This week on instagram I will be broadcasting live with Mark Hill, an informal chat from 7pm On Thursday. Join us if you can, gives you time to clap the NHS at 8pm.
Author: Robjn Cantus
In Judy Taylor’s book Sketches for friends, 2002 are a series of Edward Ardizzone’s illustrated letters. Some I have illustrated below. From reading the Tim series of books, Edward Ardizzone seemed like a kind person and his letters have a joy to them as well with all the comic illustrations.
It was an age when the postal service would run almost continuously and you could send a letter in the morning and know it would get there in the evening. You could keep in contact throughout the day.
Lindsell is a village neighbouring Great Bardfield, Essex. The church is dedicated to St Mary The Virgin and dates back to Norman period with many alterations since. It was a church that Bawden would paint and print from different angles being in walking distance from his home at Brick House.
Although the styles are much the same the colour pallets are different. The linocut at the bottom of the page is very large and in life, has the texture and detail as this first watercolour.
Edward Bawden – Lindsell Church, 1956
Edward Bawden – Lindsell Church, 1956
Edward Bawden – Lindsell Church, 1958
Edward Bawden – Lindsell Church, 1961
Born in Scarborough, Kenneth Rowntree’s father was the manager of the local department store who displayed his work in the shop, this may have been why Rowntree changed from training to be a cellist to becoming an artist. He studied at the Ruskin Drawing School, Oxford and went to the Slade School in London.
In 1941, Rowntree had moved to Great Bardfield, settling with his wife Diana (née Buckley) into the “a handsome draughty house” Town House. There they would be neighbours to Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious lived in Castle Hedingham a few miles away.
The paintings Kenneth Rowntree made during war time are rather curious because they are not on the front line. Unlike many of the other official war artists, Rowntree was a Conscientious Objector. He did paint the domestic scenes of life during wartime, but not pictures of the war maneuvers.
The picture below is of a Polo Ground is a good example of his work. The pitch as been converted into growing produce and the people working for the war effort but making food.
The figure of the man signifying the every man worker to me says ‘we are all in this together’. Below are five of his paintings for the War Artist Scheme.
Kenneth Rowntree – A Polo Ground in War-time, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – Foreign Servicemen in Hyde Park: Early Summer, 1940
In the picture above, the mixture of uniforms is a good indication of how many parties are mixed up in the conflict. A subtle communication.
Kenneth Rowntree – The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts Canteen Concert, Isle of Dogs, London, E14, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – The Experimental Establishment, Shoeburyness: Firing through Screens, 1945
Kenneth Rowntree – Experimental Establishment, Shoeburyness, 1945
All the paintings below are part of the Recording Britain series.
In 1940, when the British landscape was under attack from the threat of German bombers, the Ministry of Labour, in association with the Pilgrim Trust commissioned many of Britain’s artists to go out and paint a record of the changing face of the country before it was too late. †
I think part of the romance of the pictures below is the lack of cars in pictures. No High Street in Britain will ever look beautiful again until cars are stored back in their garages and not parked on the street. Other than the Old Toll Bar House all the places are without figures, an empty world of architectural curiosity. I also feel that there is something beautiful about those multi-layered telegraph poles and wires in the same picture.
Kenneth Rowntree – Old Toll Bar House, Ashopton, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – Underbank Farm, Woodlands, Ashdale, Derbyshire, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – Scarborough, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – The Castle, Sheriff Hutton, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – The Bellringer’s Chamber, SS. Peter and Paul Church, Clare, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – Cliff Bridge Terrace and Museum, Scarborough, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – Grainfoot Farm, Derwentdale, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – The Smoke Room, Ashopton Inn, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – The Smoke Room, Ashopton Inn, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – St. Mary’s, Whitby – Exterior, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – The Smithy, Crathorne, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – Rievaulx Abbey, 1940
Kenneth Rowntree – West Front of the Priory Church, Dunstable, Bedfordshire, 1941
Kenneth Rowntree – Chapel Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, 1941
Kenneth Rowntree – North Landing, Flamborough, 1940
† David Mellor, Gill Saunders, Patrick Wright – Recording Britain , 1990
China clay is a material known as kaolin. It was first used in China more than ten thousand years agoto make porcelain. When the Chinese started to export this to Europe it was fashionable but expensive. Noticing a gap in the market, a Plymouth apothecary called William Cookworthy began to research the porcelain-making process and spent several years searching for a material that resembled the kaolin that had been used for so long in China. In 1745 he eventually found it, at Tregonning Hill, near Germoe, in Cornwall, where a rare type of decomposed granite, finer than most talcum powders, arises naturally.
