Paul Nash – Different Places

Paul Nash’s book ‘Places – 7 Prints’ has some curious works you might think were only made for the book. It is a rare book to find, being printed in 255 editions (55 of those a folio copy).

Many of the woodcuts also came with a poem following them. It was 1922 and a great time for poetry; it was just after the First World War and the Georgian Poets series of books published by Edward Marsh were popular. I can’t help but feel personally that Nash was only interested in poetry because Marsh made it fashionable and he was also a great patron of young artists. Marsh did go on to buy one of the pictures in this post, Tench Pond in a Gale in 1922 (Before the war Marsh wanted to publish a book of young artists work called Georgian Drawings, it never happened).

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The cover features a woodcut ‘Meeting Place’ of two naked swimmers by a tree lined pond, printed in 1922.

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 Paul Nash – Meeting Place, 1922 (Woodblock)

Rather like what I have found with Eric Ravilious, many works are recycled from a sketch, to a woodcut and then a painting. It is all part of a long process – one at the time that would be new, ‘commercial art’ and in tow, printmaking; by this I mean that a woodblock printed book is more ‘mass production’ in the same way a limited edition print of 250 is.

It is nice to pin the location down to reality. The pond was in the garden of Claud Lovat Fraser’s parents’ home at Buntingford, Hertfordshire.

In preparation for the oil Nash wrote to the present works first owner, Desmond Coke, requesting ‘The Chestnut Waters I really do want photographed very badly because I am doing a large painting of that design for the show.’. 

He wrote again to Coke stating that the oil ‘is the best of the lot and nearest to being an achievement I think’

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 Paul Nash – Chestnut Waters, 1923 (Oil)

A year before the oil was made, Nash made a watercolour of the same location. What I always took to be a tree in the middle of the woodcut, appears in the Oil and watercolour to be heavy branches, laden down over the pond and the reflections. I rather think the oil painting is lovely in that Cézanne cubist style of colour shading light-to-dark. But the watercolour to me has a lightness more like a cathedral interior.

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 Paul Nash – Chestnut Waters, 1922 (Watercolour)

Below is an undated landscape in the Fitzwilliam, from what I can tell of the notes it is the back of another painting and so, likely unfinished. We can never say it is a relation of the paintings above, but there is a squared off pond lined with trees and could well be the plein air version made in the garden before working ‘Chestnut Waters’ up in his studio.

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 Paul Nash – Landscape, The Fitzwilliam Museum

The year before in Iden, Sussex, Nash drew one of his more famous works, Tench Pond in a Gale (Below). Is it a painting that puts to use all Nash’s wonderful skills of drawing trees but gives them a drama and movement unlike his other works.

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 Paul Nash – Tench Pond in a Gale, 1921–2

Below is another woodcut from the 7 Places book. Not unlike the Tench Pond in a Gale picture, but not like it enough either.

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 Paul Nash – Black Poplar Pond, 1922 

Most of the illustrations in 7 Places came with a poem by Nash. The poems here are not amazing and may be why they have been forgotten.

Paul Nash – Black Poplar Pond
Black Poplars shudder in the sun. Erect or slanting, their whorled shafts project a glinting shower into the crowded scaffolding of trees. Blunt shards of pine absorb the falling beams which polished leaf and rounded bole reflect in myriad facets of fierce light. With height of noon floods of cool wind pass over the fields, shattering quiet. The corn stalks bend, boughs swing their burdens to and fro. Dark waters image changes in grimace. The choir of leaves opens its song.

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Ponds were clearly an inspiration to Nash in his 7 Places, there are many examples of pond works from 1921 – 1922. The one below is a wonderful example with the textures in his trees.

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 Paul Nash – Landscape in pale tones, 1921

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 Paul Nash – Garden Pond, 1922

Paul Nash – Garden Pond
With silence force the sun hurles down light, With no disturbance, with no sound it falls upon the trees, the grass, the waters of the pond. Noiselessly, without movement, light mutilates the trees, the grass, beats upon the waters. No tumult comes. There is no cry, no moan. The leaves glitter, the grass is shining, the waters flash in the still pond. 

