Author: Robjn Cantus

Edward Bawden in Norfolk

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 24th October 2018

There is nothing I have found that Bawden said in favour of Norfolk that would make this post become more interesting than me presenting some of his works to you. The works I have found showed that when he visited a place he painted it from various angles. I think all of these works were painted in the late 1960s as Bawden had an exhibition at The Fine Art Society in November of 1968 of paintings from Ireland, the Middle East and Norfolk.

The Church of St Michael The Archangel in Booton, about 10 miles drive from Aylsham is an architectural marvel that you don’t see in Britain. Designed in French Gothic style with pinnacles and two towers it might be a small set from Lord of the Rings.

The Church of St. Michael The Archangel, Booton, Norfolk,

Edward Bawden – Design for The Church of St. Michael The Archangel, Booton, Norfolk, 1966

The painting below I rather like for its bold outline painting, but more for the shade of foliage to the left and white church stone in front, the church is painted in a gradient from white on the left, to black flints on the right.

Edward Bawden – The Church of St. Michael The Archangel, Booton, Norfolk, 1966

Worstead Church is signed but looks more unfinished. It has the hints of a John Piper in the colour blotting and slight unfinished abstraction, though this may be because it mostly was unfinished.

Edward Bawden – Worstead Church, 1966

Above a detail section of the Church that makes Bawden’s linocuts so wonderful; He takes a section out of scenes when making them into linocuts (on the Road To Thaxsted is a good example where he has cropped the picture with part of the Cottage roof but did not show the whole scene. If all the cottage was to appear it would look very twee). Bawden has also cut grooved grass, and a wild hacking of the lino made the distress on the building. Its printing in such a dark blue it looks like a negative image from film and to be a little provocative, I have inverted the image as a negative below.. I think it looks more pleasing, more like an Ed Kluz, though Edward wouldn’t thought much to my meddling!

after Edward Bawden – Worstead Church, 1966 (Inverted image)

The following images are Bawden as a good watercolour artist, using a wash on the grass and then a darker series of lines, the sky made up of geometric clouds and the trees inked out in pen and filled in with a broad green wash in a grey of the church and a green.

Edward Bawden – St Mary’s Church, Marlingford, Norfolk.

Edward Bawden – St Mary’s, Marlingford IV, 1968

Edward Bawden – The Churches of All Saints and St Mary’s, Great Melton, Norfolk, 1968

Edward Bawden – Little Melton Church, Norfolk, 1968

Edward Bawden – North Creake Abbey – Interior, Norfolk, 1967

Edward Bawden – Birnham Priory, Norfolk, 1968

Original Advert for the Fine Art Society Exhibition.

To see my post on Edward Bawden in King’s Lynn, click here.

Tags Edward Bawden, great bardfield, norfolk

To Visit Britain’s Landmarks

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 17th October 2018

I have featured some of the Shell posters in this series on the blog before but I thought it would be more interesting to post as many of them as I could find. I rather though the range of artists was brilliant.

Shell Mex Limited appointed a new Publicity Director in 1932, Jack Beddington. His insight turned the British Shell advertisements of the 1930s into some of the classic campaigns of the twentieth century. The genius was to let artists depict Britain in their own styles, they would paint an image and whatever their style, and it would be framed by text. There would be no need for product placement, for models holding petrol cans, it was a campaign exposing the beauty and wonder of Britain and modern art. It was to inspire people to use their cars to see the nation and so use more petrol.

Tags poster, Shell

Plats du Jour

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 17th October 2018

Plats du Jour by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd is a book illustrated by a 27-year-old David Gentleman in 1957 used to be everywhere, I would see it in most charity shops and on book stalls, however now if you look online and try to find a copy it is about £30 and up. The Persephone Press reissued it it in 2006 with the original illustrations. However the art of the small illustrated cook book has been lost on a tide of celebrity endorsed cookery books, for a nice cookery book we can only look back or to a private press and hope to get books like Lovely Food – A Cookery Notebook by Ruth Lowinsky, Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David or such like.

However I thought Plats Du Jour was worth looking at in close up for the beautiful covers, letter work and illustration inside. They are so beautiful it is almost aspirational. It sold 50,000 copies in its first year, far outstripping Elizabeth David who was the cookery writer of that age.

Although Gentleman has designed almost everything it could be imagined from Coins and Stamps to Underground Station Artwork and Anti War propaganda he is known most of either his wood-engravings or his lithographs but his drawings and watercolours need a modern retrospective.

Tags Books, cookery, David Gentleman

All Saints and Saint Andrew, Kingston.

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 10th October 2018

Here is a brief bit of information and some photographs from the church in Kingston, Cambridgeshire. It’s within cycling distance from my home so I went and took some photos of the church and surroundings.

The most interesting features of Kingston Church is the wall paintings with-in. Many didn’t survive the reformation and ‘whitewashing’ of churches and fewer still the later Victorian fashion of stripping plaster from walls in favour of stonework and totally refitting the woodwork.

