Due to long periods of ill health, Edward Burra spent much of his adult life living with his family in Rye in East Sussex. However, between 1925 and 1939, he was able to travel extensively, to Paris, the South of France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, New York (particularly Harlem), Boston and Mexico. Burra found inspiration in the people he saw in each location, and his distinctive street scenes brimmed with larger-than-life characters, real and invented.
The figure of ‘the birdman’ appears early on in Bird Women, Duennas, 1932, and again, nearly a decade later, in the Tate’s magnificent wartime picture Soldiers at Rye, 1941, in which soldiers wear bird-like Venetian masks in place of gas masks. Andrew Causey suggests that these birdheaded figures were informed by the work of several other artists, including Max Ernst, the Commedia dell’Arte characters of Gino Severini, George Grosz’s pig-head men and the ‘beaked Indians’ in Diego Rivera’s Mexican murals, which Burra saw first-hand in 1938. 1
The present work is inspired by a holiday Burra took in the summer of 1946 to Grasmere in the Lake District. The war and his own poor health had taken its toll on the artist and he was becoming increasingly withdrawn and melancholic. The trip away proved restorative, and he enjoyed the dramatic scenery which, even in summertime, must be appreciated between bursts of heavy rain. Burra made this watercolour back in Sussex. As Simon Martin explains,
‘By all accounts, Burra never drew on the spot or took photographs, but simply looked and committed what he saw (or as much of it as he wanted) to memory for reference later in the studio. There was thus a significant interval between the initial experience and the actual picturemaking. The process of recollection simplifies, condenses and abstracts. Certain features that had caught his interest would be accentuated, others diminished, but all of them organised ultimately according to the formal demands of the picture itself.’ 2
Here, Burra shows the sun breaking through rapidly moving clouds, while the landscape is described in a limited palette of oranges and greens. Lurking in the shadows is a birdman, in carnivalesque garb, playing a medieval gourd instrument. Walking just ahead, lured along by the music, is a fisherwoman, replete with delicately rendered scales, who is apparently blind, with leaves covering her eyes. Burra’s eerie vision of a post-war English landscape feels entirely appropriate for the historic moment, but also reflects his macabre imagination. As he explained, ‘Everything looks menacing; I’m always expecting something calamitous to happen.’ 3

1 Andrew Causey, Edward Burra Complete Catalogue, Phaidon, London, 1985, p66
2 Andrew Lambirth, ‘Burra: The Landscape Option,’ in Simon Martin, Edward Burra,
Lund Humphries/ Pallant House Gallery, London, 2011, exh cat, p151
3 Ibid, p35