Author: Robjn Cantus

Recently I have been working on a duel biography of Nan Youngman and her role in Pictures for Schools.  It is the story of her life through the people she knew and how it ended with each person gifting areas of knowledge and confidence for her to form the Pictures for Schools exhibitions – an annual event where councils from across England (and later Wales) could buy art to hang in schools to inspire children. This idea was quite radical for the post war era – to put real paintings in front of children and to banish reproduction prints of famous artworks.

Youngman was working for Cambridgeshire Council at the time as the Art Adviser under Henry Morris in the department for education in the council. Cambridgeshire invested in a Lowry in 1945 to get the experiment started and over the next few years with the help of the Society for Education through Art the exhibitions were formed in 1947 running until 1969.

After 1969, the momentum for many of the council’s collections started to slow down and by the millennium many of the collections of works into storage.

Cambridgeshire, the founder of the scheme was the first to sell of their collection of works due to a strange situation of the city – it was one of the few towns in the country not to have their own art gallery. Many of the museums in the city were owned by the University, including Fitzwilliam Museum. So with a collection of valuable mid-century art and nowhere to display them, they were sold off at auction. Soon Hertfordshire did the same after a large public consultation and then Nottingham sold off part of their collection via the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden. Derbyshire took some effort to re-home their more famous works to institutions around the country but the rest of the works were auctioned off under the stealth guise of them being the collection of Barbara Winstanley, the art advisor who helped found the collection.

All this is very much in my mind but it comes at a drastic contrast to schools and education today. There is a new scheme to put art into schools, and as good as this sounds it also has a depressing reality. These artworks are not to be real paintings, or even prints, but photographs of famous works of art displayed on a TV screen that is located in key points of a school.

   This scheme is run by the charity Art In Schools and is a resource to help children see art. They offer works by Picasso to George Stubbs, and even Andy Warhol. The key failing of this nice idea is that real Warhol prints are larger than you would expect – they are quite powerful works in dimension and also the texture of how they are printed. In the same way as they don’t really translate well in a book, a TV screen can never do them justice. In order to promote the idea the charity asked Damien Hirst, Bridget Riley, Cornelia Parker and Antony Gormley to suggest their favourite works of art to be on show.

The brochure for the Charity highlights they are: Closing the Art Gap that has happened in the underfunding of schools, how they are helping disadvantaged areas by bringing art into the classroom and they encourage children to think about art as a career and help with the national syllabus. They also add that seeing art supports mental health in children and promotes equality and diversity. These are more or less the original ideas of Youngman’s scheme in 1945. But in short there is no way the texture; scale or tonality of a painting can be judged from a digital screen.

Underfunding in the arts is a problem and cutting these services are seen as an easy way for cash strapped councils to save money as the true impact of the ideas are harder to grade. The problem has got so bad that Sotheby’s Auction house has been approaching councils in England to Value their most valuable objects as a free service, in the hopes they will auction them off. This is a gateway drug into councillors looking at the short term gains of making money against the benefits to the culture of their towns.
   When Simon Wallis, the director of the council backed Hepworth Wakefield gallery was asked about Sotheby’s scheme he said:

“If works are sold to attempt to mitigate financial shortfalls for local authorities, the public permanently loses a major valued resource, generations in the making, and the underlying structural problems of local government funding will remain fundamentally unchanged.”

It’s a hard scheme to judge because at the moment standards are so low that anything is better than nothing. But it feels like the ambitions of councils and the opinion of the wider public towards the arts have been set too low.

Councils approached by Sotheby’s include Derby City Council, which has a collection of paintings by 18th century artist Joseph Wright that were valued by the auction house for insurance purposes at £64m in 2012. In 2024 Suffolk council cut the arts budget to the county by £500,000 but after a public backlash they cancelled this plan and tried to promote the cut not happening that the council had gained £500,000 for the arts.

It is all a trend in the wrong direction while looking to be progressive.

• Nan Youngman & Pictures for Schools will be out in May 2025.

A memorial poem to Robert Colquhoun by Ian Rodger, from the Scottish Lines Review #19 in 1962 with a drawing of Two Figures.

In Memoriam Robert Colquhoun

Where should I go? you asked me once.
Is there not anywhere to go?
Inside your heart a fever to be still.
To hold inviolate a peace of green truth.
Was pitched against a thunder in the streets
Of an opaque city with ashened walls.

Where could you go? You with a hurt
That had a different language.
There was distant at the freeways’ ends
Dark muds of estuaries beyond the caravans,
The harsh blood of foxes in rocks, torn goats
Edging green nerves of bracken to peace.

But you could not go. The road was full
Of movement going nowhere.
And they jogged your arm to spill your mind,
Their brittleness confounding your earnest voice.
Your burnished cry was deafened in the blind
Multitude of persons with dull eyes.

And now you go. I can see now
There was somewhere to go.
Where always the Colquhouns were besieged,
Their backs to the mountain, facing east.
At Luss the ancestors will have greeted you,
Holding your sad gaze, a glass in hand.

IAN RODGER

A look at the various wood-engravings and the watercolours that followed after Eric Ravilious’s commission to make designs for London Transport’s Green Line.

Lucy Marguerite Frobisher was born in Leeds in 1890. She studied at the Bushey School of Painting and in 1920 was appointed secretary of the school, founded by artist Lucy Kemp-Welch who became her lover. They worked together and unusually, are buried in the same grave.

