Who was Denton Welch, the cult writer and painter who inspired everyone from Alan Bennett to William S. Burroughs?

‘He’s a born writer,’ declared Edith Sitwell in the foreword to Denton Welch’s novel, Maiden Voyage. He had a ‘very special way of seeing’ wrote William Burroughs, who dedicated his book, The Place of Dead Roads, to Welch.

But today, Denton Welch is mostly unknown, perhaps due to his short life or to the profusion and distinct character of twentieth century art. Although his work is in the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum, Welch’s contribution to the literary and artistic scene is overlooked. Now, a London exhibition, running during Frieze, hopes to change that, shining a spotlight on Welch’s art, the first retrospective to do so in forty years.

Welch wrote and painted throughout his lifetime. Born in 1915 in Shanghai to a British-American family, Welch went to Repton School in England, where he was a contemporary of Roald Dahl, before moving to London’s Goldsmiths School of Art in 1933. Welch suffered from the effects of a cycling accident in 1935, which left him temporarily paralysed, and eventually led to his early death at age 33.

‘It is high time to revisit Denton's art in the context of modern British art,’ says John Swarbrooke, who is hosting the exhibition at his eponymous London gallery. ‘This exhibition comes as more attention is focused on the Neo-Romantic movement, including artists John Minton and Keith Vaughan, as well as queer artists working in the first half of the 20th Century.’

Welch’s status as an outsider - as a gay man when homosexuality was illegal and as an invalid - adds a sharply observational edge to his work. In his capturing of wartime Kent, still lifes and self-portraits, a sense of foreboding and melancholy tinges the richly coloured scenes.

‘His art is rare among his contemporaries for the engraving-like depth of detail, thanks in part perhaps to his background both as a writer and an artist,’ adds Swarbrooke. ‘His pictures are stories in and of themselves, from the hypnotic image of By the Sea to the Old Master style of his self-portraits.’ Welch references works of those who inspired him in the evocative landscapes. ‘Denton was included in a Barbican exhibition of Neo-Romanticism in 1987, and richly-worked, allusive imagery of his still lifes and landscapes immediately recalls the movement and its influence, the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer - indeed, he was exhibited alongside such artists as John Craxton at the Leicester Galleries,’ says Swarbrooke.

Welch’s work leaves us with a strong sense of place, encapsulating the growing uneasiness and turbulence around him. It is an atmosphere not immediately obvious, but gleaned instead through the details, the small changes which disrupt a daily routine and hint at a bigger catastrophe. ‘The image of Denton picnicking along the Kent coast as the Second World War was raging, the bombers flying overhead towards London, encapsulates the fragile beauty of his world,’ Swarbrooke says. ‘This comes across powerfully in his art, which follows the artist towards his untimely death in 1948. The otherworldly quality of many of the images are removed from the destruction of the war as well as Denton's long-term ill health.’

Denton Welch is at John Swarbrooke Fine Art from 10 - 30 October