a post from Christopher Burlinson:

This little watercolour of a pair of ringed plovers, overseeing their clutch of camouflaged eggs, dropped out of a copy of The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (marked with an inscription, ‘Margaret L. Hall / Christmas 1924 / from Violet’) that I picked up in a second-hand bookshop in York. On the back, another text: a 1917 proclamation of King George V (‘issued under the authority of the Minister of Food’), instructing all heads of households ‘to practise the greatest economy and frugality in the use of every species of grain’ by reducing their consumption of bread by a quarter, and abstaining from the use of flour in pastry. It is printed on thick paper, presumably making it useful as artists’ material.

It was the plovers, I confess, and not the mystical poems, that made me buy the book.

Who was Margaret Hall, though? Was she the painter of this watercolour? How soon after receiving the text of the proclamation did she decide to repurpose it—trimming it to the right size and painting a scene on the back? Was the proclamation already out of date? Did the painting have a life (on display? between the pages of another book?) between the day it was painted and the point at which Margaret used it to mark a poem? And why trim the proclamation before painting? Was Margaret perhaps copying the image from a book (which one?), and keeping to the same dimensions? Or was the image painted from her memory, or her imagination?