Weymouth and Distant Portland

This 1946 drawing of Weymouth Bay with Portland in the distance was made in the immediate aftermath of World War II, a period when Bone served as an official war artist and then continued to document the British landscape with undiminished energy. Weymouth and Portland had strategic importance during the war (the Portland naval base, the D-Day embarkation from Weymouth), and Bone's choice to depict the peacetime landscape in 1946 carries an implicit contrast with its wartime uses. The colored pencil and ink medium allows for precise architectural detail (the Portland skyline, the Weymouth seafront) while the colored pencil adds warmth to the otherwise linear drawing.

Bone's post-war British drawings are among his most reflective works. The urgency of the war artist's mission is replaced by a quieter observation of the landscape in recovery. Weymouth Bay, which had been filled with landing craft in 1944, is now shown in its peacetime aspect — a seaside resort, a fishing port, a stretch of English coast that has resumed its ordinary life after the extraordinary interruption of war.

Weymouth and Distant Portland is Bone's post-war England: the same landscape that served the war effort now returned to peace. The precision of the drawing honors both the military history and the peacetime recovery, and the medium of colored pencil and ink allows both to coexist on the same sheet.