Afternoon Tea with Ravilious

The journey of any work of art can be interesting in how it is used, forgotten and then reused. As I write this I think it’s endemic of Ravilious’s life that there can be no area or topic on him that hasn’t been probed or turned into a book, but onward I go with my quest for originality.

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 Eric Ravilious – Sketch for Tea in the Garden, 1936

In 1936 Eric Ravilious made a wood engraving for London Transport. Tea in the Garden was made to be used in newspaper advertisements for the Green Line bus service, a decorative vignette to go with commuter information. It is a rather abstract design but it was the start of the commuter lifestyle as London was building a new wave of suburbia and you can imagine the print being used with slogans like “home in time for tea” or “enjoy the garden, 20 mins from the city by bus

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 Eric Ravilious – Finished print of Tea in the Garden, 1936

Soon after Ravilious reused the design for a commission with Wedgwood, he was so busy during this point that many designs where recycled from wood engravings to watercolours or china. Below you can see a sketch drawing for a teapot design using the woodblock above. Carving out the legs of the bench and inverting the colours of the table so when printed the transfer will be black and an enamel colour wash painted over.

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 Eric Ravilious – Sketched idea for Teapot design, 1938

The finished design below, with the colouring in yellow, blue and green. The design has been made simpler and the shading is able to be more subtle as it will be printed on a metal plate, so there is more detail in the halftone lines. It was first used on a preserve jar for Wedgwood.

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The preserve jar was introduced six months in advance of the rest of the pattern. The design was advertised in 1939 as being available also in breakfast and coffee sets; the war prevented production of these. At first unnamed, later called ‘Teaset’, the design was finally named ‘Afternoon Tea’.

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Here the tea-set is advertised in ‘The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art 1943-1948′ (the gap in printing is noted in the introduction due to WW2, lack of paper and designers being commissioned to do essential war work, this year book covers a wide range of time).

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The Bone china tea ware decorated with motifs illustrating Afternoon Tea, printed in sepia and hand-coloured green. Designed by Eric Ravilious A.R.C.A. for Josiah Wedgwood and Sons. 

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Here is a tea-plate from the set with the simple wave decoration on the perimeter of the plate and washed in blue enamel paint.

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 In this prototype photograph from 1938 the design is painted around with a pink glaze to the edge of the design and the Ravilious vignette and border uncoloured but printed in a brown sepia with the pink flooding over the whole plate. These are the rarest of all the designs as they were not put into production and the designs were modified to use less colour glaze after the war. 

Twenty five years later the original woodblock design would be resurrected and used in a reduced size for advertising and on the covers of Country Walks booklets.

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 Country Walks with the Ravilious Engraving on the cover, 1978

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 A rather fun and unusual poster for the Country Walks books by Harry Stevens, 1978.

Ravilious Engravings by Ravilious Jeremy Greenwood, Wood Lea Press, 2008.
Country Walks, London Transport, 1978.
Ravilious and Wedgwood: The Complete Wedgwood Designs of Eric Ravilious, 1995.
† The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art 1943-1948 
  

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Gentlemen Underground

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When he was commissioned to design murals for the platforms of Charing Cross underground station, artist David Gentleman (born 1930) chose as his theme the building of the medieval Charing Cross, one of the twelve memorial crosses commemorating Queen Eleanor (who died in 1290). He devised a scheme to take into account the architecture of the station, allowing spaces for entrances and exits and litter bins. He collaged together nearly 50 wood engravings which were then screen-printed onto melamine sheets by Perstorp Waterite Limited. This was the first large-scale application of wood engraving. 

A view of the station platform when decorated in 1979.

As with many works by any artist, what came before proved to be important. Before the Charing Cross commission Gentleman had been working in wood-engraving commercially for Penguin Books and their Shakespeare reprints. Steeped in a medieval theme and having to produce one image that would summarise a whole play it was useful training.

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 Penguin Books, Shakespeare collection with covers designed by David Gentleman.

