Poet of the beach

In this 80th anniversary year of the retreat from Dunkirk, Peyton Skipwith considers the work of Richard Eurich (1903–92), War Artist, draughtsman and visionary painter of people, landscape and the sea

- Peyton Skipwith

ON August 15, a service was held at the National Memorial Arboretum to commemorate the 75th anniversary of VJ Day. Several other notable Second World War anniversaries have occurred in the past few months: August 19 was the 78th anniversary of the disastrous landing at Dieppe; two months earlier, services of thanksgiving, muted due to lockdown, marked the 80th anniversary of the evacuation of Dunkirk. This remarkable feat took place over eight days, between May 26 and June 4, 1940, when 338,226 British, Belgian and French troops, abandoning everything—tanks, vehicles and equipment—were evacuated from mainland Europe in a flotilla of some 800 little ships of all descriptions. It inspired Churchill’s ‘We will fight them on the beaches’ speech and entered into folklore. For many, it will come as a surprise to realise that the most popular image of this event, Withdrawal from Dunkirk, June 1940, was painted by a Quaker pacifist artist of Anglo-German descent, who wasn’t even present.