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George Warner Allen
(1916 - 1988)
The Rubbish Dump, A Black Country Altarpiece
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George Warner Allen (1916 - 1988)
Size:
Height – 182.9cm
Width – 122cm
This work depicts an industrial landscape showing the factories and chimneys of the Black Country.
In the foreground a young family sit surrounded by the detritus of modern day living, an indication of the grim reality of industrialisation and the hardship that surrounds them. The figure of Christ is depicted rising above the rubbish dump, inspiring the people to raise themselves out of poverty and offering a symbol of hope. It was painted for Canon David Wood, who had married Allen’s cousin and was working at the Black Country Industrial Mission in Wolverhampton, based at St. George’s Vicarage.
George Warner Allen was born in 1916.
He was a British artist, considered to be of the Neo-Romantic school. Allen was educated at Lancing College and then, on the recommendations of the artist Robert Anning Bell and art critic James Greig, at Byam Shaw School of Art, where he subsequently taught.
He later lived and worked at Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England.
Allen held a solo exhibition at the Walker’s Galleries, London, in 1952, for which the catalogue’s introductory essay was written by his fellow painter Brian Thomas.
Pictures were purchased by T. S. Eliot, Sir John Betjeman, and The Earl Baldwin.
The strain of the exhibition left him, after a while, unable to paint for eight years.
In 1973, after being asked to paint a tribute to Cardinal Newman, he converted to Roman Catholicism at Abingdon. He died in 1988.
