Author: Robjn Cantus

Great Bardfield and the Beeb

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 22nd March 2018

Before television, the radio was the main media for the nation. The British Broadcasting Corporation was free from advertising and their early aims were to ‘educate, inform and entertain’. It was the education element that lead to leaflets being produced as a visual aid to the radio. The public could send a stamped-addressed envelope off and receive guide to the content in the radio show, from photographs of master paintings as part of a series of lectures on art to song sheets.

All of the artists from the Great Bardfield group would at one time or another work as commercial artists, many illustrating books. Here is a selection of works made for the BBC.

Eric Ravilious – BBC Talks Pamphlet, 1934

Published in 1934 this booklet was to follow six lectures on art, there are seven pages of text and 30 pages of black and white illustrations. The cover design is a wood engraving by Eric Ravilious showing a Bewick style wood-engraving, an artists pallet and oil paints and some beautiful graphic devices hand carved around the vignette. This booklet could be bought as a softback at seven pence or a hardback at one shilling.

Edward Bawden – Dust Jacket for the BBC Year Book 1947

This cover by Edward Bawden shows Broadcasting House and All Souls Church with musical faeries flying around. The BBC Year book started as an annual review beginning 1928. In the mid 50′s it became the BBC Handbook and in the 80s merged into an Annual Report. The focus of the publication would range from statistics of people with Radio Licences, to essays on Opera, Art and even Foley House, the building that Broadcasting House replaced. But this gives me a wonderful excuse to share a picture of this magnificent building so you can compare it to Bawden’s drawing.

BBC Broadcasting House, London, 1932.

Many of the other works in the rest of this article are simple two colour illustrations made for various children’s educational radio programs. The way each of the artists went about solving this problem is interesting but mostly it is based on technique and time. Inside the covers is usually sheet music, lyrics and an illustration for most of the songs.

Many of Shelia Robinson’s illustrations are black and white pen drawings or her cardboard-prints, but rarely is there much colour and when there is it looks to be the printer flooding the image around her illustration with it. It’s a shame because her art prints are extraordinarily competent.

Bernard Cheese’s works have a more interesting use of colour and layering for those interested in printmaking and use of one colour with black, as is the work of Walter Hoyle.

Sheila Robinson – Sing Together – Rhythm & Melody, 1955

Walter Hoyle – Rhythm and Melody, 1961

Walter Hoyle – Illustration from Rhythm and Melody, 1961

Sheila Robinson – Singing Together, 1961

Sheila Robinson – Rhythm and Melody – Summer, 1963

Bernard Cheese – Time and Tune, 1963

In a break from BBC radio pamphlets comes the BBC Book of the Countryside. A hardback book with a compilation of the BBC Countryside programs set out in a month by month calendar. For fans of Great Bardfield and East Anglian art, one gets work by both Walter Hoyle and Sheila Robinson, but also six illustrations by John Nash. The drawings from the book by Walter Hoyle I am delighted to own as part of my collection.

Cover to the BBC Book of the Countryside, 1963

Walter Hoyle – Page from the Book of the Countryside to the left and the drawing to the right, 1963.

Sheila Robinson – January, 1963, illustration from BBC Book of the Countryside

Walter Hoyle – April, 1963, illustration from BBC Book of the Countryside

Bernard Cheese – Singing Together, 1964

Bernard Cheese – Singing Together, 1968

Bernard Cheese – Illustration from Singing Together, 1968

To see more illustrations from the Bernard Cheese Singing Together 1968 book, click here as I dedicated a full post to them

Tags bbc, Bernard Cheese, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, great bardfield, Sheila Robinson, Walter Hoyle

Who is Erik H Forrest?

