Kenneth Rowntree – Ethel House, Great Bardfield, 1942
In a previous post I featured the work of Walter Hoyle and his drawing of Little Saling Church in Bardfield Saling. In researching that I found the lovely paintings by Kenneth Rowntree below. The image above is Ethel House, Great Bardfield, where his friend Michael Rothenstein lived.
Rowntree trained at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, and then at the Slade in London. In 1939 he married the architect Diana Buckley. They associated with many of the modernist emigr architects in London at that time, and a strong architectural sense can often be felt in Rowntree’s work. He was a Quaker, and during the war became part of the ‘Recording Britain’ project, in which everyday life in wartime Britain was captured by a range of artists. When Diana became pregnant in 1941 they wished to move out of London, and Eric and Tirzah Ravilious found them a suitable house in Great Bardfield, close to the Bawdens’ home. Local churches provided a strong inspiration for much of his work here, but he also worked in London, Kent and Wales.
Kenneth Rowntree – SS Peter and Paul, Little Saling, Essex, 1942
Kenneth Rowntree – Interior of SS Peter and Paul, Little Saling, Essex, 1942
Kenneth Rowntree – The Organ Loft, SS Peter and Paul, Little Saling, 1942
And here are two bonus pictures of nearby church in North End, again, inside and out.
Kenneth Rowntree – Exterior, Black Chapel North End, Nr. Dunmow, 1942
Kenneth Rowntree – Interior, Black Chapel, North End, near Dunmow, Essex, 1942
Eric Fraser was born in 1902. Known principally as an illustrator, he became most famous for his work in the Radio Times as well as designing many dust jackets and print advertisements for companies. Today he would be known as a graphic designer, in the 1930s he was known as a commercial artist.
The Radio Times cover above was to celebrate the release of the wonderful BBC Radio Drama of Lord of the Rings in 1981, following the 1968 Hobbit.
This blog is just a look at his work for the Folio Society editions of Lord of the Rings (1977) and The Hobbit (1979). Fraser was a specialist in illustrating classic scenes from mythology.
The Hobbit
Lord of the Rings
The drawings Eric Fraser made for Lord of the Rings were not of his own inspiration but from designs by Margrethe Alexandrine Þórhildur Ingrid, or Margrethe II, Queen of Denmark. She is also an artist whose works have been inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s literature from a very young age and she used the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer.
The same illustration as the BBC Radio Times would be used for the soundtrack to Lord of the Rings by Stephen Oliver in 1981.
Following on from my post on Pictures for Schools last week I thought I would post one on a single painting and the artist. In this case there is very little on her but I enjoyed digging out what I could.
Madeleine Elizabeth Anderson was born in Belvedere, Kent on September 18th, 1910, the daughter of Harry Percival Harvey Anderson. He was an engineer and invented ‘the Anderson condensing system’ for improved thermal efficiency and reduced water consumption in trains. The family must have moved up to Glasgow as her father’s office is in the city and Madeleine attended the Airdrie Academy, Lanarkshire.
Madeleine E Holtom – Lycaste Orchid, 1947.
(In My Collection / Hertfordshire Pictures for Schools)
In 1931 Madeleine moved to London to study art at the Kingston School of Art where Reginald Brill was principal with other teaching from Anthony Betts, William Ware and John Platt. In 1932 she was awarded a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, there she won the painting prize in 1934. She painted in oils and watercolours under William Rothenstein and Gilbert Spencer.
Leaving the RCA she became a professional artist and also worked making advertisements. She married and divorced G. H. Holtom and they had two sons and two daughters, they moved to Northwood near Watford, North-West London. She also exhibited with the New English Art Club.
Her work was bought for the Hertfordshire Collection of Pictures for Schools. The county council’s collection was started in 1949 as part of the School Loan Collection, a post-war project by Sir John Newsom, the Hertfordshire Chief Education Officer at the time. He bought artworks from contemporary British artists so that schools could borrow them for the benefit of pupils’ art education. Painted in 1947 it is likely this is a very early piece bought for the Hertfordshire Collection.
The collection was begun in the late 1940’s by Sir John Newson, the then Chief Education Officer. It complemented Hertfordshire’s radical post-war schools building programme and sat alongside the art works being commissioned for the new schools.
Newson wanted all pupils in Hertfordshire schools, to have the opportunity to see, use and be inspired by original works of art. Early purchases for the collection included work by artists who are now recognised as very important in post-war British art and craft such as Keith Vaughan, Anne Redpath, Michael Ayrton, Edward Bawden, Josef Herman, Walter Keeler and Michael Brennand. The collection also has work by notable Hertfordshire artists such as John Akers and the sculptor John Mills. As well as these famous names the collection holds many fine pieces by newer and less well known artists and makers. †
Her work is represented in the collections of: Friendship House, Moscow. Queen’s College, Oxford. The Cuming Museum. Cheltenham’s Art Gallery. The Government Art Collection, British High Commission, Accra, Ghana.