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 Paul Nash – Garden Pond, 1st Proof with studies to the sides, 1922

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 Paul Nash – Dark Lake, 1922

Paul Nash – Dark Lake
In a black pine wood is a lake, an inscrutable, dark face, staring up at the sun or into the moon’s face or at the stars peering down. Above, the pines in tall columns and mighty domes and great arches stand nearly motionless. At the water’s edge rushes and irises mass their slender swords. The grey teeth of an old fence look ghostly against dark waters. Beyond a platform jutting out, a woman, naked gleams in this shadowy place. 

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 Paul Nash – Winter, 1922

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 Paul Nash – Pond in the Fields, 1927

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 Paul Nash – Study for Paths into the wood, 1922

Above is a drawing dated 1921, dedicated to William Rothenstein from Paul Nash as a Christmas card in 1923.

Being the drawing that would have been used to carve a woodcut, the woodcut is in reverse and printed below. The figure is harder to see below in the woodcut.

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 Paul Nash – Paths into the wood, 1922

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 Paul Nash – Winter Wood, 1922

Paul Nash by Andrew Causey, p378, 1980

What is Studio Pottery?

It is always hard to say what the joy is in studio pottery, but I think it is knowing that it is crafted and made rather than mass produced in a factory. There has always been a tradition of decorated slipware in pottery as other than paintings, carvings in churches and textile embroidery there were few opportunities to ever see any decoration on items. If you did, it was normally because you too had money.

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 Thomas Toft – Staffordshire Slipware Dish, c1670-90

After the fashions of early slipware and large decorated chargers came the smaller refined pots that the public would buy in the Victorian periods. This followed the social change of home ownership and so factories had new markets to cater for. This is the time when Royal Doulton and Brannam Pottery both stopped making sewage pipes and chimney pots and started to make domestic kitchenware and vases.

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 Arthur Bamkin for Charles Brannam – Sgraffito Cup, 1898

After the fashions of early slipware and large decorated chargers came the smaller refined pots that the public would buy in the Victorian periods. This followed the social change of home ownership and so factories had new markets to cater for. This is the time when companies like Royal Doulton and Brannam Pottery both stopped making sewage pipes and chimney pots and started to make domestic kitchenware and vases.

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 Robert Wallace for Martin Brothers – Double Sided Face Jug, 1901

The Martin Brothers whose large birds command such high prices also demand a mention for they were the blurred line of Doulton’s factory made designs and Brannam Pottery’s craft. They created vases with bold and bright decoration before going into a series of ceramics with natural earthy tones. The most interesting thing about them is that they can be incredibly surreal, and, well, tacky. Some are beautiful, but I thought it was good to show some early surrealism.

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 Joseon Dynasty Moon Jar, 18c.

The moon Jar above is the most famous example of Bernard Leach’s effect on British Crafts. He bought the jar while out in the East and brought it back to Britain and when he died he left to Lucie Rie, who in-turn left it to the British Museum.

Bernard Leach was raised in the days of the British Empire. His father worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and as a child he was based in Hong Kong and in Japan before returning to Britain to attend schooling. He attended the Slade for a time and then the London School of Art in Kensington where he was taught etching by Frank Brangwyn. Leach was at this time very fond of Etching and returned to Japan with the intention of teaching it to the Japanese.

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 Bernard Leach – A London Scene (Etching), 1908-9. (Leach-Redgrave Restrike)    

While in Japan Leach became obsessed by the craft of pottery and took lessons with Urano Shigekichi. After learning the industry for a year he set up his own pottery in Japan before moving to China. He exhibited his works and this lead to the introduction to Shōji Hamada.

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 Bernard Leach – Leaping Fish Vase, c1965

Hamada was deeply impressed by a Tokyo exhibition of ceramic art by Bernard Leach, who was then staying with Yanagi Sōetsu, and wrote to Leach seeking an introduction. The two found much in common and became good friends, so much so that Hamada asked and was granted permission to accompany Leach to England in 1920 when the latter decided to return and establish a pottery there.

Edgar Skinner – a friend of Leach’s father introduced him to the St. Ives Guild of Handicrafts which was supported by local wealthy philanthropist called Francis Horne who lived at Tremorna in Carbis Bay. She offered him a capital loan of £2500 to set up his pottery with Hamada and also an assured income of £250 for 3 years.

The Leach Pottery was founded and over the next ten years they would experiment with the clays, slips and glazes in the UK and different woods to burn in the kilns. In 1923 Michael Cardew joined the pottery and left some years later to found Winchcombe Pottery.

