This exhibition will consist of thirty rarely seen watercolours, primarily on loan from private collections. They span every decade of the artist's career; from 1930’s Burlesque performers in Harlem and Marseilles (for the age, Burra was remarkably well-travelled, having visited Barcelona, Seville, Spanish Morocco, New York, Mexico City, Dublin, Milan, Lisbon and Paris) to eve-of-war Surrealist images of great foreboding and demonic scenes of rural Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, presaging the countryside’s decay.
Each work illustrates Burra's rich sense of colour, his unique often macabre vision and painstaking painting process; literally, as from an early age Burra suffered from rheumatic fever which left his hands crippled, explaining why almost all his work is in watercolour rather than more viscose oil paint.
Edward BURRA (1905 - 1976)
'Frogmen' 
Watercolour on paper
30 1⁄2 x 22 inches (77.5 x 55.9 cm)
Edward BURRA (1905 - 1976)
'Costume Design for 'Carmen'', 1947
Watercolour and pencil
19 x 8 1⁄2 inches (48.3 x 21.6 cm)