Madeleine E Holtom – View from Flamsteed House, Greenwich Park, 1959
She exhibited at the Royal Academy 1951, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1964, 1972. Holtom died in 8th November 1976. She was living at St. John’s Coach House, St. John’s Street, Lechlade, Gloucestershire, formerly Grosvenor House, Twickenham, Middlesex.
† Herts Memories – The Hertfordshire County Art Collection –14th May 2009
In Hertfordshire the County Council’s collection of pictures for schools was started in 1949 as part of the School Loan Collection, a post-war initiative by Sir John Newsom, the Hertfordshire Chief Education Officer at the time. The aims of Pictures for Schools were to provide education for children, show children contemporary art rather than reproductions of masters and to liven up classrooms that in post-war Britain would have needed modernisation.
Many of the pieces were purchased from reputable dealers, artists and the ‘Pictures for Schools’ exhibitions which took place from the 1950s and 1960s. I thought I would show some of the pictures I now own and put the biographies of the artists.
Vera Cunningham – ‘Stooks’
Born in Hertfordshire of Scottish parentage, Vera studied painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. She began exhibiting with the London Group in 1922. With Matthew Smith, she exhibited in Paris at the Amis de Montparnasse and the Salon des Indépendants in 1922. Her first one-man show was held at the Bloomsbury Gallery in 1929. She produced a number of theatre designs at the end of the 1930s, but returned to easel painting. During WWII she was involved in the Civil Defence Artists’ shows at the Cooling Galleries. After the war her Paris dealer, Raymond Creuze, mounted three exhibitions in 1948, 1951 and 1954. She lived in London. The Barbican Art Gallery held a retrospective exhibition in 1985. Her work is held in the Manchester City Art Gallery; the Guildhall Gallery, London and at Palant House, Chichester.
Cuningham modeled for and had relationships with fellow artists Bernard Meninsky and Matthew Smith.
Vera Cunningham – ‘Garden Scene’
Thomas William Ward – ‘Charmouth Manor’
Thomas William Ward, was born at Sheffield. Studied part-time with Eric Jones (Harold Jones’s twin brother) at Sheffield 1937-1939. After service during the Second World War, Bill continued his studies at the Royal College of Art 1946-1950, winning a silver medal in 1949. He married at Kensington, London in 1949, sculptor Joan Palmer Ward. He taught at Harrow College of High Education 1950-1980, finally as principal lecturer, retiring to Suffolk in 1980. Elected a member of the Royal Society of Painter Etchers in 1953 and the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1957. This painting was bought from Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester in 1957.
Alistair Grant – ‘The Weight-lifter’
Although best known as a printmaker, Alistair Grant also painted throughout his career and in the 1980s he adopted an expressionist style using vibrant colours. He was born in London and studied at Birmingham College of Art (1941-43). After serving during the war, Grant returned to art school and the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Carel Weight and Ruskin Spear. Grant was to work in the printmaking department of the Royal College for 35 years (1955-90), ending his career as Emeritus Professor of Printmaking at the RA.
The Weight-lifter was bought from the Whitechapel Art Gallery at their Pictures for Schools exhibition: 8 October – 29 October 1949. It is likely ‘Eva’s House’ came from a similar exhibition.
Alistair Grant – ‘Eva’s House’, 1955
Vincent Lines – ‘Old Hereford Wagon’
Vincent Lines was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1928. The principal, William Rothenstein described him as ‘one of the best students of the painting school’. While only in his twenties, he was appointed principal of Horsham School of Art and later became principal of Hasting School of Art. Lines was a prolific and talented topographical watercolourist, with an intimate knowledge of the countryside, which he recorded on the spot, in the open air.
He was chosen as an artist for the Recording Britain project, to which he contributed twenty watercolours. He was a close friend of Thomas Hennell and the pair often painted together in the countryside around Hennell’s home at Ridley, near Meopham in Kent.
Lines survived the war and went on to become Vice-president of the Royal Watercolour Society. He wrote the biography of Mark Fisher and Margaret Fisher Prout, illustrated Rex Waites ‘The English Windmill’
The war years brought deepened friendships in particular with Mildred Eldidge and Thomas Hennell, both fellow watercolourists of the R .W .S . Through contact with Hennell he became fascinated by country crafts and together they hunted out the potter and the cooper, wheelwright and blacksmith, hurdlemaker and charcoal burner.
During 1943-4 he painted a series of eight watercolours recording the avenues of elms in Windsor Park, before the trees were felled. The pictures are now in the Royal collection. A further commission for Vincent during these years was the contribution to Arnold Palmer’s four-volumed Recording Britain, published in association with the Pilgrim Trust.
