Duranty, Charles

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Duranty, Charles - Perpetual summer has sighed out its season *

£425

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Duranty, Charles - I remember when she was the pride of the farm

£450

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SOLD
Duranty, Charles - He longed to join them but was too shy
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Duranty, Charles - I am come back, the voice from the wilderness *

£450

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SOLD
Duranty, Charles - The Outing
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Duranty, Charles - The Blue Cart

£295

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About the artist

Charles Duranty, a poet as well as painter, is best known for his “imagined landscapes”. Born in Romford, Essex and self taught - he claimed that he had been thrown out of his art class at school - he only began painting in earnest when he was in his forties and needed some pictures to decorate the walls of his new home. Over the next 30 years he produced and sold some 1,500 watercolours featuring distinctive, though fictional views of the East Anglian countryside, whose open landscape and wide horizons he had come to love while working on an Essex farm during World War Two.

His landscapes typically feature vast fields spreading over rolling hills, with small figures, ancient vehicles or maybe a building to give focus and scale. He provided his pictures with delightfully eccentric titles, many of which can be seen on these pages.

For many years Duranty showed his work at the Thackeray gallery in Kensington. He continued painting well into his seventies; he died in 2006 at his home in the village of Merrow in Surrey, aged 87. Almost all the works here come from private collections.

Twenty or so works featured here that have a stock reference beginning with “DH” were shown in our When they were young… touring exhibition in 2016. They were originally acquired at the same time from the Thackeray gallery in 1970 by the eccentric collector Richard Cory Smith, who later presented them to a friend.

Most of these pictures had not been framed and labelled before Cory Smith snapped them up, and sadly we don’t know what titles Duranty had in mind for them. We resisted the temptation to devise humorous Duranty-style titles and initially gave them bland descriptive names such as Green landscape. But now that we have tracked down a copy of Audition, Duranty’s one and only published book of poems, we have taken the liberty of lifting phrases and lines from his poems and using them as titles. This is a bit cheeky, maybe, but also quite fun. Titles created this way are marked with an asterisk*.

The Guardian’s obituary of Charles Duranty and the extraordinary story behind these paintings can be seen in our NEWS section


The Works

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The fields were suffused with light in the early evening

£395

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Did the bird also love this place?

£350

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Do you know how much I paid for two lemon soles?

£150

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Summer no longer decked their branches

£250

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It was known as the nature walk

£395

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Never had he seen anything so magnificent

£195

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He was going to have a congregation after all

£175

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Woman in white

£375

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SOLD
You've been speeding again, Harry
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I remember when she was the pride of the farm

£450

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They were trying to make up their minds to go in

£350

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SOLD
It was all right for some people, he thought
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Well, Sarah, what sort are they?

£295

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SOLD
The Outing
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SOLD
The birds flew in on a grey morning
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The Forgotten Siding

£395

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SOLD
He longed to join them but was too shy
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SOLD
As far as the eye can see
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Oh Crikey

£395

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Just trim round the headlands this morning

£425

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Farmland pattern

£195

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It was early evening when the sisters walked out

£195

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Any Old Iron

£295

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The Blue Cart

£295

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Summer would soon be over

£195

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SOLD
Two small figures
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Under the saffron-coloured sky *

£550

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The seasons turned beneath a lolling sun *

£595

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SOLD
Black & White Landscape
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Deep in ornamental burrows *

£450

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SOLD
Black Sun
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Clouds that snaked about his head like tattered plumes *

£395

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Perpetual summer has sighed out its season *

£425

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In the hills where my childhood lingers *

£325

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She came in a fortunate month *

£425

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SOLD
Yellow Sunset
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Memory of Childerditch

£395

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The lost field is faced with delicate flowers *

£395

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Where breaks the pale sheath *

£293

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Now that the days have built seasons between us *

£450

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Perpetual summer has sighed out its season *

£425

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Risen from frozen marshes *

£295

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SOLD
Poppy Field
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I am come back, the voice from the wilderness *

£450

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