Carel Weight (1908–1997)

Occupation and the aftermath of war in Europe, 1945–1946

 

 

 

Angela Weight

 

 

Carel Weight RA (1908–1997) was an official war artist covering aspects of the Allied Forces’ occupation of Italy, Austria and Greece from May 1945 to February 1946. The long letters that he wrote to his partner Helen Roeder (1909–1999)^[1] in London described his experiences and commented on art, music, politics and his encounters with a wide variety of people, both military and civilian.^[2] In 1995 Weight donated the entire collection of letters to the Imperial War Museum, which, together with the Government Art Collection, holds the largest group of his war paintings. The following essay draws extensively on these letters and other sources.

 

 

The illustrations are of works by Carel Weight (1908–1997)

1 German Demolitions from the south side of the Ponte Vecchio, Florence 1945. Oil on canvas, 46 x 56 cm. IWM ART LD5710

 

 

Before receiving his call up papers in September 1941, Carel Weight received three one-off commissions^[3] from the War Artist Advisory Committee; a fourth was carried out while he was serving in the Royal Armoured Corps at Warminster.^[4] In January 1944 he secured a transfer to the Army Education College in London, where he was employed as a Sergeant Instructor, a post very similar to his peacetime occupation as an art teacher at Beckenham Art School. There he remained until April 1945, when the Committee decided to appoint an artist to replace Albert Richards, who had been killed in March on active service in the Netherlands. Edward Ardizzone was to be transferred from Italy to follow the advancing forces in northern Europe, while Weight was asked to replace him in Italy as a salaried war artist, with a vague brief ‘to cover the Occupation’. The opportunity to travel to Europe, denied to Britons since 1939, was not to be missed, and he accepted with alacrity.

 

Italy 1945

Weight travelled by ship to Naples, arriving at the beginning of June. While on board, he met Captain Eric Dawson, a young archaeologist who was working for the Monuments and Fine Art Commission in Rome. Although he complained that he could only understand one fifth of what Dawson said owing to his clipped public-school accent, the two became friends.^[5] Dawson proved to be a useful contact owing to his knowledge of Italy, ability to speak the language and, most importantly, his professional connection to the British School at Rome and its new Director, John Ward-Perkins.^[6]

As for Naples itself, Weight’s first impression of the city was that ‘Naples is a most beautiful place in spite of all I had heard to the contrary’. One feels that he would have liked to stay longer, but after only two nights there he was woken at 5am to catch a train to Rome – a journey of 150 miles which took 12 hours.

The actual journey provided no incident of unusual significance, but it taught a stranger like me a hell of a lot about the conditions of the people in the south of Italy. There in the midst of divine country these poor creatures exist God knows how. Everywhere there is devastation… There is no attempt to clean or tidy up, except that there are no corpses about, nothing has moved since the battles were fought. We passed Cassino and all the scenes of the war. We stopped for lunch at a once inhabited village and ate out of tins. Caught a glimpse of the palace of Caserta where the Germans capitulated – fine but not quite Versailles.

Weight spent his first week in Rome in an orgy of sightseeing – the Borghese Gallery (‘makes the Tate look like a penny bazaar’), the National Gallery (‘a terribly boring show of modern painting. I think they have purged it of Fascist elements but there isn’t much left’), and the Vatican: ‘It’s just impossible to describe all the wonders. The Primitives themselves would take a week to look at, and then there are the Titians and heaven knows what.’ Through Dawson, he was introduced to Ward-Perkins and obtained the use of a studio at the British School at Rome, which remained his base throughout his stay in Italy. Early on he met two older artists, Edward Bainbridge Copnall (1903–1973), a sculptor and painter who was a Major in the Army and who also had a studio in the British School, and Sam Morse Brown (1903–2001), who was head of the Army Education Corps in Rome. Initially he thought they might be useful contacts, but he did not pursue their acquaintance, having a poor opinion of their artistic ability and little in common with them on a personal level.