Due to Thomas Hennell’s death in 1945 the illustration of Rex Wailes’s book The English Windmill, which would certainly have been done by him, passed instead to Vincent Lines. Wailes’s definitive survey presents English windmills in their history, construction and mode of working. †
Molly Field – ‘Farm Implements’
Molly Field was born in Keighley, Yorkshire. She originally worked under the name Molly Clapham but then married the artist Dick Field. Attended Leeds College of Art (1932-33) then the Royal College of Art (1934-38), with Ernest Tristram. Showed at the Royal Academy, Women’s International Art Club and the Wakefield. She was married to Dick Field ARCA and they had one daughter.
Carolyn Sergeant – ‘Geranium’
This is a mystery as it is one of the best paintings in the collection but there is no detail in the archives about who it is by.
Bernard Gay – ‘Ivy Plant’
Bernard left school at the age of 14 and after various jobs, just before the Second World War joined the merchant navy. In 1947 that he returned to education, studying textile part-time at the Willesden School of Art (1947-52) and changed course to fine-art under Maurice de Sausmarez and Eric Taylor. He began drawing classes at St Martins School of Art and quickly established himself as a painter. It may have been in the Pictures for Schools exhibition 23 January – 14 February 1954.
David Koster – ‘Cat and Lilies’
Koster studied at the Slade School of Art (1944-47). Taught drawing and print-making at Medway College of Design. One-man shows at Everyman Foyer Gallery (1958, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70); Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre (1965); Stable Theatre Gallery, Hastings (1967). Taken several illustration commissions including work for the RSPB and a front cover for their ‘Birds’ Magazine.
David Koster was born in London and attended the Slade School of Fine Art from 1944 to 1947. He was a founder Member of the Society of Wildlife Artists in 1964.
Raymond Croxon – ‘View in the Lake District’
Raymond Coxon enrolled at the Leeds School of Art, and the Royal College of Art. While he was there, between 1919 and 1921, he not only met his future wife but also became friends with a fellow student, Henry Moore. In 1922 Moore and Coxon visited France and met a number of artists there, including Pierre Bonnard and Aristide Maillol. Coxon continued his studies in London at the Royal College of Art between 1921 and 1925 under Sir William Rothenstein. Coxon took a teaching post at the Richmond School of Art in 1925 and in 1926 he married Edna Ginesi, with Moore acting as his best-man. Coxon would later perform the same service for Moore when he married Irina Radetsky in July 1929. He became a member of the London Group in 1931 and of the Chiswick Group in 1938.
During the WW2 he became a war artist and was commissioned to produce some paintings of Army subjects in Britain. Then working for the Royal Navy as a war artist. The painting of this print is in the collection of Palant House. The lithograph made for the Contemporary Lithographs Ltd. Other artists in the series were Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Vanessa Bell, Barnett Freedman and so on.
Julia Ball – ‘East Coast Storm’
Julia Ball is a Cambridge artist and this woodcut came up for sale with the Cambridge collection of Pictures for Schools but due to a cataloguing error on the auctioneers I didn’t win it as they had labeled it as a different lot. For years I smoldered about that. But when the Hertfordshire sale came up, I had to have it. Made in the 1960s this woodcut is of a storm over the east coast. Her painting are mostly abstract and works can be found in Kettles Yard and in the New Hall art collection. This picture was bought from the Royal Academy Diploma Galleries, 1967.
Joseph Winkelman – ‘Winter Morning’
Joseph Winkelman has specialised in intaglio printmaking since 1975 after completing the Oxford University Certificate course in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing. As an active member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE), he served as President from 1989 to 1995 and was recently artist in residence at St John’s College, Oxford.
John Sturgess – ‘Black and White Leaf’
A student at the Royal College of Art in the 1950s. He would have been taught by Julian Trevelyan, Edwin La Dell, Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden. He worked with John Brunsdon as a printer, printing other artists work, rather than going into teaching. They set up a press in Digswell Art Centre and that is likely how his work ended up in the Hertfordshire Collection. This work of a leaf looks more like foil, it is rather beautiful and a lithograph on stone. Though I haven’t photographed it the frame is a John Jones frame made of aluminium and is as beautiful as the print.
John O’Conner – ‘Boy and the Heron’
John O’Connor A.R.C.A. R.W.S, is today best known for his woodcuts, but during his lifetime he was also celebrated as a watercolourist. In 1930 he enrolled at Leicester College of Art before moving on to the Royal College of Art in 1933. His teachers at this time were Eric Ravilious, John Nash and Robert Austin. He graduated in 1937.
On a visit to Eric Ravilious’s home at Bank House, Castle Hedingham in Essex, O’Connor was captivated both by the directness of the wood-engraving technique, and by the simple domestic scene in which Ravilious engraved by a lamp in one corner of the room while his wife Tirzah played with their small son by the fire in another. It was due to Ravilious that O’Connor got his first commission of work aged 23, illustrating Here’s Flowers by Joan Rutter for the Golden Cockerel Press in 1937.
