October 2008

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After a day’s reprieve, on 3 December Wadsworth began Dressed Overall; the February deadline seemed attainable, but in mid-January Cunard changed the schedule. The ship’s designers realised that they would be unable to move Wadsworth’s paintings into the smoking lounge once the doors had been installed and so with one painting finished and the other half completed the works were whisked away. According to Wadsworth, ‘the Cunard people had another fit of the panics and took my panels away from me at a few hours notice’.39 Concerned about their transportation, Wadsworth had earlier wrote toArmfield, ‘The panels are not only very big but very heavy with steel battens at the back and in moving them about six men are required. I am terrified that the surface may be scratched or otherwise ruined.’40 A photograph from the Sussex Daily News shows the panels being lifted on to the back of a lorry (Fig. 5). From London, the panels were shipped up to Glasgow. Wadsworth saw the benefits of finishing the works in situ, although he was not pleased about having to stay in Scotland during the winter.41 He travelled to Glasgow in late February and applied the last brushstrokes to Dressed Overall on 20 March 1936 (Fig. 8).42

Frustrated as Wadsworth might have been with Cunard’s restrictions and last-minute demands, at least his paintings did not meet the same fate as those of other artists. Commissioned at the same time as Wadsworth, Grant had three paintings rejected only a few months before the maiden voyage. This last-minute decision came as a shock to him, since Morris had approved his initial designs.43 A letter from the Cunard board informed Morris that the directors’ decision was unanimous: Grant’s works ‘could not remain on the ship’.44 His scantily dressed men and women dancing, playing instruments and gathering flowers, depicted in vibrant planes of flat colour, were considered inharmonious with the decorations. In addition to having to deal with ‘a fearful howl from Grant and his modern art friends’, Morris was pressed to find alternative decoration for their allotted spaces.45 Since he was unable to find suitable works to replace Grant’s, the architect opted for rose tinted mirrors, which would add a rosy glow to passengers’ faces as they crossed the turbulent Atlantic.

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