John Minton (1917-1957)
Casting
- painted in 1948
- pen, ink, watercolour and wash
- 16.5 by 18 cm.; 6 ½ by 7 in.
- Provenance: Mercury Gallery, Cork Street, London; Where acquired by the current owner, Sir Christopher Howe, 1979
- The present work was part of a commission from Everetts Advertising Ltd, then in 10 Hertford Street, London, W1, and is one of several studies Minton made of the Imperial Smelting Corporation in their industrial plants at Avonmouth and Widnes. Minton worked up watercolours from studies he made, which were then used in a series of announcements made by Imperial Smelting Corporation in a variety of trade magazines and journals. A finished watercolour of a blast furnace in this series is reproduced in Martin Salisbury's The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower and Other Work by John Minton, Mainstone Press, 2017, p. 19.
- £4,500 plus 4% ARR
John Minton (1917-1957)
An English painter, illustrator, stage designer and teacher. After studying in France, he became a teacher in London, and at the same time maintained a consistently large output of works. In addition to landscapes, portraits and other paintings, some of them on an unusually large scale, he built up a reputation as an illustrator of books.
In the mid-1950s, Minton found himself out of sympathy with the abstract trend that was then becoming fashionable, and felt increasingly sidelined. He suffered psychological problems, self-medicated with alcohol, and in 1957 took his own life.