He taught at Birmingham and Bristol before serving in the Royal Air Force form 41-45. On being demobbed he illustrated two books for the Golden Cockerel Press and taught in Hastings for two years before moving to Colchester to become the head of the School of Art in 1948. He was affectionately known as ‘Joc’ to his students, using his initials. His colleagues included Richard Chopping, who designed dust jackets for the James Bond novels, his own former teacher John Nash, and Edward Bawden, one of the finest British printmakers.
He saw his favourite painting places in Suffolk – the ponds, willows, briars and honeysuckle – disappear beneath the bulldozer and combine harvester. In 1964 O’Connor retired from teaching full time at Colchester, to concentrate on painting and engraving. He wrote various ‘How to’ books and taught part time at St Martin’s School of Art. In 1975 he and his wife, Jeannie, went to live by Loch Ken in Kirkcudbrightshire, where his love of light and water inspired his many watercolours and oil paintings. He took up a post teaching at Glasgow School of Art from 1977 to 1984.
In the 1950s and 60s, O’Connor exhibited at the Zwemmer Gallery, in London, and had many exhibitions throughout Britain. His work was purchased by the Arts Council, the Tate Gallery, the British Museum and the Contemporary Art Society, as well as by several local education authorities; it can also be found in the Oslo Museum, the Zurich Museum and at New York central library. He was elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1947, and, in 1974, to the Royal Watercolour Society. He was an honorary member of the Society of Wood Engravers.
June Berry – ‘High Meadow’
June Berry studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She has had nineteen solo exhibitions including a retrospective at the Bankside Gallery, London in 2002. Her paintings have been exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London since 1952. Berry was Vice-President of the Royal Watercolour Society from 2001 to 2004.
Her work is included in the collections of HM the Queen, the British Government Art Collection, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the National Museum of Wales, the Royal West of England Permanent Collection, the Graphothek, Berlin, Germany and the All Union Society of Bibliophiles, Moscow, Russia. Her work has also been purchased by many private collectors in the UK, USA, Germany and Russia. She is a Member of the Royal Watercolour Society, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, the New English Art Club and is a Royal West of England Academician.
Madeleine Holtom – ‘Orchids’
Madeleine Elizabeth Anderson was born in Belvedere, Kent. She studied art at the Kingston School of Art where Reginald Brill was principal with other teaching from Anthony Betts, William Ware and John Platt. In 1932 she was awarded a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, there she won the painting prize in 1934. She painted in oils and watercolours under William Rothenstein and Gilbert Spencer.
Leaving the RCA she became a professional artist and also worked making advertisements. She married and divorced G. H. Holtom and they had two sons and two daughters, they moved to Northwood near Watford, North-West London. She also exhibited with the New English Art Club.
Her work is represented in the collections of: Friendship House, Moscow. Queen’s College, Oxford. The Cuming Museum. Cheltenham’s Art Gallery. The Government Art Collection, British High Commission, Accra, Ghana.
Frank Freeman – ‘Flower Piece’,
Frank Freeman is a bit of a mystery to me at the moment. I can find mention of him in a few places but sadly due to the blitz and poor archiving many are the lost. What is known is he was supported for a while by Lucy Carrington Wertheim and he was based in the Manchester area. One flower painting is mentioned in her book Adventure in Art.
Visitors who came to see me about this time. Among these were Frances Hodgkins, who stayed for months at a time at my flat, Henry Moore and his lovely Russian wife, John Skeaping, Barbara Hepworth, Cedric Morris, Lett Haines, John Alford, William Plomer, Leon Underwood, John Gould Fletcher, Pavel Tchelitchew, Komisarieysy, David Fincham and his wife Sybil, Jim Ede and Frank Freeman. ‡
John Wynne-Morgan – ‘Christmas Roses’
John Wynne-Morgan was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire and enrolled at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London in 1945.
In a 1962 London catalogue foreword, Wynne-Morgan is described as ‘primarily a portrait painter’ (though the show contained scenes of Paris, Ibiza, Venice and London, and he also painted many Bonnard-ish nudes). His studio was in Hampstead and he was the author of three books for aspiring artists. In Oil Painting as a Pastime: A Complete Course for Beginners (Souvenir Press, London, 1959), he evokes how hard it is to embark on a portrait:
Edna Rodney – ‘Parrot Tulips’
Of all the artists I bought Edna Rodney eludes me, I can not find her anywhere and it might be she was an art student who gave up art for a family or she might have been one of Hertfordshire’s pupils that ended up in the collection as sometimes happened. It is rare to find nothing however.
Chloë Cheese – ‘Lucky Fish’,
Chloëʼs childhood was spent in the Essex village of Great Bardfield observing the printmaking of her mother Sheila Robinson and she remembers in particular often visiting the studios of fellow printmakers Edward Bawden and Michael Rothenstein.
She has contributed to a recent book Bawden, Ravilious and the Artists of Great Bardfield published by the V&A. Chloë studied at Cambridge Art School from 1969 and the RCA from 1973 to 1976.
