Painter.  Edward Burra was born in London but grew up Rye in Sussex, where he lived for the rest of his life.  He studied at Chelsea Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art.  Burra only worked in watercolour as a childhood illness had left him crippled with arthritis and oil paint was too heavy from him to handle with dexterity.  He found his inspiration initially in the underworld of the sailors’ cafés, brothels and speak-easy of Marseilles, Paris and New York.  Caught in Madrid at the beginning of the Civil War he was appalled at the violence he witnessed, after which his works had a more solemn note.  He moved away from direct human activity to less directly involved subjects Although not truly a follower of surrealism (a movement in art that made a cult of the strange and irrational), his works were invariably puzzling and unsettling.  He died in October 1976.

Burra’s works always have a suspicion of drama about them, almost as though he is planting clues for a detective story (a very popular genre of fiction at the time this work was painted).  In The Green Fig the ripe form of the fruit suggests the scene is not in Britain, (climate too cold for such exotic plants), but by the fig is a packet of Senior Service cigarettes (then a most familiar brand in Britain) and the plume of cigarette smoke suggests a hurried departure.

The Green Fig 1930
Watercolour on paper
57 x 79 cm
Purchased from Gerald Corcoran, February 1949