Author: Robjn Cantus

Bardfield Cookery Collection – Vol I – Eric Ravilious

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 22nd August 2018

This is the first part in a series of posts I have been working on about the cookery books made by artists of Great Bardfield. This first volume is on Eric Ravilious.

Eric William Ravilious (22 July 1903 – 2 September 1942) was an English painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver. He grew up in East Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs and other English landscapes, which examine English landscape and vernacular art with an off-kilter, modernist sensibility and clarity. He served as a war artist, and died when the aircraft he was in was lost off Iceland. ◊

Dust Jacket for The Country Life Cookery Book by Ambrose Heath, 1937

The Country Life Cookery Book was published in 1937 and illustrated by Eric Ravilious. Country Life to some may just be the magazine, but at this point in history they were a major publisher about architecture, craft and a style of country life that would appeal to the new middle and upper classes of Britain. The publications normally contained lots of high quality photography.

In the same year as the Cookery Book was published were many other books, here are a few others for adults: Where To Catch Salmon And Trout, Elements Of Stabling, Morning Flight A Book Of Wildfowl, Gun For Company, Victorian Street Ballads. For children there were: Skilled Horsemanship, The Golden Knight and Other Stories, Peter & Co, Knight in Africa and Rajah the Elephant… as part of the ‘Junior Country Life Library’.

The books are countryside propaganda in the age of travel by train, omnibus, charabanc and car. They were promoting Britain in the way they wanted to see it. It is fair to say when people talk about the ‘Golden Nineteen-Thirties’ that Country Life had a great deal in the legend.

The Title-Page

Eric Ravilious – Title-page of the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

We know Ravilious got the commission for the cookery book in July 1936 as he wrote in this letter to Helen Binyon:

This book is now begun and begins to be promising. †

The wood-engravings follow a seasonal theme, month by month rather than chapters on food or following the text – this calendar style is like the other Ambrose Heath books for Faber & Faber that Edward Bawden had illustrated for the previous five years. Only 12 blocks were cut by Ravilious for the in the book, so with the title page decoration, two of the months (January & December) used the same image. One can only assume this was how many images they thought they needed and so how many images they paid for.

Having the chapters as seasonal months would also hurry the project along from the illustration front – as in April of 1937, nine months later, Ravilious wrote to Binyon:

I don’t believe Heath has written his text yet. ‡

But not having the text as a guide would mean Ravilious could invent the illustrations from his mind and use past works. He worked on the illustrations from July 1936 – February 1937 while taking on other commissioned work and finishing a series of watercolours.

Below is the title page wood-engraving of a framed cornucopia, a wheat-sheaf and food produce. This illustration is a reject from another job.

Eric Ravilious – Title-page (Harvest Festival), Wood-engraving for the Cornhill Magazine, 1936

Ravilious was completing a commission for The Cornhill Magazine in the later part of 1936 and the project overlapped with the Cookery Book. So when one of the wood engravings was rejected by John Murray (editor of The Cornhill) he used it on the cookery book. I thought this engraving was a bit surreal and over the top until I discovered a drawing of it below.

Eric Ravilious – Harvest Festival and Loaves, 1936

I’ve been drawing the bread table in the church – dead and fancy loaves, barley and corn, apples and eggs – and I thought it too beautiful not to place on record. ♠

Having been rejected for one job Ravilious cut away the framed backdrop of the table and submitted the wood-engraving below for the Cookery Book project instead.

Eric Ravilious – Title-page (Harvest Festival), Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

Below is another woodblock based on the same image made for The Writings of Gilbert White of Selborne in 1938. It’s a new version and not an edited restrike. Likely cut in 1937 as the job was commissioned in May of that year and the book published in 1938.

Eric Ravilious – (Harvest Festival), Wood-engraving for The Writings of Gilbert White of Selborne in 1938

January and December

Eric Ravilious – January & December, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

January & December is the block that is used twice in the cookery book.

