Biography Enquire about this picture£2,800


Presentation: Framed

Gouache, ink and watercolour, squared in pencil, inscribed with colour notes 14 × 18⅜ in. (36 × 46.5 cm.)

This view – possibly a composite one – is clearly rooted in the Pennines, the
Mills with tall chimneys typical of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Rochdale Canal runs through scenes such as this, as do the Leeds, Liverpool and Huddersfield canals. The picture might be related to a mural that Sorrell completed for the company ICI in Middlesbrough in the late 1940s. The final work was rejected, because ICI objected to the great pall of smoke pouring out of the chimneys. A comparable drawing from this period, showing the construction of Mulberry Harbour, is in the Tate Collection (NO5731).

We are grateful to Paul Atterbury, Michael Barker and Richard Sorrell for assistance

Biography Sold


Presentation: Framed

Signed and dated 1933,
titled on a label on the reverse Gouache, 13¾ × 17¾ in. (35 × 45 cm.)
Provenance: Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe

Thingvellir is Iceland’s most important natural site. ‘Sorrell visited Iceland in 1936 the stark character of which made a special appeal to him and inspired some thirty watercolours which were shown at his first one-man exhibition at the Walker Gallery in London in 1937. His taste for the dramatic, which pervades all his work, was amply illustrated in these paintings and equally so in his firstventures into archeological reconstruction which he also began in 1936’ (D.W. Dykes, Alan Sorrell: Early Wales Re-Created, exh. cat., National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 1980, p. 5).

We are grateful to Richard Sorrell for assistance.
 

Biography Sold


Presentation: Framed
Signed and dated, titled on the reverse
Gouache and pen and ink
11-5/8 × 15-3/4 in. (29.4 × 39.8 cm)
Provenance: Richard Sorrell.

The aircraft is a stylised version of a Vickers Wellington, a British win-engine,
medium bomber designed in the mid-1930s at Brooklands in Weybridge, Surrey, byVickers-Armstrong’s Chief Designer , R.K. Pierson. It was widely used as a night-time bomber in the early years of the SecondWorldWar , before being displaced as a bomber by the larger four-engined ‘heavies’, such as the Avro Lancaster .TheWellington continued to serve throughout the war in other duties, particularly as an anti-submarine aircraft. It was the only British bomber to be produced for the entire duration of the war. The  Wellington was popularly known as the ‘Wimpy’ by service personnel, after J.Wellington Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons, and aWellington ‘B for Bertie’ had a starring role in the 1942 propaganda film One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.

It is not possible to identify the airfield, as they were all built to a standard
pattern. A similar , oblique aerial view of an airfield by Sorrell is in the collection of RAF Museum, Hendon (object no. FA03147).

Biography Sold


Presentation: Framed
Signed and date; pen and ink and gouache; 11-5/8 × 19-1/2 in. (32.1 × 49.4 cm)
Provenance: Richard Sorrell.

David Lloyd George promised the soldiers who fought for ‘King and Country’ that they would return to a ‘land fit for heroes’.The land they returned to had changed profoundly, yet it met hardly any of their expectations: of those lucky enough to return,most collected their civilian suit, a pair of medals and a small cash payment, then joined the ranks of those looking in vain for work; others collected a disability pension but were never able to work again.

Sorrell was fourteen in 1918, and had spent much of a sickly childhood in a Bath chair ; perhaps this made him more sympathetic towards the victims of the war.

In this harrowing picture, a statue of Britannia on a pedestal ironically surveys the scene: a civilian grandee with a hawkish expression watches a pathetic parade of war-wounded, some so grey-faced that they seem already to be ghosts.The picture, a grim foreboding of the carnage to come, called on Sorrell’s memories of the FirstWorldWar veterans.