Edward burra landscapes
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Edward Burra was a true English upper-middle-class eccentric. He could be waspish, camp and difficult. In 1961, while painting at home, the Royal Academy rang to ask if he would consider becoming an associate. His acerbic response was to shout downstairs to his manservant, who was speaking to them: “Tell them I’m busy.”
Birdmen and Pots, 1947
The eldest son of barrister Henry Curteis Burra and Ermentrude Anne Robertson-Luxford, he was born on 29 March 1905 in South Kensington. An attack, at the age of 13, of anaemia and rheumatic fever cut short his education and his parents, considering him too sickly for regular employment, encouraged his interest in art. After studying at home he went, in 1921, to Chelsea Polytechnic and then subsequently to the Royal College of Art.
Although not openly gay, he visited gay bars and had gay friends such as the dancer and theatrical director William Chappell, with whom he, reputedly, had an affair – though some accounts of his life suggest that he always remained celibate. He also had a camp sensibility and his copious
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Edward Burra
English painter, draughtsman, and printmaker (1905-1976)
Edward John BurraCBE (29 March 1905 – 22 October 1976) was an English painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, best known for his depictions of the urban underworld, black culture and the Harlem scene of the 1930s.
Biography
Early life
Burra was born on 29 March 1905 at his grandmother's house in Elvaston Place, London,[1] to Henry Curteis Burra, J.P., of Springfield Lodge, Rye, East Sussex, and Ermentrude Anne (née Robinson Luxford). His father, of a Westmorland family traceable back to the fourteenth century,[2][3] was a barrister and later Chairman of East Sussex County Council.[1] Edward attended preparatory school at Northaw Place in Potters Bar but in 1917 suffered from pneumonia and had to be withdrawn from school and home-educated.[1] Burra took art classes with a Miss Bradley in Rye in 1921, then studied at Chelsea School of Art until 1923, and from 1923 to 1925 at the Royal College of Art under drawing tutors Randolph Schwabe and
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(b London, 29 Mar. 1905; d Hastings, Sussex, 22 Oct. 1976). British painter, draughtsman, and stage designer, an eccentric and individual figure. He was ravaged by ill health continuously from childhood and lived almost all his life in the genteel Sussex seaside town of Rye (he called it an ‘overblown gifte shoppe’), but he travelled indomitably and had a tremendous zest for life. His career, in fact, represents a revolt against his respectable middle-class background, for he was fascinated by low-life and seedy subjects, which he experienced at first hand in places such as the streets of Harlem in New York and the dockside cafés of Marseilles. By his mid-twenties he had formed a distinctive style, depicting squalid subjects with a keen sense of the grotesque and a delight in colourful detail.
Usually he worked in watercolour, but on a larger scale than is generally associated with this medium and using layer upon layer of pigment so that—in reproduction at any rate—his pictures appear to h
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