Nice work, “Cousin” Noel Leaver fella!
The year before he died, Noel Leaver is seen in the middle of this group admiring someone else’s work during Civic Arts Week in the town of my birth, Burnley, Lancashire, England.
While Dali House was fully booked up for the seemingly interminable Salvador Celebration there were a few other things happening in the world of art, of which some I want to take note while pretending the rest didn’t occur.
One development that would have gone almost completely unnoticed was the establishment of a website dedicated to British watercolourist Noel Harry Leaver (1889-1951). I came across it after receiving an email from Kristian Baxter of the UK-based Briercliffe Society geneaological website, who said there was information online about Noel, a cousin (I think) of my late Uncle John Leaver, the husband of my late mother’s late sister Elsie.
Because of the family linkage I’ve written it all up on my personal blog, Dorseyland, but I wanted to get some of his paintings on show at Dali House as well. These images come from the Noel Leaver website set up by Robert Bruce.
The site has more than 250 works on view, and I was surprised to see that Noel had roamed quite far in his time. “His famous ‘Eastern Scenes’,” as Robert Bruce calls them, were unknown to me. These are actually North African (possibly some Middle Eastern), pocked with mosques and minarets, but sharing the same fascination with high walls as his paintings from France, Germany, Italy and the length of England. There are a few American views too, including Hoover Dam (which is nothing but a very high wall). The one show here is titled “Italian Town” on the website, and the one at the top of the post “An English Country House”. See the rest.
