Tea Shop in the High Street, Colchester
1940
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
1940
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Tea Shop in the High Street, Colchester is a 1940 watercolor by Walter Bayes, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
Walter Bayes’ watercolour shows a quiet tea shop on a busy street. It’s an odd fit for him—most of his work shows lively public scenes, not polite tea rooms. His signature crosshatching gives the room a lively, chatty feel without showing faces. The painting was made around 1940, when Britain was still mixing old habits and new routines. Tea shops were spots where all kinds of people could sit together, even if the setting looks calm. Check out more of Bayes’ playful linework at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Walter Bayes’s 1940 watercolour depicts a genteel tea shop interior where two groups and a lone woman, all dressed in fashionable attire, sit at separate tables engaged in conversation; a hunting scene hangs above the mantelpiece, and the artist’s characteristic crosshatching animates the scene with the impression of lively polite discourse. The work was produced for the Recording Britain project, a wartime initiative that commissioned topographical images to document places and buildings across England during the early 1940s. Bayes, a minor founding member of the Camden Town Group, typically…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Walter John Bayes was an English painter and illustrator who was a founder member of both the Camden Town Group and the London Group and also a renowned art teacher and critic.
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