A Famous Stroke

In A Famous Stroke, Tomlinson reworks a figure from Isaac Cruikshank’s hand-coloured etchings (c.1803), The Swimming Venus of Ramsgate, originally conceived as satire depicting a female swimmer performing breaststroke. In Tomlinson’s painting, the swimmer is transformed into a figure of excess and indifference. Her skin is intensely sunburnt, rendered an unnatural red against the dark sea, as she continues to smoke while moving through the water; she exhales a plume of smoke that echoes the spray of a whale surfacing for air.

Behind her, the conventional setting sun is replaced by a vast mushroom cloud. As throughout the exhibition, the bather remains suspended between leisure and catastrophe, continuing her endless activity despite the collapse of the world beyond the frame. Whether read as defiant, detached, ignorant or simply bored, she keeps swimming, carrying on as the horizon burns.