Illustrations Of Integrity

Peyton Skipwith revels in this summer’s bonanza of exhibitions and books dedicated to the innovative graphic designer, book illustrator and printmaker

- Peyton Skipwith

EDWARD BAWDEN is breaking out all over the country this summer. dulwich Picture Gallery and the Fry art Gallery in Saffron Walden, Essex, have major surveys of his work, each with an accompanying book; the V&a Museum is displaying his mural The English Pub from the SS Oronsay; his late self-portrait is included in ‘about Face’ at rugby art Gallery; ‘Bawden’s Beasts’ is at The Higgins Bedford; and Mainstone Press’s Are You Sitting Comfortably?, detailing his 100 plus bookjackets, has just hit the bookshops. Illustration, illumination and calligraphy were important ingredients in Bawden gaining his scholarship to the royal College of art (rCa) in 1922, and formed a continuous strand throughout his work as a designer and an illustrator for the next 65 years.

Bawden (1903–89) was a man of extraordinary personal modesty, but he had an unshakeable belief in the integrity of his work, be it a vignette for a cookery book, a London Transport poster, a watercolour of the Essex countryside, a portrait for the war artists advisory Committee or his 40ft-high mural for the Festival of Britain. He was a designer-craftsman, as well as an artist-printmaker.