Edward Burra: Britain's Overlooked Painter of the Underworld

Edward Burra is one of British art's great eccentrics — and one of its most unjustly overlooked. Tate Britain's 2025 show set out to fix that, surveying a singular career spent largely working in watercolour, a medium he pushed to ambitious, large-scale heights.

In the 1920s and 30s he painted the louche, energetic life of Harlem jazz clubs, Marseille dockside bars and city streets; later his vision darkened into brooding landscapes and visions of war.

Wry, worldly and physically frail for much of his life, Burra watched the modern world with a knowing eye — and turned it into some of the most distinctive pictures of his century.

Image: “Marseille Vieux Port Night” — Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.