The Leach Pottery took on various students to work there: Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, Norah Braden, Charlotte Epton and Dorothy Kemp. It was not the only pottery but I think it is honest to say the Leach pottery and the skills learnt in Asia have made him important. His influence would go on when there was a serge in home pottery in the 1960s and people copied his designs and used his glaze recipes.

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 Charlotte Epton – Jar and Lid, c1930

The other pottery that helped the surge of British Studio Pottery would be at Dartington Hall. Bernard Leach helped set up the pottery in the late 1920s. He recommended Sylvia Fox-Strangeways who was the first potter at Dartington. She was joined by Marianne De Trey who would later run it and education pupils.

Many other potters were forging the way in Studio Pottery in the interwar years: William Staite Murray, Dora Billington, Lucie Rie, Ursula Mommens, Ray Finch and Hans Coper. But to list the styles they made, the shapes of pots and their individual glazes would make this post too long

In the 1960s and 70s in the UK there was a boom in the amount of small potteries. Some looked back at the methods of making pottery in the Leach-Asian tradition, some went on to make domestic wear, others just experimented with styles. There are so many wonderful potters from all over Britain and their decorations and ways of potting are all so different. To collect it now doesn’t have to be expensive as some galleries would have you believe and I have been both collecting and selling pots in Cambridge for years.

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 Peter C Arnold for Alderney Pottery – Pot and Lid, c1970

I don’t know if the modern potters would call it their moment of postmodernism, but there are many craftsmen out there who are experimenting with the size and form of things. Below is plate by Dylan Bowen who has an amazing eye for almost careless slip designs.

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 Dylan Bowen – Plate, c2015

Now some potters make record amounts at auction and museums have exhibitions of their pottery, like Kettle’s Yard with Jennifer Lee. In the 1990s David Bowie invested in the Leaping Fish Vase by Bernard Leach and in the sale of his collection of art it broke the record for a Leach work at £32,500.

Who is Robin Darwin

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 Robin Darwin – Near Dedham, Suffolk, 1956, Government Art Collection

Sir Robert Vere “Robin” Darwin KCB CBE RA RSA PRWA NEAC has more names and honours to his name than you would think possible, so why isn’t he better known?

He was the son of the golf writer Bernard Darwin and his wife the engraver Elinor Monsell. His aunts were Gwen Ravarat and Margaret Keynes. One of his sisters was the potter Ursula Mommens who married and divorced Julian Trevelyan before Mary Fedden. He was a great-grandson of the naturalist Charles Darwin. Robin was both an artist and an educator.

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 Robin Darwin – The Thames at Kew, Oliver’s Island, 1954

Robin started off at Eton and then went on to the Slade art school, under Henry Tonks he lasted only a term. When the Second World War came he found himself as an artistic administrator in the Camouflage unit under the Ministry of Home Security in Leamington Spa designing things from inflatable rubber tanks to working out how to disguise large factories from the air with trees and their shadows. He went back to teach art at Eton and there set up the school’s famous ceramics department.

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 Robin Darwin – Suffolk Landscape, c1935

He then moved on to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in 1945, looking at the post-war reconstruction of London. Then he was appointed education officer in the newly formed Council of Industrial Design. It was under the  Board of Trade and a propaganda unit for British Design. Under the leadership of Gordon Russell and Paul Reilly it became the Design Council.

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 Robin Darwin – The Wittenham Clumps

He was also involved with the Festival of Britain but he is now famous for being the rector of the Royal College of Art from 1948 until 1971.

Through his reforming leadership of the Royal College of Art, Robin Darwin had an enormous impact on C20 art and design. As a subsequent Rector of the RCA, Sir Christopher Frayling, points out in his introduction to this first biography of Charles Darwin’s great-grandson, Darwin’s influence at the College has lasted for over sixty years, far longer than the Bauhaus existed (thirteen years) or Black Mountain College’s celebrated twenty-year heyday.

Thorpeness

Thorpeness is a curious place on the Suffolk coastline. Between Aldeburgh and Sizewell, it is a toytown. There are some old properties in the village but many of them are 20th century.

In 1910, Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie, a Scottish barrister who had made his money building railways around the world, increased the family’s local estates to cover the entire area from north of Aldeburgh to past Sizewell, up the coast and inland to Aldringham and Leiston.

