Foreword by Phillip Trevelyan

One of the more consistent messages to be found in my father’s work is the notion that people need to be creative in life. His work so often celebrates the little private spaces or events, where he felt that this could be achieved: the gardens and allotment sheds, the blacksmith’s workshop, the railway arches where the engineer, the potter, the gardener or farmer were able to work at their own pace. In his mind, these were some of the creative areas in which people were more likely to think for themselves. I often remind myself how he encouraged the Ashington miners to record the daily aspects of their lives. I realise too, that in his later work, he felt drawn to celebrate the more joyful moments in our lives: a moon-lit harvest festival, a sailing or rowing event, the skittle alley, a trip on a pleasure boat, a ride on a horse or even a bus. Perhaps a walk in Kew Gardens.

That is not to say that my father avoided the darker side of our working lives: the suffocating smoke of northern industry in the 1930’s, the blackened faces of exhausted coal miners, the rows upon rows of terraced housing, the deep clay pits. Nor did he avoid the horrors of war: see ‘Premonitions of the Blitz’ in the Imperial War Museum) or the traumatic effects of war on soldiers (Pen & ink drawings of the 1940’s). During the Spanish civil war, Julian was an active member of the Artists International which not only met at Durham Wharf but demonstrated in Chamberlain masks and raised enough money to send an ambulance to the front.

Today, we are left with one artists’ highly unusual mixture of subjects: an African rhinoceros beside a red pillar-box, a dumpy Statue of Liberty and a tugboat, etchings of factories and silos, the shoeing of Oxen, a night view of Manhattan office windows known as ‘Adultery with Secretaries’. Drawn either to the spectacle of oxen ploughing or the latest jets at Heathrow airport, my father produced a variety of apparently simple images that often ask questions.

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Auction Details

Wednesday 11 March 2026, 10.30am GMT

Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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Viewing:
Dreweatts London (highlights): 16-17 Pall Mall, SW1Y 5LU

• Friday 27 February: 10am–4pm
• Monday 2 March: 10am–4pm
• Tuesday 3 March: 10am–7pm

Dreweatts Newbury (full sale): Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

• Saturday 7 March: 10am-3pm
• Sunday 8 March: 10am-3pm
• Monday 9 March: 10am-4pm
• Tuesday 10 March: 10am-4pm

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