Cover: John Deth (Homage to Conrad Aiken) 1931

Whitworth Gallery, Manchester

Edward Burra

The Burra family had origins in Westmorland, being descended from Robert Burra (1767–1846) of Crosby Ravensworth, who moved south around 1790. The family prospered and in 1864 Edward’s grandfather, Henry Burra, after a career in India, bought a substantial William IV house standing in its own grounds, ‘Springfield’, Playden, very close to Rye. Edward’s father, also Henry, was a barrister, but had a private income and like his own father was involved in local government in Sussex. They were both amateur painters, and Edward’s aunt, Anne Burra, was married to the architect Reginald Blomfield.

Edward was born in South Kensington in March 1905 in his maternal grandmother’s house, 31 Elvaston Place, but Rye was his base for his entire life, from which he made frequent forays to London, and also to France, Spain, and North America, notably Harlem and Mexico. His interests were primarily metropolitan and cosmopolitan. He disliked the conventional bourgeois values of his parents’ life, but was prevented from breaking free entirely because of ill health. He ‘had a little money’. Paul Nash referred to him as the Laird of Springfield, which he only left in 1953, when his parents built a new house on the site of a bombed Methodist chapel in the centre of Rye. He never liked the town, which he derided as ‘Tinker Belle Towne’, and after the death of his mother in 1968 he moved to a gardener’s cottage at Springfield. His sister Anne was very supportive and drove him around various locations in the British Isles which feature in landscapes painted after 1965, and she kept an eye on him until he died in 1976.

Edward boarded at prep school at Potters Bar, but severe arthritis and anaemia followed by rheumatic fever, prevented him from going to Eton. He was in pain for much of his life, but found relief in painting. He was educated privately, with art lessons from Miss Bradley in Rye, and French lessons in Kensington. His mother was an important influence, taking him to Switzerland and Bordighera as a boy. In the library at Springfield he had access to satirical prints by Hogarth and Caran d’Ache, and the epic visions of Doré. Aged 15 he went to the College of Art at the Chelsea Polytechnic, 1921–23. Learning to draw figures at this stage was fundamental and his skill in architectural drawing was to feature in later works, but he soon began freer, unshaded contour drawings. Jazz Fans (Pl 2) and Rue de Lappe (Pl 3) are good examples.