Above is a wall painting of the Crucifixion, with unusual iconography. On a red ochre ground decorated with a brocade pattern there are three silhouettes, of a crucifix and two figures. On either side of the crucifix is a kneeling angel holding a cup which catches Christ’s blood; beyond these a pair of angels playing musical instruments and a pair censing. The censers, with their chains, were probably appliqué wood or metal. Above the rood are two faint circles, representing the sun, to the left, and the crescent moon, to the right, symbolising life and death.

One of the paintings on the walls is of the Devil standing on a tree. He has bat wings, a tale and horns.

The Seven Acts of Mercy – Wheel of Mercy.

Six of the seven acts, intended to counter-balance the Seven Deadly Sins, were derived from the gospel of St Matthew, Chapter XXV:

feeding the hungry;
giving drink to the thirsty;
offering hospitality to the stranger;
clothing the naked;
visiting the sick;
visiting prisoners.
burying the dead – this one comes from the Book of Tobit, Chapter I.

The wheel is turned by two angels with outstretched arms, one to the lower left, the other to the lower right.

Tags Cambridge, Church, knapwell, wall paintings

First Prize at the Slade

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 3rd October 2018

The University College London and the Slade School of Fine Art are linked and in the UCL art archives are many painting from the Slade’s past. Many are nudes and it turns out, they are the winners of the Slade School of Art prize for Figure Painting. I have not included all the paintings – some are un-named and un-dated but must fit in the missing spaces. I have put them in order of date and many of the names listed are surprisingly famous.

Frederick Brown was appointed as Slade Professor in 1892 and introduced new prizes for the 1893-4 session. The prizes for life painting and drawing, anatomical drawing and new figure composition. The prizes were abandoned in 1965 and in 1966 students could choose what they presented. I don’t know what the prizes were for Figure Drawing but I do know Stanley Spencer won the Slade Summer Composition Prize in 1912 and it was £25, today with inflation that is £2,800.

Augustus Edwin John – Figure Painting, Second Prize (Equal), 1898

Evelyn Cheston – Figure Painting, Second Prize (Equal), 1898

William Orpen – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1899

Albert Rutherston – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1901

Elinor Proby Adams – Figure Painting, Second Prize (Equal), 1906

Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1909

Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1909

Elsie McNaught – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1910

Edward Alexander Wadsworth – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1911

Thomas Saunders Nash – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1912

Dora Carrington – Figure Painting, Second Prize, 1912

Eileen Lambton – Figure Painting, Third Prize, 1912

Dora Carrington – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1913

Thomas Tennant Baxter – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1914

Arthur Outlaw – Figure Painting, Second Prize (Equal), 1914

Grace English – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1916

Neville Lewis – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1916

Helen G. Young – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1916

Enid M. Fearnside – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1917

Rita Nahabedian – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1917

Henry Charles Bevan-Petman – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1917

Alice Joyce-Smith – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1918

Dorothy Josephine Coke – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1918

L. A. (Ida) Knox – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1918

Mabel Greenberg – Figure Painting, Second Prize (Equal), 1919

Ralph Nicholas Chubb – Figure Painting, Second Prize (Equal), 1919

Amy Nimr – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1919

Robin Guthrie – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1920

C. E. Roberts – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1920

Rodney Joseph Burn – Figure Painting, Second Prize (Equal), 1920

Daphne Pollen – Figure Painting, Second Prize (Equal), 1920

Rodney Joseph Burn – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1921

Walter Thomas Monnington – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1921

Muriel Holinger Hope – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1921

Allan Gwynne-Jones – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1922

Theodora Meares – Figure Painting, Second Prize, 1922

Robert Boyd Morrison – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1923

John Hookham – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1923

William D. Dring – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1924

Rex Whistler – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1924

Robin Bartlett – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1925

Leila Faithfull – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1925

Jesse Dale Cast – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1925

Alice van den Bergh – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1926

Francis E. Hopkinson – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1926

Glynn O. Jones – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1926

Kathleen Hartnell – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1926

Ena Muriel Russell Higson – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1927

Helen Lessore – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1927

Joseph H. Rogozen – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1928

Dorothy I. Reid – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1928

Bryan William Bodington – Figure Painting, First Prize,
1930

Olga Lehmann – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1931

Elizabeth Brown – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1931

Margaret A. Berry – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1932

Thelma Carstensen – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1933

Guy Anthony William Burn – Figure Painting, First Prize,
1937

Mary Kent Harrison – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1938

Nora B. Braham – Figure Painting, First Prize, 1939

William D. W. Paynter – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1940

Jean Muriel Brett – Figure Painting, Second Prize, 1943

Nancy Mellor – Figure Painting, First Prize (Equal), 1948

Tags Dora Carrington, Neville Lewis, Nude Painting, Olga Lehmann, Rex Whistler, The Slade, Thelma Carstensen, William Orpen

Better Known Podcast – Robjn Cantus

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 2nd October 2018

Better Known Podcast – Robjn Cantus

This week, Robjn discusses six things which he thinks should be better known. Each week, a guest makes a series of recommendations of things which they think should be better known. Our recommendations include interesting people, places, objects, stories, experiences and ideas which our guest feels haven’t had the exposure that they deserve.

