[ORIGINAL WATERCOLOUR] WINTER STREET SCENE WRAGG, Arthur:

Original watercolour on board depicting a stylised eighteenth-century winter street scene with a mother and her daughter in the foreground. The image measuring 29.5 x 24.5. The board measuring 53 x 39cm. Signed by the artist in black ink to the top left corner of the image. The watercolour itself is in very good condition, remaining clean and the colours bright. The board with several pinpricks to the margins, dust-soiling, and wear to the corners (all of which would be masked by framing). A vivid, colourful watercolour by the British illustrator Arthur Wragg (1903-1976), best known for his later striking modernist style and searing social commentary during the inter-war period. Born in Eccles, Greater Manchester, Wragg studied at the Sheffield School of Art, before settling in London as a freelance commercial artist. Here, during the 1920s, he contributed mainly to women's periodicals, but soon began producing work for left-wing journals and illustrations for books and pamphlets regarding Christian socialism, pacifism and social justice. By the 1930s, Wragg's simplified block-style, with its dramatic chiaroscuro effects (which led some to assume that his publications were based on woodcuts, rather than pen and ink drawings), had brought him significant success. His most notable works in this period were perhaps his highly politicised and emotive illustrated biblical texts, such as The Psalms for Modern Life (Selwyn & Blount, 1933). The stark, haunting imagery of these works shared clear affinities with the visual-symbolic language of propaganda art, however Wragg's creations were certainly not doctrinaire. Indeed, although a committed socialist and pacifist (he was a friend of the pacifist preacher Canon Dick Sheppard, a sponsor of the Peace Pledge Union, and a conscientious objector during the Second World War), his themes were often broad, focussing on deprivation and social alienation, justice, conscience, and the persistence of spiritual values in the alienated urban-industrial environment. These ideals were deeply imbued in Wragg's artistic practice; eschewing fine art, everything he produced was designed for publication, resulting from his desire to speak directly with common people, rather than the intelligentsia, something that has also led to the relative neglect of his work until recent times. A devotee of George Cruickshank, Albrecht Durer, and William Blake, the latter to whom he was compared during his lifetime, Wragg combined a striking, urgent visual style, a strongly held ethical-political belief system, and an undeniable trace of mysticism, to create a body of highly distinct, idiosyncratic work which blended immediate social commentary with a reflection upon deeper human urges and preoccupations. Despite the style for which he would later become famous, Wragg's early work was characterised by a whimsical decadence and patterned delicacy, typical of a number of fin-de-siècle illustrators, as reflected in the present work.