John MINTON

Drawn in 1945, this fine sheet is a splendid example of John Minton’s landscape draughtsmanship. The artist’s biographer Frances Spalding has suggested that this drawing may depict ‘Marshalls’, the home of his friends Edie and Newton Lamont in the village of Chart Sutton in Kent. Minton had met Edie Lamont in the 1930s when both were students at the St. John’s Wood Art School, and they remained good friends for many years afterward. Between 1945 and 1954 Minton would occasionally escape postwar London to stay with the Lamonts at ‘Marshalls’, with its view over the Weald of Kent, and make sketching trips with Edie around the countryside, at such places as Forstall, Frittenden, Little Chart and Tenterden. As Spalding recounts, ‘From [Edie’s] diaries we know that Minton made between two and four visits to ‘Marshalls’ every year up until 1954, staying usually a couple of nights and returning to London with sheaves of drawings…His Kent landscapes had contributed significantly to the success of his 1945 Rowland, Browse and Delbanco exhibition, soon after which he tried to interest the same gallery in Edie Lamont’s work…Minton’s friends were aware that Edie Lamont was an important figure in Minton’s life, but most knew little or nothing about her. He deliberately kept the Lamonts in a separate compartment, their home providing him with a place to refuel in company he enjoyed and in countryside he loved.’ Another drawing by Minton of ‘Marshalls’ and its garden, seen from a different angle, appeared at auction in London in 1993. 

The present sheet may have been among a number of Minton’s Kent drawings that were exhibited at the newly-opened Rowland, Browse and Delbanco Gallery in London in 1945, the same year it was drawn. As Spalding writes, ‘Meanwhile [Minton’s] landscape drawings had become much sought after. He held two one-man exhibitions in 1945: one in the top floor gallery at the recently opened Roland, Browse and Delbanco of drawings of Kent and Cornwall; the other at the Lefevre Gallery. Both shows sold well, Minton’s drawings at this time fetching between ten and twenty guineas.’

Among stylistically comparable works is Sunflowers, signed and dated 1945, which was purchased from the Rowland, Browse and Delbanco exhibition by the Victoria and Albert Museum.