Provenance: The Artist's Family
Literature:Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II; Kenneth Rowntree, A Centenary Exhibition, Moore-Gwyn Fine Art and Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, 2015, Cat. 43, p.84
Exhibited: Fry Art Gallery, Kenneth Rowntree, A Centenary Exhibition, 2015, no 10
For the School Prints series, 1945
Rowntree first met Ravilious when he enrolled as a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford, where the latter was teaching part-time, and his example remained an enduring influence throughout the younger man’s life. Their friendship prompted the Rowntrees to settle in Great Bardfield at the beginning of the Second World War and it was memories of Great Bardfield that inspired the School Print, Tractor and Landscape, which proved to be one of the most popular exhibits in the ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibitions at the V&A in 1946 and continues to have enduring appeal. Peyton Skipwith, Country Life, Stylistic Switchbacks, August 2015
As a muralist Rowntree understood art for public spaces - it called for a maximum legibility from a distance, simplification and an instantly recognisable catalogue of images. This approach, along with his interest in everyday scenes and his preference for flat frontal views, led to his School Print being one of the most popular, John Milner, Kenneth Rowntree, Lund Humphries.
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