‘Everything looks menacing,’ Edward Burra once told the Tate’s director Sir John Rothenstein. ‘I’m always expecting something calamitous to happen.’ This was late in Burra’s career, when his by then well-known and characteristic figure paintings had mostly given way to landscapes and still lifes, though without any diminution in their imaginative power or their peculiar sense of humorous unease. There were still figures in some of them, though they had become more insubstantial. ‘Why,’ asked his friend William Chappell, ‘are you painting transparent people?’ ‘Well,’ said Burra, ‘don’t you find as you get older, you start seeing through everything?’
Like so many of the best British artists, Burra was sui generis, an eccentric who forged his inimitable style from a seemingly random bundle of influences. Signorelli gave his figures their tight bottoms and taut poses, Goya, Grosz and Breughel their malevolent, gross, oafish faces, Beardsley their febrile exhibitionism, De Chirico and Ernst their nightmarish settings and, occasionally, bird heads.
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