Julian Trevelyan, a Jekyll and Hyde painter, at the Bohun Gallery

Between 1917 and 1923, Julian Trevelyan produced a map and an illustrated guide to Hurtenham, an industrial town on the Tees between Stockton and Darlington. You’ll search in vain for the place in an atlas today, as the entire town, with its warren of streets, railways, parks, public buildings and monuments to local luminaries, was the figment of a pre-teen imagination. But the wit and ingenuity of its conception — and its bird’s-eye views of an abstracted world — set the creative pattern for what was to follow.

Born into a family of writers and intellectuals, Trevelyan was not destined for an artistic career. When he dropped out of an English degree at Cambridge in 1931 to study art in Paris, his uncle G.M. Trevelyan expressed the hope that he was not ‘going to meet one of those Matisses or Picassos’ — which of course was just what his nephew had in mind.