Ravilious would also find inspiration in the past. He owned a copy of The Frugal Housewife published by J Fairburn, 1838 and below is the meat guide on animals. I think this Ravilious woodcut is one of the defining moments in cookery illustration and helped re-popularise this old fashion key to animal flesh. The meat guide is now a typical image to see in cookery books to educate what meats can be gained from an animal. It is used three times in this book. He mentions the idea to use old cookery books below:

I’ve had what you would call a cleaver idea, and Mrs Beeton has been a help. †

Frontispiece – The Frugal Housewife, J. Fairburn, 1838

February

Eric Ravilious – February, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

In the August of 1935 Edward Bawden and Ravilious went on a painting trip to Newhaven and in the wood-engraving above, the basket of fish emblazoned with the name of the town.

The idea for the wood engraving would also pop up again in another format, this time a print for Contemporary Lithographs, a company working with artists to make large runs of lithographic prints that would be cheap for the public to buy from the Zwemmer Gallery. Below is one of the watercolours from 1935 that could have been the inspiration for the commission. (The watercolour was also sold via Zwemmer Gallery).

Eric Ravilious – Newhaven Harbour, 1935

The print that Ravilious completed is very similar to the Cookery Book print as the jobs overlapped. The official title of the print is Newhaven Harbour but Eric referred to the print as ‘Homage to Seurat’. Helen Binyon wrote that the print has a:

scene of sensitive clarity and beautiful luminosity ♦

Eric Ravilious – Newhaven Harbour, Contemporary Lithographs Ltd, 1937

Eric Ravilious – February, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

March

Eric Ravilious – March, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

A pig surrounded by the fruit of choice, apples, and to the left of the wood-engraving a garden sieve with berries upon it. The watercolour below comes from the same year as the Cookery Book’s commission, but is now one of the lost paintings of Ravilious, it was also damaged when last seen having had the top left corner ripped and creased.

Trugs with Fruit is a lost watercolour by Eric Ravilious, damaged. In the corner it may have been framed and sold or just disregarded and thrown away, but it appears in the wood engraving in this commission for John G Murray, editor of the Cornhill Magazine. It was made for publicity for the Magazine but so far has only ever been seen on the compliment slips they had for a short time.

Eric Ravilious – Trugs with Fruit, 1936

April

Eric Ravilious – April, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

Rather like the Title Page, the wood engraving for April came at the same time as the Cornhill Magazine commission. Below is a watercolour, now presumed lost of trugs of fruit and the same trug appears in the wood engraving next to a glass of mint – these are red currents and mint, said to be the good sauces for Lamb.

Eric Ravilious – Trugs with Fruit, 1936

The wood-engraving below would have been copied from the painting and in the printing process it appears reversed, it comes with the same cornucopia from the title-page engraving.

Eric Ravilious – Autumn Fruits, 1936

And here you can see the wood-engraving in use on the Cornhill Magazine compliment slip.

Eric Ravilious – Cornhill Magazine Complement Slip with Autumn Fruits, 1936

May

The wood-engraving for May looks to be the most original of all of the illustrations, I can’t think of having seen any element in past work.

Eric Ravilious – May, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

June

Eric Ravilious – June, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

The June illustration features a bee-hive. A variation of the image would be used two years later on The Garden Implements Jug that was also designed by Ravilious for Wedgwood. The bottom most vignette.

Wedgwood Garden Implements Jug, 1939

July

Eric Ravilious – July, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

The wood-engraving for July has roots in many places. The finished wood block has a hat, cornucopia of pears, a hat on the backdrop of hills and cornstooks. In an early drawing for the wood-block the hat is in the same place (reversed when printed) but many of the other elements have changed.

Eric Ravilious – Proposed July Block, Drawing made on tracing paper for woodblock, (reversed for printing), 1936

It is likely that the print Ravilious drew out was inspired by the Harvest theme of the month he was illustrating and he looked back on older work. Below the wood engraving from 1934 is one of many Curwen Press Stock Blocks. They are woodblocks and prints the press has paid artists to make so they can be used without the need to hire an illustrator for a job, so production times can be quicker and still have illustrated items.