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 22nd March 2018

Erik Harrower Forrest – Trees, 1956, In My Collection

In the past few weeks I bought two wonderful paintings by Erik H Forrest but I couldn’t find much information about him. I was buying them at auction and online as I lived too far to view them, so I was worried they may be mid-century inventions (sadly there are many paintings on the market that look old but have no age to them). But when my two paintings were delivered I found they had gallery labels. The paintings were marked as 1956 and 1957. In 1956 Forrest was listed as living in 36 Chapel Lane Leeds, in 1957 he was at 17 Richmond Road Leeds. From that date on I couldn’t find any other details on E H Forrest in the UK.

Erik Harrower Forrest – The Red Church, 1957, In my Collection

I then went to Google and found a monograph from 1985 he published ‘Harry Thubron at Leeds, and Views on the Value of his Ideas for Art Education Today’ in the Journal of Art & Design Education – Vol 4 No 2, 1985. This came with a biography that said he moved to America, from then I found a LinkedIn profile and his email.

From our emails I can report Erik Harrower Forrest, born in 1925, trained in Scotland at the Edinburgh College of Art under John Maxwell and Leonard Roseman. He started the Diploma in Art in 1941 but the war paused his studies and he had three years out flying in the Fleet Air Arm Squadron. He continued his work in 1945 with a specialisation in Drawing and Painting. He went on to the University of Edinburgh and at this time he admired the works of John Piper, Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash and John Minton.

Forrest taught painting and lithography at Leeds College of Art in the late 1950s and later became the deputy head of the School of Art Education at Birmingham Polytechnic.

My first job at the Leeds College was in Art and Design because I was in their Design department and I taught Illustration as well as drawing and painting. About half way through my time there I moved to the Art Education department. I had found that I had almost as strong an interest in art education, especially at the Tertiary level, as in painting and drawing. I had also been teaching Lithography, so I was wandering away from the life of a ‘professional’ painter already.

He was commissioned to made a painting of Temple Newsam for the gallery booklet in 1951

Temple Newsam House Gallery Booklet with cover painting by E.H.M, 1951

In the late 1960s he took the first year of a two-year degree in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, and left for the USA before he could complete it.

That was in 1968. The doctorate I did between 1980 and 1983, finishing the dissertation when I was 58 years old.

He has had one man shows of paintings, prints, and drawings in Britain, Canada, and USA, and articles by him have been published in British and American journals. His works are in the collections of Wakefield City Art Gallery, Nottingham City Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. He also exhibited at the Wakefield, Twenty Artists Exhibition.

Erik Harrower Forrest – Interior, 1950

In America he was the Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in 1969 and in 1977 became the Art Professor at Ohio University and is now retired in San Diego.

Tags british art, Erik Forrest, in my collection, Paintings

Twa Corbies

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 16th March 2018

Here are two poems read and drawn as an interesting collaboration of artists as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951. The drawings were used to make a series of scenes for a short film, the spoken or sung content added over this.

In this clip there are two poems. Twa Corbies narrated by John Laurie and illustrated by Michael Rothenstein and Spring and Winter (Shakespeare) sung by Peter Pears to music by Thomas Arne and illustrated by Mervyn Peake.

Both of these poems are available to be seen on the BFI for free. Here is the link.

Michael Rothenstein – A Still from Twa Corbies, 1951

Tags Festival of Britain, fry gallery, great bardfield, Mervyn Peake, Michael Rothenstein, Peter Pears

Images from Instagram

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 15th March 2018

My instagram account is a record of what I am up to or buying. Here are some photos from the past week. https://www.instagram.com/inexpensiveprogress

Tags instagram, Photography

Discover Marion Adnams

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 8th March 2018

Marion Adnams – Aftermath, 1946

Marion Elizabeth Adnams was an English painter, printmaker, draughtswoman and one of Britain’s unknown Surrealist painters, there are many artists who don’t get the recognition they deserve.

Her family were from the Isle of Wight but moved and settled in Derbyshire, where she was born and educated. After reading Modern Languages at Nottingham University and teaching French and English in the day, it was then that she started to paint and took evening classes at Derby School of Art under Alfred Bladen. In some of her paintings she used locations in Derbyshire as the subjects in oil.

