Patrick George (Hardback)

The first monograph and only substantial publication on the work of Patrick George (born 1923), this book will reveal to a largely unsuspecting public the lyrical paintings of a rare and original talent. George is better-known as a teacher (for 40 years he taught at the Slade, ending up as Professor and Director of the School) and he has only shown his work infrequently. Yet perceptive commentators have identified him as a School of London painter, to be viewed in the same context as Lucian Freud (a friendly rival from schooldays on), Frank Auerbach (a strong supporter of George’s work), and Euan Uglow (George’s close friend and colleague). For too long dismissed as a follower of Coldstream, Patrick George is in fact very much his own man, a Northern European landscape and figure painter, working in the tradition of Gainsborough and Constable. In this book, his unique contribution to the development of contemporary landscape painting is for the first time examined and evaluated. ‘The paintings have an extraordinary resonance of the reality of the seasonal moment; of weather, the greys and browns of February, the greenness of the trees in May, or the stretching space between the trees in the foreground to trees in the far distance...the paintings have an inevitability: their power is their lack of narrative. Patrick George has made the fields and the trees and the skies of Suffolk his own.’