Object Description
The Forest Road, Boldrewood, Hampshire’ by Montague Dawson, oil on canvas, showing a road winding past a stand of tall conifers. Signed, framed and glazed, a paper label on the reverse from Daniel Rees, Fine Art Dealer, Jackson, Michigan stating ‘The Forest Road, Boldrewood, Hampshire, England, Original Oil painting by Montague Dawson. Exhibited at Royal Academy London 1959’. English, circa 1959.
Exhibited: The Royal Academy, London. 1959.
Provenance: Frost & Reed, Bristol and London
Daniel Rees, Jackson, Michigan
Private Collection
Footnote: Montague Dawson RMSA, FRSA (1890–1973) was born in West London, in Chiswick in 1895, and was the grandson of Victorian landscape painter Henry Dawson. He studied under the seascape artist Charles Napier Hemy at the Royal Academy. He also worked in an art school in Bedford Row. Dawson joined the navy during World War I and painted naval battles for illustrated magazines. He first met his mentor, Hemy, while on leave from the Royal Navy and frequented his studio in Cornwall. Hemy advised Dawson, “You must follow after me and you must do better than me.”
After the war Dawson became a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy in London and began a life-long exclusive relationship with the Gallery Frost & Reed in London. He was also an associate of the Royal Society of Artists and a member of the Royal Society of Marine Artists. He was an official war artist during World War II.
Although Dawson is justly famous for his prolific output of marine subjects, he also enjoyed painting in the New Forest, just a few miles north of The Solent – that strip of water which inspired so many images of day boats racing, which we have in our gallery. Boldrewood is a village in the south of the New Forest. An example of a landscape with trees, called ‘This England’, is illustrated in L.G.G. Ramsey, F.S.A., Montague Dawson, R.S.M.A.,F.R.S.A., Leigh on Sea, England, 1970 edition, p. 30, Catalogue No. 92, illus. p.43.