In 1938 Adnams became an art teacher and around this time she started painting in a surrealist style; putting apparently unrelated objects together in mysterious scenes, and rarely if ever including figures. †

She became head of the art department at Derby Training College in 1946, the year Aftermath was painted. The skull and barbed wire may allude to the war, but they were also standard Surrealist motifs, seen also, for example, in the work of John Banting. ‡

Adnams made many friends in the artistic world, she is listed in the credits of many books on surrealist and abstract art in the 1930s and credited as a adviser on churches in Derbyshire in John Betjeman’s English Parish Churches. She is also thanked in the book, Vom Bauhaus nach Terezín – Children’s Drawings from the Concentration Camp Theresienstadt.

Marion Adnams – Alter Ego, 1940

Marion Adnams – For Lo, Winter Is Past, 1963

Marion Adnams – Three Stones, 1968

Marion Adnams – Variation On Red, 1949

Marion Adnams – The Seven Lamps, 1956

Marion Adnams – Spring In The Cemetery, 1956

Marion Adnams – Hay Harvest, 1947

Marion Adnams – Coloured Ending, 1962

Marion Adnams – The Living Tree, 1939

The Living Tree: On a visit to Sark in the summer of 1939 she was thrilled with the sea and its accompaniment of seaweed, sand and shells. Skies fascinated her, too, and of these she made endless colour notes. The twisted trunks and branches of trees. ♠

† Marion Adnams – National Galleries of Scotland
‡ Another World – Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists, 2010, p162
♠ The Studio Magazine – Volumes 127-128, 1944, p120
Alan Windsor – Handbook of Modern British Painting and Printmaking 1900-1990, 1998, p3
Sara Gray – The Dictionary of British Women Artists, 2009 p11

Tags Discover, Marion Adnams, surrealist, Surrelism, Women Artists

Ideal Home in Cambridgeshire

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 8th March 2018

The other day I bought a vintage magazine and inside the copy were a set of photographic contact sheets for the article. The piece was on ‘The house they built with glue!’ I have copied out some of the text and posted the pictures from the magazine and the contact sheets.

The Wilson House.

The first House of the Year is built on a delightful open site, green and peaceful, with trees screening it on two sides and a fine view to the south. Basically T-shaped, the four-bedroom house has an enclosed open-air patio in the centre to add space and light.

R.H.Wilson is a chemist/engineer who specialises in adhesives. He is sales director of CIBA (A.R.L.), the firm that developed the lightweight glued construction for Mosquitoes during the war. The adhesives used were epoxy resins, so strong that if you stick two pieces of metal together the metal will fracture before the joint breaks.

These resins are the vital components of the Wilson house. They hold the beams together. They hold the roof together. They even hold the flooring on. “The house,“ says Mr.Wilson, “would quite literally collapse and disintegrate if the adhesives failed."

Mr. Wilson asked Felix Walter to design the house after reading Walter‘s book, Fifty Modern Bungalows. The architect chose a simple post and beam construction on a concrete slab, with walls of double glazing and cedar cladding, and brick sections for stability. The framework of the house is light and strong, based on a new type of box beam developed by the architect and W.Brown & Co. (Ipswich) Ltd. Lighter, and easier to handle than traditional solid beams, it is made from plywood, the hollow centre strengthened and stabilised with struts glued to the ply with resin. According to Mr. Wilson, “this is a staggeringly stable construction that doesn’t warp or twist like ordinary timber; it‘s economical to make and easy to erect.”

What is the significance of the techniques used in the house? Briefly, they could make future house building cheaper and faster. This is what our Consultant Architect, Eric Ambrose. has to say: “I have often stressed that the future of economic and effective house building lies in the factory-the methods used here mean that much of the house can be delivered to the site ready for rapid ‘assembly’. The lightness of the materials (the beams and the roof) means reduced cost in labour and transport. The technique makes a big advance towards the ideal of dry construction. This avoids the present necessity of having to live in wet houses holding something like sixty tons of building water that can only be dried out at comparatively high heating costs in the first year."