The most interesting and taxing commission to come my way so far did not begin as an engraving job at all. Late in 1977 London Transport asked me to design a mural for Charing Cross Underground station. The practical aspects were clear enough; it was to be fabricated in screen-printed melamine laminate, curved to follow the profile of the tunnel; it would be about two metres high and it would have to find room not only for numerous platform entrances and London Transport roundels but also for various staff letter boxes, telephones, plus litter bins and wooden benches for people to sit on. The subject-matter however was pretty vague. At that time the words Charing Cross suggested little more than a closed-down hospital and a run-down British Rail terminus, and the only brief was that the mural should remind passengers of what the name Charing Cross had once meant. Graphically I was given a free hand, and also the vital assurance of being directly responsible to the two people with real authority: The Chairman, Kenneth Robinson and the Chief Architect, Sidney Hardy. 

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Having recently been working not only on the Shakespeare covers but also on lithographs for an American edition of The Ballards of Robin Hood, medieval imagery in illuminated manuscripts and paintings was still much in my mind, both for its epigrammatic clarity and for the way it often depicts a sequence of related events in one picture. This narrative technique suited the hundred-metre long strip of platform, and the idea of showing how the original Charing Cross had been constructed came to my mind straight away.

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 Original Woodblock by David Gentleman

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 Here one of the early proofs of the woodcut above for the project before the black background had been carved out.

The only proviso they made before they committed themselves absolutely to it was that a strip of it, about twenty yards long, but just as it would be finally, should be built (a mock up) in the disused Aldwych station where there are empty platforms available for such things and I got blown up (photographically) a few engravings and a few roundels… ♠ 

Underneath the roundel bulls-eye with ‘Charing Cross’ there was a bench where people can sit. So there was a bench built into the mock up, and then as the idea developed I got the idea that I could have the figures in my design sitting on the bench or using it as a work table. ♠ 

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Many stations also feature unique interior designs to help passenger identification. Often these have themes of local significance. Tiling at Baker Street incorporates repetitions of Sherlock Holmes’s silhouette. Tottenham Court Road features semi-abstract mosaics by Eduardo Paolozzi representing the local music industry at Denmark Street. ♥

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Building the first Charing Cross
The original Charing Cross was built in 1291-1294 by Edward I in memory of his wife, Queen Eleanor of Castile. It was the most splendid of the twelve Eleanor Crosses erected to mark the successive places where her body rested on its way from Lincoln to Westminster Abbey, and stood near here until it was destroyed in 1647.

Richard of Crundale and Roger of Crundale were the master masons. The stone came from Corfe in Dorset and Caen in Normandy; Richard of Corfe and John of Corfe cut the English stone. Alexander of Abingdon and William of Ireland carved the statues of Queen Eleanor which stood halfway up the Cross, and Ralph of Chichester carved some of the decoration. Many others whose names are forgotten took part in the work: quarry-men, rough-hewers, masons, mortarers, layers, setters, carpenters, thatchers, scaffolders, labourers, falcon or crane-men, apprentices, hodmen, drivers, horsemen and boatmen. These pictures of them are by David Gentleman ♣

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 The historical plaque with the text (above) and the enlarged wood engravings by David Gentleman. 

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David Gentleman – V&A Website.
The Wood Engravings of David Gentleman, David Esslemont p114, 2000.
Oral History – David Gentleman – Reel 4, Imperial War Museum, 2008-07-03.
♥ London Underground – An overview. Pediapress
Mural text in Charing Cross Station, London.
Guide to the Archive of Art and Design, Victoria & Albert Museum by Elizabeth Lomas, 2001.

Spender on Woolf

In The Listener, April, 1941, there is a tribute by Stephen Spender on the death of Virginia Woolf. Below is the full text.

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 Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of Virginia Woolf

In these dark times, the death of Virginia Woolf cannot strike her circle of friends and admirers except as a light which has gone out. Whatever its significance, her loss is irreparable. Her strength-and perhaps also her weakness lay in her rare mind and personality. Moreover, the quality of what she created had the undiluted purity of one of those essentially uncorrupted natures which seem set aside from the world for a special task by the strangest conjunction of fortune and misfortune.

