Edward Seago British, 1910-1974

There is a stretch of the Seine, north of Paris and south of Rouen, where the river loops beneath a wall of white chalk and a broken castle keeps watch from the heights. Edward Seago painted Château Gaillard here, at Les Andelys in Normandy, on one of the river voyages that carried him well away from the Norfolk marshes with which his name is usually linked. The fortress commands the upper third of the composition, its ruined keep and curtain walls set down in dark greys and browns against a working Normandy sky. Below, the chalk hillside catches the light and falls away in thick strokes of cream and pale ochre, the paint pushed across the panel with brush and knife until it stands proud of the surface. A cluster of low cottages gathers at the foot of the slope, half screened by dark green trees, and the foreground opens onto the river, where vertical reflections break the water beneath the town. Overhead, banked cumulus gives way to grey, rain heavy cloud moving in from the right. Seago has signed the work at the lower left.

For Seago the subject was an excursion. Born in Norwich in 1910 and largely self-taught, he spent most of his life in East Anglia, first in the city and later at Ludham in the Norfolk Broads, and it was the flat water, wide skies and windmills of that country that made his name. From the early 1950s, though, he crossed the Channel in his yacht Capricorn and worked his way up the Seine from Dieppe towards Paris, painting the French landscape from the deck and the bank as he went. Les Andelys sits squarely on that route, and Château Gaillard belongs to those French river campaigns, a Norman subject taken up by a painter of the Norfolk broads.