The shape of the outside house is beautiful, the cut of the chimney, the line of the roof beyond the garage, quite lovely.

Tags Architecture

Bernard Cheese for BBC (I)

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 1st March 2018

The BBC Radio for Schools books were a wonder for illustrators and young artists, a chance to showcase a style but also work with a brief given by the BBC based on whatever the topic was about. In the days when Radio was a more dominant media than television the BBC had opportunities for the public and schools to buy printed booklets on the shows with more information and sometimes pictures too.

A music series offering children opportunities to listen to music and sing along, with creative suggestions and games to develop music appreciation and skills.

Bernard Cheese – Cover to Singing Songs,

Below are the drawings made by Bernard Cheese in 1968. As the BBC wanted to save money the booklets were normally one colour and black on white paper. Here Cheese is working with pure Cyan. Some of them use dotted plastic film that was used in the printing process then, normally to save money on ink and to add shading. But in the cover picture above there are various features going on that make it a remarkable print technically. The band in black but with the drum and flag decoration shaded in blue, the crowd to the right are in black at the front and behind in blue – a cunning use of limited colours. The shading too is in blue and black dots. This is a process that the other images have been separated up using.

The following illustrations are curious as they incorporate parts of 19th century illustrations, likely from religious books like the Quiver, the sea and the trees are clearly from steel engravings, the King and Queen I also suspect are not from Cheese’s own hand. It is a jolly way to use and recycle such illustrations.

Tags bbc, Bernard Cheese, great bardfield, lithography

Forbes-Sempill

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 1st March 2018

Although not a post on art per se it is an account of a family and their links with art.

Lord Sempill

William Francis Forbes-Sempill, 19th Lord Sempill, was a Scottish peer and record-breaking air pioneer who was later shown to have passed secret information to the Imperial Japanese military before the Second World War.

Educated at Eton, he began his career as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and then served in the Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Air Force during the First World War. In 1921, Sempill led an official military mission to Japan that showcased the latest British aircraft. In subsequent years he continued to aid the Imperial Japanese Navy in developing its Navy Air Service.

In the 1920s, Sempill began giving military secrets to the Japanese. Although his activities were uncovered by British Intelligence, Sempill was not prosecuted for spying and allowed to continue in public life. He was eventually forced to retire from the Royal Navy in 1941 after being discovered passing on secret material to Tokyo shortly before Japan declared war in the Pacific.

John Lavery – Eileen in Primrose Yellow, 1926

Eileen Lavery

In 1919 Sempill married Eileen Marion Lavery, daughter of the Irish painter Sir John Lavery the WW1 War Artist. Eileen was Lavery’s only child. Shortly after giving birth and suffering from tuberculosis, Kathleen MacDermott, her mother, died in November 1891.

When her father took up permanent residence in London 1898. Eileen attended Holy Cross Convent School at Rochampton, and accompanied her father on his annual trips to Tangier before her marriage to James Dickinson in 1912. This marriage failed after the birth of their first child and Eileen and James divorced.

John Lavery – R23 Type British Airships at Pulham St Mary, Norfolk, 1918

In 1920 Eileen married William Francis Forbes-Sempill, later Lord Sempill of Craigevar with whom she had two further children.

Their first daughter, Ann Moira, was born in 1920. Their second daughter, June Mary, was born in 1923, and was killed aged 18 as a result of enemy action on 11 May 1941 – the last day of the Blitz – at 15 Basil Street, London, just behind Harrods. She had been serving with the WVS Mobile Canteen Service. Eileen died in 1935.

