Midhurst

Guy GREY-SMITH: artist

Not On Display

About the work

As a wartime pilot Guy Grey-Smith was shot down over Germany in 1940. He contracted tuberculosis in the prisoner of war camp and was repatriated to Britain in 1944. While convalescing at a sanatorium in Sussex he started to paint under the pioneering art therapist Adrian Hill. Midhurst was painted by Grey-Smith while a patient, and is a view of the surrounding countryside from the grounds. Although a very early work by the artist, this painting shows how, absorbing the work of the British Modernists and Cézanne which he had been studying, Grey-Smith approached the rendering of the landscape in a very structural way, using planes of colour to shape the scene. This simplification of form and use of flat areas of colour became even more strongly expressed in his later landscapes of remote areas of Western Australia.
Title
Midhurst
Artist/Maker and role
Guy GREY-SMITH: artist
Date
1945
Medium
oil on canvas
Measurements
51.0 x 76.5 cm (unframed)
69.0 x 94.5 cm (framed)
Credit line
Purchased through the Sir Claude Hotchin Art Foundation, The Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation, 2008.
© Susanna Grey-Smith and Mark Grey-Smith
The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia
Accession number
2008/0128

This is one of the paintings in our collection.

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