Alan Sorrell, Soane’s Museum

The intricate drawings of Alan Sorrell hold the distinction of being included in more public collections than any other 20th Century artist. But curiously enough the Soanes Museum’s exhibition A Life Reconstructed is the first dedicated Sorrell retrospective, and the first opportunity for Londoners to take in his diverse portfolio of paintings and murals in one sitting.

 Born in South London in 1904, Sorrell studied at the Royal College of Art where he became a key figure amongst a stellar generation of English artists including wartime watercolourist Eric Ravilious, graphic artist Edward Bawden, and painter Charles Mahoney. Whilst in the RAF during World War II his painterly talents were put to use camouflaging aerodromes, at the same time as capturing the evocative scenes of air force life for which he is well known. 

But he is best known for his prolific collection of archaeological illustrations, undertaken after the war as a result of a chance commission in 1936. Depicting ancient life and landscapes, particularly those of Roman and Norman Britain in vivid detail, these illustrations are both breathtaking in their intricacy and weighty as archaeological documents; throwing light as they do on past cultures and their parallels with our lives now.

Sorrell once said that the first task of an artist is to ‘learn’ his subject before one can properly paint it, by means of 'an intense study of the object, each square yard of land, sea and sky'. This painstaking attention to detail, along with his extraordinarily vivid imagination, comes together in a body of drawings that is equally inspirational to archaeologists, and the public.