60 Pictures

60 Pictures in ‘51 was part of the Festival of Britain celebrations, a touring exhibition of art with 60 paintings by Britain’s leading artists. It came with a booklet but like many books of the time, all the images were in monochrome. I thought it would be entertaining to present the pictures in colour and though I haven’t found all of the paintings, here is what I amassed.

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 Gerald Wilde cover for the book 60 Paintings for ‘51.

If the Festival of Britain is to achieve its avowed aim of showing the British way of life in all its various facets it is clearly appropriate that a number of our distinguished painters and sculptors should have been given an opportunities to make their contribution.

With this very end in view – and also in the  hope of handing down to posterity from our present age something tangible and of permanent value – the Arts Council has commissioned twelve sculptors and invited sixty artists to paint a large work, not less than 45 by 60 inches on a subject of their own choice. 

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 Keith Vaughan – Interior at Minos, 1950

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 L S Lowry – Industrial Landscape, River Scene, 1950

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 Lucian Freud – Interior Near Paddington, 1951

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 Rodrigo Moynihan – Portrait Group, 1951

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 John Tunnard – Return, 1951

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 Michael Ayrton – The Captive Seven, 1950

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 Ceri Richards – Trafalgar Square, London, 1950

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 John Nash – Afon Creseor, North Wales , 1951

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 Keith Baynes – Hop-Picking, Rye, 1950

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 Elinor Bellingham Smith – The Island, 1951

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 Martin Bloch – Down from Bethesda Quarry, 1951

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 Edward Burra – Judith and the Holofernes, 1951

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 Prunella Clough – Lowestoft Harbour, 1951

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 Roy de Maistre, Noli Me Tangere

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 Hans Feibusch, The Prodigal Son

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 Carel Weight, “As I wend to the Shores…”

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 Ivon Hitchins, Aquarian Nativity, Child of this Age

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 Gilbert Spencer, Hebridean Memory

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 Charles Mahoney – The Garden, 1950

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 Claude Rogers, Miss Lynne

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 Ruskin Spear – River in Winter, 1951

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 Victor Pasmore – The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White, 1951

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 Robert Medley – Cyclists against a Blue Background, 1951 

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 William Gillies – The Studio Table, 1951 

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 Patrick Heron – Christmas Eve, 1951

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 William Gear – Autumn Landscape, 1950

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 Peter Lanyon – Porthleven, 1951

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 Robert MacBryde – Figure and Still Life, 1951

Below are some of the sculptures mentioned in the forward, but these really had their own booklet and part of the Battersea Park Festival Of Britain Pleasure Garden.

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 Henry Moore – Reclining Figure, 1951

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 Jacob Epstein – Youth Advances, 1951

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 Barbara Hepworth

Contrapuntal Forms, 1951

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 Frank Dobson – Woman and Fish, 1951

The statue above stood in Frank Dobson Square, Tower Hamlets until it was vandalised and she had her head destroyed. Now with scars she sits in Delapre Abbey, Northampton, pictured below.

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† Philip James – 60 Paintings for ‘51, 1951