Artist: William Gear
Date: 1949
Medium: Oil and gouache on paper
Dimensions: 46.5 x 66.9 cm
Credit: Towner Collection, purchased in 1998, with the support of the Friends of the Towner. Image Towner Eastbourne, © Estate of William Gear
William Gear is regarded as one of the leading British post-war abstract painters. Born in Fife, he studied at Edinburgh College of Art, then spent time travelling and working in Paris before he was stationed with the Royal Signal Corps in Europe and the Middle East during the Second World War. He continued to paint despite the hostilities and his abstract landscapes combined the physicality of paint with the European Modernist approach. In 1958 Gear was appointed as Towner’s Curator and raised the profile of the gallery, leading to it being described in The Observer in 1962 as “the most go-ahead municipal art gallery in the country”.
Winter Landscape was exhibited in in New York alongside works by Jackson Pollock in 1949.