Josef Herman was born into an impoverished background in Warsaw in 1911, the son of a Jewish cobbler. He trained as typesetter but he suffered from serious lead poisoning so he turned to book designing before spending 18 months training at the Warsaw School of Art and Decoration, having his first solo exhibition in Warsaw in 1932. Fleeing the Nazis, he travelled across Europe, staying in Belgium between 1938 and 1940, until he settled in Britain. He lived first in Glasgow before moving, in 1944, to the mining village of Ystradgynlais in South Wales. During the 1950s, Herman rose to prominence as part of the London Group with a string of solo and group exhibitions, with the Whitechapel Gallery’s 1956 exhibition of work from the 1940s and 50s, the touring retrospective organised by the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum in 1975 and the Camden Arts Centre’s 1980 retrospective of particular significance. He was made an OBE in 1981, was elected as an Honorary Senior Royal Academician in 1990, and received the Silver Medal for services to art by the Contemporary Art Society for Wales in 1992. The Josef Herman Art Foundation was established posthumously in Ystradgynlais in 2005, following his death in February 2000. Herman was a prolific author and wrote many articles and books reflecting on his life and practice, including A Welsh Mining Village (1956), Related Twilights: Notes from an Artist’s Diary (1975) and Notes from a Welsh Diary (1988). In the mining community of Ystradgynlais, the location in which Women on the Shore (1945-50) was produced, Herman found a subject matter that was to inspire some of his most admired and memorable works. His profound identification, spiritually and politically, with the miners manifested in evocative depictions of their toil and labour, of the hardships and struggles of working class life, echoing Herman’s early upbringing in the Jewish slums of Warsaw. Moreover, the mining community was highly active politically with the establishment of various regional committees and organisations supporting miners and mining. Herman’s nostalgic yet celebratory and heroic portrayals of man at work earned him the support of the famous Marxist critic John Berger from 1952. In Women on the Shore Herman depicts two nude women on a beach: one woman stares impassively out towards the rolling sea, an impenetrable surface topped by white foam, whilst her companion, who faces the viewer, removes her shirt, presumably in preparation to swim. Both the draughtsmanship and the colouring reveal the artistic legacy of the nineteenth-century Barbizon school of painting upon Herman, particularly the portrayals of French peasants by Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, and also Paul Cézanne’s Bather series from the turn of the twentieth-century. The women seem to be part of or constructed from the earth – the tones of the oil paint are organic, muted and limited to earthy hues of browns, blues and dirty yellows. The technique of thickly applied paint underlines the heaviness of the form of the figures. The women are solid, firmly placed within the painting as their feet sink under the sand so that bodies and landscape merge. They recall classical statues in their contrapposto poses and the dual viewpoint of each subject allows us to see the women ‘in the round’ echoing the experience of viewing a sculpture. The painting is an almost mythological celebration of the strength of the body: the women’s bodies take up most of the canvas and we are drawn to their powerful thighs and broad shoulders. A pen and wash copy (dated 1953) of Women on the Shore was lent by Herman’s first wife, Catriona Herman, to the Whitechapel 1956 retrospective (catalogue no. 126).