The Wheel

Many of John Minton’s drawings and watercolours of the late 1940s depict farms and record farming practices that were soon to be mechanized. This large sheet can be associated with a handful of watercolours by Minton of pieces of farm machinery that were no longer in use, all dating from 1948 and of similar dimensions. Related to these watercolours, although earlier in date and without colour, is a pen and wash drawing of Agricultural Implements of 1945, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (inv. 5772-1958; London, Royal College of Art, and elsewhere, John Minton: 1917-1957. A Selective Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, 1993-1994, no. 46).

Minton employs his characteristic distortion of perspective in order to highlight the wheel in the centre-left of his composition. The undulating and rather rough terrain combine with the sharp colour boundaries to create a slight sense of abandonment, lending the work a subtle nostalgic feel. Also in 1948, Minton was employed in the advertising campaign of the Imperial Smelting Corporation, creating dark watercolours of industrial life. The present work balances the idyllic harmony of the post-war promise with that new sense, on which he was simultaneously working, that the society-wide aspects of wartime industrialism were there to stay. A comparable watercolour of Derelict Farm Machinery, signed and dated 1948, was with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in 2015 and is today in the collection of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California (inv. no. 2015.2).