SOLDSigned, and dated,
Inscribed Altar
inscribed 1 inch to a 1 foot.
ink and gouache on paper
Tags: Edward Irvine Halliday gouache ink allegory TOP 100 war 1.PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST Golden Generation RELIGION World War II Paintings by British Artists Realism
Provenance: Private Collection
Exhibited: WW2 - War Pictures by British Artists, Morley College London, 28 October -23 November 2016, cat 122.
Literature: WW2 - War Pictures by British Artists, Edited by Sacha Llewellyn & Paul Liss, July 2016, cat 122, page 163.
Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.386.
During the war Halliday worked as an air traffic controlled for the RAF and later was transferred to Intelligence and worked on intercepting German radio signals. Altar offers a deeply personal and kaleidoscopic vision of war and peace. Conceived in 1939 for an unidentified (and presumably never completed) altar the dominance of the disproportionately large central figure of Christ recalls that of Hypnos in Evening on the Roman Campagna, which though painted in 1928, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the same year that this composition was conceived.
