Edward Walker
Oliver Cromwell's Barn, near St. Ives (Recording Britain, Huntingdonshire).

Watercolour; signed, dated and titled. View of agricultural buildings in a field near St. Ives in Cambridgeshire.

Given by the Pilgrim Trust

This work is from the 'Recording Britain' collection of topographical watercolours and drawings made in the early 1940s during the Second World War. In 1940 the Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime, part of the Ministry of Labour and National Service, launched a scheme to employ artists to record the home front in Britain, funded by a grant from the Pilgrim Trust. It ran until 1943 and some of the country's finest watercolour painters, such as John Piper, Sir William Russell Flint and Rowland Hilder, were commissioned to make paintings and drawings of buildings, scenes, and places which captured a sense of national identity. Their subjects were typically English: market towns and villages, churches and country estates, rural landscapes and industries, rivers and wild places, monuments and ruins. Northern Ireland was not covered, only four Welsh counties were included, and a separate scheme ran in Scotland.

The scheme was known as 'Recording the changing face of Britain' and was established by Sir Kenneth Clark, then the director of the National Gallery. It ran alongside the official War Artists' Scheme, which he also initiated. Clark was inspired by several motives: at the outbreak of war in 1939, there was a concern to document the British landscape in the face of the imminent threat of bomb damage, invasion, and loss caused by the operations of war. This was allied to an anxiety about changes to the landscape already underway, such as the rapid growth of cities, road building and housing developments, the decline of rural ways of life and industries, and new agricultural practices, which together contributed to the idea of a 'vanishing Britain'. Clark also wanted to help artists, and the traditional forms of British art such as watercolour painting, to survive during the uncertain conditions of wartime. He in turn was inspired by America's Federal Arts Project which was designed to give artists employment during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Over 1500 works were eventually produced by 97 artists, of whom 63 were specially commissioned. At the time the collection had a propaganda role, intended to boost national morale by celebrating Britain's landscapes and heritage. Three exhibitions were held during the war at the National Gallery, and pictures from the collection were sent on touring exhibitions and to galleries all around the country. After the war, the whole collection was given to the V&A by the Pilgrim Trust in 1949, and it was documented in a four volume catalogue published between 1946 and 1949. For many years the majority of the collection was on loan to councils and record offices in each county, until recalled by the V&A around 1990. The pictures now form a memorial to the war effort, and a unique record of their time.

'Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was the second son of Robert Cromwell (d. 1617) and his wife, Elizabeth Steward (d. 1654); he was born in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599 and was baptized in St John's Church there four days later. He was named after his father's elder brother, Sir Oliver Cromwell of Hinchingbrooke and of Ramsey, who almost certainly stood as his godfather
[...]
On 7 May 1631 Cromwell (and his mother and his wife) entered into a deed of sale of almost all their properties in and around Huntingdon for the sum of £1800, which suggests an annual value of about £100. Oliver, Elizabeth, and the children moved to a farmstead in St Ives, 4 miles away. For the next five years he may have remained a gentleman by birth but he was a plain russet-coated yeoman by lifestyle.
[...]
From 1631 to 1636 Cromwell lived and worked as a farmer in St Ives, suffering from an intractable chest infection that led him to wear a red flannel around his throat, even to church. Perhaps his move stemmed from an accumulation of debt from having too many sisters to marry off, compounded by having lost status, honour, and such authority as he had possessed in Huntingdon.'

John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2008

E.1637-1949