Walter Michel (op. cit., p.115) writes of Lewis's paintings of the thirties 'One can only marvel at the energy, optimism and conviction which in 1932 allowed Lewis to begin painting in oils again on a large scale. His enthusiam must have been largely self-generated, for, though during the later twenties he had on occasion published striking drawings (as in The Enemy), he was now known primarily as a writer. To create a new audience his pictures would have to overcome two widely held beliefs: that one person cannot be a good artist in two different media; and that painting is the purveyor of ineffables feelings and delicate sensory perceptions which, besides, only originated in Paris - as proclaimed by Fry and Bell.

Lewis did not have a studio, not even the money, to buy an easel, and he worked with his canvases propped up on a chair in the bedroom of the apartment at 31 Percy Street. But he was fifty, and perhaps he felt that, if he delayed, he would never carry out the major compositions in oil of which he knew he was capable. What, fortunately, he could not have known was that for the next five years he would be plagued by intermittent but severe illness, which sapped his strength and demanded that time be taken from painting in order to write articles and books, to pay for operations and nursing homes. It was by sheer will that he carried out his plan and completed, by 1938, the large group of paintings for which he is most widely known.

During the thirties a number of British painters began to work in abstract-constructivisit or surrealist modes, but they were directly inspired by Continental models and there was no connection with, or recognition of, the earlier British modern movement. Lewis, preoccupied with his new figurative but non-surrealist work, paid little attention to these artists, and his own painting, in turn, was known to very few people before the often-postponed 1937 exhibition finally took place'