with an unfinished work on the reverse.

In the late 1930s, John Minton and a number of artists began to associate themselves with English Neo-Romanticism. Influenced by the visionary landscapes of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, as well as the French Neo-Romantics, Eugene Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew, they sought to rediscover romantic sources of inspiration and technique rather than following the popular trends of Modern Art. Under this influence, Minton and his peers came to focus on images of subjectivity and poetic intensity, often inspired by nature. Minton’s melancholic compositions from this period are often arranged in a stage-set design within which perspective, especially of the human figure, is subtly distorted. As with the sister-watercolour for this work, ‘The Kite’, held in The Ingram Collection and painted two years earlier, a recurring theme in Minton’s work was that of a lone, often male figure, placed in an emotionally charged setting.

‘Figure in a Deserted Landscape’ executed in the midst of War, presents a scene poised between emotional intensity and physical barrenness. The solitary figure of an emaciated boy dressed in rags stands with melancholic resignation in a desolate wasteland, deprived of vegetation, hemmed in by mountains and a pallid, receding stretch of water, while an uneasy sky overhead begins to swirl in greys and blacks undercut by a sickly yellow. This forlorn, war-torn figure stands within, and yet somehow apart from, this backdrop of destruction and ruin: a derelict building, charred trees, sun-scorched earth, and a cracked urn connoting the idea that even death itself is insecure or uncertain in this context of vulnerability. The boy stands, frail yet arresting, with a lopsided, glassy-eyed gaze mixing resignation and sorrow. His folded arms restrict, rather than welcome, compressing and suppressing an unknown world of trauma and loss.

This desolate landscape effects a contorted kind of pathetic fallacy, in which the psychological consequences of the Second World War, endured by Minton and his peers, are being narrated by a landscape of horrific discordance, with this solitary figure as an unwilling protagonist. Minton presents a world fraught with tension, shattered and in ruin. Yet the sky has not yet decided between the storm and the sun: the clouds are parting and rays of gold prevent bleakness; the scene is bathed in a contrasting palette of warmth, with golds, sun-baked reds and the untroubled blues of a summer’s day; and as in ‘The Kite’ (Ingram Collection), where the red kite flies optimistically above the chaos of the wasteland, here too, a red swatch of cloth which has been attached to a tall branch flies defiantly above the destruction, enacting a breeze which brings life and hope to a post-apocalyptic scene. The artist sees a form of optimism within the ruins which transforms the boy from a figure of pity into an otherworldly messenger who, poised between despair and resurrection, dares us to see the hope within the ruins.