She has lived in South London since the 70s, investigating her home and surroundings first through drawing which is then used as a basis for the creation of monoprints, lithographs and etchings. Her engagement with still life subjects has widened to include figures against the palimpsest of an urban life.
Chloë has exhibited widely and her work is held in various public collections including The V and A Museum London and The Arts Council of Great Britain. Bio via St Judes.
Chloë Cheese – ‘Pink Carnations’
Michael Rothenstein – ‘Coronation Cockerel’
Born in Hampstead, London, on 19 March 1908, he was the youngest of four children born to the celebrated artist, Sir William Rothenstein and his wife Alice Knewstub. He studied at Chelsea Polytechnic and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Affected by lingering depression, Rothenstein did little art making during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Despite this, he had his first one-man show at the Warren Gallery, London in 1931.
During the late 1930s the artist’s output was mainly Neo-Romantic landscapes and in 1940, like Vincent Lines, he was commissioned to paint topographical watercolours of endangered sites for the Recording Britain project organised by the Pilgrim Trust. In the early 1940s he moved to Ethel House, in the north Essex village of Great Bardfield.
At Great Bardfield there was a small resident art community that included John Aldridge, Edward Bawden and Kenneth Rowntree. In the early 1950s several more artists (including George Chapman, Stanley Clifford-Smith, Audrey Cruddas and Marianne Straub) moved to the village making it one of the most artistically creative spots in Britain. Rothenstein took an important role in organising the Great Bardfield Artists exhibitions during the 1950s. Thanks to his contacts in the art world (his older brother, Sir John Rothenstein, was the current head of the Tate Gallery) these exhibitions became nationally known and attracted thousands of visitors.
From the mid-1950s Rothenstein almost abandoned painting in preference to printmaking which included linocut as well as etchings. Like his fellow Bardfield artists his work was figurative but became near abstract in the 1960s. Although little known as a painter, Rothenstein became one of the most experimental printmakers in Britain during the 1950s and ’60s.
Rothenstein was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1977 and a Royal Academician (RA) in 1984. Near the end of his life there was a retrospective of his work at the Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery (1989) and important shows followed at the Fry Art Gallery, Essex.
The print I have (The Cockerel) was made for the Festival of Britain series of prints in 1951 and is signed under the mount. Likely bought from Redfern Galleries.
The intention is to lead the spectators eye over the canvas surface by an intentional redistribution of the tones and colours of nature and into the picture by the same means plus a reorganisation of the main planes of nature. But that of course is any serious painters job. ‡
Ivon Hitchens – Sizewell Figure among Bracken, 1935
Ivon Hitchens – Sleeping Figure with Book – Sizewell, 1934
When most people talk to me of Sizewell in Suffolk they either think of the nuclear power plant or of Maggi Hambling. But many artists used this sleepy town as a place to paint from. Walter Batley painted the coast and lanes of Sizewell and Dunwich. John Barlow Wood painted the fields and views of the rivers in watercolour. Then in the 1930s Ivon Hitchens rented himself a cottage as an escape from London.
Hitchens was born in London in 1893. His father was the portrait painter Alfred Hitchens. Ivon studied first at St John’s Wood Art School in 1911 and then the Royal Academy Schools from 1911-12, again from 1914-16 and finally 1918-19. Hitchens was elected a member of the Ben Nicholson vision of the Seven and Five Society in 1920, exhibiting in all its exhibitions until 1935. Hitchens also exhibited with the London Artists’ Association, the London Group, and the Society of Mural Painters. After leaving Suffolk his final move was to West Sussex in 1940 after his Hampstead studio was bombed in the Blitz.
During his time at Sizewell on the Suffolk coast he painted various landscape paintings. Some of these came with paintings of his new wife Mary (Mollie) Cranford Coates.
Ivon Hitchens – River Scene at Holbrook and Molly in a Boat, 1938
Ivon Hitchens – Haystacks – Suffolk, 1933
He painted views of the Stour Valley whilst staying with artists Ida and Blair Hughes-Stanton at either Higham – Stratford St Mary near Dedham.
He married at Hove, Sussex in 1935, Mary Cranford Coates and honeymooned at Sizewell. Towards the close of the 1930s, when Hitchens had ended a brief flirtation with abstractism, painting ‘Holbrook Pools’ to the south of Ipswich and a ‘Path Through the Wood’ during his stays on the Shotley Peninsula that his Suffolk stays ended.
She had been invited down to Suffolk to stay for the weekend with Ivon Hitchens, who had rented a cottage on the beach at Sizewell (before the days of nuclear energy); he wanted to make some drawings of her. John Piper, who was already a friend of Hitchens, although ten years his junior, was already staying there, and he came to meet her off the train at Saxmundham. †
The quote above may be at odds with an account it was Leiston station Piper picked her up from. Pedantic, but I can’t find a definitive source. Below is a painting of a balcony in Cambridge, the house of his friend Jack Murray.
