A dark sense of foreboding haunts this expansive English landscape depicting the countryside near Rye in East Sussex; a part of England that Edward Burra came to know well during the war years. The Country Road is a superb example of the intricately detailed, surreal watercolours that are eponymous with Burra’s practice and of the large format landscapes that consumed him during the 40s.

Andrew Lambirth notes that ‘By all accounts, Burra never drew on the spot or took photographs, but simply looked and committed what he saw (or as much of it as he wanted) to memory for reference later in the studio. There was thus a significant interval between the initial experience and the actual picturemaking. The process of recollection simplifies, condenses and abstracts. Certain features that had caught his interest would be accentuated, others diminished, but all of them organised ultimately according to the formal demands of the picture itself.’ (1)

Here, in the foreground we see the Sussex countryside: composed of trees, bushes, hedges, grassy banks, and on the left, an imposing steep cliff – realised with a rich tonal palette and expressive brushstrokes. By contrast, as if competing with these natural elements are man-made features. Most strikingly, a road which runs from the foreground, cutting a sharp diagonal through the landscape toward a house in the distance. To the left of the road, a drainage ditch scars the landscape, and to its right a canal can be discerned by its steep banks, intersected by fences, and a bridge which runs across it.

The scene is pregnant with a sense of unease as the natural and human worlds collide. Notably devoid of human life itself, the only inhabitants are some surreal harlequin-like figures, dressed in all black, who stand on a bridge in the foreground at the beginning of the road, peering over the edge at something that we the viewer can’t see. Trees in the distance are excessively bent, seemingly by the wind, while the telegraph poles are also tipping over a little, like walking figures pushing into the wind. At the very edge of the paper, on the right, a train is moving across the horizon, before the skyline of the town of Rye itself. The steam of the engine car dissipating into the broad sky, evolving into menacing physiognomic looking clouds which envelop the sky.

Burra took ideas from Cubism, Dada (notably George Grosz) and, especially, Surrealism, but his work is also linked with the English satirical tradition of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank. His first one-man show at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1929 gained him a personal following, and his place in the English modern movement was acknowledged by his inclusion in the avant-garde Unit One exhibition in London in 1934. He had spent the 20s and 30s travelling, primarily in France, Spain and the USA, but during the Second World War, confined to England, he began to focus on the English landscape and the sparsely populated peripheries of the British Isles. Inspired by Romanticism he explored notions of the grandeur and solitude of his native land.

The present work is not listed in Andrew Causey’s catalogue raisonné published in 1985, but it is comparable to a number of other landscape works from the period including:

Landscape with Red Wheels, 1937-9 (cat no.141)
Landscape with Wheels, 1937-9 (cat no.142)
Blasted Oak, 1942 (cat no.158)
Landscape Near Rye, 1943-5 (cat no.164)
The Cabbage Harvest, c.1945 9 (cat no.167)
Landscape with Birdman Piper and Fisherwoman, 1946 (cat no.171) (Fig.1)
The Railway Viaduct, 1947 (cat no.177)
The River, 1947 (cat no.178)
Sussex Landscape, 1949 (cat no.199)

(1) Andrew Lambirth, ‘Burra: The Landscape Option,’ in Simon Martin (ed.), Edward Burra, Lund Humphries/ Pallant House Gallery, London, 2011, exh cat, p151