DAVID INSHAW (born 1943) Biography
BROTHERHOOD OF RURALISTS (founded 1975) Biography

Provenance

Theo Waddington Fine Art, London 1995; sold to:
Private collection; to 2006

Description / Expertise

Like many of Inshaw’s paintings, Barn Owl at Stanton Bridge evokes a sensation of timelessness and soundlessness.(1) The barn owl is suspended in the summer air, moving silently through the twilight. As Nicolas Usherwood explains: the events ‘before’ and ‘after’ are left entirely to our imaginations. The barn owl also attests to the artist life-long compassion for birds and animals. Usherwood describes how the birds, themselves fragile and joyous symbols of the various relationships with the people and places in his life, the frozen stillness and quietness of the flight placing them outside time and imaginatively inside our heads.(2)

Inshaw studied at the Royal Academy Schools and in Paris. In 1975 he was appointed Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Trinity College Cambridge. He was a founder member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists along with Ann and Graham Arnold, Peter Blake and Annie and Graham Ovenden. Inshaw's work is represented in many public collections including Tate, the City of Bristol Art Gallery and Museum, The Arts Council and the British Council. His painting, The Badminton Game, was for many years the most popular painting in Tate Britain.

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. T.S. Elliot

This is Inshaw’s territory. In painting after painting he evokes a world both recollected and projected, of intimidation and provocative possibility rather than forthright exposition ... The sense of ‘never and always’ permeates many of Inshaw's most famous pictures.(3)

(1) Nicholas Usherwood, David Inshaw, Agnews, 2004
(2) Ibid.
(3) Simon Rae, David Inshaw Never and Always, 1986, page 1