Henry Inlander was born in Vienna on 14 January 1925. His family relocated to Trieste in northern Italy in 1935, where the young Inlander lived for three years and where his life-long love of the Italian countryside was doubtless first formed. The Inlanders were presumably fleeing the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria (other members of the family were to perish in Auschwitz during the Second World War).1Ron Burnett, ‘Henry Inlander: a personal view’, Critical Approaches to Culture and Communications, <rburnett.ecuad.ca/ronburnett/2014/8/13/henry-inlander-a-personal-view>, accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
In 1938 the Inlander family moved to London. Here Inlander studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art, the Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. His teachers at the Slade included artists William Coldstream and Claude Rogers. In 1951 Inlander was awarded Equal First Prize for Summer Composition for his painting Paradise Lost, Book XII (The Expulsion from Eden), 1951 (UCL Art Museum, London). In the same year Inlander made an etching, Slade Print, 1951 (UCL Art Museum, London), depicting Jewish people finding solace from the horror of the war within a synagogue.2For a discussion of Paradise Lost, Book XII (The Expulsion from Eden), 1951 (UCL Art Museum, London, acc. no. 5431) and Slade Print, 1951 (UCL Art Museum, acc. no. 7061), see Helen Downes, ‘Spotlight on the Slade: new findings’, University College London, <blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2017/05/17/spotlight-on-the-slade-new-findings/>, accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
In 1952 he won a scholarship to study art in Rome, and held his first solo exhibition in Rome at Galleria La Tartaruga in 1953. Inlander remained in Italy until 1956 and in October of that year, after returning to London, held his first solo exhibition with the Leister Galleries.
Yellow fields, c. 1955, is one of a group of paintings depicting the countryside around San Quirico Dorcia, near Siena in Tuscany, which Henry Inlander exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, where they attracted mixed reviews. The Tate Gallery, London, purchased another painting from this exhibition, Sienese Hills, 1956.
The Studio (1956) noted that the
first one-man show by Henry Inlander at the Leicester Galleries brought together the distinctive landscapes of this Vienna-born painter who has instilled in his dry and yellow canvases an atmosphere of heat and salty earth. His brush seems to etch the surface of the paint so that while it conveys the eroded crust of rocks it also makes a texture of pigment; sometimes the two effects cancel each other out so that the end product is a hatching of brush strokes that, if interesting in the tactile sense, are visually negative.3 G. S. Whittet, ‘London Commentary’, The Studio, vol. 152, no. 765, Dec.1956, p. 189.
The critic for The Times (1956) was somewhat more generous, writing of how:
Mr Henry Inlander has seen [Italy’s] fields and arid chalk-hills and strange skies as though they might have been the moon-landscapes of Paul Nash. His style is inclined, if anything, to the dullness of the academic, but it is relieved by a pleasant sense of colour and a spacious planning based on the geometry of receding fields breaking into high, repeated triangles where foothills start to rise from the plain.4‘Leicester Galleries’, The Times, 8 Oct. 1956, p. 3.
Under the guidance of the Gallery’s Felton adviser A. J. L. McDonnell in the 1950s and early 1960s, when many contemporary British paintings entered the Collection, Henry Inlander’s Yellow fields was purchased by McDonnell from London’s Leicester Galleries in 1956.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