Eric Ravilious – Wood Engraved Trade Card for Dunbar Hay Ltd, 1938

Cecilia Dunbar Kilburn

Lord Sempill would remarry, Cecilia Alice Dunbar-Kilburn, the daughter of Bertram Edward Dunbar-Kilburn, a

patent agent.

Cecilia would open the shop ‘Dunbar Hay Ltd’ of 15 Albemarle Street, London W1. It was founded in 1936 with and Athole Hay and gave opportunities for graphic artists and students from the Royal College of Art. These included Eric Ravilious, Eric Bawden and Enid Marx, to show their designs, including furniture, furnishings, ceramics, fabrics, patterns. Ravilious designed the wood-engraved trade card for the shop, which closed in 1940 because of WW2

In 1947 Cecilia would publish a monograph on English pottery and china as part of the Britian in pictures series of books.

Sir Ewan Forbes, 11th Baronet

Sir Ewan Forbes of Craigievar, 11th Baronet (6 September 1912 – 12 September 1991) was a Scottish nobleman, general practitioner and farmer. Due to the presence of an intersex condition at birth, he was christened Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill, and officially registered as the youngest daughter of John, Lord Sempill. After an uncomfortable upbringing, he began living as a man at the start of his medical career in 1945. He formally re-registered his birth as male in 1952, adopting the name of “Ewan Forbes-Sempill”, and was married a month later.

In 1965, he stood to inherit his elder brother’s baronetcy, together with a large estate. This inheritance was challenged by his cousin, who argued that the re-registration was invalid; under this interpretation, Forbes would legally be considered a woman, and thus unable to inherit. The legal position was unclear, and it took three years before a ruling by the Court of Session was finally upheld by the Home Secretary, granting him the title.

Tags Cecilia Semphill, Dunbar Hay Lmt, Eileen Lavery, John Lavery

Roland Vivian Pitchforth: War Art

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 22nd February 2018

Roland Vivian Pitchforth was 44 when war was declared. He was one of the few artists to get the job done. He painted every type of scene you could think of and accurately.

The spotlight after the war fell on more abstract artists. I blame gallery curators who want to make an easy (lazy?) link between the wars; the abstract paintings of Paul Nash of the First World War next to the paintings of Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore’s Second. In this funk I think Roland Vivian Pitchforth lost out, as did Eric Ravilious until his work was reviewed again in the 1970s. I think it is time these works are championed.

After almost a year of bureaucratic wrangling with the start up of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, Pitchforth was made an official war artist.

Kenneth Clark was chairman of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. That committee was part of the Ministry of Information. Clark would describe the ministry and its role succinctly, if rather negatively, in his autobiography:

It was said to contain 999 employees… [Its] large staff had been recruited to deal with three or four different objects. The first, and most defensible, was censorship; the second the provision of news; the third a feeble attempt at propaganda through various media; and the fourth to provide a kind of wastepaper-basket into which everyone could throw their grievances and their war-winning proposals.

The official role of war art had been, after much difficulty, established during the First World War. (In part, the idea had succeeded because the Germans had already developed such a scheme of their own, and the English felt a need to rival their enemy.) The essential purpose was that artists should provide a record of the war; and in some instances, (though it was not required, or expected) they might create something beyond reportage or official portraits – works of art in their own right. †

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Post Office Buildings, 1941

From 1940 to 1945, Pitchforth served as an official war artist for the Ministries of Information, Home Security, Supply and for the Admiralty. In March 1940, he was given a brief to depict the work of the Air Raid
Precaution (ARP) organisation and in December secured a six month
appointment with the Ministries of Home Security and Supply.

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Repairing Telephone Cables, 1941

In a series of pencil, watercolour, oil and lithograph pieces, he depicted ARP training, war damage, military production and naval scenes. Many of these were singled out for praise by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1941. He also painted a series of London war damage scenes including a number of paintings of the House of Commons in 1941

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Repairing Telephone Cables, 1941

His artist’s eye picked out the many bleak and surreal sights on London’s bomb sites. In March 1941, he described sketching damaged lift shafts open to the elements: “They look like dead prehistoric animals lying
over the jagged walls.”