Weight struggled with the language at first and felt slightly overwhelmed by his new surroundings, but he loved the hot weather and felt very fit, and it was not long before he found his feet, as he recalled in 1978:

This business of being a war artist had certain quite interesting sidelights for me. For one thing it was quite common for me to be taken off by plane somewhere to record some building or other and then told that the plane was coming back in three days, so I had to adapt myself completely to a place where I had never been before, and I found this was a great help to me later on. Very often artists say we can’t paint this or that place until we really know it, but I had never had the chance of ever really knowing anywhere and I just made myself settle down and find the things that I wanted very quickly.^[7]

When the prospect of a flight to Caserta arose on 11 June (his first flight on an aeroplane) it seemed as though life as a war artist was about to begin. The Palace at Caserta, a vast, rambling 18th-century building containing 1200 rooms, was rather depressing and the room where the capitulation of the Fascist government in 1943 had taken place lacked any visual interest. Nevertheless, in his five days there he painted the grand staircase with incongruous khaki figures going about their business, watched over by voluptuous marble sculptures in arched niches.^[8]

Back in Rome, he continued the cultural whirl with another visit to the Borghese Gallery and to the opera. Music, as much as art, filled his free time. In the absence of any official guidance, he decided for himself, as he put it later to Eric Gregory,^[9] at that time the Secretary to the WAAC, to concentrate on ‘the cultural side of things, which I feel should be recorded’.^[10] He wrote to Helen on 17 June, ‘Am much enjoying everything and feel I am an amazingly lucky person to be seeing all these lovely things. I only regret that I haven’t found anybody who can share my enthusiasms; all these Press boys aren’t quite my type.’

He was greatly pleased when he encountered two other official war artists at breakfast in his hotel in Rome, Edward Bawden (1903–1989) and William Coldstream (1908–1987), who had just arrived from Florence on their way home to England. Carel already knew Bawden, whom he first met in the early 1930s as a student at Goldsmiths’ College of Art. The older man was already a teacher at the College and became a lifelong friend. Carel had not met Coldstream before and did not really take to him, despite finding him ‘very amusing.’ Bawden and Coldstream had arranged to meet the painter John Aldridge (1905–1984), who was working as an Army Intelligence Officer in Rome. Weight recalled this wartime rendezvous in his introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of Bawden’s work at the Fine Art Society in 1978:

At the end of the War I met him again in Rome with Bill Coldstream and John Aldridge. We could at last turn our attention to art. Edward meticulously planned a series of sightseeing expeditions – so long at one church, then to a gallery – ten minutes for coffee – it was marvellous but when we returned in a state of collapse Edward went off by himself with a sketchbook and drew entirely for his personal record. This did not prevent him from scouring all the second-hand bookshops – he was especially anxious to find novels by Mrs Oliphant.^[11]

Bawden was the most travelled and long-serving British official war artist. He had survived the sinking of the SS Laconia (torpedoed by a German submarine while en route from Cape Town to London) in September 1942, internment in Casablanca by Vichy French forces, transfer to America after the Allied invasion of North Africa and repatriation to the UK in January 1943. After a spell recording military exercises on Dunwich Common in preparation for D-Day and a few days at Colchester Military Hospital, he went out again to the Middle East, visiting Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. From November 1944 to August 1945, he travelled in Italy, visiting war-damaged cities.

William Coldstream had enlisted in the Army in 1940. Commissioned as an official war artist in 1943, he was posted to Egypt, before transferring to Italy in April 1944. In Capua, a small town about 20 miles south of Monte Cassino, he painted the Casualty Reception Station and the bridge over the River Volturno built by the Royal Engineers. In the winter he visited Pisa and Rimini, both of which had been badly damaged in the war. Coldstream moved to Florence in the spring, where he met Bawden and Ardizzone. While in Florence, both Bawden and Coldstream painted the Ponte Vecchio and its surrounding ruins. The 12th-century stone bridge was the only one over the River Arno that had not been blown up by the retreating German army, although the buildings at either end had been destroyed to make the bridge impassable.

Weight, visiting Florence in September the following year, positioned himself at the site of the destroyed Ponte alle Grazie, where a ferry was taking people back and forth across the river.^[12] This gave him a clear view of the Ponte Vecchio in the distance. A second painting, German Demolitions from the South Side of the Ponte Vecchio (Pl 1), shows people walking through a sunlit arcade with the wreckage on the opposite riverbank in the background. Here the emphasis is not on wartime destruction but on ordinary people once more enjoying a stroll and a gossip in the sunshine.

His former employer, the Army Education College, had its headquarters in Perugia; feeling that ‘the old AEC should be put on the map artistically’, Weight visited the city in late June. He painted several views of it as well as two paintings of classes in the Palazzo occupied by the AEC. He felt A Classroom in the University, Perugia^[13] was more successful than his previous interior of the Palace of Caserta, but in truth both paintings convey a sense of airlessness, heat and lassitude. His other smaller painting, A Window of a classroom in the Army School of Education (Pl 2), is more successful, showing the head and shoulders of two soldiers framed by an open window through which there is a view of a sunlit street, silent but tempting.