The tree and setting of cornstooks reminded me of the drawing he made above and even the way the stooks flow uphill.

Eric Ravilious – July, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

Eric Ravilious – Curwen Press Stock Block 985, 1936

The booklet the block was used upon happened to be called Spectator Harvest, for the Spectator Magazine.

Spectator Harvest, 1952

It was also re-cut in mirror image for The Writings of Gilbert White of Selborne in 1938.

Eric Ravilious – Selborne Tailpiece Volume 2, 1938

But back to the cookery book – the cornucopia below (that appeared next to a hat and a baguette) has been seen before in this post – in the wood-engraving in use on the Cornhill Magazine compliment slip.

Eric Ravilious – July, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

One above the other, it isn’t hard to see a link.

Eric Ravilious – Autumn Fruits, 1936

August

Eric Ravilious – August, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

For the August vignette Ravilious chose to illustrate the garden of Brick House in Great Bardfield. Ravilious and his wife Tirzah had shared the house with Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte from 1932 until 1935 when the Raviliouses moved to near-by Castle Hedingham.

In 1936 Bawden painted the garden in the winter of the Cookery Book commission showing the wood gazebo that was up in 1932 as it was a wedding gift from Eric and Tirzah to Edward and Charlotte. The arches must have been added between then, around 1936.

Edward Bawden, February 2pm, 1936

Eric Ravilious – The Garden Path, 1933

Eric Ravilious – August – Drawing made on tracing paper for woodblock, 1936 (reversed for printing)

September

Eric Ravilious – September, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

The illustration for September shows the game shooting season and a brace of birds, maybe a goose to the left and pheasants to the right in front of a country lane. Below is the original trace drawing for the block, reversed for printing.

Eric Ravilious – September, Drawing made on tracing paper for woodblock, (reversed for printing), 1936

Followers of my blog would not be surprised to see that the illustration bears a similarity to another one, the wood-engraving for London Transport, this is confirmed in a letter to Helen Binyon again:

The jobs, cookery and Green Line advertisements – are all done and sent off and very glad am I that hard work is finished. ♣

Counter to the letter I can’t find another reference to them in print.

Eric Ravilious – The Shepard, 1936

The Shepard is one of the most lively engravings that Ravilious made for London Transport. The Sheep and their ears with the hillside up to the house are pleasing. The technicality of the halftone shading are some of his best. ♥

The Cookery Books version of the engraving is more detailed, I think because the printing was likely to be finer than the press adverts the London Transport one would be reproduced in.

Eric Ravilious – September, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

October

Eric Ravilious – October, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

October sees kitchen items, a jug, copper jelly mould stacked mixing bowls and baking trays with two jars of preserved items.

November

Eric Ravilious – November, Wood-engraving for the Country Life Cookery Book, 1937

The last work of a chicken farm and a turkey with wheelbarrow gives the Christmas feeling and may have been marked to have been the December illustration but January’s wood-engraving was also used as December.

† Eric Ravilious to Helen Binyon – 19th July, 1936
‡ Eric Ravilious to Helen Binyon – 14th April, 1937
♠ Eric Ravilious to Helen Binton – 6th October, 1936
♣ Eric Ravilious to Helen Binyon – 17th August (1936)
♦ Helen Binyon – Eric Ravilious: Memoir of an Artist, 2016
♥ Robjn Cantus – A Journey of London Transport with Eric Ravilious, 2018
◊ Wikipedia – Eric Ravilious

Tags Ambrose Heath, cookery, Cookery Books, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, great bardfield, GtBardfieldCookery, helen binyon, Wood Engraving, woodcuts

Contact Sheet

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 15th August 2018

I found some photographic contact sheets by James Ravilious and I thought it was rather interesting to look at the way he took photos. The way he circles a subject, or photographs from one place. It shows that he worked at subjects he found interesting rather than taking just one photo alone.

