The Sleeping Dead, Design for Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, c. 1931
Framed (ref: 10605)
Watercolour, pen and ink
Signed with initials
8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (21.5 x 14 cm)
Watercolour, pen and ink
Signed with initials
8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (21.5 x 14 cm)
Provenance: The Artist's Family
Exhibited: Barnett Freedman 1901-1957, Retrospective exhibition at the Arts Council, 1958.Design for Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (no. 20)
Literature: Mason, Emma, Barnett Freedman, Designs for Modern Britain, Pallant House Gallery, 2020, p. 48
This original watercolour was reproduced in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Chapter Ending (no. 50). The work was published by Faber and Faber in 1931. This was one of fifteen illustrations that Freedman created for the Memoir, and the combination of image and text meant that it was heralded a modern classic.
In a review for the Daily Telegraph, the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart wrote that 'Those who in future really want to understand the atmosphere of the years of 1916 and 1917, and the conditions of life, will turn back to this book.'
