Given that the civil war ended in 1939, it’s remarkable that the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester has pictures on the walls by a living artist, painted just after she returned from a country in the early stages of war.
McCannell was 13 at the time. Today, at 91, she still paints at her home in Surrey.
Her father was Otway McCannell, a painter and teacher. As with many intellectual British families in the 1930s there was much discussion at home of the growing crisis in Madrid.
She remembers her father worrying about the pressure the Republican government was under from the Nationalists under General Franco. Later in the war he would plot the two sides’ changing fortunes on a big map of Spain, despairing as the Republicans lost control.
“Every Thursday we had Left Book Club meetings at our house and there would be people talking about Spain and politics. In truth, when we went to Torremolinos in 1936, it was partly to stay with a school friend. But I remember the suffering of the local people clearly. The sense of unease was obvious, even to a young person like me.”
One of McCannell’s paintings on show is Family of Beggars. “I didn’t paint or sketch in Torremolinos, which in those days was just a sleepy little village and totally unlike how it is now. I started the paintings when we got back to England. There were quite a lot of them but I sold some.
“In fact the beggars were outside the cathedral at Malaga. They were a pathetic sight but my parents thought I ought to see everything.
“When we got back I was interviewed by newspapers including the Daily Mail. They were fascinated that a 13-year-old had painted pictures of the Spanish poor. I wasn’t painting the conflict as such, but they said I’d portrayed the suffering of refugees well. You couldn’t help being moved.”
McCannell is among the last artistic witnesses to the crisis of Spanish politics in the 1930s. Martin has selected around 100 other works to give an overview of how British art responded.
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