Pen and black ink heightened with white, 57 by 37 cm (22 ½ by 14 ½ ins)

Provenance: Sal Shuel (the artist’s daughter)

Many of Boswell’s finest street scenes date from the 1930s and incorporate the influence of satirists and illustrators from across Europe, amongst them George Grosz. A committed Marxist, he graduated from the Royal College of Art in the early 1930s becoming a founding member of the Artist’s International Association and an early voice against the spectre of fascism. He was also a remarkable lithographer and created similar subjects to the present drawing in that medium. Boswell was the subject of a major book by William Feaver, James Boswell: Unofficial War Artistin 2008, focusing on the extraordinary work he executed as an active soldier in London, Scotland and Iraq in World War Two. Many of these works are now in the collection of the British Museum. Feaver has also described Boswell as “one of the finest English graphic artists of this (the twentieth) century”.