PAUL DRURY, PRE
1903-1987

LIMITED TO 450 COPIES

The Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints of Paul Drury
by Robin Garton
1992
ISBN 0 906030 26 9 (without the wood engraving)
88 pages; 99 illustrations
Page size: 272 x 205 mm; 10 3/4 x 8 inches
Colour dustjacket; dark green 'cloth', gold-blocked spine.
£55

Paul Drury was the son of the renowned sculptor, Alfred Drury. He attended Goldsmiths' as an art student from 1921. Portraiture predominated in his early work yet his most famous prints from that time are the two or three small landscape etchings in the pastoral vein with which he and his colleagues, Graham Sutherland and Robin Tanner, became so closely associated. Drury's later printmaking shows the development of a highly imaginative mind with an inherent sense of design. These qualities were, on occasion, informed with a delightful sense of humour.

Drury's skills were recognised by Richard Dorment, art critic of the Daily Telegraph, who wrote 'he may be amongst the finest practitioners of the art (of etching) in England this century'. His obituarist in that paper referred to him as 'One of the most distinguished etchers and draughtsmen in that remarkably gifted generation of printmakers who grew up between the two World Wars. [His landscapes] contain a deep poetic quality which was to exert a powerful influence on the succeeding generation of neo-Romantic artists.'

Drury began to etch in 1922 and continued until the end of his presidency of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1975. The catalogue of his 90 prints is based on the artist's own trial proofs and notes together with information from various other sources.

Although Drury exhibited regularly at the RA and the RE, he remained largely disinterested in self-promotion, particularly in the post-war period. Typically he would complete an image without editioning it and then move on to develop a new idea. It may yet be the poetic qualities he achieved in his later landscapes for which he will be remembered: images such as French Cemetery, Forms in a Wood and Mickleham Yews are no less profound than his universally known September.