Edward Seago, R.W.S.

STRUCTURE The board is flat and is providing a stable structural support. There is an area where the board is exposed along lower right edge below the cattle but this appears to be the artist's working method rather than damage. UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT Ultraviolet light reveals a few minor flecks of retouching in the sky upper right, and two small spots near the centre of upper edge. FRAME Held in a gilt composite frame with a canvas inset.
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‘Perhaps one has to be born and bred there for it to really get in one’s blood. But it has a powerful hold on me, and wherever I go, I feel a longing to return there.’ Edward Seago, Peace in War, 1943, p.21

 

Seago was born in Norwich on 31 March 1910 and his East Anglian landscapes are the ones with which he is perhaps best associated. His first painting forays into the fields were made when he was only ten and he became interested in trying to capture the fleeting effects of light, weather and the seasons. For the first two decades of his life he lived in Norfolk and intermittently between 1930 and 1945 he spent long periods there greatly inspired by the windswept marshes, isolated farmsteads, silver expanses of sea and the patchwork of fields. In 1945 he purchased The Dutch House, a large seventeenth century cottage in the village of Ludham, ten miles north-east of Norwich. Although he travelled extensively around the world looking for inspiration, East Anglia was always his home and the place with which he felt the greatest affinity. In the present picture the wind appears to be shaking the boughs of the ancient tree and hurrying storm-clouds across the vast sky. He particularly liked to paint the moment that weather changes, as sunlight is engulfed in dark clouds; ‘The clouds gather and spread their shadows across the marshes. Modelled by the wind into rugged islands of majestic shape, they enrich the earth with an ever-changing pattern of light and colour, and glorify the country over which they pass.’ (Edward Seago, A Canvas to Cover, 1947, p.73)