Local hero: Discovering the work of Leslie Moffat Ward

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Leslie Moffat Ward’s engaging painting is currently on show in Lymington, England. Julian Freeman explains why this artist should be better known,

An English Idyll. Leslie Moffat Ward: Paintings and Prints, with an introduction by Peter Davies

The arrival of this catalogue is a restorative: a reminder that what the painter Walter Sickert called ‘the august-site motif’ can as easily be effectively and pleasingly delivered by those whose reputations do not precede them. Leslie Moffat Ward’s work (at St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington, Hants, until  6 June 2015) will not be known to an extensive audience, though those for whom British printmaking is a magnet will probably recognize him through reproduction in surveys of the art.

An English Idyll will easily entice anyone with a casual or academic  interest in the local topographies of southern England, for the skill of the draughtsmanship, printmaking and painting reproduced, as for the potential for comparison with other, similarly idiomatic but better-known work of the same era: Adrian Allinson (1890–1959) and C.R.W. Nevinson   both come to mind. Ward (1888–1978) is an important representative of many equally skilled men and women with deserved local reputations, who never rose to national prominence. He was a ‘regular’ at the Royal Academy during the inter-war years and after, and had a long and continuous association with the Royal Society of Painter Etchers, becoming a full RE (member) in 1936. An English Idyll is important not just because it charts Ward’s artistic progress as a painter-printmaker, but also because, more generally, it points to the continuity, importance and vitality of local arts activity in the UK. It happens that Dorset loomed large – but not solely – in Ward’s work: the South coast is more generally represented in this excellent production, from Corfe to Rye.

Peter Davies’ lucid assessment of Ward’s working life is an engaging text. Ward is presented amid the locale within which he was most active: one on whose periphery lurked for a time such eminences as Augustus John and Henry Lamb,  thereby creating a form of attraction for some. Ward clearly found the town of Poole absorbing, by day and night, as readers will see from the several reproductions of prints of riverside and dockside scenes, from which much of his printmaking was derived. Indeed, despite the presence of excellent reproductions of watercolours of Bournemouth, of the Dorset coast, and of Corfe Castle itself, Ward’s prints are the principle feature of this very attractive book.

What Davies has not done has been to point to comparisons that might be made with Ward’s prints and paintings, in the work of others. Specifically, it is interesting to note the evident appeal of Southampton docks for Ward, in lithographs of 1913, and to recall very similar images by Nevinson – very much his contemporary – in 1917; similarly, Ward’s painting Near Worbarrow Bay, Dorset (1931) includes general tonal and stylistic similarities with Allinson’s railway poster Downland Walks of approximately the same date. Davies points to the picturesque nature of Ward’s prints, but though he speaks about the atmosphere of several images, he does not tarry on their weather, as he might, for this feature is one of Ward’s strongest qualities, in etching and lithography: the drama of prints executed throughout his life remain compelling to audiences. Taken as a whole, these features are all present in An English Idyll, and call to mind some of the best of Frank Brangwyn, and of James McBey (1883–1959) also.

To judge from the excellent illustrations here, Ward’s capabilities extended far beyond the limits of his retrospective reputation, and any scholar considering a thesis on the self-image of Britain between the wars, as delivered by local artists, would have to include Ward. There is real pleasure to be had here, and discoveries to be made also, in this very deserving publication. 

An English Idyll. Leslie Moffat Ward: Paintings and Prints, with an introduction by Peter Davies is published by Sansom & Company. 80pp., with 70 mono and colour illus, £15.00 (pbk). ISBN 978 1 908326 74 4