Ivon Hitchens – Balcony at Cambridge, 1929
Ivon’s son is a painter too, John Hitchens. John’s son is also an artist – Simon Hitchens.
† June Osborne – John Piper and Stained Glass, 1997 p36 ‡ Ivon Hitchens to John Maynard Keynes, 27th Nov 1940
Elsie Marian Henderson – Landscape – Watercolour and Ink
Henderson was one of the great shining students of the early twentieth century. Her works are in the collections of the Tate, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum’s in London, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Manchester City Art Gallery, Guernsey Museum & Art Gallery and The Whitworth Manchester.
Elsie Marian Henderson – Black Panther & Snake – Linocut
Henderson was born in Eastbourne, Sussex and studied art with the encouragement of her mother. Henderson was a student at the Slade School of Art under the strict Henry Tonks from 1903 to 1905. She continued her art education in the tradition method of the time, by doing a European tour. She moved to Paris and took lessons at various ateliers in the city including the Academie Moderne, Académie Colarossi, Cercle Russe and the Académie de La Palette (studying with cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant and André Dunoyer de Segonzac) under Henri Le Fauconnier. In 1912 Henderson also studied with Othon Friesz before spending 1913 in Italy observing master paintings and works.
Elsie Marian Henderson – The Towers of San Gimignano, Italy – Watercolour
In 1914 at the start of the First World War Elsie moved to Guernsey, living with her sister but in 1916 she enrolled at the Chelsea Polytechnic, where she was taught lithography by the artist Francis Ernest Jackson, one of the pioneers in British lithography. In London she became a frequent visitor to London Zoo and animal drawings and paintings became a major theme of her early work. While still a student London Transport commissioned a poster from her to promote travel to the Zoo, which was, despite its unusual design for the time of a selection of animal studies, was well received.
Elsie Marian Henderson – Moorhen – Linocut
Henderson started her own press and became a member of the Senefelder Club for printmakers. Between 1921-1924 she joined Lucien Pissarro’s short lived art society, the Monarro Group, one of only two women members. In 1924 Henderson had her first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London. The exhibition consisted of drawings, lithographs and bronze sculptures of, often savage, animals such as Jaguar Tearing its Prey and Leopard Killing a Parrot. She had a joint exhibition with Paul Nash. Between 1927 and 1938 she exhibited with the Society of Graver Printers in Colour.
Elsie Marian Henderson – Tiger – Charcoal and pastel
In 1928 Henderson married Emmanuel Edouard Marie Henri de Coudenhove the French consul to Guernsey. The couple lived on the island during World War Two and throughout the German occupation. Baron de Coudenhove died towards the end of the war and in 1946 Henderson moved to Hadlow Down in Sussex.
During her lifetime Henderson exhibited at the Royal Academy, with the Women’s International Art Club and the Society of Women Artists. A joint retrospective exhibition of Henderson’s work, with that of her friend Orovida Pissarro, was held in 1985 at the Michael Parkin Gallery. Sally Hunter Fine Art subsequently held exhibitions of her work.
To Elsie Henderson, stone is a living thing, hence her joy in lithograph. No other process gives such range from velvet-black, profoundly deep to delicate silver. – The Prints of Elsie Henderson – C A Nicholson 1928
Original Poster for the Monarro show at Goupil Gallery, 1921
Lucien Pissarro was the son of painter Camille Pissarro. In 1911 Lucien Pissarro helped to set up the Camden Town Group, he deplored their decision to exclude women members (it was one of his motivations in leaving and setting up the Monarro). In 1913 he was a founding member of the London Group. These major groups not being enough he founded a third, the more obscure Monarro Group with the intention of carrying on the Impressionist tradition.
Lucien Pissarro – All Saints’ Church, Hastings: Sun and Mist, 1918
The Monarro Group was named after Claude Mon(et and Lucien Piss)arro. Monet was the honorary president. Pissarro’s brother Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro also helped set up the group. Theo van Rysselberghe acted as the group’s secretary in Paris and in England it was James Bolivar Manson. Manson was also keeper of pictures at the Tate from 1917 – 1930.
The aim of the group was to exhibit those artists who were inspired by the leading Impressionists. The only known women who exhibited with the Group were Hilary Clements Hassell and Elsie Marian Henderson.
Elsie Marian Henderson – A Tiger, 1916. Tate Britain.
However, it lasted only a brief three years. Other members included New Zealand painter Raymond Francis McIntyre. At least two exhibitions were held at the Goupil Gallery in 1920 and 1921 and included the work of Post-Impressionist Paul Signac.
I do enjoy looking at an artist in a narrow period of time or at one point in an artist’s life. With Bawden his holidays are wonderful examples of a fixed period of time. He normally took them with other artists, John Nash and Carol Weight.
