The Silence, 1965

Carel Weight RA (1908 - 1997)

RA Collection: Art

Set in his garden in Wandsworth, Weight’s Diploma Work depicts three people observing the two minutes silence on Remembrance Sunday. The artist explained that he always found this silence eerie, when everything went quiet except sounds like a dog barking. Even the tortoise in the flowerbed is still.

During the Second World War, Weight was an official war artist in Italy. In this painting, he wished to convey his belief that although people come together in rituals, their experience is essentially solitary. To emphasise this, the three figures never met and were painted separately.

Weight trained at Hammersmith School of Art and Goldsmiths’ College. Following his time as an official war artist during the Second World War, he subsequently taught at the Royal College of Art becoming Professor of Painting there in 1957.