Room 4: Whitby

Fog Bank, Whitby (1934)
Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 76.2 cm

Whitby’s distinctive West Pier lighthouse and its smaller East Pier fellow, feature in several works. Here a dense foggy wall disrupts the skyline on a seemingly fairweather day.

Image © Richard Eurich Paintings

Sketch_20-016 fog bank Whitby (c1930)
Pencil on paper, 13.5 x 22 cm

The sketch for this early work shows the care taken over the structural elements, alongside precisely observed notes on the colour values for each part of this deceptively simple composition.

Image © Richard Eurich Paintings

Whitby in Wartime (1940)
Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76 cm

Before the war, Richard had begun to explore the coasts of Dorset and Hampshire, but his first commission from the Admiralty: for £5 the pair of fishing boats… was of Whitby and nearby Robin Hood’s Bay. This portrait of life unchanged by the build-up to war, looks down onto the cobles he admired …"surely one of the most graceful ships in the world."

Image © Crown copyright. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1947 (CC BY-NC-ND)

Queen of the Sea, 1911 (1954)
Oil on canvas, 122 x 182.8 cm

This colourful panorama displays Whitby as both seaside resort and working fishing port. A young Richard is by his boarding house window, a notice below playfully announcing his stay in 1911. While the foreground harks back to outdoor processions in Bradford, its middle ground concentrates on the pleasure-craft and buildings of the town. The title could refer to the huge statue of Venus, or perhaps a name traditionally given to an impressive ship.

Image © Royal Academy of Arts

Whitby, Study for a Mural in the Teaching Hospital, Sheffield (1960)
Oil on board, 69 x 101 cm

A high viewpoint taking in the surrounding hills, abbey and Cook Memorial was selected for a mural representing Sheffield on Holiday, part of a double commission for Sheffield’s Royal Hallamshire Hospital. This highly finished study reveals traces of the squaring up process Richard used with his daughter Caroline to transfer the image.

Image © Rosebery's London

The Whitby Lights (1962)
Oil on board, 35.2 x 58.1 cm

The sparsest of sketches, inscribed in pencil "LT trawlers putting to sea" is the starting point for this atmospheric painting of boats setting out from the two piers. Richard had described the dark tanned sails unlike any in shape in his memoir. Here he scribbles down "dorsal fins" to capture their curved silhouettes. The horizontal bands of sky, sea and beach – full of activity or deserted, would be recreated in compositions of endless invention in the following decades.

Sketch_02-03b LT trawlers putting to sea, Whitby lights (27th Aug 1962)
Pencil on paper, 9.5 x 12 cm

A Moment of Sadness (1981)
Oil on board, 51 x 76 cm

Here, the joyous detail and humour of Richard’s earlier work is replaced by a gentle melancholy. To the right, a silent pierrot at the picture’s edge and hesitant dancer towards the centre, interact with the two harbour piers - still verticals against other familiar motifs- the flash of a partial rainbow on the left and backdrop of a deep blue starry sky.

Whitby

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