Events

Probably one of the most skilful, prolific and little-known artists to have come from Seaford in the late nineteenth century was Harry Harison Evans – nicknamed ‘Wingy’ by some because he had lost an arm. No photographs or portraits of Harry seem to have survived and we know remarkably little about him.

The museum is presenting a special exhibition to mark the centenary of his death and displaying many of his works. Local legend has Harry doing quick sketches on beer mats in return for a pint of beer. This seems unlikely, not least because beer mats were not widely introduced until the 1920s and no ‘quick sketches’ seem to have survived. Rather, we know of several hundred meticulously drawn pen and ink images of Seaford, each of which would have taken hours to complete.

There is a clear element of nostalgia in his drawings. Many of them look backwards depicting events that happened when he was an infant – the cliff explosion in 1850 – or while he served in the army in India, such as the great flood of 1875. His annotations under the images often refer to the date the particular buildings were demolished and therefore make a valuable contribution to our knowledge of how Seaford changed and developed. Few people inside or outside Seaford were aware of Harry’s work and he remains little known to this day.