THE new exhibition at The Art Stable at Gold Hill Organic Farm, Child Okeford, features the work of 20th century painter and film-maker Humphrey Jennings and his daughter Charlotte. The work is on show in the main gallery and upstairs until 21st March.

Best-known as a documentary film-maker, Humphrey Jennings (1907 to 1950) was described by Lindsay Anderson as “the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced”. He was particularly renowned for the films made during the Second World War – Listen to Britain (1942), Fires were Started (1943), and A Diary for Timothy (1945).

Jennings was also a painter, writer, poet and photographer. Before focusing on film-making, he was a member of the International Surrealist Group, and co-founder of the social survey group, Mass Observation.

The oil and collages in the Art Stable exhibition date from the 1930s, and the watercolours, from the late 1940s, shortly before he died. The watercolours, which feel fresh, lyrical and poetic in their sparseness, express a joy in mark making, suggesting that Jennings, gifted in more than one genre, may have focused his future on painting, had his life not been tragically cut short by his early death.

A photograph of Jennings is currently hanging in Tate Britain as part of the exhibition of photographs by Lee Miller, who was a friend of his.

His daughter, Charlotte, was born in London in 1935, spent the war years in New York, attended Hammersmith and Chelsea Schools of Art, before winning a major County award to the Slade School of Art in 1955. She won several prizes at the Slade and gained a Boise Postgraduate Scholarship leading to study at the Atelier 17 in Paris.

She exhibited widely during her lifetime including in Australia where she lived for 20 years, from 1982. She died in 2021. The Art Stable exhibition focuses on her larger oil paintings, most of which were painted in Australia and express the bright light and colour of that landscape.

Pictured: Humphrey Jennings, Untitled, Fruit Bowl, c.1949, watercolour; Charlotte Jennings, Une Carte Postale, 1985,