"Edward Burra grew up in a house, designed, it would seem, to produce normality, conformity and absence of introspection; yet he became one of the twentieth century’s most original painters." – Jane Stevenson, Edward Burra Twentieth-Century Eye

The Window (Drawing Room at Springfield) is one of a number of interior scenes that Burra created of Springfield. Other works titled, Cedar at Springfield, The Drive and The Garden were all executed the same year, in 1927.

Burra was born in 1905 and grew up in the family home known as Springfield, or Springfield Lodge. The house is believed to have been acquired by the Burra family around 1864. Due to his lifelong struggles with rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia that caused chronic illness, Burra spent much of his life living at Springfield.

This early depiction of The Window (Drawing Room at Springfield), in all its brilliance, showcases the exceptional powers of observation that characterised Edward Burra’s artistry and dominated his practice. Burra’s art captures the polarising notions of stillness and movement, parochialism and cosmopolitanism, and familiarity and fantasy. The Tate’s most recent exhibition, the first retrospective in London for 40 years, Edward Burra, (13 June-19 October 2025) was no exception in showcasing this.
The show opened with the first picture Burra sold, French Scene of 1925-6, a vivid, engaging and vibrant depiction of many familiar faces, and included many notable early examples. The exhibition also included a later watercolour titled Peonies and Vegetables 1955-7 that captured the major shifts in Burra’s practice and his relationship to Springfield throughout his life. Peonies and Vegetables was a later depiction of Springfield and from a different perspective, the garden. This clearly captures a continuity and change in subject matter and a shift in perspective quite literally. In 1927, Burra captured the view from the window he looks out from the comforts of Springfield whereas this later work Peonies and Vegetables 1955-7 takes on a new meaning, being outside. A few years later, in 1969, Burra moved from the main house at Springfield to a smaller house on the grounds of his family estate, where he lived independently for the first time.

The Window (Drawing Room at Springfield is juxtaposing not only in execution from many of his 1950s creations but also in subject matter. Burra had been inspired by travel in the form of many places, from Paris in the 1920s, New York and Harlem in the 30s and Spain following the devastation caused by the Spanish Civil War. While travel filled his imagination, Springfield grounded his practice. The creation of this particular watercolour is so vastly different to later works which relied on vibrant colours, dark forms and defined figurations.

This early work captures a delicacy and intimacy that Burra clearly felt at Springfield in his younger years. His working method of being a clearly accomplished draughtsman, drawing first and then using the medium of watercolour to create colour and wash, was preferred to oil, which was difficult for his hands. This early work marks a significant point in his stylistic development, and a shift from his later works, which capture the same British homeland, his familiar Rye, but depict eerier, stranger scenes, deeper valleys and cloudier skies. This early iteration of the house at Springfield was created with a sense of earnestness.

The work stands alongside many as another insight into the creativity of Edward Burra, whilst this work precedes many of the places and faces he encountered, it demonstrates the limitlessness of Burra's artistic vision. Burra’s world at Springfield provided the ideal foundation to artistic learning; both his formal education during art classes in Rye in 1921 and time that followed at both Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art. It was not just the physicality of his environment and space in which he inhabited at Springfield but the inspirations he drew elsewhere in whatever form he could, from meeting artist Paul Nash in 1925, to the vast amount of cultural creativity he later absorbed, his love for visual culture, music, ballet and the profound impact a changing world had him. This ultimately lead to his depictions of skeletons, masked figures and ruined landscapes inhabited by military ghostly figures.