Beginning at the end of this month, a Scottish gallery called Bourne Fine Art will show 10 paintings by Edwin Lucas, a Scottish painter whose work from the 1930s and 40s has never been seen. Lucas gave up painting when he married and had a family. Before he died in 1990, he asked his son to sell the hundreds of paintings that had been stored in the family home.
Faced with the challenge of an unknown artist, Colin Gleadell explains, Lucas’s son was getting nowhere:
Then, in 2010, Alan went to an exhibition of Surrealist paintings, Another World, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Since bequests by Gabrielle Keiller and the Penrose family 20 years ago, the gallery has had an exceptional holding of Surrealist art, and the exhibition included works by Dalí, Magritte and the other great European Surrealists, but only two works by Scottish artists. If British Surrealism was a backwater of an international movement, Scottish Surrealism caused barely a ripple in the pond. Lucas wrote to the gallery curator, Patrick Elliott, enclosing photos and suggesting that his father’s work might help to redress the balance. […]
The gallery’s acquisition committee, agreed that they should buy some. Now, having been cleaned and reframed, five of Edwin Lucas’s surreal paintings are hanging in the gallery’s New Acquisitions exhibition, which continues until May. Here they are placed beside works by Picasso, Miró, Graham Sutherland and William Scott. “As a Surrealist, I think his works would hang quite happily with Magritte’s,” says Elliott.
Art Sales: Surrealist discovered by his son (Telegraph)