Kemp-Welch had been taught by Hubert von Herkomer, and in 1905 took over the running of his art school, renaming it the Bushey School of Painting. In 1928 Frobisher took over and renamed it once again, as the Frobisher School of Painting. The school focused on Landscape and Animal painting.

Over time Kemp-Welch has become famous for her paintings of animals, but it is curious that Frobisher took such a back seat in her artistic life.

Recently Lucy and Lucy’s grave was restored by locals.

This is just a short blog about something that appears in two works and shows off Edward Bawden’s eccentric lavish life with his Rococo easel. In the painting below, by Eric Ravilious of Edward painting in his studio, it looks unlike most young artists rooms today, with a lavish mirror, Victorian bust and a dress mannequin. At the time this was painted, Bawden was five years out of art school.

This is the first professional illustration by Chloe Cheese, made for the Sunday Times Magazine in 1977. She was commissioned to make a drawing for one of Caroline Conran’s weekly cooking tips.

It was bought by Terrance Conran and then sold recently when his estate was put up for sale, when i bought it.

Caroline and Terrance opened up the shop Habitat in 1964 and by the 70s he was very famous for making European furniture styles and fitting the shop with stylish international products. I have a collection of some of the early catalogues and they really were key in setting trends rather than following them, due to the fact they had such little competition.

Sherman trained in London at the Regent Street Polytechnic getting a National Diploma in Design for Painting. Later took a Post-Graduate Course in Sculpture. In 1964 awarded the Premio Internazionale Europa Arte award for extensive and meritorious artistic activities.

Works in collections of Public Galleries, Education Authorities and private collectors in Great Britain, Australia, Lebanon, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and U.S.A. Organizer of the touring exhibitions Contemporary Hangings and ‘Contemporary Pictures in Fabric and Thread.

Vera Sherman has organized and kept going for some years a highly successful travelling exhibition of wall hangings. The exhibits, which are, of course, changed from time to time, include examples of several crafts weaving, embroidery, batik, tie-dyeing, etc. She is well acquainted with the leading artists in these fields, and has herself contributed some distinguished hangings.

A by-product of her activities has been this book, illustrating a selection of the attractive and interesting hangings that have appeared in her exhibitions. There are notes on the 33 contributing artists and their method of working, and captions draw attention to special points of design and technique. In this way the book manages to give practical information and yet not fetter the reader’s imagination. Wall hangings are much in fashion at present, and making them is a popular leisure activity no doubt because the scope is so wide and there are many different ways of arriving at successful results. People do, however, need help with ideas to get them started, and it need which will be met by Mrs Sherman’s book.

The painter Frances Hodgkins was known for her portraits, mostly of her friends. Some of these include Cedric Morris and Kitty Church and Anthony West, but this post is about the lesser known Elizabeth Curtis.

Elizabeth Curtis nee Carr was a teacher whose husband Arthur Curtis died in the First World War. In 1923 she had set up a school at Langford Grove, a Georgian mansion in the Essex village of Langford near Maldon to give herself a better income.

The school was a private boarding school for girls aged from about 8 to 17, known for for music and art. One of the most notable pupils was Angelica Garnett. She employed other teachers who were often exhausted at her flippant impulses, as she would barge into the classroom to pick girls to join her to see plays in London or concerts in Cambridge. She also wrote poetry, with a booklet of her works being published by a memorial fund in her name. She retired from her school in 1962.

As well as being painted by Hodgkin, Elizabeth also owned some of her works, some included in this blog, but many more.

Elizabeth chose to send her son Dunstan to Eton. He went to Trinity College, Oxford studying PPE and became a lawyer and politician. In 1939 he married Monica Forbes of the American political family (William Cameron Forbes, John Kerry). After their divorce Monica married the poet John Pudney and Dunstan married the sociologist Patricia Elton (daughter of Australian psychologist Elton Mayo) in 1955, this post work work spent working in Europe and drafting a copy of the European convention on human rights.

When A A Milne wrote When We Were Very Young (1924) he was looking for an illustrator. It was E V Lucas, head of Methuen that suggested Ernest Shepard. Originally Milne didn’t enjoy Shepard’s illustrations for his book of Poems but Shepard had been an illustrator for Punch and would have been familiar to young parents. The first illustration of Winnie the Pooh appeared in this volume in the thirty-eighth poem Teddy Bear.

Shepard encouraged Milne to write more about his son and toys and two years later Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) was published. The authors hope was that the illustrator would observe his son and use them for the drawings, however Shepard used his own son Graham as the basis for Christopher Robin and used Graham’s teddy bear Growler as the inspiration for Mr Saunders aka Winnie the Pooh.

While Christopher Robin lived until 1996, Graham Shepard joined the Navy in the Second World War and died when HMS Poyanthus sunk by a U-Boat in the Atlantic while rescuing the crew of sunk HMCS St. Croix in 1943.

This isn’t the only link to tragedy that linked Shepard to an author; in 1931 Shepard illustrated a new edition of Wind in the Willows (1907) by Kenneth Grahame based on stories written for his son Alistair, a child born partially blind but whom Graham educated well enough to get him a place at Oxford University. But sadly aged 19 he committed suicide by laying down on the London to Oxford train tracks. Shephard’s illustrations have remained the most popular for Wind in the Willows, being reprinted continuously.