James Ravilious was born at Eastbourne, England, the second son of Eric Ravilious, the war artist, wood-engraver and designer, and Tirzah Garwood, also an artist and wood-engraver. James studied art at St Martin’s School of Art, London, and then taught painting and drawing in London for some years. He married Robin (daughter of the glass-engraver Laurence Whistler) in 1970, and in 1972 they moved to Devon to live in a cottage near her family home in Dolton. They had two children: Ben and Ella. †

† jamesravilious.com

Tags James Ravilious, Photography

Mixed Media

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 8th August 2018

In various books throughout time, you can read about the vulgar arts; it is mostly a term for any mass production and in art that means printmaking. From an art history perspective, the patron and the artist was a system that was more or less redundant in the 20th century. It was at this time that printmaking came into fashion because if an artist didn’t have one major sponsor, they would need many smaller incomes from the public.

The history of printmaking and the taboo also follows publishing technology. After 1800 the wood-engraving was considered to be un-artisan and best left to newspaper printing and advertising. When wood-engraving was embraced by artists as a reaction to various exhibitions of Japanese woodcuts, the artists who used colour printing aped the Japanese styles of carving with British scenery. Sylvan Boxsius is a good example printing in a traditionally Japanese way.

Sylvan G. Boxsius – A Devon Village, 1930s. From My Collection

With more traditional styles of English wood-engraving colour wasn’t welcome. Linocut had a vogue with Cyril Powers works but for printmaking it would be the 50s when colour came in for most artists; much like how colour photography wasn’t considered artisan until the 1980s.

It is important to add this is only in Britain. In France artists had worked in colour. Many of the big artists even worked in advertising making large lithographic posters. Pissarro made colour woodcuts in a medieval style. The French also had the fantastic Atelier 17 – a studio founded in 1927 by Stanley William Hayter. He was a British artist and working mostly in intaglio prints, but he developed new printing methods for colour etchings. Towards the end of the 40s the studio had encouraged mixed media printing methods that crossed over the sea to Britain.

Stanley William Hayter – Cinq Personnages, 1946

But the biggest taboo to some would be to mix medias, pen and ink with wood-engraving or an etching with a lino-cut. It was the 20th century when nothing was classed as holy. For me I should also add there is a thrill when you see something new. When was the last time you saw something new?

The images below are a series of John O’Connor wood-engravings with pen and ink continuations of the illustrations surrounding it. It might look to be obvious, but it is something new to me and I can’t recall seeing it before or after. The book is E. L. Grant Watson’s Departures from 1948.

John O’Connor – Illustration from Departures, 1948

On the face of it John O’Connor doesn’t look to be a rebel. A student of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden at the Royal College of Art his wood engravings always have an old-world charm to them. But I think adding the ink drawings really worked with these illustrations. Below, I love the way the woodcut ends at the child ankles and the ink drawing takes over to show the feet submerged in water.

John O’Connor – Illustration from Departures, 1948

John O’Connor would go on to surprise me with printmaking by making colour wood-engravings. After spending a great deal of time carving the main black inked block, rather than waste time with wood to make the colour layers he would instead use Lino to make his abstract shapes that are loosely thrown over the engraving. Below I have over-saturated the colour layer to make the point, and it might look lazy but I think it’s fantastic and gives a lovely quality to the prints. So many artists fail in printmaking by trying to be too technically accurate, I think of

Stephen Whittle for example.

John O’Connor – Illustration from A Pattern of People, 1959

Michael Rothenstein – Horse and Sunrise, From my collection, 1974.

The other artist that thrills me somewhat is Michael Rothenstein. He is an artist that doesn’t get the credit he deserves and different people who represent his collection push the agenda that suit them.

Having a diverse career in art he started making accurate and twee illustrations of the countryside. As part of the Record Britain project he was sent out to document areas of Britain as artworks before the start of the Second World War. But after the war is where his life and work is far more interesting. He became one of the real innovators of printing and an early British Pop Artist, before the term was coined.

His first print was made in 1947 and after that he went to study at Atelier 17 with Hayter. There he developed skills with lithography and etching but abandoned them for their time consuming preparation processes and influenced by Edward Bawden he moved into Linocut.

