DB7

The secret artist of Ealing studios


Andrew Pulver is on the case with the Camden Girls

Friday January 5, 2007
The Guardian

Art-housed cinema... poster for It Always Rains on Sunday

They stare out of the canvas with their big, mascara-caked eyes, touting for business outside a grimy wartime pub, huddling together in the twilight ... at least that's what I thought, wandering around Tate Britain on a rainy afternoon. The painting was tucked away in a corner, another one of those rarely disinterred, unfashionable little masterworks that seem to litter the history of British art. But the caption served up a surprise: the painting, entitled Camden Girls by someone called James Boswell, was the basis for a film poster, for It Always Rains on Sunday, Robert Hamer's gritty crime number from 1947, featuring a glowering Googie Withers as a former moll trying to stay respectable.

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Clearly, this demanded investigation. I may not know much about painting, but It Always Rains on Sunday is a rarely disinterred, unfashionable little masterwork itself: one of British cinema's more successful stabs at hardboiled noir, with its distinctively gloomy street-tough atmosphere. Camden Girls and It Always Rains on Sunday are a good fit. The poster that resulted is a type you just don't see any more; an image with few concessions to commercial imperatives. And though I hadn't heard of Boswell, it turns out I should have: William Feaver wrote in the Guardian last month about his paintings of Iraq and Mesopotamia during the second world war.

Boswell, born in New Zealand, was for a large part of his career one of the British left's foremost satirical illustrators, with his work regularly published in the Left Review. After the war, when he was art editor of Lilliput magazine, Boswell was commissioned by S John Woods, Ealing studio's head of marketing, to produce the poster. I called up Boswell's daughter, Sally, who remembers her father working on it in the late 1940s when she was "about 12". "My father was absolutely chuffed with it," she says. "S John Woods was an amazing man, and had an ability to understand that he could create astonishing works of art as posters. So he just went to his artist friends. Of which my father was one, luckily." The poster design came first, she says, followed by a series of full paintings on the same theme.

Boswell received other Ealing commissions, of which the best known is The Blue Lamp, the most successful example of the rough-and-tough Brit crime thriller of the immediate postwar period. But, says Sally, Ealing's increasing success got to Boswell - he especially disliked having to illustrate the racing film The Rainbow Jacket in the early 1950s, and the commissions dried up.

After Boswell's death in 1971, his partner Ruth (who later became a TV producer, making, of all things, The Tomorrow People) gave his work to the national collections - where, like many an artist's output, it lay unloved and unseen. Sally recalls her astonishment at one day seeing, purely by chance, a group of her father's Camden Girls paintings in a "New Acquisitions" cabinet in the Victoria & Albert museum.

She says she would love to still own one of the Camden Girls, not least because the original poster artwork has been lost. As a 12-year-old, she recalls, she made her own contribution to the finished design, colouring in some of the torn-paper effects Boswell had drawn for the title placard, plastered on brickwork at the top of the painting. "I can see what I did every time I look at it."

Both she and Ruth tirelessly promote Boswell's work, and you can sense the pleasure that both are taking at the art establishment's belated recognition of his talent. What lay behind the difficulties he encountered in making his name as a proper painter, I asked Ruth. She explains how he pretty much gave up painting after his period in Iraq, before returning to it for the last decade of his life. "His reputation as a painter was always more difficult to settle on than as an illustrator," she says. "You have to develop a style, and Jim didn't do that - he was always experimenting."

· James Boswell's Camden Girls is at Tate Britain, London SW1, now