Here we can see many views of Ireland by Bawden, as a contrast to some of the drawings and pictures he made of Portugal and other countries these are some of the most muted, colour wise. I am struggling to resist using the world gloomy. But there is a drama in the landscape that is very much Bawden with his painted lines of geology showing the drama of the hills.
The paintings formed two exhibitions, the first in November 1963 at the Zwemmer Gallery and a later exhibition at the Fine Art Society in November 1968.
Edward Bawden – Errigal, 1962
Edward Bawden – Quarry at Ballybofey Road, 1962
Edward Bawden – The Vault at Glenties, Donegal, 1962
Edward Bawden – The Poisoned Glen, 1962
Edward Bawden – The Muchish Mountain, 1962
Edward Bawden – The Bloody Foreland VI, Co. Donegal, 1965
Edward Bawden – Bloody Foreland VII, Co. Donegal, 1965
After a previous post of Henry Moore’s shelter drawings I wanted to move on to his series of the Family Unit. The shelter drawings were met with a wave of public success as they captured the public’s imagination of hardship without conflict. The drawings were on show at the National Gallery while the gallery’s permanent works were relocated into air-conditioned huts in caves.
Henry Moore – Family Groups, 1944
The Government used the now empty National Gallery for lunchtime concerts of music and displaying the work of War Artists. So the public where being introduced to modern art by Government patronage.
The Family unit works feel like perhaps a natural progression of the shelter themes, the drawing is in that new style of wax and watercolour. Moore abstracted forms down to crash-test-dummy basics. Draped in fabric it was this period of his work that defined the styles he would continue for the rest of his life. Before the war his work being more abstract and less figurative.
Henry Moore – Family Group, 1944
The works date from 1948-1950 though due to chaotic recording of dates and sketches on Moore’s behalf (pages cut out for sale, for exhibitions, etc) some of the works may have started in 1943. The bulk of the work came from a commission from Henry Morris for a sculpture, this acted as a catalyst for the theme and the work in the sketchbooks.
Henry Moore – Family Group, 1944
The educationalist Henry Morris asked Moore for a sculpture to be placed in the grounds of a proposed village college in Impington, Cambridgeshire. It was to be the first Village College in the Britain. Moore later wrote:
’The Family Group in all its differing forms sprang from my absorbing [Morris’s] idea of the village college – that it should be an institution which could provide for the family unit at all its stages.‘ †
Henry Moore – Studies for Family Groups, 1944
Henry Moore – Studies for Family Groups, 1944
The picture above has a notation ‘Family Group (Impington)’. Below are a series of maquette studies for the sculpture.
Henry Moore – Maquette for Family Group, 1944
Henry Moore – Maquette for Family Group, 1944
Henry Moore, Family Group, ca. 1943-1944
Between the commission of the sculpture and the reality of it, Cambridge Council got colder feet about the projected costs. They had started a program of building more Village College Schools all over the county and filling them with art from the Pictures for Schools series too. Cambridge was a county with money but they were spending it quickly. In the end Henry Moore sold the sculpture to Hertfordshire Council Council, who like Cambridge sold off their pictures for Schools. Cambridge didn’t have any sculptures to retain but Hertfordshire kept their sculpture and only sold off the framed works.
The commission was delayed and finally refused due to lack of funds, but a cast of the resulting Family Group 1948-49 was installed at Barclay School, Stevenage, in 1950. †
Henry Moore – Family Group, 1949 cast 1950-1
One great regret for Morris was his failure to acquire a sculpture by Henry Moore for Impington. Moore at that time was not a fashionable artist; the general public found his work shocking. Morris went to see him; they discussed the idea of the village college and Moore agreed to attempt a major sculpture which would stand in front of Gropius’s Impington. †
First a maquette was sent to Morris, who was eager to have it executed; but for the Cambridge county councillors of the time, Moore, and the price asked, were too much. They refused to order it. Two years later, Henry’s adoptive county of Herefordshire commissioned the piece. ‡
John Newsom, Hertfordshire’s imaginative county education officer, was an admirer of Henry Morris and knew that Moore still had the models for the Impington project up his sleeve. †
The Family Group above was Moore’s first larger scale bronze sculpture. Now based in Stevenage, the piece has been seen as symbolising aspects of the values of the post-war era of austerity and reconstruction.
Postcard of the statue in situ.
Grouping outside Harlow Church
When the work was produced Henry Moore made a few more drawings of the Family Group, I would guess to sell on the back of the publicity. There was also a Penguin Print of the sculpture too at the same time in 1948.
Henry Moore – Family Group, 1948. A Penguin Print.
Henry Moore “Family Group” 1948
† Harry Ree – Educator Extraordinary, 1973, p72 ‡ Roger Berthoud – The Life of Henry Moore, 1987 p223
Henry Moore – Women and Children in the Tube, 1940
The London Underground stations and tubeways, being so deep underground for some of the network became the obvious places for Londoners to shelter from air raids by German bombers.
