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Number 24 of an edition of 30, published by the Twenty One Gallery in 1932. (A second edition of 25 impressions was issued in 1981 by Merrihill Press, Dyfed.) Beetles 1985: 32 (Chris Beetles, S.R. Badmin and the English Landscape, London: Collins, 1985, p. 63) Beetles 2015: 32 (Chris Beetles, S.R. Badmin RWS: Paintings, Drawings & Prints, London: Chris Beetles Ltd., p.44) An artist’s proof is in the British Museum (1941,0208.24)
Badmin produced forty etchings from 1928 to 1936 after graduating from the Royal College of Art where he learned etching and engraving under Professor Malcolm Osborne and Robert Sargent Austin. Austin recommended Badmin to the Twenty One Gallery in 1928 and it began publishing his prints annually until 1932; Priory Pond was the last of Badmin’s etchings for the Twenty One Gallery before he transferred to the Fine Art Society. Despite early critical acclaim, Badmin abandoned printmaking in 1936 for more lucrative work in illustration and watercolor owing to the gradual decline of the etching market after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Priory Pond represents a fishpond and fourteenth-century tithe barn in the Gloucestershire village of Leonard Stanley, both originally part of the Priory of St Leonard. The barn was retained after the priory’s dissolution in 1538 when the church became the village’s parish church and its land became Priory Farm. Priory Pond later became the subject of Stanley Spencer’s painting Farm Pond, Leonard Stanley when Spencer visited the village regularly between 1939 and 1941 (Tate Britain; TO5762).


Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2017