Yet when one thinks of what Virginia Woolf achieved, her life appears far more a wonderful triumph over many difficulties than in any sense a defeat. In a different time or in different circumstances, she might well have died far younger and with far less finished. As it is, although she died at the height of her powers, she had completed the work of a lifetime. The history of other writers who have suffered from ill-health shows how much there is here to be grateful for.

Her best novels, or prose poems in the form of fiction, are The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves. Although all of these novels have tn common the qualities which distinguish her writing, they differ not merely in portraying different material, but in having different artistic aims. Indeed the artistic aims in Virginia Woolf‘s novels are far more varied than the material, which is somewhat narrow and limited.

Most novelists having achieved, by about their third novel, a mature style, continue to write novels in that style, but covering different aspects of experience. With Virginia Woolf, however, style, form and material are indivisible. With every new novel she was ‘trying to do something different’, especially with time. For example, the whole action of Mrs. Dalloway takes place in one day: the first long section of To the Lighthouse describes a scene lasting for perhaps an afternoon ; this is followed by a very short section describing the passage of several years, illustrated by the decay of an empty house. Orlando is a fantastic account of someone who lives for several hundred years. beginning as a man and turning into a woman. The Waves is a poetic account of people seen through each other’s minds through all their lives, speaking their thoughts in poetic imagery to each other. A new way of writing a book was simply a new way of looking at life for Virginia Woolf : she held life like a crystal which she turned over in her hands and looked at from another angle. But a crystal is too static an image; for, of course, she knew that the crystal flowed.

It is a well known device of composers to take a theme and write variations on it. The same tune which is trivial in one light passage in a major key is profound in a minor key scored differently; at times the original tune seems lost while the harmonies explore transcendent depths far beyond the character of the original theme; now the tune runs fleetingly past us; now it is held back so that time itself seems slowed down or stretched out. This musical quality is the essence of Virginia Woolf ’s writing. The characters she creates – Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay are well defined to be sure, but they are only the theme through which she explores quite other harmonics of time, death, poetry and a love which is more mysterious and less sensual than ordinary human love.

A passage from To the Lighthouse will illustrate the ’ beauty which she could achieve Mr. Ramsay, who is a philosopher – almost a great Victorian – faces the sense of his own an failure: and what are two thousand years? (asked Mr. Ramsay ironically staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still. (He looked into the darkness, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of stars, if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at his post, the line figure of a soldier. Mr. Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn. This passage has all Virginia Woolf ’s virtues, and perhaps some of her defects. It starts off by being very faithful even in its irony to the thoughts of Mr. Ramsay. She takes one of those plunges beyond the present situation of her character into the past and the future which strikes one often in her writing as a night of pure poetic genius. But then the focus shifts and the writer has forgotten her character’s thoughts, or perhaps she is regarding him from the outside. But the image of the leader of the expedition in the snow is a little too general, and one begins to wonder whether she hasn’t strayed too far from the particular.

As with the impressionist painters, there are opposing tendencies in her novels. The one is centrifugal, the tendency for everything to dissolve into diffused light and in the brilliant detachment with which their surroundings flow through her characters’ minds. The other is centripetal-the tremendous preoccupation with form which nevertheless holds her novels together and makes them far more significant than if they were just the expression of a new way of looking at life. This doubtless reflects an acute nervous tension in her own mind between a two great sensitivity which tended to disintegrate into uncoordinated impressions, and a noble and sane determination not to lose hold of the central thread.

To have known Virginia Woolf is a great privilege, because it is to have known an extraordinary and poetic and beautiful human being. Some critics describe her as forbidding and austere. Her austerity was not that of a closed-in or a prudish mind. As with all genuinely intelligent people, one could discuss anything with her with the greatest frankness; she was far too interested in life to make narrow moral judgements. Perhaps she was a little too impatient towards stupidity and tactlessness; it is a gift to writers to suffer fools gladly. To be with her was a joy, because her delight and her awareness of everything around her communicated themselves easily and immediately to her friends. What was written on her beautiful unforgettable face was not severity at all, though there was some melancholy; but most of all there was the devotion and discipline which go with the task of poetic genius, together with the price in the way of nervous strain and physical weakness which doubtless she had to pay.