Michael Rothenstein, for instance, has applied boundless energy to extending the range of the relief process of wood and lino, sometimes combining them with screenprint and photo-screen. ‡

Michael Rothenstein – Marilyn I, From my collection, 1978

This Rothenstein print is made up of two screen prints of a photograph of Marilyn Monroe with a pink frame over printed impressions of a burnished planks of wood in green. I think it may need repeating; printed planks of wood.

When I was at art school at the end of the previous century I thought my printing of pavements and blocks of wood were new ideas, however Rothenstein had already penned a book on the topic called Frontiers of Printmaking – New Aspects of Relief Printing in 1966. In the book he shows printed Tree-trunks, metal cans, chicken fencing, the board at the back of an old Pye radio, electronic motors… anything flat you could get an impression off of.

Any materials that were fairly thin were printed on the platen press. In proofing surfaces of rough texture, however, a soft, flexible packing was placed above the paper as already described … Before use, metal from the scrap-head needs cleaning. It is clamped to the bench and brushed down with a wire brush or wire circumference brush used in a power-tool. An industrial mask should be worn for this process. Very dirty metal taken from the scrapheap or city dump should be first put in the sink and scrubbed down with disinfectant. †

Example page from Frontiers of Printmaking, 1966

Rothenstein later claimed that Hayter had prompted him to take pictorial risks and avoid predictable effects.

What Hayter did in France to stimulate etching and engraving’. wrote James Burn lately, ‘Michael Rothenstein has done in England for relief printing’. ♠

Rothenstein found and collected things to make really wonderful works and I think he should be celebrated more than he is.

Michael Rothenstein – Red Gothic, 1962

† Michael Rothenstein – Frontiers of Printmaking, 1966
‡ Richard T. Godfrey – Printmaking in Britain, 1978
♠ The Penrose Annual: Review of the Graphic, 1964

Tags great bardfield, John O'Connor, Michael Rothenstein, Printmaking

Edward Bawden – Watercolours of Cornwall

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 1st August 2018

Edward Bawden frequently would take painting holidays in Cornwall. The landscape is hilly and pastoral unlike Bawden’s home in Essex made up of arable crop fields. A stony landscape of quarries, hill contours and spires made from tin mining ruins and churches set a challenge and some of the most curious paintings in his repertoire.

I think what I like so much about these paintings is the lack of abstraction that comes from the Cornish schools of art. Rocks are painted in details to the point they look like leaded stained-glass windows. The Quarry paintings from 1960 look as menacing as the effort to destroy the natural landscape they are in, each of the three I have depicted look like scenes from a nightmare. The only paintings that look typically Bawden are of Caerhays Castle.

Edward Bawden – Caradon, 1958

Edward Bawden – St. Neot, Cornwall, No. 2, 1958

Edward Bawden – Near Liskeard, 1958

Edward Bawden – View Toward Henwood, Minions, Cornwall, 1958

Edward Bawden – Gold Digging Quarry, Minion, Liskeard , 1958

Edward Bawden – Gold Digging Quarry, Minion, Liskeard (detail), 1958

Edward Bawden – Cheesewring Quarry no.4, Minions, NR Liskeard, 1958

Edward Bawden – The Engine House, Cornwall, 1960

Edward Bawden – The De Lank River, Cornwall, 1960

Edward Bawden – The De Lank Quarry No.2, 1960

Edward Bawden – Nant Mawr Quarry, Cornwall, 1971

Edward Bawden – Quarry at Pengwern II, Llanwrst, 1977

Edward Bawden – Cornish Well, 1977

Edward Bawden – Caerhays Castle, 1983

Edward Bawden – Caerhays Castle, 1983

Tags Edward Bawden, great bardfield

Sports Gardens by Michael Rothenstein

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 26th July 2018

I thought it would be good to digitise an essay Michael Rothenstein wrote and illustrated in 1948 about ‘Sports Gardens’ or what we would now call an Arcade. It shows he was looking at his contemporary items as artworks, pre Pop-art.

