Painting of the Day: Rule's, 35 Maiden Lane, W.C.2, C. 1940

Rule's, 35 Maiden Lane, W.C.2
Walter Bayes, c. 1940
The Victoria & Albert Museum 
*Click image to Enlarge*

This charming watercolor painting, dating to 1940, depicts an inviting view of a restaurant interior.  The walls of the room are hung with glinting mirrors  and diners in grand evening dress chat gaily.  A table in the foreground is set with lobster—long symbolic of opulent dining.

This was painted in London by an artist called Walter Bayes (1869-1956) and forms part of the “Recording Britain” collection of topographical watercolors and drawings which were made in the early 1940s during the Second World War.

This was part of a scheme of the Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime, part of the Ministry of Labour and National Service, who hoped to employ artists to record the home front in Britain.  This program was funded by a grant from the Pilgrim Trust and ran until 1943.

Some of Britain’s finest watercolor painters, such as John Piper, Sir William Russell Flint and Rowland Hilder, were commissioned to create paintings and drawings of buildings, scenes, and places which captured a sense of national identity by depicting typically English scenes: “market towns and villages, churches and country estates, rural landscapes and industries, rivers and wild places, monuments and ruins.”