PEAKE MERVYN: (1911-1968) English writer, artist, poet & illustrator. A fine A.L.S., Merve, two pages, 8vo, Sark ...

PEAKE MERVYN: (1911-1968) English writer, artist, poet & illustrator. A fine A.L.S., Merve, two pages, 8vo, Sark, Channel Islands, 14th May 1934 ('May 14th? 1934 (Monday anyway)'), to his friend Helene Bruce ('Lanie dear'). Peake writes a social letter, commenting on his recent activities and mentioning mutual friends, in part, 'I wonder where this letter will find you. Maybe still in Ebury Street…..The island is magical now. The flowers are like living cataracts of pure colour. Yesterday I spent the whole day painting in a warm valley. The sunlight was terrific, making the grass, trees and flowers and especially the gorse almost dizzily brilliant. Oh Lord, the sunlight on the gorse is almost cruel in its unrelenting intensity. I took easel & paints, canvasses, lunch and everything down in a wheelbarrow. It was wonderful. The trees, at least some of them, are only just coming into leaf and make a faint pink blurr (sic) against the sky - like a cloud at sunset, and their boles ivory white in the glare. I cannot help constantly remembering about picking the flowers in the garden with you - not our garden. It was all so incredibly lovely. Oh, I do want to see you again. Sark would be heaven, if we could wander about the cliff tops and among the trees and discuss things. The people I know here are all swell in their way but I perhaps feel a trifle apart and could never get on with them as I do with you. Next Saturday the Gallery is opening for the first of the summer shows they are holding here. It is going to be good I think - better than the London one anyway for our work has changed a lot since last summer and autumn. Is there any chance of you coming over here and then returning with me for Leslie's wedding…….Please forgive the last disintegrated letter I sent you. God, it was lovely having you to see me off at Waterloo. If you find you can come almost immediately give me a wire if you like…..Well Lanie - au revoir pour le moment. Write soon and send good news if you can…..I'd love you to see this place in the spring - besides of course the rather absurd and wholly unaccountable wish to see you myself. Lots of love Lanie…'. A scarce letter of good content. Some extremely minor, light creasing and a couple of small tears to the edges of some folds, otherwise VG Peake's early career in the 1930s was as a painter in London, although he lived on Sark for a time, first moving there in 1932. Eric Drake, his former teacher, was setting up an artists' colony on the island and in 1934 Peake exhibited with the Sark artists both in the Sark Gallery built by Drake and at the Cooling Galleries in London, and in 1935 he exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the Leger Galleries in London.