 

 

2 A Window of a classroom in the Army School of Education, Perugia 1945.
Oil on canvas, 24 x 29 cm. IWM ART LD5498

 

 

When he finally returned to Rome, Weight settled down to a daily routine in his studio at the British School, painting several scenes of places and people associated with the British occupation. But he wasn’t averse to some humorous social observation when the opportunity arose: Between Two Fires, a Dream. St. Peter’s, Rome (Pl 3) shows two army padres looking down on St Peter’s Square with its prominent central obelisk. One consults his guidebook while his companion succumbs to a sideways glance at one of the two women standing nearby, possibly with something other than sight-seeing on their minds.

 

 

3 Between Two Fires – a Dream. St. Peter’s, Rome 1945. Oil on canvas, 16.5 x 24 cm.
UK Government Art Collection

 

 

It was Colonel John Ward-Perkins, the newly appointed Director of the British School at Rome, who advised Carel that he should visit Verona where all the bridges over the River Adige had been destroyed by the Germans. Ward-Perkins also told him about Mussolini’s official residence in Rome, the Palazzo Venezia.^[14]

I have a desire to do a painting of Musso’s house. I went there yesterday – it is now used as an Officers’ Transit Hotel for the RAF and to me it was the most haunted of places. I felt ghosts and decay everywhere. Like the good old vandals that we are, the place was terribly neglected, the garden thick with weeds, the magnificent eighteenth-century theatre, a perfect gem, now a storage dump.

He contemplated painting a picture of ‘Mussolini’s spirit appearing to an RAF sentry’ but sadly thought better of the idea.

Weight spent about two weeks in Verona in August, from where he reported that he was working hard on two large landscapes and one small one. These were Veronese Night (Pl 4), The Remains of the Ponte Navi [sic] and The Ponte della Vittoria. ‘The people are rather touching’, he wrote, ‘they loved their city, and come up to me while I’m painting and say, “That was once a beautiful bridge. Fine carved figures, very, very old”.’

 

 

4 Veronese Night 1945. Oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm. IWM ART LD5708

 

 

Moving back to Florence in September, he continued with his self-imposed mission to depict the work of the Army Education Corps, whose art school was based there. He painted students at work in a life class, a portrait class and even a dress design class. In two weeks, he produced seven paintings of damaged bridges and buildings, but his stay was marred by a series of accidents. He was perched on the second floor of a bomb-damaged house in the Piazza della Signoria, painting a view of the Palazzo Vecchio (Pl 5) with Michelangelo’s David in the background, when the floor gave way. His paintbox was smashed in the fall and he was bruised but unhurt. He then lost his wallet in the Pitti Gardens – it was probably stolen – and rain and dull skies hindered his work.

 

 

5 The Palazzo Vecchio, Florence 1945. Oil on canvas, 62.2 x 50.8 cm.
© CSG CIC Glasgow Museums & Libraries Collection

 

 

Florence was also without many of its great works of art, although he caught a glimpse of Giotto frescoes in the Santa Croce as workmen removed the protective covering. But he was annoyed that the local Army Education staff did not invite him to go with them on a visit to Castello Montegufoni, Osbert Sitwell’s house outside Florence, where many famous paintings from the Uffizi Gallery had been stored for the duration of the war. In general, Weight found the Army Education people in Italy unhelpful and regarded them as ‘just about fourth rate in everything’ – a view shared by Bawden and Coldstream.

At the end of September he visited Rimini, where the Temple of Malatesta, designed by Leon Batista Alberti in the mid-15th century, and the oldest Renaissance church in Italy, had been severely damaged by an American bomb.^[15] William Coldstream, who had been in Rimini the previous year, noted in his diary, ‘It is most depressing coming to these smashed up towns like Pisa and Rimini, particularly in winter. It is cold, all the streets are filled with mud, and I am almost overwhelmed with the difficulties to be overcome if I am to work.’^[16] Weight’s reaction was not dissimilar: ‘Alberti’s masterpiece looks a sad thing indeed. I painted three pictures of it. One of the façade, which is least damaged, one of the back, which is scarcely recognizable, and an interior with pools of rainwater and a dreary priest. I was depressed while painting it’ (Pl 6).

