Who Painted This? #42

Who painted this? #42

I've had to adjust the wikimedia commons version of this painting as it glares at you - it's terribly over-saturated! I've been using a couple of other images of it in a recent exhibition as a reference point - and that's as much as a clue as you're getting for now!

For those who've not risen to the challenge before please take a minute to read the rules - see below.

How to participate in "Who painted this? #41"

PLEASE make sure you read the rules before posting a comment - and ONLY POST ON THIS BLOG what you think is the answer.
Click this link to read THE RULES for participating in this challenge (this saves having to copy them out for each post!).

In short:

• use your brains not software to find the answer
• search using words only on a database of images
• leave your answer as a comment on this blog
• if correct it will not be published until the next post - which provides the answer
• if wrong it will be published
• do not leave the answer on Facebook!
• the winner - who gets a mention and a link on/from this blog - is the first person to give me a completely correct answer for ALL the things I want to know

Who Painted This #41 - The Answer

By Richard Ernst Eurich (RA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

• Title of the artwork: Preparations for D-day
• Name of the artist who created this artwork: Richard Eurich RA
• Date it was created:  1944
• Media used: oil on canvas
• Where it lives now: Imperial War Museum

This painting relates to Richard Ernst Eurich's work as a war artist. He worked for the War Artists Advisory Committee - for a number of years during the Second World War.  This has been set up on the instigation of Sir Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery (Later known as "Lord Clark of Civilisation" following the BBC programme of the same name')

The aims were:

• to raise morale by having art exhibitions
• to produce artwork for propaganda
• to keep artists gainfully employed in the hope this might reduce the numbers killed (the First World War saw the death of a lot of writers and artists)

At the end of the war, the collection consisted of 5,570 works, over half of which are held by IWM.

David Teter found the image on the Google Art Project  which gives the best view of it (ie you can zoom in).  This is what the site says about the painting.

Eurich’s enigmatic composite painting of land and naval forces massing off the South Coast before D-Day gives an impression of brooding calm before the storm.The dark belt of trees across the centre of the painting obscures the transition from land to sea. The roads end in barriers of smoke or barbed wire and the only way forward is into the unknown, through the huge jaw-like hold-doors of the central ship. Camouflage netting, smoke screening and the camouflaged shipping all contribute to the sense of secrecy and hidden strength conveyed by the painting.Eurich was a marine painter living near Southampton and was very familiar with this part of the coast, overlooking the Isle of Wight. He was a salaried war artist with an honorary commission of Captain in the Royal Marines and would have been able to paint from his own observations. His wartime style has been compared to the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Breughel whose work shows a similar attention to distant detail and purposeful activities. Indeed, the gaping ship’s doors seem to echo Breughel’s Mouth of Hell, making a visual equation between war and hell which agrees with Eurich’s Quaker background and beliefs.

Here are some more of his paintings in the Imperial War Museum

• Air Fight over Portland, 1940
• Dunkirk Beaches, 1940
• The Raid on the Bruneval Radio-location Station, 27th-28th February 1942
• A Destroyer Rescuing Survivors

Interestingly - and this is what I was referencing when I said some websites might be lisleading - he isn't on any of the lists of war artists and yet has clearly been one.  See

• Wikipedia - list of British Official War Artists
• The National Archives - War Artists 

The story behind how this painting was chosen is that I've had an art postcard of  one a still life painting by him for a very long time.  I wanted to feature that - but couldn't find it located anywhere online!  So then I started looking at what else he had painted - and got a big surprise!

Who guessed correct?

Who painted this #41? Congratulations to Roger Brown (Art Of The Wild by Roger Brown)
who was first with the name of the artist and all the other available details.

Others who got all the correct answers were:

• Bernadette Madden 
• John O'Grady
• David J. Teter
• Colours and Textures
• Jacqui Boyd

If you'd like to study how people get the correct answer try studying past challenges which are listed in the Page Who painted this? - at the the top of the Page. Since of the requirements is to say how you found it, you can see the various ways people get to the answer.

Just for the record - anybody who leaves a comment on the page which lists all the "who painted this?" rather than the specific blog post is not counted.  You have been warned!