Most of this land was used for farming, but Ogilvie developed Thorpeness into a private fantasy holiday village, to which he invited his friends’ and colleagues’ families during the summer months. A country club with tennis courts, a swimming pool, a golf course and clubhouse, and many holiday homes, were built in Jacobean and Tudor Revival styles. Thorpeness railway station, provided by the Great Eastern Railway to serve what was expected to be an expanding resort, was opened a few days before the outbreak of World War I. It was little used, except by golfers, and closed in 1966.

For three generations Thorpeness remained mostly in the private ownership of the Ogilvie family, with houses only being sold from the estate to friends as holiday homes. In 1972, Alexander Stuart Ogilvie, Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie’s grandson, died on the Thorpeness Golf Course. Many of the houses and the golf course and country club had to be sold to pay death duties.

In many ways Thorpeness reminds me of Frinton-On-Sea, a protective elite of housing owners, but Frinton (though also hellish) has some fantastic art deco properties. Thorpeness is a poorly maintained theme park of some strange Tudor England. It reminded me of the home-made houses for tri-ang train sets and early dolls houses.

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 Tri-ang dollhouses #93 

While walking around I kept thinking of the quote below by Linda Smith on golf courses vs the countryside. To me Thorpeness is fake architecture vs historical homes.

People say ‘it’s out in the countryside’, a golf course is not the countryside – it’s the countryside tidied up, it’s the countryside for people who wished the countryside had wipe clean surfaces, it’s the countryside for people whose gardens are full of conifer and heather. 

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Edwin Smith – The Painter

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 Edwin Smith – Steam Roller 

Edwin Smith is renowned for being a photographer but few knew that he was a painter as well. His wife Olive Cook was a self taught painter and was educated at Benton End under Cedric Morris on weekends.

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 Edwin Smith – Self Portrait, 1970

He was born in Canonbury, Islington, London, the only child of Edwin Stanley Smith, a clerk, and his wife Lily Beatrice. After leaving school he was educated at the Northern Polytechnic, transferring to the architectural school at the age of sixteen. He then won a scholarship to the Architectural Association, but gave up his course and worked as a draughtsman for several years. He became a freelance photographer in 1935, working briefly for Vogue as a fashion photographer. However he concentrated his artistic efforts on subjects such as the mining community of Ashington in Northumberland, the docks of Newcastle, and circuses and fairgrounds around London.

In 1935 Smith married Rosemary Ansell, but the marriage ended in divorce two years later. A few years later Smith was living with Olive Cook, whom he married in 1954.

The Fry Gallery holds a great deal of Smith’s painted works and they are naive but I would say competent; I think there is something free and wonderful in them.

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 Edwin Smith – Stacking Peas with a view of Waveney Church, Norfolk

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 Edwin Smith – Turf Fire

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 Edwin Smith – Corn and Pomegranate

Dunkirk in Art

In this post I look at the artworks of events at Dunkirk in 1940. Some would have been sketched or observed on the day, others were painted with eye-witness reports and photographs. Many were finished in a studio in the weeks and months after.

On 10 May 1940, Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, pushing the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), along with French and Belgian troops, back to the French port of Dunkirk. A huge rescue, Operation ‘Dynamo’, was organised by the Royal Navy to get the troops off the beaches and back to Britain. 

‘Dynamo’ began on 26 May. Strong defences were established around Dunkirk, and the Royal Air Force sent all available aircraft to protect the evacuation. Over 800 naval vessels of all shapes and sizes helped to transport troops across the English Channel. The last British troops were evacuated on 3 June, with French forces covering their escape. Churchill and his advisers had expected that it would be possible to rescue only 20,000 to 30,000 men, but in all 338,000 troops, a third of them French, were rescued. Ninety thousand remained to be taken prisoner and the BEF left behind the bulk of its tanks and heavy guns. All resistance in Dunkirk ended at 9.30am on 4 June.

When I saw the Richard Eurich picture below, the sea was so well painted it looked like glass. It was at an exhibition in the Queens House, Greenwich. It is a fantastic picture that viewed in a book or on the internet doesn’t comprehend. It was also used by the Navy as its Christmas card for 1940.

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 Richard Eurich – Withdrawal from Dunkirk, 1940

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 Charles Cundall – The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, 1940

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 John Spencer-Churchill – Dunkirk from the Bray Dunes, 1940

Below is a painting by Wilkinson who to my eye is the master of painting seascapes. He has a wonderful repertoire of boats and the lighting in this painting is a marvel. Though beautiful, it also shows the hellish chaos of the day.

