The autumn season of art fairs has begun – and in suitably September-ish rain – with the 20/21 British Art Fair.  My mission (after tracking down the source of complimentary wine) was to find the Burra painting – just the one, though used to publicise the whole event.  Why is Burra suddenly the star of the show?  Is it the very scarcity of his works on show, along with his recognisable and idiosyncratic style, that distinguishes him from all the other prestigious names represented at the fair?

Well here it is, presented by Austin/Desmond Fine Art.  Entitled ‘The Garden’, it is dated 1927, a period when Burra was excitedly discovering the South of France, holidaying at Toulon with his art-school friends, and visiting the seedier parts of Marseille.  Burra, never in the best of health, would withdraw to his hotel room during the heat of the day and sit at a table painting in watercolour from the lower right hand corner outward across the page as his imagination dictated.  Jean Cocteau was at one point staying in the same hotel, and Burra’s friend Barbara Ker-Seymer, who was beginning to earn a reputation as a society photographer in her own right, was commissioned by him; she recalls being unable to carry this out owing to the thick haze of opium that permeated his room.

The painted palm trees suggest a location on the French Riviera, while the androgynous central figure is dressed in some sort of effeminate adaptation of a sailor’s outfit.  Sailors as a social group held a fascination for Burra – much as they did for Stephen Tennant too, who spent most of his life attempting to write and illustrate a novel called ‘Lascar: A Story of the Maritime Boulevard’.  Yet though there is always (to a greater or lesser extent) androgyny, none sport the striking blue eyeshadow of the the sailor in ‘The Garden’.

And what of the dog (or is it a cat?) with the ruff around its neck?  Is this a nod to the commedia dell’arte, elements of which so frequently appear in Burra’s pictures?  It certainly adds to the sense that this is a scene without narrative, plucked from a vaudeville piece now lost and, lacking its comedic context, looking a bit silly.  In fact, could it be a satire on the decade’s obsession with dressing-up for pointless theatrical tableaux? Though Burra was far from critical; indeed he positively revels in the flamboyance.

Considering the title of the Burra, there were two interesting comparisons: John Nash’s ‘The View from the Rose Garden’ (left, 1928) and Julian Trevelyan’s ‘The Garden’ (above, 1946).  One is exotic, the other in its muted colours a clearly English landscape; in both, however, the garden itself dominates – it is the subject, in itself – while Burra treats his garden, trees like cardboard props, as a backcloth to the human comedy that undfolds in the foreground.  It shows what a wealth of difference such a simple title can encompass.

The Nash brothers were particularly well represented this year.  Paul Nash’s lithograph ‘The Strange Coast (Dymchurch)’ (above, 1920) contrasted with his brother’s garden scene in its monotone precision.  Rather than an idyllic vision of timeless nature, the lithograph seems to recall the man-made coastal defences of the recent war, the repetitive wooden groynes and tiered rocks of the sea wall standing like ranked armies.

Messums was showing John Nash’s ‘The Woodpile’ (left), just as accomplish- ed as his brother’s quiet tree- dominated reveries – though without the foreboding that often dominates Paul’s seemingly innocuous landscapes, imbuing them with a mysterious symbolic meaning.  Meanwhile Lucy Johnson presented Paul Nash’s ‘Haystack at Oxenbridge Farm, Iden, near Rye’ (1923), a gentle vision in pencil and watercolour.

The Court Gallery had an interesting pair of works by Nevinson – though ‘pair’ is the wrong word because one would never imagine they were by the same artist.  One was a 1911/12 prepatory drawing for a fragmented, futurist-style composition with dominant typographic elements; the other a colourful painted nude in traditional figurative style.  It was a particularly stark example of an avant-garde artist whom the Great War turned backwards (neither, sadly, seem to be illustrated on the website).  Also at the Court Gallery was a lovely Vanessa Bell, ‘The River at Cagy, France’ (c.1950) – as close to a Monet as anything I have seen by an English artist, though painted almost a century after the arch-Impressionist’s first depictions of bridges over the Seine.

At the London Art Fair earlier this year Ewan Mundy Fine Art showed some very fine Elizabeth Blackadder paintings; this time it was the turn of the Colourists – Cadell’s deserted white beaches of Iona and George Leslie Hunter’s ink drawing of ‘A Street in Provence’ (left, c.1927-9).  An exquisite Charles Rennie Mackintosh watercolour of catkins may have been my ‘most desirable object’ of the entire fair.

There was, as always, a tempting array of prints – easy to imagine on the walls of even the smallest flat, so almost affordable…  Hockney’s ‘Cushions’ (right, 1968), where the protagonists’ absence creates an atmosphere tense and palpable with expectation; or Henry Moore’s placid ‘Sheep in a Landscape’ (below, 1974) – both at the William Weston Gallery.  Or the charming Peter Blake etching accompanied by a poem about Monica, beautiful and poignant, at Simon Hilton, that I wish I could remember.

Piano Nobile showed some superlative Dieppe views by Sickert.  And a ‘Siamese Cat Asleep’ (1925) by Christopher Wood – close rival to Mackintosh in the hallowed halls of my imaginary collection.