Pick of the week

John Noott began to collect paintings from the Second World War when he was a successful Birmingham businessman and continued to put them to one side when he came across them in his second, equally successful, career as a gallery owner in Broadway. He was seven when the war began and, gradually, he came to realise that his collection was not only a product of his own childhood, but that it could be interesting and educational to others.

Until February 17, the collection is exhibited at the St Barbe Gallery in Lymington. It includes both professional and amateur artists, Official War Artists and servicemen and women. Chronologically, the first work is a peaceful view of the mountains from above Hitler’s Berghof by Otto Eduard Pippel, and the last a pastel of ruined Berlin buildings by an artist known only as Souty. Between are Dunkirk (by John Spencer Churchill and Bawden), the Blitz (Shearer Armstrong’s The Senior Warden, above) and the war in the air, at sea, on the Home Front and around the world.

Many easily overlooked aspects of wartime are revealed, as in Robert Sawyers’ Home Guard Parade, Ambleside (above right), in which the troop combined locals with art students fr om the Royal College of Art, based there for the duration, or Stanley Cooke’s watercolour France 1944 (right), in which the destruction that accompanied the liberation of Europe is starkly laid out.