PL will be introducing Gwen Yarker’s talk at Dorset County Museum: Recording Wartime Shipping on the Thames: The Dazzle Paintings of John Everett.

DORSET COUNTY MUSEUM – News Release

ART LECTURE AT DORSET COUNTY MUSEUM Recording Wartime Shipping on the Thames: The Dazzle Paintings of John Everett, by Gwen Yarker. Dorset County Museum, Dorchester at 7.30pm on Friday 23 January 2015.

John Everett was an official war artist during the First World War and one of the few recording the maritime side of the war. He worked for the Ministry of Information on paintings connected with seaborne commerce, using his experience as a deep-water sailor to give his work a sense of unqualified realism.

He specialised in the interpretation of the military’s use of ‘dazzle’ – a colourful camouflaging technique used to disguise ships at sea. Nothing revealed to the landsman better than Everett’s work the beauty that camouflage – through grim necessity – brought to wartime shipping. Dorchester-born John Everett produced a remarkable and unique body of work centred on Atlantic convoys.

On his death he bequeathed all remaining maritime works in his possession to the National Maritime Museum which now holds the most important collection of his paintings in the world.

Gwen Yarker MA, FSA, FRShitS, is an independent art historian, formerly art curator at the National Maritime Museum, specialising in British art and the life and work of John Everett.

On Friday 23 January 2015 she will give a lecture at Dorset County Museum about Everett’s paintings of the Dazzle ships on the Thames. She will be introduced by Paul Lashmar of Brunel University and Editor of the DNHAS Proceedings. All are welcome to this event which is free although donations are welcome to cover costs.

The lecture will start at 7.30pm and doors are open from 7pm.

For further information see www.dorsetcountymuseum.org