The Sunbathers

The Sunbathers is a sculpture by Hungarian artist Peter Laszlo Peri, made for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

The Sunbathers at the Southbank Centre

A maquette is held by the Leeds Art Gallery, donated by William Peri in 2000. The full-size concrete work, made from "Peri-crete" a continuation of the artist’s Constructivist interest in the use of new materials, was mounted on a wall at the entrance to the festival site on the South Bank, at the gate on York Road near Waterloo station. Dylan Thomas mentioned the sculpture in an essay written after he visited the Festival, as "the linked terra-cotta man and woman fly-defying gravity and elegantly hurrying up a W.C. wall".

The sculpture disappeared after the exhibition closed, and it was believed to have been lost. When Historic England held an exhibition of lost art in 2016, the work was rediscovered in pieces at The Clarendon Hotel in Blackheath. A former proprietor of the hotel, Joseph O'Donnell had bought the work at an auction in the 1950s, and displayed it at his previous hotel, the Westcombe Park Hotel, later moving it to his new hotel in Blackheath, where it was displayed on a patio in the hotel garden, and used as a children's climbing frame. The work deteriorated and was later removed from public display.

A campaign to restore the sculpture raised £15,000 in 5 days, with contributions from the Heritage Lottery Fund, NESTA and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The work was restored by Tessa Jackson of Jackson Sculpture Conservation Ltd. After restoration, it has returned to the Southbank Centre, at the Royal Festival Hall, for temporary public display for two months from 5 July 2017 [1][2]


References
  1. "Bathers bask again": Photograph and caption in The Guardian 2017-07-06
  2. South Bank Centre Website
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