Sports Gardens have a tough, adolescent, slightly underhand air; a compound of chain-store and small town fairground. They are of course an urban version of the country fair an indoor version compressed into restricted floor space completely mechanised and with some of the high spirits ironed out.

Further, Sports Gardens are static non-itinerant in contrast to the transience of the village fair, with its attendant sense of a momentary flowering for a single night. The knowledge that the show will be moving off somewhere tomorrow, that it will always be moving off somewhere gives the fair a quality of poignancy, of romance, which the Sports Garden entirely lacks.

So Gardens are harsh without being romantic; harsh, noisy and garish. Swing is laid on from 11am when they open to 12pm when they close. The typical pattern has a frontage of perhaps twenty feet, and runs straight back from the street. Pin-tables, wall-machines and cranes are ranged at either side: peep-shows are placed at the far end to give greater privacy. But in all Sports Gardens pin-tables and cranes are the largest profit makers, the serious business end of the industry. Hence these two types of machine are placed nearest the entrance in the largest numbers possible.

At the entrance to the Coventry Street saloon in London, for example, stands a large grab. A grab consists of a revolving table spread with the cheaper forms of ‘swag’: cigarettes, trinkets, powder-compacts, lighters-above which four shining chromium hands are poised. Aggressive in shape and predatory in gesture, these clutching silver fists are oddly symbolic of this tough, profitable branch of the entertainment catering business. Though in fairness to the management it should be noticed that earnings come chiefly from regular customers, fully aware of the small return received on outlay and not from the larger, more gullible crowd of casual visitors. Three or four shillings spent on the pintables may bring a few cigarettes: six or seven shillings on the cranes – a packet of Players. At the tables a maximum score earns a prize of two cigarettes.

Now the original cost of these machines was about £25, so it looks as if the profits must be very large indeed. The pin-tables themselves, all of American origin, are marked Daval Manufacturing Coy. Chicago. Importations stopped in 1939. Since no other country is able to produce machines of competitive quality, Sports Gardens carry equipment at least nine years old. But the machines are Cheap and easy to maintain: the brightly figured surfaces are all washable and the well-made ingenious machinery inside runs without undue need of repair.

There are, perhaps, twenty-five standard types of table. The numerals on the distinctive backplates are interspersed with pictures of cigar-shaped racing cars zooming along concrete autobahns, pink and blue skyscrapers, giant vermillion aeroplanes with all the faked-up, streamlined paraphernalia of the Futurist city associated with American boys’ magazines.

As one releases the piston, the chromium ball kicks up the shoot, ricocheting from point to point touching off electric buzzers, lighting groups of coloured bulbs, while automatic calculators flash out rapidly mounting scores.

To register winning scores, it is necessary to know how hard to pull back the spring piston, when to jog the table. In a limited sense, then an element of skill does exist, though the scales are heavily weighted in favour of the machine. Rarely does a customer succeed in beating the hazards. When he does however the management count it good advertisement the ‘punter’ pulling in packet after packet of cigarettes, incites the crowd to spend sums far in excess of any temporary loss.

Regular customers are of many types but of only one sex-male. A mixed age-group, very young to middle-aged they return day after day to play a particular table. Many are prosperous; ten shillings is a not unusual sum to spend on each visit. Business men wearing soft hats of emphatic curve, carrying bulky pigskin briefcases, often play the tables in pairs during the lunch hour.

The peep-show, a non-scoring game of mechanism Peeping Tom has also an exclusively masculine following. A penny is placed in the aperture of the ‘Muto-scope’ or ‘Butiviewer’ and one peers down a black eyepiece at a miniature motion picture of a girl caught, as a rule, in protracted dalliance, wearing only her wrap or underclothes; a clothed male may also appear, the sleek young-middle aged shop walker type, sometimes dressed in Turkish costume.

