Andrew Murray, Naive London Street Scene Folk Art Oil Painting Big Ben, Parliament, Union Jack

Description

Big Ben, House of Parliament with Union Jack flag, Thames River, boats, barges, airplane and double decker red bus. Classic … more Big Ben, House of Parliament with Union Jack flag, Thames River, boats, barges, airplane and double decker red bus. Classic London street scene.
24 inches by 11 inches in a frame 24.5 inches by 11.5 inches.

ANDREW MURRAY became known and loved as an imaginative Naive painter who captured the character of cities (especially Cape Town and London) with humorous and affectionate insight. An English counterpart to Michel Delacroix of Paris and Charles Fazzino of New York
He was born in north China, the son of a missionary. As a child of five he had his first lesson in painting from the son of another, the 10-year- old Mervyn Peake. Andrew's father, A.H. Jowett Murray, was the youngest son of Sir James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
In 1956, in his 40th year, a chance present led to his breakthrough as an artist. An elderly English artist friend (perhaps by intuition?) gave Murray his own brushes and paints, and he bought himself Norman Colquhoun's Penguin Paint Your Own Pictures. So began the second and increasingly fruitful half of his life.
From the first, Murray's painting meant the release of the interior child which had been waiting for expression. A brief early dalliance with abstract painting taught him to think about structure in a way which became almost instinctive, but abstract forms could not satisfy the child's vision and sense of fun. Inevitably Murray is classified as a "naive" artist, but of a special kind: meditative, seeking the "inscape" of a scene; gently teasing in face of anything grand or pompous, yet without malice.
His subjects can be divided roughly into works of free imagination and evocation of city scenes. The former include biblical and religious subjects (but never too serious), animal and jungle groups, and playful variations on Jungian themes.
It was his Folksy city scenes, however, that gave Murray the success, first in Cape Town (1956-69) and thereafter in London and Paris, which enabled him and his wife to live by his painting. To their sorrow, they had no children of their own, but sales and commissions constantly led to lasting friendships which filled their successive homes with good conversation and laughter. Almost all Murray's pictures set in South Africa have remained there, some now in the National Gallery in Cape Town. In many, Table Mountain rises above the scene, an icon as dominant as Mount Fuji in Japanese painting. The images of street life have a vividness and humour which is rarely if ever surpassed in Murray's later pictures set in London or other European cities.

Murray was taken on by the Portal Gallery (then in Grafton Street) and began a series of successful exhibitions, especially "Poetry into Paintings" and the two series of "Images of Reconciliation"; one of these "images", the lion cradling a lamb, was adopted as a Unicef Christmas card.
Perhaps it was partly the success of this card which suggested a series of gift cards reproducing paintings in colour; once the Murrays had settled (in Chelsea), the cards could give their address, and sales and commissions could be arranged without depending on a gallery. Murray also learned colour etching and for a few years produced a number of successful works, but always concentrated on painting and producing the "Andrew Murray Cards". In the next 20 years the series of these grew to well over a hundred, and in 1980 a selection was reproduced as a book, Andrew Murray's London.
At first the cards (and etchings) included some works of free imagination, but it was the London scenes - both major public monuments and attractive corners, especially of Chelsea - which sold best. Andrew did the paintings and oversaw the colour printing; then Beryl found sales outlets and kept them supplied. People recognised and enjoyed the characteristic clouds like piled puffballs, the ridiculously huge flags and the horses with bulgy Chippendale table legs, pulling drays or carrying policemen, but also, deeper than the fun, the intimate feel for London's moods and a sure sense of structure and colour harmony.
Commissions came from many sides; a set of four Christmas cards, very popular for several years, led to Sheikh Yamani's commissioning a Koranic Nativity to send to his Christian friends. Eventually the most fruitful outlet came to be London Mitsukoshi; they both bought and sold many of Murray's paintings and agreed to his producing cards from the same, while in Tokyo small reproductions on phone cards became fashionable.
In later years the task of distribution became too heavy and the Murrays sold Andrew Murray Cards to Simon Tan, a Singapore Chinese resident in London, who (with his own family) became a close friend and support. One of his developments which has continued is Harrod's annual calendar of Murray's London scenes. less