Manner of Josef Herman RA Still Life with Red Poppy in a Blue Jug

An original mid-20th-century watercolour painting, Manner of Josef Herman RA, Still Life with Red Poppy in a Blue Jug.

An immensely striking drawing in watercolour, bodycolour, pastel and graphite in the manner of Polish-British artist Josef Herman RA OBE (1911–2000).

Herman is best known for his figurative subjects and depictions of working people—peasants, fishermen and, most notably, coal miners, produced during his eleven years living at Ystradgynlais, a mining community in South Wales, beginning in 1944. He did, however, also paint portraits and still lifes, with known flower still life subjects painted in the 1960s and 1970s.

The arrestingly bold palette is characteristic of Herman, who discovered a new world of colour on his move to Wales. He started experimenting with pastel, immersing himself in the drawings of Degas, and through this he developed a technique of underpainting the pastel in watercolour and gouache. Herman stated that through this technique 'I could get from pastel a red as luminous as a flame'.

Herman has a fascinating biography, knowledge of which endlessly enriches his work. He was a Jewish socialist artist, the son of a cobbler in a poor district of Warsaw, Poland. In 1938 he fled the imminent Nazi threat, arriving in Glasgow via Belgium and France in 1940. Initially he painted nostalgic images from his childhood, until in 1942 he learned that his entire family had perished in the Holocaust. In 1944 he relocated to the Welsh mining village of Ystradgynlais, and found new inspiration in the miners and field labourers he encountered there. His reputation as an artist developed and in 1951 Herman was commissioned to paint a mural for the Festival of Britain, cementing his place in the British Arts. In 1981 he was awarded an OBE for services to British Art and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts a year later.

Watercolour, bodycolour, pastel and graphite on heavy wove paper.