International Herald Tribune

"…Then there were artists like James Boswell (1906-1971), whose centenary has been celebrated in London by an exhibit at Tate Britain, and, currently, by a small group of prints and drawings from the 1930s and '40s at the British Museum (until Nov. 16). Boswell had long been urgently antiwar and there was no place for him in the war artists scheme: he was, as the title of a book of his work from 1939-45 that comes out early next week puts it, "James Boswell: Unofficial War Artist."

Reproduced by kind permission of Mary Blume and the IHT on this site, or read the original page here

THE GUARDIAN Review, Land of Dead Ends…

"It's the middle of nowhere and there's nothing doing. You can count the telegraph poles, check the numbers planted as route markers, guess the distance to the next dump, but that's about it until you reach the two wired-off water towers that mark the spot where you are about to stay put."

Images of heat, dust and bored troops in Iraq are all too familiar today. But they were first captured in the unheroic paintings of James Boswell during the second world war…

William Feaver, Saturday December 16, 2006, The Guardian