Edwin G Lucas

Early career

Edwin George Lucas was born in Leith in 1911, and grew up in Juniper Green, a village on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He was educated at Juniper Green Primary School and then George Heriot's School.

He was interested in a career in art, but his family discouraged this because his uncle, E G Handel Lucas, who is now a well regarded Victorian artist, struggled to make a decent living and lived the latter part of his life in poverty. Instead, Edwin joined the Civil Service in Edinburgh and studied at Edinburgh University, graduating as a Bachelor of Law in 1934.

Throughout the 1930s he painted conventional, well executed landscapes. These were mainly watercolours, with a strong emphasis on the countryside close to the family home in Juniper Green. They were often accepted for exhibition by the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) and the Royal Scottish Academy

One of these paintings attracted attention from the French journal La Revue Moderne des Arts et de la Vie. Its review called him "artiste extrêmement cultivé...un artiste plein de claire simplicité" (a highly educated artist...a painter of great clarity and simplicity). It also commented on his "liberté d'esprit et sa souplesse de style" (freedom of spirit and stylistic versatility), attributes that were to become defining characteristics of his later work.

Influence of Surrealism

Surrealist works were shown at a number of exhibitions in Edinburgh during the late 1930s. One example was the SSA exhibition in December 1937, which included the first works by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico to be shown in Edinburgh. Lucas would certainly have attended because one of his watercolours was also included. Another example was an exhibition at Gladstone's Land Galleries in June 1939 by a group of graduates of Edinburgh College of Art, including William Gear.

Gear and Lucas were both close friends of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, from whom Lucas started renting a studio in 1939. Almost immediately he started painting Surrealist works, the first of which is dated August 1939, probably influenced by shows such as those mentioned above. He would later refer to this period as a brief "flirtation with Surrealism" but it had a great impact on his future career as he developed his own highly individual take on Surrealism and produced works that are said to be unprecedented in Scottish art of the period.

Post-War work

Lucas was a committed pacifist and as a conscientious objector he went away from Edinburgh to do hospital work during the war. He returned to Edinburgh in 1944 and the immediate post-war years were a very creative and prolific time for him. He returned to work as a Civil Servant, in the Estate Duty Office, but also attended evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art and saw himself as a serious painter who had a day job.

Patrick Elliott, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, described the purchase in 2013 of some of Lucas's works of this period as follows:

They are impressive because they are inexplicable, I've not seen anything quite like them before in my 20 years at the Gallery of Modern Art: there's a bit of Picasso, but overall he's got nothing in common with anyone painting in Scotland at the time - or in fact anywhere else.

However, at the time they were painted Lucas's innovative works had little appeal to the Edinburgh art world. Unlike his landscapes, they were generally not accepted for exhibition. Lucas proceeded to hold solo shows at the New Gallery in Shandwick Place, Edinburgh, in 1950 and 1951 but these received little attention from the art establishment.

Later life

Lucas married Marjorie Eileen McCulloch in 1952. They bought a house in Ann Street in Stockbridge, Edinburgh and had two sons, born in 1953 and 1957. He stopped painting after his marriage, except for a period in the 1980s. His painting was ended by deteriorating eyesight and he died of leukaemia in 1990.

Posthumous recognition

In 2009 his family started renting gallery space in Edinburgh to hold occasional exhibitions, but his work remained almost completely unknown until a letter to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art led to five paintings being acquired. They were hung beside works by Picasso and Miró in the "New Acquisitions" exhibition from October 2013 to May 2014.

A number of newspapers published stories about the discovery of this "lost Surrealist", including The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Herald (Glasgow) and the Edinburgh Evening News.

Since then the Edinburgh City Art Centre has shown some of Lucas's work in two exhibitions: "A Capital View - the Art of Edinburgh" and "Jagged Generation: William Gear’s Contemporaries and Influences". Also, two exhibitions devoted to his work were held at the Fine Art Society.