BETTY SWANWICK: ARTIST & VISIONARY.

In the latter part of her career, Betty Swanwick painted an extraordinary series of visionary pictures that are still largely unknown and, until now, unexamined. They appeared every year at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition between 1965 and 1989.
Earlier, Swanwick had worked as an illustrator of great wit and invention. But the visionary watercolours and drawings show her ability to recognise - in ordinary day-to-day events - ideas that could be transformed into a more profound understanding of life. The pictures touch on what Paul Nash has described as 'mystery expressed with precision'.
This monograph intends to rectify the neglect of a highly imaginative twentieth-century British artist in the tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. A friend and pupil of Edward Bawden, both a student and a teacher at Goldsmiths and a successful book illustrator, Swanwick and her unique, spiritual and sometimes eccentric oeuvre are vividly and sensitively examined by Paddy Rossmore, a close friend of the artist and collector of her work. A chronology and catalogue raisonne record documentary detail, while other voices, including Swanwick's own, help to bring her alive.