This handsome and lavishly illustrated monograph on the artist Richard Eurich (1903–92) is most welcome. Eurich is chiefly admired for his landscapes, often panoramic in scope yet intricately detailed, and for narrative pictures that are rich in incident. His Men of Straw (1957), in the collection of the Castle Museum, Nottingham, is here given a double-page spread and forms the frontispiece to the book. A night-time scene in which small figures rush about while straw is shifted from the rick yard to the field, it shows Eurich at his most typical, mesmerising but enigmatic. In his lifetime, information about him was primarily gained from catalogue essays that accompanied his one-man exhibitions, and in more recent years, homage has been paid to his achievements as a war artist during the Second World War. But overall there has been scant literature on him, and a lack of any easily accessible profile has not helped his posthumous reputation.

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