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 Norman Wilkinson – The Little Ships at Dunkirk, 1940

The Little Ships at Dunkirk: June 1940, by Norman Wilkinson. The gently shelving beaches meant that large warships could only pick up soldiers from the town’s East Mole, a sea wall which extended into deep water, or send their boats on the beaches to collect them. To speed up the process, the British Admiralty appealed to the owners of small boats for help. These became known as the ‘little ships’.

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 Newspaper with the small announcement under ‘War Artists’.

On Thursday, 7th March, 1940, three days before his 37th birthday, it was announced in the British papers that Edward Bawden and Barnett Freeman were to become Official War Artists on behalf of the British War Office.

In the first days of April, Ardizzone (Edward) and Bawden took rooms for a while in the hotel Commerce in Arras, fussed over by a shared batman. They enjoyed the local wine and hospitality, before being billeted separately. Arras was dour, small and grey, It was also the GHQ for the British Army in France.

Arras in France is just over fifty miles away on a map, from April to May the retreat to Dunkirk was rapid and not an inspiring start for a war artist. In this short time Bawden said he was passed from regiments and groups rapidly as none of them wanted the alien burden of an artist to deal with, but being on the move a lot may have prepared his sketching style ready for Dunkirk where rapid copy was needed.

On his way to Dunkirk, Bawden has rolled up his paintings in a cylindrical tin which he clutched under his arm.

Approaching the port, he ditched all his equipment except his art materials (what would the Germans have done with them?) Marching into the town, they ran the gauntlet of ragged French soldiers jeering them. It discomforted him, as did the looters sweeping like locusts through abandoned houses.

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 Edward Bawden – Dunkirk: Embarkation of Wounded, May 1940

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 Edward Bawden – Dunkirk – The New World, 1940

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 Edward Bawden – Boys Serving Coffee, Dunkirk, 1940.

He reached the quayside in the company of a Canadian major, and they watched with dismay the frantic self-preservation of a group of British generals on the Dunkirk quayside, the swagger sticks pointing at likely boats bound for England. He turned to the major, with a wry smile. ‘Rats always go first’ he said.

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 Edward Bawden – Dunkirk – Embarkation of Wounded, 1940

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 Edward Bawden – The Quay at Dunkirk, 1940.

In the watercolour above, notice the fires along the jetty. The men in the foreground descending into a air-raid shelter and the bomb craters on the ground. The air raid shelter is likely to be the same one below, but in the chaos who could tell.

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 Edward Bawden – The Entrance to an Air Raid Shelter, Dunkirk, 1940

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 Edward Bawden – In an Air Raid Shelter, Dunkirk: Bombs are dropping, 1940

The Sketchbook War by Richard Knott, 2013 978-0752489230
Imperial War Museum – Dunkirk

John Nash’s Wood Engraving

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 John Nash – Foxglove, 1927

John Nash is more famous for his paintings of the First World War or his later-life landscapes, but as a young man he was a very fine wood-engraver. It seems by nature that wood-engraving at this time follows book illustration and as John’s brother Paul was championing a wave of woodblock revival at this time it is no surprise that in 1921 John became a member of the Society of Wood Engravers, a new society set up in 1920 by Eric Gill, Lucien Pissarro and Edward Gordon Craig. In coming years with more confidence with woodcut John Nash was able to illustrate whole books such a Poisonous Plants, 1927 that features 20 large botanical illustrations.

Many of his prints before 1924 where done to learn the craft and given as gifts but the Golden Cockerel Press asked him to illustrate a book in woodcut and he became professional and and a commercial artist. He would sell these woodcuts as limited editions too.

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 John Nash – Black Bryony (Dioscorea communis), 1927  

His innocence and freshness of outlook has led him to emphasise the sharp-cut quality of engraving and this expresses the essence of living and the appreciation of forms. John Nash’s engraving of the human form, of flowers and of plants have a realism that is quite scientific in its observation and crispness of expression. 

