I’ve worked in and around Farringdon on and off since 1999, and I’ve long loved a painting by East London Artist Cecil Osborne. I’ve spent an unfeasibly long time trying to work out where the view it depicts through this open window, on a road I now know so well, is.
I find that it’s very easy to get lost in this picture. I’m drawn in by the warm, restricted palette of browns and reds, the absence of people and the stories behind the doors of the shops and dwellings. An early morning in 1929.
Cecil Osborne was a self-taught artist who was part of a fascinating 1920’s art collective called The East London Group, which featured working class male and female artists of the east end. Born out of an art club in Bethnal Green, the artists mostly came from all walks of local life and captured street scenes of the local areas. They exhibited and enjoyed popularity in the 1930’s, but post-war that popularity waned until an exhibition in 2014 brought them some overdue recognition:
“The Group painted the East End’s streets, alleys, mills, factories, pubs and churches with the same fascination that other artists have for the English countryside. The streets, in their paintings, look interesting, like places you want to see…and this without prettifying the essential industrial, poor reality. This is the real accomplishment. Somehow the character of the area, the vibrancy of its community, is communicated through these representations of its buildings.
Partly this is achieved by the flat colour and the way they all seem to have of capturing light. It suggests, to me at least, a parallel with that other great painter of the built environment, the American artist Edward Hopper.”
Osborne’s painting pre-dates Edward Hopper’s by a year, and it is the only one of his available in a public collection, owned by the Brighton and Hove Museum.
It’s said that the East London Group’s artists were able to see beauty in the most unlikely subjects, bringing ‘a warm feeling to their art which is transmitted to the viewer’. There are many parralels to me with the modern street photographers, who still find the east end such fertile creative ground.
As well as painting, members of the East London Group also made a documentary film, advertising posters for Shell and Phyllis Bray painted large murals which are now at Queen Mary, University of London.
I’m very excited to learn, through researching for this blog, that ‘Sunday Morning Farringdon Road’ lives not too far from me in Brighton and I’m definitely going to take a trip to visit it in person, if it is on display.
There’s lots of fascinating material about the East London Group:
The East London Group and their Contemporaries
The famed painters who vanished into obscurity
Cecil Osborne’s Lost Murals Rediscovered
I’m definitely keen to find out more about these artists. But this morning, I’ll just keep losing myself in Osborne’s best-known work.