The White Ship, Weymouth

There seems to be a couple of narratives being acted out in the distance. The celebratory pennants caught my eye to begin with and took me on to the great crowd of people beyond. Are the two connected? And why is there a smoky bonfire burning up on the hill?

This large work is undated.  Richard put it into the 1953 RA Summer Exhibition. Most of the paintings he submitted to the RA summer shows were ones he had painted a year or two before. The way he used the paint to create a work of utter stillness points to the early fifties too, quite different from the vibrating style of paint he used in the ships-in-harbour scenes he did in the 30s.

There is no mention of the painting in any of the diaries we have but there are gaps in them where he might have done the work …

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This large work is undated.  Richard put it into the 1953 RA Summer Exhibition. Most of the paintings he submitted to the RA summer shows were ones he had painted a year or two before. The way he used the paint to create a work of utter stillness points to the early fifties too, quite different from the vibrating style of paint he used in the ships-in-harbour scenes he did in the 30s.

There is no mention of the painting in any of the diaries we have but there are gaps in them where he might have done the work - 1941, late 1944 until the end of the war in 1945, and from June 1951 to January 1956. There is some chance that it is the same work recorded as Ships in Harbour (c1935) , but it feels more like a more mature work than what he was doing then. Richard was such an unpredictable artist he could have easily chosen to pick up a 1930s theme in the early 50s, but we will have to be open minded about the date until some other information comes along which might pinpoint it more accurately.