It was during this time that Henry Moore came across the people sleeping in the underground. Moore had been out to dinner in London in the autumn of 1940 and that evening took the underground home. When the train got to Belsize Park, Moore and his wife Irina had to work over the sea of people using the network as a shelter. The view is somewhat squalid. They were documented by the photographer Bill Brandt in Lilliput magazine.
Bill Brandt – Liverpool Street Underground Station Shelter, 1940
Henry Moore – Sleeping Figures, 1941
The most curious feature of the shelter drawings is Moore claimed never to draw subjects. He was living at 11a Parkhill Road, Belsize Park at the time but used to watch people and then sketch the scene afterwards at home. I would suggest he did some on location very quickly, like the image above and the one below, then worked them up at his home or in the studio he had in Hampstead. The shapes would have been recorded but not the people or their expressions.
Henry Moore – Shelter Study, 1941
Henry Moore – Large Shelter Sketchbook, 1941 (From the Sketchbooks)
Henry Moore – Tube Shelter Perspective, 1941 (From the Sketchbooks)
Henry Moore – Tube Shelter Perspective, 1941 (From the Sketchbooks)
Above are drawings from the Sketchbooks. The bodies are simple penmarks and the reversed wax wish washes over. The drawing could be made in the Underground and then waxed, washed and painted over after. Below is a version of the Tube from the studio, more detail worked in.
Henry Moore – Tube Shelter Perspective, 1941
Curiously Moore decided to cut the sketchbook pages out and exhibit them in 1970. The Pictures below are three examples from the Sketchbooks that shows Moore adding a felt tipped marker pen for colour in the 1970s long after the originals were created.
Henry Moore – Sleeping Figures, 1941 (Reworked in 1970)
Henry Moore – Reclining Figures, 1941 (Reworked in 1970)
Henry Moore – Shelter Drawing with Sleeping Figures, 1941 (Reworked in 1970)
The rest of the images were made at the dates stated and are final finished versions, much more pronounced and refined.
I was fascinated by the sight of the people camping out deep under the ground. I had never seen so many rows of reclining figures and even the holes out of which the trains were coming seemed to me to be like the holes in my sculpture. And there were intimate little touches. Children fast asleep, with trains roaring past only a couple of yards away. People who were obviously strangers to one another forming tight little intimate groups. They were cut off from what was above, but they were aware of it. There was tension in the air. They were a bit like the chorus in a Greek drama telling us about the violence we don’t actually witness †
Henry Moore – Shelterers in the Tube, 1941
Henry Moore – Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941
Henry Moore – Shelter Scene: Bunks and Sleepers, 1941
Henry Moore – Pink and Green Sleepers’, 1941
Henry Moore – Woman in an Underground Shelter Feeding a Child, 1941
Henry Moore – Mother and Child among Underground Sleepers, 1941
Moore moved from London in 1941 as his studio was bombed. It lead him to finding a shelter of his own and moving to Much Hadham, the home that is now a museum of his life’s work.
We came here in 1941, when my studio in London was made unusable by a bomb falling nearby and it happened that we were not in London that weekend. We were staying in Much Hadham with friends only two or three hundred yards across from here in a little park called South End. We could see that there was a raid going on because it is near enough to London as the crow flies – only about twenty miles. The friends we had been staying with tried to persuade us to stay a little longer, but I said I was doing the Shelter Drawings and had to get back. We left them on the Monday morning in the little Standard Coupé that we had in those days, and for which I had a small petrol ration, being a war artist. When we got to Hampstead, the road to our studio was cordoned off by the police because of an unexploded bomb. A policeman said, You can’t go this way. Where do you live?’ I said, ‘7 Mall Studios,’ and he said, ‘Oh, they’re flat to the ground,’ with almost a kind of enjoyment in the devastation. So we had to go all the way round, taking about five minutes and imagining all the time that our studio was flat to the ground. However, he had mistaken it and it was Park Hill Studios that had the direct hit, but it was near enough our studio for it to be made unusable, with the windows and doors blown in. ‡
Photograph of Mall Studios in the late 1930s
In those days you couldn’t possibly get a house repaired within six or seven months but we had to have somewhere to live. I rang our Much Hadham weekend friend and said, ‘We would like to come back as you suggested’. Within a week we had found that half this house, Hoglands was available to rent. It was near enough to London for me to travel backwards and forwards, spending the night in the shelters and coming back here the next day to do the drawings. You couldn’t sit in the shelters and draw people undressing their children – it was too private.
In 1941, the house was in a very bad state, tumble-down and so on. Later we got the whole house. The owner wanted to sell, we bought it, and we have been here ever since, gradually making repairs. Ten or fifteen years ago, we built an extra room because there was no room facing the south that got the sunshine, and we acquired several acres, of garden so I could continue working out-of-doors. ‡
† Henry Moore – Writings and Conversations, 2002 p320 ‡ With Henry Moore, 1978 p24
