Betty Swanwick RA

Her name may not be familiar but - if you're of a certain age - you'll probably know at least one of her paintings. And the song that goes with it.

'It's one o'clock and time for lunch hum-dee-dum-dee-dum ...'

The cover to Genesis' fifth (and, in my opinion, best) studio album is a watercolour painting called The Dream. Peter Gabriel was so taken with it that he asked the artist, Betty Swanwick, to paint a cover for the band's next LP. Sadly, Swanwick didn't have time but, as a compromise, she agreed to paint a lawnmower, which was added to The Dream as an allusion to the lyrics on the album's first single, I Know What I Like (in your wardrobe).

I've always liked her work - from her early primitive style to her later dream-like paintings. Clearly influenced by Stanley Spencer, and no doubt also by Blake and the pre-Raphaelites, Swanwick claimed that her non-commissioned paintings and drawings always had Biblical associations. However, you sometimes have to really work to find the connection. Most of her images seem to represent English pastoral scenes. And many of her works seem to have no obvious narrative at all.

She's a definite one off and her style is pretty unmistakeable.

Ada Elizabeth (Betty) Edith Swanwick was born in Forest Hill in London in 1915. Her father, Henry Gerard Swanwick, who was in the naval reserve, painted marine watercolours. She was inspired by her father, and her mother who gave her pencils which she had retrieved from shipwrecks on the Scilly Isles. 

Swanwick enrolled at Goldsmiths College at the age of fifteen and by 1934 she was simultaneously attending classes at Goldsmith's, the Royal College of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. She was a student of Edward Bawden. This academic activity continued until 1936 when she began to create work for London Transport. She continued to paint posters for them until 1954.

In 1945 she published the first of her several novels, The Cross Purposes. Then, in 1951, she and Ben Nicholson were asked to create murals for the Regatta and Rocket restaurants at the Festival of Britain. She would later create another mural for Evelina Children's Hospital in 1960. 

Her paintings post 1965 start to take on the curious dream-like quality for which she is now best known. She died in 1989 but her life and her intriguing paintings are wonderfully recorded in this excellent book by her friend Paddy Rossmore. 

It's a book I treasure and recommend.