Gerard de Verre

In the mid 1970s, I used to help Gerard in the garden, cutting the grass and weeding etc for pocket money. He didn’t have children and at various times gave me presents of paintings he’d made. I didn’t really appreciate these at the time but kept them and can see, now that many of these sometimes strange works (mostly dating from the mid 1940s but some later ones worked or reworked in the late 1970s) were quite prescient of later developments by much more successful artists. In September 2014, some of Gerard's works were included in an exhibition at the Salisbury Arts Centre which attempted to survey lost but influential or prescient works from the mid 20th century