© The estate of Bernard Meninsky

Meninsky began to employ a monumental style of painting in the 1930s (a style also employed by his former Slade School contemporary Mark Gertler in the same period). Meninsky's bathers are etched in his so-called 'Miltonic style', in which the artist employed an idealised, generalised, pastoral setting peopled by monumental figures, the best-known of which are his illustrations to Milton's poems 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' (published 1946). After the outbreak of the Second World War caused the closure of the London Art Schools, Meninsky (who had taught at the Westminster School of Art), found a position at the Oxford City School of Art and moved to Oxford to take up his role. Many paintings, drawings and lithographs in the Miltonic style resulted from this period, influenced by Picasso but also Samuel Palmer, who inspired a new generation of 'neo-romantics' in the 1940s.