For the sixth edition of Hidden Gems, Liss Llewellyn are delighted to unveil a new selection of pictures on a Maritime theme. This includes a recently rediscovered portrait of Paul Gauguin at the Port of Poulan (in Finistere), only hitherto known through a black-and-white reproduction in A .S. Hartrick’s memoir: A Painter’s Pilgrimage through Fifty Years. Hartrick spent some months in 1886 working in Pont-Aven, an artists’ colony in Brittany later publishing a lively account of his friendship with Gauguin, both of whom lodged at the Pension Gloanec, a favourite haunt of visiting artists. Hartrick recalled his initial impression of Gauguin, dressed in the traditional attire of a Breton fisherman: ‘Tall, dark, rather handsome, with a fine powerful figure, and about forty years of age, wearing a blue jersey, and a beret on the side of his head, is how I saw him first. Hartrick also enjoyed close friendships with Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec during his time in Paris and created similar format portraits of both; the former now in the Van Gogh Museum, and the portrait of Toulouse-Lautrec part of the Tate Gallery collection.

Other highlights of ‘All at Sea….’ include Edward Bawden’s unique original carved matrix for his linocut ‘Fish’, (the linocut itself is so rare that there are only two versions of it recorded); two paintings by Charles Pears, (a nocturn of Thames Sailing Barges and spectacular Dutch Bomber setting fire to a German oil tanker), Charles Cundall’s original plein air sketch for the National Maritime Museum’s, On Board a Minesweeper, and the original full size cartoon for Muirhead Bone’s Imperial War Museum late masterpiece Winter Mine-Laying off Iceland. Additionally, there is Douglas Percy Bliss’s lyrical view of Castlebay, Barra, (Barraigh), Albert de Belleroche’s desserted view of the port Boulogne sur Mer, Rudolph Sauter’s record of WW2 defences along the south coast, and Frank Brangwyn’s Old Kew Bridge shortly before it was demolished in 1900.

Women are represented with works by Marion Adnams, with her intriguingly surreal design for a mural, Barbara Jones’ jaunty Hot Air Balloon, a tour de force by Claire Leighton in the form of her original woodblock Shells & Seaweed from Where Land Meets Sea, Marion Wallace-Dunlop’s Google-Eyed sea monster from the period that as well as being an art student she was playing a vital role in the woman’s Suffragette movement, and Rachel Reckitt’s Neo Romantic Maltese Fisherman.