Edward Seago: A Generation Risen

"A Generation Risen,' was the third book in which twenty-four of Edward Seago's pictures were matched to poems by John Masefield. Masefield had been hard put to find time to write all the poems needed because he had committed himself to do war work. 'The composition may take longer than I supposed,' he wrote. The book was the title of the tribute in pictures and poetry to the anonymous heroes of war, and was the only instance of Seago's collaboration with Masefield in which the illustrations were rated higher than the poems.

'Seago has gone to the source for his material while Masefield has gone to Seago,' wrote the critics of the 'New York Times,' unfairly discounting the older man's experience of an earlier war. Undoubtedly there was a new strength of draughtsmanship and a stark realism in the lightning pencil drawings of groups of young soldiers and airmen preparing for battle, planes wheeling into the sky, lorries lumbering along rain-lashed roads; the relentless war march, halted for a series of brief moments by a painter who was acutely aware, because he was part of it all, and had trained and exercised his talent in the make-believe worlds of the circus and the ballet until he was completely equipped to portray the dramas of real life.

Seago did great work in the war because he was seeing it from the inside and not as an official artist. Anonymous, though the people were in the drawings many can be identified, 'The Reconnaissance Pilot' in the book was his closest friend Bernard Clegg, and Peter Hurndall, the man who taught him to fly, had sat for the 'Portrait Study of a Pilot.' One drawing in the book, 'The Bronze Soldier,' was a personal tribute to sculptor and friend Charles Jagger who had died in 1934 and whose greatest work resulted from the First World War. Seago's picture showed a group of soldiers standing in front of Jagger's colossal bronze memorial at Paddington Station, perhaps his friend's own most impressive memorial.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)