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| Alan Sorrell, Self-Portrait (1928) |
We've been looking for information about British artist and writer Alan Sorrell (1904-1974), who served as a camoufleur and war artist during World War II. According to the Brighton University website—
During
the Second World War Sorrell volunteered for the RAF but was transferred as a
Camouflage Officer to the Air Ministry in 1941. He made drawings and paintings
of camp life, a number of which were purchased by the War Artists Advisory
Committee…
It was well known that scores of British artists had worked as camoufleurs during World War I, so that, as Brian Foss explains in Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939-1945 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 16-17), when World War II broke out—
…from early on, camouflage design had
struck many artists as the most obvious route to congenial employment. By the
beginning of September 1939 the Ministry of Labor had received letters from more
than 2000 applicants for camouflage work, only a tiny fraction of whom even got
onto a waiting list.…[By 1943] the number of artists who had earned a living in this line of
work—though far below the number who had hoped to do sso—was impressive. Among
the artists who had found camoufleur jobs for themselves were William
Coldstream, Frederick Gore, Ashley Havinden, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Robert
Medley, Colin Moss, Rodrigo Moynihan, Mervyn Peake, Roland Penrose, Robert
Scanlan, Edward Seago, Richard Seddon, Alan Sorrell and Julian Trevelyan.
Earlier in his life, at age 24, Sorrell had been awarded the Prix de Rome for mural painting, which enabled him to study in Rome. Reproduced above (with permission) is an extraordinary self-portrait drawing, made with pencil, ink and opaque watercolor in 1928.
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| Alan Sorrell, Cavern in the Clouds (1944) |
Mark Sorrell, one of the artist's three children, has written an online biographical essay about his father for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In an especially memorable passage, he writes—
Sorrell
was a neo-Romantic. Recruits marching down to the station, in a wartime
painting, proceed under a haloed moon. His reconstruction drawings are invested
with dramatic cloud formations, swirling rainstorms, and smoke. In his more
imaginative compositions, not tied down to immediate reality, a brooding
oppressive atmosphere often prevails. They are images of a violently broken
civilization—earthquake-shattered cities, jungle-invaded monuments, propped
façades. In spite of this pessimistic attitude, he was a man with a gusto for
life, naturally sociable and gregarious, with a witty manner which was hindered
but never stifled by a stammer.
