Duranty, Charles

About the artist

Charles Duranty, a poet as well as painter, is best known for his “imagined landscapes”. Born in Romford, Essex and self taught - he claimed that he had been thrown out of his art class at school - he only began painting in earnest when he was in his forties and needed some pictures to decorate the walls of his new home. Over the next 30 years he produced and sold some 1,500 watercolours featuring distinctive, though fictional views of the East Anglian countryside, whose open landscape and wide horizons he had come to love while working on an Essex farm during World War Two.

His landscapes typically feature vast fields spreading over rolling hills, with small figures, ancient vehicles or maybe a building to give focus and scale. He provided his pictures with delightfully eccentric titles, many of which can be seen on these pages.

For many years Duranty showed his work at the Thackeray gallery in Kensington. He continued painting well into his seventies; he died in 2006 at his home in the village of Merrow in Surrey, aged 87. Almost all the works here come from private collections.

Twenty or so works featured here that have a stock reference beginning with “DH” were shown in our When they were young… touring exhibition in 2016. They were originally acquired at the same time from the Thackeray gallery in 1970 by the eccentric collector Richard Cory Smith, who later presented them to a friend.

Most of these pictures had not been framed and labelled before Cory Smith snapped them up, and sadly we don’t know what titles Duranty had in mind for them. We resisted the temptation to devise humorous Duranty-style titles and initially gave them bland descriptive names such as Green landscape. But now that we have tracked down a copy of Audition, Duranty’s one and only published book of poems, we have taken the liberty of lifting phrases and lines from his poems and using them as titles. This is a bit cheeky, maybe, but also quite fun. Titles created this way are marked with an asterisk*.

The Guardian’s obituary of Charles Duranty and the extraordinary story behind these paintings can be seen in our NEWS section