 

 

6 Temple of Malatesta, Rimini 1945. Oil on canvas, 55 x 65.5 cm.
UK Government Art Collection

 

 

Vienna 1945

In the autumn the WAAC decided that there was little left to do in Italy and in October Weight was directed to Vienna, politically a much more significant city than Rome, where the Allies and Russia were struggling for control and influence in Central and Eastern Europe. He flew to Klagenfurt and thence to Vienna by train, where he found the Public Relations people to be surprisingly helpful:

Quite unlike the Rome office they have gone out of their way to give me jeeps to career around the town in and have actually given me a marvellous studio. Its former occupant was evidently a Nazi and had to clear out very quickly, leaving his works and a mass of artist’s paraphernalia behind. He was employed in making coloured wax models of diseased sexual organs for a Viennese hospital. These were a bit too much for me and I spent a morning hiding them from sight as they turned my stomach. He also painted strange pictures of healthy Nazi maidens having affairs with walruses and seals.

Writing to Helen after four days in Vienna, he remarked on ‘the hungry and poverty-stricken people’ and the badly damaged state of the city, the lack of motor traffic and the widespread use of horses for transport, but this is scarcely evident in his paintings of the city. Much later in life he recalled:

I was in Vienna and the set-up was exactly like in the film The Third Man.^[[17]] There were all these terrible people ^[[18]] and I was an innocent abroad really. I used to wander about at night and go right through Russian lines. I would wave at the sentries and they always used to wave back, and when the C.O. said, ‘Where have you been?’ I described it and he said, ‘It’s a wonder you weren’t killed!’ I found there wasn’t the terrible animosity they all thought there was.^[19]

Weight’s mild socialist sympathies and dislike of privilege and snobbery are often apparent in his letters, but his encounters with the Allied occupation in Vienna stirred quite angry reactions. The city was divided into four zones occupied respectively by the British, French, Americans and Russians. The latter were unpopular and came in for strong criticism for the greedy and brutal way they treated the Austrians. Weight, who had been an active member of the Artists International Association since the 1930s but was not an admirer of communism, felt that ‘I feel a party of our leftist friends [Clifford] Rowe, Margaret Lewis, Michael [Rothenstein], should be invited to come here’ to see for themselves how the Russians behaved. The British came in for criticism too; while scouting for a site for a painting in the Schönbrunn Palace, he came across lavish preparations for a party for a departing General in the State Apartments. ‘It rather made my blood boil that these things go on with so much hardship and suffering so close.’

Life in Vienna did, however, have its compensations and in many ways he found it more stimulating than Rome. Cultural life was beginning to revive, and Weight enjoyed visits to the ballet and opera, including performances of The Bartered Bride and Fidelio. He reported with satisfaction that although the opera was frequented by large numbers of Russian officers in full military uniform, the British were by far the most popular of the Allied occupiers.

In early December he returned to Florence, where he saw an exhibition of modern Italian art at the Strozzi Palace, which he thought ‘a model of beautiful arrangement. The standard of work is very high on the whole, much better than anything I have previously seen in Italy’, although there were few works that showed any evidence of progressive tendencies. ‘Chirico, Picasso, Matisse, Dali, might not have existed.’ On an exhibition of paintings by de Chirico, he commented, ‘However well he may paint, to me he is a disappointment when he abandons experiments. There are loads of competent painters in the world but so few that contribute anything to the future.’^[20]

With Christmas in the offing, he began to wonder where he should spend it and with whom – most of his friends and acquaintances had left or been posted elsewhere. He began to think he would be spending the holiday with ‘a bottle of sherry, one of gin and a Canadian whiskey and last but not least some Sicilian wine’. Fortunately, he encountered one of his old students, Denis Lucas, who was in Florence on a course. On Christmas Day, in search of a proper Christmas dinner, Carel, Denis and Joyce,^[21] an ATS Sergeant, ^[22] decided to gatecrash the Senior Officers Club:

Trust the old hogs to do themselves well. The principal snag was that Joyce was a mere Warrant Officer (even a Captain was only just tolerated). The place was lousy with Generals of the most bloated kind, UNRRA directors and ENSA chiefs,^[[23]] but for some reason nobody chucked us out. Instead, we were given a table in the middle of the room (of course I was wearing a rather dirty old battledress which must have been a contrast to all the medals and braid around us.) The food was quite marvellous, turkey, pudding – six courses of delight, with a good bottle of wine… At last we went, and the Captain who runs the hotel came to me and said, “It was very naughty of you to bring a Sergeant Major in the ATS here tonight with all those high rankers. I was in great fear that they might object.” I said I didn’t think he need worry too much about it, and we left the hotel very pleased with everything. There is something divinely sweet about gatecrashing if you are in the right mood.