The sequence of pictures shown within is advertised by a ‘still’ bearing the expected caption: ‘Paris Nights’, ‘Sunbathing’, ‘Parasol Polly’, ‘A Pair of Queens’. Some are old fashioned machines worked by hand. In this case stills of half-dressed chorus girls, of the 1920 type flick over as one turns the handle. The pictures are illuminated in flashes, so the viewer’s eye holes shine yellow at one moment and are deeply shadowed the next.

The attendants are an essentially urban type, matey, good-humoured and nervy having a predilection for flashy up-to-dateness. This makes them touchingly proud of the little modern equipment they possess. Many of the older types of installation have great visual charm with their fussy grandfather clock appearance and elaborately erratic machinery ticking over within.

For these or other attractions single customers are apt to have a furtive look. They twist their mouths at you a bit sheepishly as they crane their necks to the peepshow eyepiece. But practised in groups, these penny pastimes take a more wholehearted and genial turn; and there is much geniality in the hours of peak attendance – rainy Sunday afternoons or evenings towards the week-end.

There is a sense of motion, vitality, quick-fire humour and attractively sharp colour, which contrasts not unfavourably with the stretched-out monotony of the scene outside. The Sports Garden entrance cuts a yellow hole in the black forbidding frontage of the night streets; beyond it we catch sight of the mysteriously welcome dazzle of coloured lights and animated crowds; while relayed Swing music, throbbing rather pleasantly down the empty street, thumps quietly at our ears.

Tags contact book, great bardfield, Michael Rothenstein

BBC & Parr

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 25th July 2018

Only by chance did I discover that these BBC One idents are photographed by Martin Parr. Not quite like his normal portrait work, as you can see from the Making Of photos below. They are as forced as most portraits are but I find it a curious collaboration compared with his point-shoot-and leave photographs.

I have to say I find the idents a bit disturbing myself, the bird-watchers one the most, the way the people look directly at the camera isn’t something you get from TV other than the news and weather. They are a bit too quaint for me, too much of Ohh the British are an odd lot, it becomes too obvious for Parr’s work, its almost a parody of himself.

Tags bbc, Martin Parr, Photography

Edward Bawden – War Artist

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 18th July 2018

This post started looking at the difference between the Dunkirk painting and the print, but I thought it was also a good excuse to talk about the Edward Bawden ‘War Artist’ book. One of the cheaper Bawden books to buy it is full of Edward’s letters home with 38 of his war paintings.

Edward Bawden – Dunkirk, 1986

Above is the print of the Dunkirk bombings. Below is the original painting, but there is 40 years difference between the pair.

Painted by Edward Bawden during the shelling of Dunkirk in May 1940, the watercolour shows the interior of a bar and the soldiers hiding from shots under the tables. The bar ironically is called Au Nouveau Monde, ‘In The New World’. Paintings of Dunkirk fascinate me as it was such chaos it would have taken real nerve to paint at all.

Edward Bawden – Dunkirk, 1940

Bawden marched into Dunkirk with the retreating troops through lines of jeering French. The generals had already left by then, as Bawden noted: ‘Well, the rats go first”. Later he said: “By temperament I am a pacifist. War horrifies me, it horrified me then…. I hated the big bangs. No one knew what was happening , and I was just tossed about like a bad penny. Nobody wanted a war artist. Every day I got shoved off to a new unit.”

At Dunkirk he didn’t head for the beach and the rescue boats but to the docks where he holed up for two days making notes of chaotic smoke-filled scenes as thousands of troops tried to get away under constant strafing and shellfire. Eventually a boat came near enough to scramble aboard and he found it full of exhausted men ‘lying in heaps everywhere, some only half dressed.

Edward Bawden – War Artist prospectus, 1986

In 1989 Bawden released a series of his war letters, edited by Ruari Mclean. Edward Bawden War Artist and His Letters Home 1940-45. The book was due to come out in 1986 in a different format, a wide landscape book, signed and limited edition published by the Hurtwood Press. But the project stalled and ended up being rekindled and published in a landscape format in 1989.

Above is the original prospectus for the 1986 book that was never produced in this format. It would have looked much like a Fleece Press book.

