The Vale from Cucklington, Somerset

The present work was painted in 1944 after the artist had been invalided out of the Royal Navy. For the remaining months of the War, Hillier stayed in a cottage in Somerset and spent every waking hour painting. Painted with cold, pale hues, The Vale of Cucklington is infused with an inherent loneliness. The road cluttered with stones and dead branches, leads precariously forward down over the hillside. The foreboding broken gate and abandoned steel bucket stand as powerful symbols of the devastation of the war and the bleak view beyond speaks of the disturbingly quiet isolation of provincial villages in Britain during the war.
As in lot 23, Hillier's paintings of Somerset, after his return from Paris in 1941, are infused with a surreal otherworldliness; the sky bearing menacingly down upon the bare branched trees, whilst remaining faithful to the landscape itself.