When she first exhibited her work, at the Hanover Gallery, London in 1949, Eden Fleming adopted the pseudonym E. Box. She had studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic in the late 1930s, and then married Professor Marston Fleming. Box accompanied her husband on his research visits to North America, Africa, Russia, Asia and Europe, gathering material for her own work.
Box painted highly colored, stylized animals and figures, sometimes with Christian significance, in exotic landscapes. The catalogue for her 1981 retrospective at David Carritt Ltd in London was prefaced by Howard Hodgkin, who wrote that Box's work was 'painted with the direct one to one representation that we find in Persian and Indian miniature painting'. Roy Strong, in a 1978 article for Vogue magazine, identified the influence of icons and the work of the Douanier Rousseau in her paintings. The Expulsion (1951, Tate) shows animals inside the Garden of Eden, the gate shut against the two small figures in the distance. Above the couple hangs a flaming sword, flanked by two angels. Box also used literature as a source for her art; one painting was titled To Pushkin -A Leningrad Memory April 1957, while later works referred to poems by William Morris, Andrew Marvell, William Blake and John Clare. |
