Michael Berkeley’s favourite painting
John Mcewen comments on Winter Landscape
The composer chooses a wintry landscape by Julian Trevelyan
Julian Trevelyan is an intriguing and individualistic artist, as befits his heredity as scion of that formidable Cornish dynasty. as ‘Trewellen’, the family appears in the Domesday Book. The surname derives from the parish of St veep, but Julian’s branch later settled in northumberland.
His father, poet and dramatist, was the second son of the second northumbrian baronet; the third son was the famous historian G. M. Trevelyan OM, a Fellow and latterly Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Julian went after Bedales. in the 1930s, having decided on an art career, he studied in Paris and travelled in europe.
Trevelyan’s second wife, the painter Mary Fedden, said her husband had a knack of capturing the exact feel of places. it was this that perhaps made his first commercially successful show—in London, in December 1946—so satisfying. ‘i knew that i had found myself,’ he wrote.
The location of Winter Landscape remains unknown. During 1947, Trevelyan visited Paris, italy and Sweden, but the beginning of the year saw notoriously bad weather at home; from January 21, for 55 days, snow fell somewhere in the uk. There are only three conifer trees and the scene seems more local than foreign, with its haphazardly placed roller and mangle-type object. The veiled sun, tinkering man, questing birds and smoking chimney all convey a particularly bleak midwinter.
So bleak was it in Britain that year that ‘Manny’ Shinwell, Minister of Fuel and Power, received death threats and required a police guard.