ministry of aircraft production and the government censorship department in Holborn. This work is from 1940.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Eero Jarnefelt's cloud study (1893) is a view over Lake Pielinen near Koli in North Karelia in eastern Finland - creatives of Järnefelt's generation, from Sibelius to Akseli Gallen-Kallela, saw Karelia as a lost paradise and an embodiment of the authentic soul of Finland.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

'Spring Morning,Campden Hill.' (1940) The effective use of light is the true subject of Algernon Newton's pictures. Reviewing his career, he said: ‘I felt I had to try to create something in every picture I painted, a mood, a mental atmosphere, a sentiment.’

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Mevagissey, Cornwall.' (c1914) Like many female artists working at the beginning of the 20thC, Doris Zinkeisen’s work traversed the boundaries between fine and decorative art; she was one of the first artists to enter the Belsen camp in April 1945.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

'View from the Window.' (c1950) Margaret Green was a painter of narrative landscapes and figure compositions of subtle strength and quiet lives; she remained largely unknown to a wider public - a story familiar to many women artists of her generation.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

'Eggs, Tomatoes and Mushrooms.' Frances Hodgkins was a New Zealander who came to Europe in 1901. This is from 1929, when she was experimenting with still lifes - all of which have an inner yearning for certainty, stability and calm.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This picture dates to the early 1880s, shortly after Albert de Belleroche had enrolled at the atelier of Carolus Duran. Here Belleroche met John Singer Sargent. A life-long friendship ensued, with both the artists sharing studios in Paris and London. With thanks to Paul Liss.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This is the only drawing (1868) made by John Everett Millais for an uncompleted project with Alfred Lord Tennyson and the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan to combine poetry, painting and music - 'The Songs of the Wrens,' by Tennyson and Sullivan came out of this idea.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

'The Bathers.' (c1947) Moving to London in 1943, Jankel Adler had a major impact on several British artists, notably Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. His Jewish heritage was a great influence on his early work until the 1930s when he moved from Expressionism to abstraction.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

'Sunshine, Drawing Room.' (1905) Vilhelm Hammershøi’s interiors are his most popular pictures, and they have defined public perception of his achievements as an artist. Although he was working in the era of Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp, he has more in common with Vermeer.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I'm close to the end of writing my book on forgotten British artists; it's made me realise how many very good painters have been forgotten. This work is by the late Norfolk artist Geoffrey Burrows. It measures 21.5 cm x 28.5cm and is for sale at £900 richard@richardmorris.org

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Dora Carrington painted this portrait of the novelist E. M. Forster in 1920—without a single sitting. Instead, she worked from memory and photographic references, drawing on her own enthusiasm for photography.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

'Still life with Crucible.' (1890) Born in Wales in 1864, Albert de Belleroche spent his formative years in France, where he forged friendships with Degas, and Renoir. He also developed a lifelong bond with John Singer Sargent, sharing studio spaces throughout his career.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Lesser Ury was one of the first artists in Germany to take hectic modern city life, with its traffic and busy nightlife in theatres and bars, as a topic for art. As in this work from 1920, Berlin, its motor vehicles and a wet evening, plays a prominent role in his work.

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Richard Morris @ahistoryinart.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The late 1870s to the 1880s were a major turning point in the career of Camille Pissarro and the other Impressionists. Here we can see his tendency toward pointillist techniques which would be further developed in the later 1880s under Seurat's influence.

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