Cottage on the Edge of Lough Currane

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

In this topographical oil painting Claude Muncaster depicts an isolated farm cottage by Lough Currane in County Kerry in Ireland, close to the Atlantic Ocean. Two workers are shown handling farm machinery to the left of the image while a woman tends to the chickens outside the cottage. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the landscape is the brooding dark hill in the distance over which the storm clouds are gathering. 

Resolutely a painter of traditional subjects, Muncaster was not drawn to avant-garde developments in modern British art during the 1920s and ‘30s. Aside from painting landscapes, he painted marine subjects based on real journeys including a trip taken in a four-masted ship from Melbourne to Cardiff, which was the subject for his first book, Rolling Round the Horn (1933).

Claude Grahame Muncaster was born in West Chiltington in Sussex. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1919 and his first solo exhibition was held in 1926 at the Fine Art Society in London. He was President of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours from 1951 to 1960 and he published several books on art. His work is represented in public collections including the Tate, the Royal Academy and the Royal Collection in London.

Places

Ireland, Lough Currane, County Kerry

Subjects

cart, landscape C20th, tree, donkey, chicken, hill, stone/rock, Irish, man, field, road, furrow, house, cottage, hut, barn, wall

Materials & Techniques

masonite, oil, oil painting

Artist

Claude Grahame Muncaster (1903 - 1974)

Title

Cottage on the Edge of Lough Currane

Date

Medium

Oil on masonite

Dimensions

height: 49.50 cm, width: 75.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the Fine Art Society, June 1952

Inscription

BR: CLAUDE / MUNCASTER

GAC number

1739