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 John Nash – Shearing Sheep, 1923

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 John Nash – Woodland Interior, 1929

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 John Nash – Spurge-Laurel (Daphne Laureola), 1927

 John Nash – Frontispiece for Kathleen Woodward’s Jipping Street, 1928

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 John Nash – Marrow and other Autumn Fruit and Flowers, 1935
‘Flowers and Faces’ by H.E. Bates, published by the Golden Cockerel Press

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 John Nash – Flowers and Faces, 1935
‘Flowers and Faces’ by H.E. Bates, published by the Golden Cockerel Press

Albert Garrett – A History of British Wood Engraving, 1978

Paul Nash at the Fitz

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 Paul Nash – Landscape of the British Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum

One of the arguments for not leaving a good bit of art to a large museum is that it might never be seen. The idea that your gift may end up in the endless archives of the Tate Gallery or Towner comes with that danger. When Edward Bawden was looking to leave his studio to someone he chose the Higgins Gallery in Bedford because they were much smaller and would be more likely to exhibit his works, though for some time that was not what happened. (It was a decision he apparently regretted when the Fry Gallery was founded in 1985 and opened in 1987.) If work sits in archive storage this might give more weight to my constant quest for Why not a Tate East?

I digress – the other day while looking up engraved windows by John Hutton I discovered the The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge have an online archive of the pieces they own, many of them being in archives not on display and it shocked me to see how many works by Paul Nash they had.

Living in Cambridge one of the things visitors to the city want to see is the Fitzwilliam’s amazing collection of art, but to me a lot of it doesn’t rotate and so I find going rather boring. I wish they could set a rotating room or explore their archives for exhibitions. Below the paintings are mostly from the collection of Paul Nash’s in the Fitzwilliam Museum archives.

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 Paul Nash – Landscape with Rooks, 1913, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – The cliff to the north, 1912, Fitzwilliam Museum

Below are a series of Monster Studies, the photographs and oil are in the Tate but the watercolours are in the Fitz. It is interesting to show how Nash used photography as a memory aid.

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 Paul Nash – Monster Field, Study I, 1938, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – Monster Field, 1938, Tate TGA 7050PH/1111

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 Paul Nash – Monster Field, Study II, 1938, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – Monster Field,  1938, Tate TGA 7050PH/1109

Here in the oil painting by Nash below, he uses both of the ‘Monster’ tree stumps, one in front of the other with his dream like landscape. If it wasn’t for the Oak trees, I would guess at it being Mexico, it’s almost a tacky colour palette.

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 Paul Nash – Monster Field, 1938

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 Paul Nash – Clouds, hill and the plain, 1945, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – Sunset eye, Study II, 1945, Fitzwilliam Museum 

The photography returns with this other ugly Grotto made in the back-garden of Paul Nash’s house in 3 Eldon Grove, Hampstead. Nash lived at this address from 1936 till August 1939. In the photograph a tree stump has been placed in front of the grotto entrance in what might be said to be a phallic way.I don’t think anyone would have guessed this without the photograph as a guide as I thought his painting was of a semi demolished house.

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 Paul Nash – The grotto, Eldon Grove, 1938, Tate TGA 7050PH/670

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 Paul Nash – The grotto, Eldon Grove, 1938, Tate TGA 7050PH/673

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 Paul Nash – The Grotto at Eldon Grove / Study of the Grotto at Eldon Grove, 1938, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – November Moon, 1942, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – Garden, 1929, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – Atlantic ocean, 1932, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Bright Cloud Sketch of a landscape, 1941, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – Landscape of the Death Watch, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – The Bird-Cage (Canary), 1927, Fitzwilliam Museum

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 Paul Nash – Design for backcloth, The Truth about the Russian Dancers, 1920, Fitzwilliam Museum

Bye Felicia, Browne

You would think that after the First World War that young people wouldn’t rush to war again, but when in 1936 the Spanish Civil War started a lot of the left wing types you might suspect of being conscientious objectors went off to stand against fascism.

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The son of Bloomsbury’s Clive and Vanessa Bell went off to Spain in 1937. Julian Bell wished to fight against Franco in the International Brigade in Spain, but his Aunt Virginia Woolf and his parents both persuaded him he would be safer and more use as an Ambulance Driver with the Spanish Medical Aid. Julian died after being hit by Shrapnel 18 July 1937 months after arriving.

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The artists that remained in Britain would hold auctions or art exhibitions of works to raise funds or go on anti-fascist  marches. It all reminds me of Marghanita Laski’s ‘Love on the Supertax’. Felicia Brown went off to Spain and died there.