 

Greece 1946

Greece had been liberated by the Allies in October 1944 but a civil war between Communist and Royalist partisans broke out the following year. By the time Weight got there in January 1946 most of the fighting was over except in pockets in the north, but it was the most challenging of the countries he visited, not least because the British occupiers were deeply resented for trying to reinstate the Greek monarchy without a democratic mandate.^[24] He arrived in Athens during a general strike and was put up in a squalid hotel without carpets, blankets, electricity or hot water in an area of the city that had been much damaged by fighting. The weather fluctuated wildly between snow and sunshine, but he managed to paint two street scenes, one of which, A Typical Street Scene in Athens (Pl 7) he described as:

A typical street in Athens which suffered considerably in the ELAS fighting. The damaged building at the end of the street was a last ELAS stronghold. The streets are always thronged with people – men standing on street corners – black marketeers doing their business without restraint. The streets are in a very dilapidated state and very dirty.^[25]

 

 

7 A Typical Street Scene in Athens 1946. Oil on canvas, 70 x 49.5 cm.
IWM ART 5805

 

 

The British Press Attaché in Athens was none other than the well-known architectural historian and cartoonist for the Daily Express, Osbert Lancaster,^[26] who ‘although rather vague and unhelpful’, arranged for Weight to visit Macedonia two or three weeks later. In the meantime, the local Education Officer invited him to join a history course visiting all the main sites on the Peloponnese Isthmus, a trip he justified by making small sketches of the scenery, including the blockade of the Corinth Canal. The expedition to Macedonia finally set out from Eleusis, after a delay due to a truck breakdown. A two-day journey over pot-holed roads through mountain passes covered in snow brought them to their destination at Kosani, where he did a painting of conscripts for the Greek Army passing the British Officers’ Mess on their way to their barracks.^[27]

Weight wrote to Eric Gregory from Athens on 2 January 1946 requesting some leave after almost ten months’ continuous service. In February a letter from Helen arrived with the news that Gregory had resigned from the War Artists Advisory Committee. Almost simultaneously he received a letter from Mrs Irene Oxford-Coxall, a clerk at the Imperial War Museum, informing him that the WAAC had been wound up on 31 December 1945 and its remaining functions transferred to a joint committee of the Ministry of Information and the Museum. Its remit would run until 31 March 1946, but thereafter no money would be available to pay any bills. With this abrupt news, it was clearly time to go home, but he still had to wait several days in Athens for a plane back to Rome. He occupied his time writing a script for broadcasting to the Greeks, commissioned by the Public Relations Officer in Athens, a pre-war acquaintance of his. He chose the subject ‘The Arts in England since 1940’, but he was told not to over-emphasise state help to the arts in case it made the Greeks dissatisfied with their own government. The Greek general election was set for 31 March and, as the date approached, he witnessed demonstrations in the streets and the strong-arm tactics of the police. He admired the Greeks for their cheerfulness and good looks but thought them a bloodthirsty lot: ‘Their only desire is for their liberty, but that doesn’t prevent them from slitting the throat of their neighbour if he is a slightly different pink’ – a reference to the various left-wing political parties competing for control of the country.

In several interviews after the War, Weight affirmed the importance of his experiences as a war artist, describing his time in Europe as a kind of scholarship from the Army:

I was tremendously lucky in a way because I had all the most pleasant parts of being a war artist. My few moments of danger were very few indeed in comparison with lots of other people and I think I gained a great deal from the experience of painting in all sorts of different places and meeting all sorts of different people.

Back in London, he lost no time in taking up painting again, sometimes borrowing a studio from artist friends, his old one in Shepherd’s Bush having been destroyed in the Blitz. In 1948, after a gap of six years, he submitted Holborn 1947 (Pl 8) to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

 

 

8 Holborn 1947. Oil on canvas, 76 x 112 cm.
Collection John Brandler, Brandler Galleries, Essex

 

 

This large painting of Holborn Circus is a panoramic view from the studio of his friend Kathleen Allen, whose top floor flat at 30 Holborn overlooked the Circus and the huge bomb site on its southern edge. The scene is a record of an area that underwent enormous change in subsequent decades.^[28] Carel Weight was interviewed for the British Library Sound Archive in 1989, and described his feelings at the time:

Well, you’ve got to remember that I had just come out of the Army, and it (Holborn 1947) was almost my first picture that I had painted out of the Army… half of London had been destroyed, everywhere you looked had been affected in some way, and in that particular picture there was a whole empty space, where once a line of very high buildings were. It had opened up the place in an extraordinary way, and all that was very interesting to me. And also, the slight feeling of being at last free, and you could paint what you liked and so forth. And all that made me want to paint things about London, and the river, and all those sorts of things. I did a whole lot of that … for about the best part of a year.^[29]

In 1947 he was offered a teaching post at the Royal College of Art, which had recently returned to its home in Kensington from its wartime exile in the Lake District.^[30] He was a Tutor in the Painting School for the next ten years, becoming Professor of Painting in 1957. He retired in 1973.

