Claughton Pellew

Claughton Pellew was a fascinating and original artist. Studying at the Slade during the fabled and celebrated years between 1907 and 1911, his distinguished contemporaries would define British art soon after; among them Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash David Bomberg, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, along with several others.

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Through his association and friendship with Paul Nash he became interested in the revival of the Romantic English landscape watercolour tradition. A harking back to a bygone era of rural peace and simplicity; and a renewed interest in the spirituality within nature, born partly out of a mistrust of the modern in the years following the war. It too, was a main concern of the Neo-Romantics of the following generation, notably Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Graham Sutherland.

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This focus can be seen throughout Pellew’s output, but in the present work he has also combined it with a more Gothic sentiment, befitting of its Bavarian setting. Pellew captures this deeper sense of nature, this time in Germany, showing his sensitivity in understanding the ‘locus genii’ of his surroundings.

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At the commencement of WWI Pellew marked himself out as an objector and was duly jailed, which his friend John Northcote Nash, suggested left him with a ‘sense of permanent isolation from which he never recovered’. It is perhaps through this that some of his work has a darker, more sombre edge. Pellew married fellow Slade student Emma Tennent in 1919, moving to Norfolk. They rarely left, but on occasion travelled to Bavaria, where this piece would have been painted.

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