Picture of the Month: February 2024

S&W Picture of the Month for February

James Walker Tucker (1898–1972)

A Summer Breeze in the Cotswolds (from Horsepools)

Boundary Stones

This handsome pair depict the Cotswold countryside in Gloucestershire where James Walker Tucker was Head of Drawing and Painting at Gloucester College of Art (1931) until his retirement in 1963.

Tucker presents the landscape with a consciousness of form and sense of pattern—modern, geometric and graphic, reminiscent of the work of Eric Ravilious.

He is an artist who represents a neglected era in British Art: Realist painting between the two World Wars. Along with artists of the 1920s and 1930s such as Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Meredith Frampton, Winifred Knights, Harold Williamson and James Cowie, Tucker eschewed abstraction and worked in a realist manner—precise, hard-edged and graphic, and with minimal narrative detail. In their own way these artists were modernisers, especially in the adoption of new subject matter—such as Tucker's Hiking (Laing Art Gallery), of 1936, which showcases the newfound independence of young women post-World War I and popularity of the great outdoors

Hugely respected and selling for vast sums in their time, after World War II these artists fell out of favour, eclipsed by the rise of abstraction and Pop Art.