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Felicia Browne was born to well-to-do parents in the London suburbs in 1904. She took various courses at the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1921 and 1928. Then she went to Germany to study sculpture. Historian Tom Buchanan writes* that she witnessed the rise of Nazism in Berlin, and may have taken part in anti-fascist street fighting. She returned to Britain in the early 1930s and in 1933 joined the Communist Party.

She travelled by car to Spain via Paris with her friend, Edith Bone. They arrived in Barcelona just days before Franco’s attempted coup of 18 July 1936. The people rose up to defend the Popular Front government and Felicia Browne was immediately caught up in those heady days.

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During her brief time in Spain, Felicia Browne sketched other members of the militia, local people and the scenes around her. Following her death, these and other sketches were exhibited in London in October 1936. A selection of them were later published by Lawrence & Wishart, using as a preface Felicia Browne’s letter to Elizabeth Watson. They have frequently been reproduced to illustrate books on the Spanish Civil War. 

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After trying unsuccessfully to enter the medical services, she volunteered to join the PSUC (Catalan communist) militia, the Karl Marx, heading for Aragon to defend the Republic. They made their headquarters in the small but strategically important town of Tardienta. It was situated near to the railway line from Zaragoza to Huesca, which took vital supplies to the rebel forces. An aqueduct that carried water supplies to the enemy also passed through the town.

When the Karl Marx militia arrived in Tardienta, other militia columns were already billeted there. Several small-scale exchanges of fire took place on 14 and 15 August 1936 between forces of the Columna del Barrio, which included Dutch miliciana and machine-gunner Fanny Schoonheyt, and the rebels.

Felicia Browne’s militia attempted to sabotage the railway line. In a surprise attack by fascist forces that greatly outnumbered them, an Italian miliciano was wounded. Felicia went to his rescue and both were cut down by machine-gun fire and killed, probably on 22 August 1936. 

Drawings by Felicia Browne, 1936.
Felicia Browne: The first British casualty in Spain
Tom Buchanan – The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press

Reginald Percy Robert Gossop

Here is a post on Robert Gossop, an extraordinary designer who really moved with the times. His style went from Art Nouveau to bold bright modernism. He opened up an advertising agency to promote his own and other young talent for advertising.

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – The Queen of Hearts, 1899

Robert Percy Gossop (1876 – 1951) was apprenticed in 1892 as a wallpaper and fabric designer in London. Whilst undertaking his apprenticeship he attended art classes at colleges including Birkbeck College and Hammersmith School of Art. From 1896 to 1902 he worked as a designer and freelance illustrator. In 1902 he married Jessie Dora Meech, an artist from Camden School of Art.

From 1902 until 1904 he worked as studio manager for the printers Eyre and Spottiswood and from 1904 in the same capacity for W. H. Smith. At W. H. Smith he worked with a number of significant artists, including Henry Ospovat, and designed Smith’s famous lozenge shaped logo. In 1913, following a visit to America, Gossop became the first art editor for British Vogue. In 1914 he became art adviser to Dobson Molle and Co., an Edinburgh firm of printers. From 1916 until the end of the First World War he worked at the Ministry of Information, helping with the distribution of propaganda. At the end of the war he became joint manager at Carlton Studio.

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – London town and country, 1929

In 1923, partly to help his friend Edmund J. Sullivan, Gossop set up his own firm of artists’ agents, R.P. Gossop Ltd. His clients included Hanslip Fletcher and Eric Fraser. At the same time he continued to work as a freelance designer and illustrator, with commissions including designs for the Empire Marketing Board, Heal & Son Ltd and London Transport. In 1926 he co-founded the Society of Industrial Artists with Milner Gray. He also served on the Council of the Design and Industries Association. In 1937 he delivered the Dent Memorial Lecture, on book illustration, and from 1938 worked as a lecturer at the City of London College. His daughter joined him as office manager for R.P. Gossop Ltd in 1925 and after his death in 1951 she continued to run the business.

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 An advert for the Reginald Percy Gossop Artists Agency. 

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – With a season ticket, 1926

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – Time is Money, 1926

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – The Way to Theatreland by Underground, 1926

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – The Way to Theatreland by Underground, 1926

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – Hendon RAF Display, 1926

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – It is warmer down below, 1924

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – Advertising Agency advert.

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – Heal’s For Sound Furniture, 1927

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 Reginald Percy Gossop – Heal’s for Beds, 1927