Sonia Lawson RA Hon ROI RWS Hon RWA • 1934 - 2023

As part of this year’s ROI show, an incredible work, Triptych 'The Garrison Town (8'x10') by female, English contemporary artist Sonia Lawson, is to be exhibited and is available for sale. Created between 1981 and 1984, this stunning piece of art history provides a poignant view of garrison towns during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes of women. Of the work, Zoe Congo, Sonia Lawson’s daughter said; “The sentinel figures on each side are rendered with a muted pallet as they bear silent witness to the activity of the main panel which features a female form in white sounding a drum; a splash of golden hair masking her face, while a girl in a spotted headscarf, red blouse and blue and yellow skirt stands with her back to the onlooker. The Garrison Town is one readying for a call to arms, and women are the foundation of all: muse; nurse; lover; sweetheart; mother; comforter. The castle serves as a dark backdrop with a small flag fluttering, while a skull looms spectre-like, the leitmotif of war.”

Garrison Town. Oil on Canvas 1981- 84   8' x10' Triptych 

This painting belongs to an autobiographical  and introspective period of Sonia Lawson’s career.  In it she examines the complex and contradictory feelings brought about in her by war.

Sonia’s childhood memories of living in Wensleydale during the second world war were mostly of intense excitement. With the then huge Catterick army camp nearby, she recalled vividly how her quiet market town was suddenly filled with bustling, urgent activity and a feeling that important things were afoot: ‘a different pace – dances, talk of war, victory/defeat and a sense of camaraderie between the grown-ups, pulling against a common enemy for a communal cause’. Allied soldiers often visited the town: ‘smart Canadians and  Americans….seeming to breeze in bringing chocolates for the children and nylons for the young women – a sense of daring, sexy, romantic and a certain heroism’.

These are the feelings that infuse the central panel of ‘Garrison Town’ with colour, life and light: a female form in white sounds a regimental drum; a splash of golden hair masking her face, while a girl in a red spotted headscarf, red blouse and blue and yellow skirt stands with her back to the onlooker, chatting to a soldier.

However, even as a child at the end of the war, Sonia was starting to become aware of the destruction brought about by armed conflict, and began keeping scrapbooks of images, cut from newspapers and magazines, that bore witness to the human misery of war. So, in the central panel the mood of youthful excitement is tempered by a sense of foreboding. The gay colours of the two young women shine out in stark contrast to the dark uniforms of the soldiers and the brooding backdrop of the fortified town gate, which give a feeling of strength and security but strike a more ominous note . The soldiers themselves, identified only by their N.C.O. stripes and shiny buttons, are virtually faceless – even the sergeant to whom the girl is chatting has what Nicholas Usherwood described as ‘a dog’s skull face’- and appear perhaps to belong more to death than to life.

The two monumental female figures that fill the flanking panels of the triptych confirm the sense of foreboding. They are rendered with a muted palette and look upon the central panel’s scene of gaiety like silent sentinels. They, along with the layering and massing of figures on a tight, frontally flattened plane in the central panel, show the influence of Max Beckmann, whose work Sonia had admired since her student days. In 1991 Sonia was to make a painting of these two figures under the title ‘Grieving Women’. The left hand figure also bears a strong resemblance to the figure of Death from Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, a film that Sonia described as ‘holding all the weight of passionate colour.’

Unlike in previous war and anti-war paintings, women are not portrayed as victims but as an active and integral part of the war. The Garrison Town is one readying for a call to arms, and women are the foundation of all: muse; nurse; lover; sweetheart; mother; comforter, and ultimately mourner.

With acknowledgement and thanks to Zoe Congo and Nicholas Usherwood.