Pictures from the Home Front

THOMAS HENNELL wrote poetry as much with his brush as with his pen, capturing the countryside in his drawings and watercolours. He was hailed as ‘the greatest watercolourist of the 20th century’ and his scenes are now in museums throughout the UK, including Tate. Next Monday, a selling exhibition of a private collection of Hennell’s works, put together by another artist, the late Peter Coate, opens online at Sim Fine Art. The watercolours have a delicate quality, but are neither idyllic nor nostalgic. ‘They were reportage from the front line of the Second World War’s Food War,’ explains art dealer Andrew Sim. ‘Hennell had been commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to record the effects of war on agriculture, showing... gaggles of men and women making do in the fields’ (as with Ploughing, with sunburst, above).

He was the perfect man for the job, as he had a thorough knowledge of farming, about which he had written or illustrated several books (although his bestseller was The Witnesses, an account of his experience of mental illness).

His records of the Home Front only lasted a few years, however; in 1943, Hennell stepped in as a full-time Official War Artist to replace his friend Eric

Ravilious, who had been killed in Iceland. After a spell in the same country, he followed the Allied Forces in France and Holland, before heading, in June 1945, on an Air Ministry assignment to India and Indonesia. A few months later, in November, he was kidnapped by local guerrillas and presumed killed.

‘Digging for Victory’ opens on April 1 at www.simfineart.com; www.thomashennell.com