Lot 1778
‡SIR MUIRHEAD BONE, HRSA, HRWS (1876-1953)
STUDIES FOR `WINTER MINE-LAYING OFF ICELAND`, 1942
A folio of 23 rudimentary studies of figures, limbs, hands, faces, charcoal, some on tracing paper, various sizes, 45 x 58cm and smaller; with six further damaged studies on tracing paper, many losses and creases in these, rolled (a folio and a roll)
*"Wednesday June 25th 1940 …Muirhead Bone called at the School to ask Albert [Rutherston, Ruskin Master of Drawing] & me to come to tea in Gavin's rooms in St. John's, to look at the progress of his picture of the mine-layer ...Saw the big drawings of the men laying the mines from the stern of the special ship which does this work, also other drawings of such ships' activities, some of them very secret and unpublishable at present, which I ought not to have seen: all done at sea, under very difficult conditions, with obstacles that only Bone could surmount… " (The Diaries of Randolph Schwabe: British Art 1930-48, edited by Gill Clarke published by Sansom & Co., 2016).
Muirhead Bone was appointed as one of Britain's first official war artists in May 1916. His small black and white drawings were widely reproduced in war-time government-funded publications. In early 1940, at the age of 64, Muirhead Bone was again appointed as a war artist, commissioned as a major in the Royal Marines. These formative studies are for the oils in the Imperial War Museum.
