Edward Bawden valuation
Designer, illustrator and watercolourist of English villages, posters, wallpapers and garden furniture.
Edward Bawden was born at Braintree in Essex in 1903, the only child of an ironmonger, and studied at Cambridge School of Art from 1919 to 1921 and then, on a scholarship, at the Design School of the Royal College of Art, where he met Eric Ravilious and was taught by Paul Nash.
What a work by Edward Bawden is worth
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Bio
Edward Bawden was born at Braintree in Essex in 1903, the only child of an ironmonger, and studied at Cambridge School of Art from 1919 to 1921 and then, on a scholarship, at the Design School of the Royal College of Art, where he met Eric Ravilious and was taught by Paul Nash. With Ravilious and Charles Mahoney he painted murals at Morley College in 1928. He married the potter Charlotte Epton in 1932, and they settled at Brick House in Great Bardfield, where he became a central figure among the Great Bardfield artists. He worked across watercolour, linocut, lithography and design, making posters for London Transport and Shell, wallpapers, book illustrations and cast-iron garden furniture, and served as an official war artist in France, the Middle East and Africa. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1956 and died at Saffron Walden in 1989.
Bawden's linocuts and lithographs were printed in editions and appear often, as do his posters, book work and designs; watercolours are fewer. The Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden and the Higgins in Bedford hold large collections, and the Imperial War Museum has the war pictures. Condition matters in watercolour and in prints, which fade and stain.
Great Bardfield, London Transport and the war
As a war artist he went to France in 1940 and was evacuated from Dunkirk, then worked in the Middle East and Africa, including among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, and in 1942 survived the sinking of the Laconia, the ship bringing him home.
In the 1950s the Great Bardfield Artists opened their own houses for exhibitions that drew national attention. His last major commission, completed in 1972, was a historical mural for Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford.
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