Spirit of Place Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and Ls Lowry

Several themes, links, personal and professional relationships connect five English artists working in the 1950s: all of them developed a peculiar "spirit of place" and embedded themselves into a particular location and among a particular community, portrayed with empathy and dignity, sometimes with humour, in a significant part of their work.
This volume examines the work of five figurative artists working in Britain in the 1950s: they are Joan Eardley (1921-1963), Sheila Fell (1931-1979), Eva Frankfurther (1930-1959), Josef Herman (1911-2000) and LS Lowry (1887-1976).
Each of them established a strong identification with the place in which they chose to live and work and that represented, for a significant part of their careers, the primary focus of their practice. Each associated themselves with a specific place: Eardley, the Gorbals in Glasgow; Fell, the mining community and landscape of her native Aspatria, Cumbria; Frankfurther, London's East End and its multi-cultural working-class communities; Herman, Ystradgynlais in South Wales with its indigenous mining community; and Lowry, his hometown of Manchester with its industrial, densely populated cityscape. Each produced a concentrated and coherent body of work imbued with this strong sense or spirit of place and the largely working-class people associated with it, although Eardley and especially Fell also produced powerful landscapes.
This volume links these five seemingly disparate artists by uncovering a network of relationships, both personal and professional, and their shared exploration of particular artistic concerns and motifs.