Oil sketch entitled 'Saturday Night' (study for a poster for the film It Always Rains on Sunday, used as an illustration in Lilliput, April 1947) by James Boswell. New Zealand School, Britain, 1947.

Oil sketch entitled 'Saturday Night' (study for a poster for the film It Always Rains on Sunday, used as an illustration in Lilliput, April 1947).

Purchased, 1982.

Historical significance: Born in New Zealand, James Boswell (1906-1971) came to England in 1925 and took up a place to study painting at the Royal College of Art. He exhibited intermittently with the London Group, and joined the Communist Party in 1932. A co-founder of the Artist's International Association (AIA; originally the International Organisation of Artists for Revolutionary Proletarian Art) in 1933, during the 1930s Boswell became known as one of the foremost artists of the radical left.

Boswell was art editor of Left Review (launched 1934), a journal in which his illustrations appeared regularly until 1938. During the Second World War Boswell was not made an official war artist, but during his time in the army made numerous sketches and watercolours. After the war, in 1947, he became art editor of Lilliput, a small-format, 'pocket' magazine of humour, short stories and the arts which had been founded in 1937.

In his illustrations Boswell drew inspiration from Edward Ardizzone and the German artists George Grosz and Otto Dix. Saturday Night dates from the beginning of Boswell's editorship of Lilliput, where it was published. It was also used as a poster design for the 1947 Ealing Studios film It Always Rains on Sunday, directed by Robert Hamer and starring Googie Withers.

Saturday Night was purchased in 1982.

Study for a poster for Robert Hamer's 1947 film 'It Always Rains on Sunday', used as an illustration in Lilliput, April 1947.

P.53-1982