Picture this….
It’s 1937. The far-right is on the rise throughout Europe. In Paris, Picasso is painting a dying horse in his anti-war masterpiece Guernica, while Orwell is visiting the front-line of the Spanish Civil War taking notes.
When he returns to his cottage (in the tiny Hertfordshire village of Wallington), Orwell will work these notes up into a book of first-hand reportage, Homage to Catalonia.
In Royston, a market town less than ten miles from where Orwell is scribbling, E. Herbert Whydale (like Picasso) is painting horses. These are beasts that strain every sinew against the recalcitrant plough or cart, as the artist pictures the passing of the old rural life…(read on at East Anglia Bylines).