Who was Edward Burra? Born in 1905, a painter who used the unfashionable medium of watercolours, he has been likened to Hogarth, Cocteau and Francis Bacon; but he was too inventive, eclectic and unpredictable to be classified in any school. Baroque art, French surrealists, Mexican kitsch, Walt Disney, Magnasco, Bosch, Brueghel, El Greco and Goya were among his inspirations. His bewildering diversity has resulted in him being critically underrated.

Burra spent the first 50 years of his life living with his mother and father in an elegant manor house near Rye in Sussex. He was lucky in his parents, who transmitted to him their confidence in themselves and indifference to other people’s opinions. He developed rheumatoid arthritis as a small boy and had deformed ankles, knees and hands by the age of 10. He also suffered from anaemia and had a hereditary condition that resulted in an enlarged spleen. He was a puny pixie, in chronic pain and with easily depleted energy, the course of his life ruled by his ailments from the moment his parents realised that he was too sickly to survive formal schooling. His bad health gave him a monastic sense of vocation and made him dedicate his will, energy and imagination to his art. “The only time I don’t feel pain,” he said, “is when I’m working.”

His first commissioned painting, a water-colour entitled Hop-pickers Who Have Lost Their Mothers, sold for 15 shillings and sixpence (it recently made £74,000 at auction), but much of his early work celebrated human vitality with more sensuality and sleaze. He was attracted to images of rough sailors lounging in Toulon bars; his outlandish figures with their air of stealthy menace were the pictorial equivalent of WH Auden’s more paranoid poems of the 1920s. He had a surrealist phase, which produced paintings such as Revolver Dream, but he was bored by politics and the collectivising tendencies of his left-wing contemporaries: his motto was, “Always join the minority.” After the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in 1936, his work focused on cruelty, violence and destructive horrors. “In a war-racked South American landscape,” Osbert Lancaster wrote of Burra’s paintings Beelzebub, Torturers and War in the Sun, “extravagant puppet figures . . . squeak and gibber among ruins of a high Renaissance grandeur.” Like Graham Greene, Burra was preoccupied by “the dangerous edge of things.”

In the 1950s, he produced luminously serene landscapes and flower paintings of hallucinatory intensity, as well as emotional biblical pictures inspired by Caravaggio and El Greco. In the 1960s, his work protested at the ravaging of England by town planners and motorway builders. Burra had new ideas until his last year of life, and constantly renewed his imagination in unexpected directions. “He spent his life jumping off bandwagons,” says Stevenson.

He was an odd little man. He believed in Satan, but not in God. His conversation was camp, he was a binge drinker and intensely loyal to his sister Anne and to three art-school friends whom he teased and adored for 50 years. In turn, they cherished him and let him live vicariously through their experiences. Otherwise close relationships seemed a demanding, unfulfilling chore. He preferred, he said, to sit in a louche bar watching “sailors, petty gangsters, aged whores and queens wrangling over the sailors like gulls over something that’s been thrown off a boat”. Mae West was the only person to give him an erection, he claimed. He fell in love twice, with men. Stevenson describes him with his second loved one: “They liked to be together, and to sit leaning against one another like small children, enjoying the first and simplest pleasure of the flesh, proximity.”

Burra was almost unschooled, and used an idiosyncratic spelling of captivating inven-tiveness. His letters, which Stevenson quotes with hilarious effect, are like nobody else’s – as she says, “charming, original, funny, gallant, and sardonic, he was staggeringly observant”. Here he is describing evacuated mothers and children who were billeted in his parents’ house in 1939. “Nobody seems to have dared sing Keep the Home Fires Burning – except me – Ime singing all the dear old hits . . .We’ve got some kiddies here ’Arry, Fred, Sheelah, Vera and Lily. Vera wets the bed we ’ad to buy some draws at Marx & Spencers Mother says she’s got a weakness... The mothers are getting a bit restive for the dear old Elephant & Castle and feed the kids on Osborne biscuits & potted crab one was offered some Fresh vegetables the other day it nearly killed her poor woman she had to be brought round with .. . smiths crisps.”

He remained an upper-middle-class Edwardian not only in pronunciation but opinions. Harrogate was his favourite town, he despised the shoddy supermarket culture of the 1970s and consigned his enemies to his idea of private hell: “They should be imprisoned in Tescos for Life & never allowed out.” In 1976 he broke his hip, and after six months of mind-numbing boredom attached to a hated Zim-mer frame and longing to resume the work without which his life seemed senseless, his fragile body finally failed him.

This is Stevenson’s triumphant debut as a biographer. She brings a novelist’s sensibility to bear on her subject: the descriptions of Burra’s childhood and travels in France, Spain and Mexico are lusciously evocative, and she has a rare tenderness, sympathy and grace. Her treatment of this brave, funny and inspiring artist is touching, totally unsentimental and supremely intelligent.

Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye by Jane Stevenson
Cape £30 pp496

Shock tactics

Burra’s work puzzled his contemporaries, partly because of its original style and lush colours, and partly because of his subject matter. In the 1920s, his paintings tended to start from a particular scene that caught his imagination: ‘This afternoon I saw 2 of the most dissipated men I ever saw in the Café they gave me the shivers they had 2 Jolly girlies with them my dear I don’t feel they will be jolly long one mans face looked like a cross between a crossword puzzle and Clapham junction . ..’, he wrote to a friend in France.

Burra thrilled to the ‘shivers’ all his life.

After the war, the cartoonist David Low lamented that satire was dying. ‘What can a satirist do with Auschwitz?’

Burra agreed. ‘So many appalling things happen that one’s response diminishes. Still,’ he added, as if consoling himself ‘everything looks menacing.’

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