He was active mainly in France from the late 1940s. He painted portraits, landscapes, and religious subjects, often using a semi-abstract style. In the late 1940s he turned increasingly to characterful portraiture. His portrait of Winston Churchill 1954 was disliked by its subject and eventually burned on the instructions of Lady Churchill (studies survive). He first studied engraving and etching, his early prints showing some affinity with the work of Samuel Palmer, but began to paint from 1930, and during that decade acquired a Surrealist appreciation of the strangeness and metaphorical suggestion of natural form. This developed into the characteristic thorns, sinister tree shapes, and distillations of landscape of the 1940s. As official war artist from 1941, his sense of strangeness found vivid expression in paintings of bomb devastation. The Crucifixion, 1946, for the church of St Matthew, Northampton, the Origins of the Land (for the Festival of Britain, 1951, Tate Gallery, London), the excursions into portraiture, among which the Somerset Maugham is especially striking, and his designs for the Christ in Glory tapestry of Coventry Cathedral, 1962, show varied aspects of his art. Its essence, however, is the imaginative symbolism that has gained him international repute. Other work includes ceramics and designs for posters, stage costumes, and sets.
