Beach Watchers

Beach Watchers

Watercolour - Signed and dated 1942

Image area: 16ins x 14ins

Suggested Offer: £2,950

We can only assume that the Beach Watchers series of drawings and paintings formed part of Norman's war time work as both examples in this collection are dated 1942

A scheme was drawn up by the Royal Navy in 1929 based on the original Coast Watchers which was established in Australia 10 years earlier. The Royal Navy extensively re-organised the structure during the early part of the war in 1940. By 1942 the scheme was well organised and recruits were spotting enemy ships and aircraft, not only around the shores of the UK but across the world, especially in the Japanese theater of war as was well portrayed in the film 'South Pacific'

Beach watchers was not a new phenomenon, it was an established practice for crowds to gather on the shore after a shipwreck or even to watch for their menfolk to return form the sea

In this painting as with the drawings titled 'Beach Watchers' Norman has shown the windswept shoreline but here drawn against the cliffs makes this painting even more dramatic. The cliffs were probably either Hingesbury Head or Beachy Head on the south coast where Norman spent a lot of his free time