 

 

 

1. Helen Roeder was born in Richmond, Surrey. Both she and Weight were students at Goldsmiths College in the late 1920s.During the war she was actively engaged with the Artists’ Refugee Committee, helping to bring German Jewish artists, writers and intellectuals to London and campaigning to have them released from internment. Obituary: The Independent, 27 August 1999. ↑
2. A selection of 52 letters, entitled The Curious Captain, edited by Helen Roeder, was published by the Camberwell Press in 1989 with an introduction by Colin Hayes and black-and-white illustrations of Weight’s paintings. ↑
3. These were: It Happened to Us, 1941 (declined by the WAAC, now in the collection of the RAF Museum); replaced by Lewisham Shelter 1941 (lost by enemy action, 1942); The Battle of Suburbia1941 (Leeds City Art Gallery); The Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo 1941 (Manchester City Art Gallery). ↑
4. The Recruit’s Progress, 1942–43 (Imperial War Museums). ↑
5. Dawson is mentioned frequently in Weight’s letters from Italy, but apart from a listing in the Monuments & Fine Arts Commission database (www.monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org) no details of his career have been traced. ↑
6. John Bryan Ward Perkins (1912–1981), British classical archaeologist, Director of the British School at Rome, 1945–1974. ↑
7. Carel Weight interviewed by Conway Lloyd Morgan, 1978, IWM Sound Archive 3171. ↑
8. The Great Staircase, Caserta, 1945, Izika, National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town. ↑
9. Eric Craven ‘Peter’ Gregory (1887–1959) was the fourth and final Secretary of the War Artists Advisory Committee, appointed in July 1943. He is best known as a director at Lund Humphries and patron of the arts. See Valerie Holman, Peter Gregory Publisher and Patron of Modern British Artists, Lund Humphries, 2024. ↑
10. Weight to Gregory, cSeptember 1945. IWM War Artist Archive GP/55/156. ↑
11. Mrs Oliphant (1828–1897) was a Scottish novelist and historical writer. ↑
12. Ponte alle Grazie, Florence, 1945, City Art Gallery Leeds. ↑
13. IWM ART 5501. ↑
14. Now the National Museum of the Palazzo di Venezia. ↑
15. The Temple was fully rebuilt after the war. ↑
16. Coldstream painted the ruins of the Opera House and a view of the city with the tower of the Temple of Malatesta in the distance. ↑
17. The Third Man, 1949, directed by Carol Reed, script by Graham Greene. ↑
18. The ‘terrible people’ were probably black marketeers. ↑
19. ‘Carel Weight RA, An Eightieth Birthday Celebration’, Hastings Museum & Art Gallery 1988. ↑
20. Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) settled in Rome in 1944. By this time his work consisted mainly of replicas and variants of his metaphysical paintings from the1920s. ↑
21. Joyce E Doo (1924–1990). Paintings by her in a sub-Weightian style can be seen on ArtUK. ↑
22. ATS: Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army. ↑
23. UNRRA: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. ENSA: Entertainments National Service Association. ↑
24. Sir Reginald Leeper was British Ambassador to Greece between 1943 and 1946 and his memoir When Greek Meets Greek, Chatto & Windus 1950, vividly describes the politics and personalities of this fraught period. ↑
25. ELAS: National People’s Liberation Army, the largest of the Communist resistance organisations in Greece. ↑
26. Osbert Lancaster (1908–1986) was Press Attaché from December 1944 through 1946. He travelled widely through Greece and its islands between periods of civil strife and returned to the country frequently throughout his life. ↑
27. IWM ART LD5813. ↑
28. See Angela Weight, ‘Topography of a Painting: Carel Weight’s Holborn Circus 1947’, The London Journal, 2024, vol 49, no. 2. ↑
29. British Library Sound Archive, F2553, Tape 21, Side B ↑
30. The Royal College was based in Ambleside 1940-45. ↑