To accompany the 1986 book would have been two new lithographs, but these were released without the book and then used as the front and back covers of the 1989 dust jacket. The Hurtwood Press published Among the Marsh Arabs, and Dunkirk in 1986.

Edward Bawden – Among the Marsh Arabs, 1986

Below are the front and back views of the 1989 book with the lithographs used as artworks.

Edward Bawden – War Artist front cover, 1989

Edward Bawden – War Artist rear cover, 1989

Tags Dunkirk, Edward Bawden, great bardfield, WW2

Edward Bawden’s Zinc Zeal

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 11th July 2018

I rather love these adverts by Edward Bawden from the Architects Journal to promote Zinc from 1945-46. From the end of WW2 Britain needed to be rebuilt and Zinc Development Association wanted it to be done with Zinc! In the 1940s it was in direct competition with Aluminium and the asphalt roofing roll.

Bawden completed 12 adverts, one would guess each for a monthly copy of the Architects Journal and Architectural Review (where they were advertised). Bawden got the job from his life-long friend and patron Robert Harling, who was working for Everett’s Advertising Agency at the time. Harling was the fairy godmother to Bawden, providing him with work throughout his life and even penned a book on the artist, he wrote novels and worked as a typographer.

I think the typeface used in this adverts are delightful as well.

The full advert has some text under it, rather bleak and a little bulling I think. Each advert had something related but all about rebuilding Britain, post war.

Until the road system of England is one grand impenetrable traffic-jam, peacetime productions will mean more and more cars. And more and more cars will mean more and more garages. And heaven grant these garages will be neither in the shed-and-shanty nor in the Bypass-Tudor-cum Queen Anne manner, but decent, dignified and honestly contemporary. Their building will demand zinc. For zinc lasts long, resists atmospheric corrosion manfully and does its job economically. It has proved itself the best permanent material for roofs, gutters, weathering and down-pipes. And the wise architect will look into the many new ways and means of unit it.

It can only ever be a guess but the swimming pool here is very similar to the Mounts Baths in Northampton, opened in October 1936 pictured below when they opened from Architectural Review.

Mounts Baths, Northampton, 1936

Tags Edward Bawden, great bardfield, Great Bardifeld Artists, Robert Harling

Robert Tavener in Cheltenham

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 11th July 2018

Robert Tavener was a designer and illustrator. He worked for the Central Office of Information, GPO and ICI, as well as publishers Hamish Hamilton, Longmans, and

Oxford University Press. He was a member of the Society of Industrial Artists. In 1957, he was included in the book Young Artists of Promise by Jack Beddington. Tavener taught art at Remple School in Stroud, Medway College of Art and Eastbourne College of Art and Design.

This is just a simple post about a painting I bought on ebay that got lost in the post and was never seen again. It was Robert Tavener’s Neptune Statue, Cheltenham pictured at the base of this post.

Here is a photograph of the rather elaborate fountains in Cheltenham.

The Neptune Fountain was built in 1893 and designed by Joseph Hall. The fountain is probably fashioned on the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Carved by Boulton & Sons in 1893. Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, is shown with sea horses and tritons. Robert Tavener made a series of lithographs of the town.

Robert Tavener – The Neptune Statue, Cheltenham, Lithograph

Robert Tavener – The Neptune Statue, Cheltenham. Missing in action.

Tags Cheltenham, Robert Tavener

Bawden on Ives Farm

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 4th July 2018

A short post showing the link between two Edward Bawden works. One is the illustration for the cover of The Twentieth Century, April 1956 and the other, a linocut print ‘Ives Farm’ that Bawden also produced in the same year. It isn’t a long post but little by little these observations all shall build up.

I had posted both works before but I just hadn’t noticed the cottage hiding in the corner.

Edward Bawden – Illustration for the cover of The Twentieth Century, April 1956

Edward Bawden – Ives Farm, 1956

Edward Bawden – Cover of The Twentieth Century, April 1956

Tags Edward Bawden, great bardfield, Ives Farm, Linocut