Tags Better Known, Podcast

Discover Robert Henderson Blyth

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 27th September 2018

There is always the thrill of what comes next in my hunt for things to buy and own. I found this artist’s work, printed in black and white in the studio magazine and knew I would love it. The magazine was from 1958 and I think the art that I have been able to find so far by Henderson Blyth makes him an unknown treasure, to me anyhow.

Among the younger established painters of the Contemporary Scottish School none has attained a more prominent place than Henderson Blyth.

Blyth is a true Scot. He has inherited the characteristic temperament of his people and his art is the embodiment of all that is nordic, elemental and discrete. In addition he has inherited the Scots intellectual curiosity and insatiable appetite for intimate knowledge of the phenomenal world. Together these ingredients account for the peculiarly personal and indigenous quality of his work.

Trained at Glasgow, he was early initiated into the poetry of tone and the ‘logic’ of form. A year’s study under the late James Cowie, R.S.A. at the country Art School at Hospitalfield enabled him to continue and develop his personal interests and leanings. Cowie was an impeccable draughtsman, a fastidious classicist and a man of profound artistic integrity. To a young romantic the environment at Hospitalfield could hardly have been better adapted to his intellectual and spiritual requirements. A prodigious worker. Blyth’s reputation rests primarily upon his landscapes which are burdened and sombre. †

Robert Henderson Blyth – Rain on the Hill

Robert Henderson Blyth – Thunder Light, 1967

Robert Henderson Blyth – Self-portrait as soldier in trenches – Sub-titled ‘Existence Precarious’, 1919

Robert Henderson Blyth – The Artist’s Wife Hanging out the Laundry, 1947

† The Studio Magazine – March 1958

Tags Discover, Robert Henderson Blyth, Scotish Art

Bardfield Cookery Collection – Vol IV – Chloe Cheese

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 27th September 2018

Here to go on with the Great Bardfield Cookery Collection are some of Chloe Cheese’s illustrations for Big Flavours and Rough Edges by David Eyre and the Eagle Cook, published in 2001.

Chloe Cheese is an English illustrator, painter and print-maker. She was born in London, the daughter of artist and printmaker Bernard Cheese and artist and illustrator Sheila Robinson. Her childhood was spent in Great Bardfield, Essex. She studied at Cambridge School of Art and the Royal College of Art.

Tags Chloe Cheese, cookery, Cookery Books, great bardfield, GtBardfieldCookery

Hoyle at Great Lodge Farm

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 20th September 2018

There are three villages in a remote area of north Essex which, for different reasons, attract attention: Thaxted for its magnificent church, Finchingfield as a near perfect example of a picturesque English village, and Great Bardfield, which in the immediate post-war period attracted artists as a place to live and work. The coming together in one area, of several artists happened by chance, rather than design. †

Hoyle moved first to Great Bardfield in 1952, living for a time in a farm cottage on the outskirts of Bardfield near Great Lodge Farm.

The farm was once part of a royal estate belonging to Anne of Cleves with large barns to hold hay to feed deer and other animals. In the 1950s some of the barns were pulled down but there is a brief visual record of the time the farm was working, rather than the wedding venue it has become today.

Walter Hoyle – Great Lodge Farm, 1955 (Fry Art Gallery)

Denise Hoyle – Great Lodge Farm, 1955 (Fry Art Gallery)

The view out of the front window of Walter and Denise’s home overlooked barns and the main farm house. Some of the sheds to the left of the house have gone now. Above Denise must have drawn the picture standing with her back to the barn, whereas Walter’s painting has a wider viewpoint and was done inside the house, with the oil lamp, staffordshire dog and the milkman. The workmen and people of the village made it in to many of the paintings Hoyle made. A lot of the machinery is painted in red too.

Walter Hoyle – Great Lodge Farm Cottage, 1952 (Fry Art Gallery)

Above is a photograph by James Ravilious (son of Eric) and was taken in Devon, but I include it because the painting below has the same item in it. The painting by Hoyle depicts a grain elevator, designed to get grain or hay into the higher windows of a barn. Again it is painted in bright red, maybe because it was iron and was rusting, or it might have been a motif of his at the time.

The figure with the shotgun and dog may actually be a distant relative of mine on my mother’s side who worked on the farm in this period. Most of the men usually had a gun about them to shoot down deer, pheasants or most commonly, rabbits.

Walter Hoyle – Great Lodge Farm, 1952 (In My Collection)

Walter Hoyle – Great Lodge Farm, 1953 (Fry Art Gallery)

Walter Hoyle – Winter – Great Lodge Farm, 1953c

From what I can understand of the area, this painting above is also taken out of the Hoyles house window in the winter time.

Walter Hoyle – Great Lodge, 1952 (Fry Art Gallery)

† Printmaking Today – V6#2 – Great Bardfield Artists, 1997

Tags great bardfield, Walter Hoyle

Chocolate Idea

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 13th September 2018

This is from my student days when I studied Graphic Design. It is a little off topic but I thought it was rather good fun. It was from a module when we had to design tourist merchandise. My idea was for Wedgwood chocolate bars made from milk chocolate with white chocolate cameos on top using some of Wedgwood’s designs.

Tags Chocolate, Student Work, Wedgwood