Provenance: acquired directly from Robert Lyon family, circa 1980; private collection.
Robert Lyon trained at the Royal College of Art in the early 1920’s before going on to win a scholarship to the British School at Rome. For eight
years from 1934 Lyon was tutor to the Ashington Group of spare-time
Northumberland miner artists, one of the most remarkable of such groups
to emerge in the inter-war years. This woodcut, which appears to have never been printed as an edition, is clearly inspired by Gertler’s iconic Merry-Go-Round, 1916. The figures on the carousel are here replaced by miners, adding resonance to an already politicized image.