The mining of this over the years scared the landscape with a white mountain of spill and a quarry pit. I have some memory that it was on one of these trips that John Nash painted with Edward Bawden and Carel Weight.
John Nash – Disused China clay pit near Hensborough
John Nash – China clay landscape
John Nash – A mine, Bugle, Cornwall
John Nash – Mountain Landscape with Distant Lake, 1939
John Nash – China Clay Matterhorn 1952
John Nash – Clay pits , 1954
John Nash – Panorama of Pyramids, 1953
Below is a painting by Carel Weight, it’s the same view of the painting above by John Nash, is it chance or not? Nash used to make pencil drawings of a subject and then come back to it later in the year, maybe with some of his Cornish paintings he came back years later? Or just a fluke, who knows. It doesn’t help that the Weight picture isn’t dated.
Carel Weight – Clay Pits, Cornwall
John Nash – China Clay Country, 1958
John Nash – China Clay Country , 1958
John Nash – China Clay Country, 1958
John Nash – China Clay, Cornwall
To see more of Edward Bawden’s paintings of the 1958 trip click here.
In my isolation I thought it would be fun to make a map of where the Great Bardfield artists painted from. To pinpoint the locations and tag the work. Well that is what I have done, so now you can sit at home and traverse their work using a modified version of Google Maps. I have also added a few more of the Fry Galleries other artists like Paul Beck.
The artists are colour indexed.
The House Pin – location of an artists home.
Camera Pin – The pins of from where the work was painted (I thought it would be more fun for people to stand in the spot where an artwork was painted)
Before and After Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Lucie Aldridge
Once considered lost, the forthcoming autobiography of Lucie Aldridge is released in the Summer of 2020. It covers her childhood in rural Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century, her sisters, the Suffragette movement, her first marriage during WWI, and her life in London. That ‘London’ life was a release from the conventions of her childhood. She notes the famous parties of Cedric Morris and the Bright Young Things; meeting John Aldridge and finding herself in Majorca with Robert Graves and Laura Riding. There are too many people to list.
Following the success of Long Live Great Bardfield, The autobiography of Tirzah Garwood, Lucie’s book is a autobiography comes with a postscript by Inexpensive Progress detailing frankly the life and trials Lucie would go on to have in that Essex village.
If anyone has ever met Lucie, has any information on her, or her work (paintings and rugs) do please let me know at frozenocean18@hotmail.com but time is short!
Lucie by John Aldridge, 1930 (Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum)
Many people might be unaware that Paul Nash did portraits, few are finished works but some are in illustrated letters. To me they are rather pleasing and the dress and hair of the sitters is also of the era. I picture them being drawn in a 1930s sitting room by a fire.
Paul Nash – Margaret Nash, 1919
Margaret Theodosia Odeh was born in Jerusalem, Nash grew up in Cairo. She was the daughter of an Anglican minister. Shortly after moving to London in 1908, she became involved in the suffrage movement and the Tax Resistance League. One of the founding members of the Committee for Social Investigation and Reform, Nash offered rehabilitation and opportunities for women working as prostitutes. With funding from donors including Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Anderson, the Women’s Training Colony in Berkshire was established. Women could stay at the retreat and learn arts and crafts, including millinery. The initiative was inspired by the Arts and Crafts objective to improve people’s lives through craft. She also worked on textiles at the Omega Workshops run by the Bloomsbury group. She married Paul Nash in 1913.
Paul Nash – Portrait of Alice Daglish, 1921
Alice (nee) Archer is known mostly for The Land of Nursery Rhyme, 1932, a book she co-edited with Ernest Rhys. It was illustrated by Charles Folkard. She married Eric Fitch Daglish in 1918 and lived to be 103.
Paul Nash – Yvonne, 1922 (Maybe Yvonne Gregory)
Paul Nash – Douglas Goldring
Douglas Goldring was an English writer and journalist. He became known mostly as a travel writer. In the late 1930s Goldring came to prominence in two ways. He was Secretary of the Georgian Society, which he helped to found after writing in the Daily Telegraph in 1936, with Lord Derwent and Robert Byron. Inspired by the ideas of William Morris, Goldring helped transform it in 1937 into the Georgian Group, a section within the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, on the advice of Lord Esher.
Goldring soon became unhappy with the Georgian Group’s political conservatism and left it. He was also noted, at the same period, as a radical journalist and prolific contributor to left-wing publications. Goldring described his political views as socialist. In his last years, Goldring contributed reviews to the Socialist Labour League magazine Labour Review.
Paul Nash, Barbara, c1910
Paul Nash – Self Portrait, 1922
Here are a set of nice but random photographs I have taken over the past few months. Anyone who knows me would know that I take hundreds of photos every week and so it is always hard to edit it down.
