The red room

Mervyn Peake is celebrated as a writer, artist, illustrator and poet. He is best known for his Gormenghast books: Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone, the first of which was published in 1950, heralded for their surreal and gothic nature. His early career began as a painter and illustrator in London in the 1930s, where he primarily worked on portrait commissions before depicting wartime scenes in the 1940s, with the outbreak of World War II. During this period, he was conscripted into the Army, where he served with the Royal Artillery and then the Royal Engineers, before being employed as a graphic artist by the Ministry of Information to work on propaganda illustrations. In 1943, after being invalided out of the Army, he was commissioned by the War Artist’s Advisory Committee to paint glassblowers at the Chance Brothers factory in Birmingham, where cathode ray tubes were being produced for early radar sets, examples of which are now in the Imperial War Museum Collection.