March 10, 1903

Here is a thumbnail of a cat drawing Edward Bawden (March 10,1903 to November 21, 1989) did. I call Bawden the king of the cats' artists.





And here is some biographical context. About his career we learn:

'...The gallery in Saffron Walden is in effect home to the national collection of the Great Bardfield artists – the mid-century group of figurative painters, designers and illustrators, including Bawden, Bernard Cheese, Michael Rothestein, Kenneth Rowntree, Marianne Straub and, for a time, Eric Ravilious. Between the 1930s and 1970s, they lived as a sort of artists' colony in the bucolic Essex village.....'

Edward Bawden's artistic significance is such that he partly created the art of midcentury Britain:

'“If you look at a piece of art and you say: ‘that’s fifties’ without knowing the artwork or the artist, whatever that quality is, Bawden is partly responsible for it,”... “I think it was his view of the world. He always claimed that he wasn’t an artist. He said, 'I’m a designer. I’ll design anything for anybody.”

'This sense of pragmatism... may stem from his time at the Royal College of Art, where he and [Eric] Ravilious entered the Design School rather than the Fine Art School.

'“Some people think this was possibly on class lines, because they were bourgeois. They weren’t posh. Bawden’s father was an ironmonger and Ravilious’s was somewhere between a junk dealer and an antique dealer. They were shop keepers. They were 'in trade my dear' - and that mattered in the 1930s.” '

Here is a closing glimpse of the art of Edward Bawden.




I case my rest.