This view of a Grain Ship in Falmouth Harbour is an attractive example of Richard Eurich’s pre-war paintings, with its vibrant colours and elaborate handling of the paint. It shows the painter’s characteristic association of anecdotal details with the atmospheric mood of the finely observed sea and sky. It is also an important historical record, in showing the survival of sail shipping well into the 1930s.

Eurich continued Britain’s long tradition of marine painting, and was inspired by the art of van de Velde the Elder and Younger, JMW Turner, and his contemporaries Christopher Wood and Edward Wadsworth. In merging such influences with a personal approach of the sea, Eurich’s ‘individualist, intense but visionary style of painting’ was unique in the school of modern British art (Edward Chaney and Christine Clearkin, ‘Richard Eurich (1903-1992): Visionary artist’, 2003).

Eurich trained at the Bradford School of Art and the Slade in London in the 1920s, when he turned to sea painting (predominantly coastal scenes), exhibiting at the Goupil and Redfern Galleries from 1929. His paintings produced for the War Artists Advisory Committee between 1940 and 1945 were among the most acclaimed, by his commissioners, art critics and the wider public. His success earned him to become the youngest Associate of the Royal Academy in 1943, and constant attention in the Press. Choosing to remain away from the London art scene after the war, he is today relatively unknown by the greater public. The NMM holds 11 of Eurich’s wartime works, as well as a later Dock Scene (1971).