Hugh Cronyn is among the artists featuring in the next Modern & Post-War British art sale at Chiswick Auctions on April 22.
Born in Canada, Cronyn (1905-96) came to London in 1935 following art school in New York and Paris. He settled in Hammersmith and became part of the community of artists living in the area.
He loved the Thames and although he moved to Suffolk with his family when he took a job at Colchester School of Art, he later returned to live close to the river in west London by the mid-1970s.
The 30 x 50in (76.5 x 127cm) oil on canvas ‘Churchill’s Funeral Barge – Havengore approaching Festival Pier’ is estimated at £600-800.
Among the six works by Cronyn to be offered in the April 22 sale at Chiswick, is Churchill’s Funeral Barge – Havengore approaching Festival Pier. The 1965 oil on canvas depicts Winston Churchill’s funeral procession on January 30 of that year and Cronyn witnessed the proceedings first-hand, from the Embankment on the north side of the Thames, looking across to the floating pier on the South Bank.
Other works to be offered is this portrait of his neighbour, the Irish painter Nora McGuinness (1901-80). Smoking a cigarette, she is posed with the distinctive green door of her house at 1a Hammersmith Terrace behind her.
To her right is The Black Lion pub on Black Lion Lane, where she, Cronyn and other artists and writers in Chiswick and Hammersmith would congregate.
A 1937 24 x 20in (61 x 51cm) oil on canvas of ‘Nora McGuinness on Black Lion Lane’. It is estimated at £400-600.
Cronyn also created a woodcut of Black lion Lane before the war. Depicting The Black Lion pub on the left, with ‘Bell Steps’ at the end of Hammersmith Terrace beyond, and the entrance to his own studio – 9A (now Emery House), to the right.
Another woodcut shows the purpose-built skittle alley at The Black Lion in full swing in the late 1930s.
Alongside these Cronyn pictures will be offered at the Chiswick works by fellow artists who were part of this west London community including Julian Trevelyan, Mary Fedden, Kitty Church and John Piper.
