James Boswell (artist) - Works

Works

He made many drawings of life in Britain during the 1930s and sketches of life in war-time Britain.

His pre-war satirical style has been described as "attractively pugnacious" and compared to the work of the German artists George Grosz and Otto Dix and to British artist/illustrators such as Edward Ardizzone. It was an influence on later artists such as Ronald Searle and Paul Hogarth. Although much of his work was political satire aimed at exposing class injustice, he also produced work simply portraying everyday life, such as his 1939 series of London lithographs.

Despite not being an official British war artist, he is known for his depictions of life in the armed services, including his service in Iraq. These, now in the Tate, The British Museum and Imperial War Museum in London, evoke the atmosphere, boredom and solitude of military life. While in Iraq he also produced a series of fierce surreal sketches graphically illustrating his view of war more symbolically:

"a bestial farce conducted by bulls. These Orwellian animals, often dressed in generals' uniforms, heave their obese bulk through page after page. They ride on the backs of exhausted Tommies, pause with a watering-can to sprinkle a flower-pot containing the grotesquely dismembered skeleton of a soldier and sit on a hideous pile of corpses and ruined buildings while they type out a mass of documents which sail ridiculously into the sky. Sometimes they play at doctors and press a telescope to their ears in order to inspect a truncated, headless body held up with callous unconcern by two horned orderlies. And then they turn into bespectacled priests who ram a huge graveyard cross into a hapless soldier's mouth. The flow of imagery is as prodigal as it is remorseless, suggesting that Boswell treated these sketchbooks as a cathartic outlet for all his deepest loathing of war"

In later life Boswell settled into painting abstract oils and landscapes. Boswell also drew illustrations in Lilliput for Maurice Richardson's series The Exploits of Engelbrecht; some of these were later reprinted when the series was reprinted in book form.