Alice Strang explores how travel, both within Britain and in Europe, inspired and developed the work of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

The drawing was part of the George and Ann Dannatt Gift to Pallant House Gallery in 2011. Along with Barns-Graham, George was a member of the Penwith Society of Arts and the Newlyn Society of Artists. Their gift also included Barns-Graham’s painting Geoff and Scruffy of 1956 and the watercolour Glacier of about 1949.

As Barns-Graham’s professional standing grew, so foreign travel became possible after World War Two. Following a studio visit to see her work, a Mr Brotherton, Deputy Education Officer for Devon, invited Barns-Graham to join him and his family on a trip to Switzerland in May 1949. Whilst there, she spent time climbing and studying the Grindelwald Glaciers (see photo), which had a profound effect on her developing ideas about abstraction.

Glacier comes from a seminal series of works on paper and paintings in which Barns-Graham attempted to express what she had encountered in Grindelwald. She said of the glaciers: “The likeness to glass and transparency, combined with solid rough ridges made me wish to combine in a work all angles at once, from above, through and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience.”

The abstract forms which combine monumentality with fluidity in Glacier are softened with the use of gentle pencil-markings and delicate washes of blue watercolour. The glacier works proved to be a turning-point in Barns-Graham’s career, not least when her painting Upper Glacier (1950) was purchased by the British Council that year.

Between 1956 and 1957, Barns-Graham taught part-time at Leeds College of Art. She painted Snow at Wharfedale II (1957) during the winter she spent in Yorkshire. Once more, Barns-Graham responded to her natural environment, in this instance to one of the North Yorkshire Dales. Field boundaries provide the structural basis of a complex, abstract image. The rhythm of layered rectangles describes the lay of the land, whilst a raw technique speaks of the texture of snow and earth, as the dale stretches towards a high horizon and glowering sky.

Snow at Wharfedale II was given to Pallant House Gallery by the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, through the Art Fund, in 2015, along with the painting Expanding Forms, Touchpoint Series No. 1 (Entrance) of 1980. Set up in 1987 in order to promote her work and to support others to fulfil their potential in the visual arts, the trust became active on Barns-Graham’s death in 2004.

Alice Strang is an award-winning art historian and curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

This article is indebted to W. Barns-Graham: A Studio Life by Lynne Green (Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2011).