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – The City Temple Church, London, EC4, 1941

Pitchforth subsequently specialised in coastal scenes, joined several naval convoys to Gibraltar and the Azores and produced paintings on RAF test flights and maintenance subjects.

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Loading Stores for Italy at Algiers, 1944

Commissioned in October 1943 as a temporary captain in the Royal Marines, Pitchforth was attached to the Royal Navy and in 1945 was sent by South Eastern Command to record the naval campaigns to retake Burma and Ceylon. During the British assault on Rangoon, he assisted in the camouflaging of his group’s amphibious craft. He captured the events in a series of paintings of Colombo Harbour and in The First British troops in Rangoon (1945). At war’s end, Pitchforth acquired a lung infection and spent 1945-1946 convalescing in South Africa (he still managed to exhibit at Wildenstein’s Gallery) before returning to London in 1948.

It is not surprising that you can still find the locations of Pitchforth’s paintings in London, but due to bombing and redevelopment some of the shops have changed shape.

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Sunday Morning, Great Titchfield Street, London, 1941

The Street Today, Google Maps.

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Chamber of the House of Commons, Bomb Damage, 1940–1945

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – AFS Practice with a Trailer-pump : On the banks of the Serpentine, London, 1941

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Fire-hose Practice in St James’s Park, London, 1941

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Protection Pits for Dispersed Aircraft, Lee-on-Solent, 1941

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – A New Runway, Lee-on-Solent, 1941

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – A Swordfish Aircraft Getting Ready to Take Off, 1941

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – A Royal Observer Corps Post, Rottingdean, 1944

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – An AA Battery, 1943

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – WAAFs Packing Parachutes, 1940

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Raw Materials for 4.5 Anti-aircraft Shells, 1941

Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Night Transport, 1940

† Peter Stansky & William Abrahams – London’s Burning – Life, Death & Art in the Second World War. 1994. p16

Tags Roland Vivian Pitchforth, War Artist, WW2

Shell – Everywhere You Go

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 15th February 2018

Both beautiful and inspiring, the artwork that Shell used on their posters was a shift in advertising for two reasons: They were selling the ambitions of the motorist beyond commuting; a generation of day-trippers without trains. Also they were presenting modern art to the public in an era when museums charged admission. The posters were pasted on the sides of petrol stations, lorries and billboards with that simple line “You Can Be Sure of Shell”.

Shell Mex Limited appointed a new Publicity Director in 1932, Jack Beddington. His insight turned the British Shell advertisements of the 1930s into one of the classic campaigns of the twentieth century. The genius of the campaign was to let artists depict Britain in their own styles, they would paint an image and whatever their style, it was surrounded 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.

Some of these posters were exhibited at the New Burlington Galleries in 1934. Below are two quotes from different reviews on the exhibition that show the surprise of critics to Beddington’s use of modern artists in poster design.

It is now a good many years since, under the able directorship of Mr Frank Pick, some of our best designers were encouraged to show their works in public – using the expression in its broadest sense. People who never though of going to picture galleries could, for the first time find delight in good pictorial art even in an Underground station and in the street. –
Apollo, January to June, 1934, p322 †

If it can be hoped that big firms like Shell-Mex are really going to patronize art as intelligently as this, we shall expect to be seeing in a few years’ time at Christie’s, not the sale of the collection of the Duke of Frumpshire, but of the Gas Light and Coke Company. If the princes of commerce are going to behave like princes we shall have some fun. ‡

The Everywhere You Go series is one of the more curious for it is before the typographic design for the posters had settled down, a range of typefaces, colours and sizes are used. The first offering by W J Steggles has the tag line in lowercase. Steggles was part of the now fashionable, East London Group of artists, he painted various scenes for Shell posters, as did his brother Harold and

Elwin Hawrhorne.