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Sir Thomas Monnington:
Study for Students Union Mural,circa 1969
Unmounted (ref: 5722)

Squared

Pencil and chalk on three pieces of tracing paper

Tags: Sir Thomas Monnington chalk pencil design

Provenance: The Artist's Studio

Literature: Paul Liss, Thomas Monnington:The British School at Rome, 1997. 

In 1964 The Edwin Austin Abbey Trust for Mural Painting in Great Britain commissioned two works from Monnington for the University of London Students’ Union. The first of the two designs was executed in situ, in polyvinyl acetate on a panel 8 x 20 ft. (see photograph). The second design, to which this study relates, was executed towards the end of the decade.

‘It has been a failing all my life that I take a long time to resolve a painting problem. I take a year to do one painting because I make innumerablestudies preparing the way … I am now preparing something for the summer exhibition – I expect that I will use that as a basis for the mural’ (interview in the Sunday Express, 1969).

The mural to which Monnington refers, and for which this painting is a study, was commissioned by the Edwin Austin Abbey Trust for Mural Painting in Great Britain, and completed and installed in the early 1970s. It was later removed from the Students’ Union and is assumed to have been destroyed.

Monnington was the first President of the Royal Academy to encourage the exhibition of abstract works at the academy, including his own. Although in 1967 the Chantrey Bequest acquired Square Design 1966 for the Tate Gallery, his significant contribution to post-war art in Britain has since been largely ignored.

Monnington at his easel