Sneazing Searle

Ronald Searle was born in Cambridge and studied at the Cambridge School of Art for two years. Aged 19 in April 1939, realising that war was inevitable, he abandoned his art studies to enlist in the Royal Engineers. In January 1942, he was stationed in Singapore. After a month of fighting in Malaya, he was taken prisoner along with his cousin Tom Fordham Searle, when Singapore fell to the Japanese. He spent the rest of the war a prisoner, first in Changi Prison and then in the Kwai jungle, working on the Siam-Burma Death Railway. 

Searle contracted both beri-beri and malaria during his incarceration, which included numerous beatings, and his weight dropped to less than 40 kilograms. He was liberated in late 1945 with the final defeat of the Japanese. After the war in 1961 he worked as a courtroom artist for the Adolf Eichmann trial.

The illustrations here are from Lilliput in 1946. It was the start of a flood of illustration work for Searle in magazines, it was just as he was developing the ideas for the ‘St Trinian’s’ books. Searle’s job here is to illustrate is a set of quotes about being ill. The original layout is at the bottom of the post. One signed in full and the other monogrammed RS.

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Last Saturday night I came home, and the drab had just washed my room, and my bed-chamber was all wet, and I was forced to go to bed in my own defence, and no fire: I was sick on Sunday, and now have got a swingeing
cold… I detest washing of rooms; cant they wash them in a morning, and make a tire, and leave open the windows? I slept not a wink last night for hawking and spitting: and now everybody has colds. 
– ‘The Journal to Stella’ by Jonathan Swift. 1711.

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I am at this moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose,
green in the gills, damp in the ,eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in
the temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold, caught the other day, I suspect, at Liverpool, where I got exceedingly wet…
– Charles Dickens to H. Ainswarth. 1843

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…it seems the Duchess had caught a violent cold by a hair of her own whisker getting up her nose and making her sneeze …“
– Horace Walpole to Lady Harvey. 1758

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Afterwards I happened to be alone with this charming Princess, and her sister Elizabeth, in the Queens dressing-room. She then came up to me: Now will you excuse me, Miss Burney, if I ask you the truth of something I have heard about you? … It is such an odd thing, I dont know how to mention it; but I have wished to ask you about it this great while. Pray is it really true that, in your illness last year, you coughed so violently that you broke the whale bone in your stays in two? As nearly true as possible, ma’am; it actually split with the force of the almost convulsive motion of a cough that seemed loud and powerful enough for a giant. I could hardly myself believe it was little I that made so formidable a noise.
– Diary. Frances Burney 1786

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Rex Whistler Pops Up

I collect many books, but I have a passion for old travel books and it is while shopping I came to pull this book off the bookshelf outside the shop.

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George Borrow’s ‘The Bible in Spain’, it is thankfully not too religious. It has three photogravure plates and a pull out map at the back. The main reason for buying the book however was the ex-libris bookplate and the name pencilled inside. 

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The book is signed Violet Granby, who was Marion Margaret Violet Lindsay, Marchioness of Granby, Duchess of Rutland. It is dated, Madrid, 1906. Under the name is a sketch of sorts, the outline of a bay or mountain. 

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Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners was one of Violet Lindsay’s daughters (Diana’s biological father was the writer Henry Cust but she grew up thinking Violet’s Husband, Henry Manners was her father). Diana married 1st Viscount Norwich, Duff Cooper, a British Conservative Party politician, diplomat and author.

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The bookplate inside is for Duff Cooper by Rex Whistler. It is likely the book was inherited and he pasted in his bookplate over the drawing on the end-papers. Whistler was a fashionable artist and illustrator of the 20s and 30s, one of the Bright Young Things.

With Lady Diana comically decorated as a bust of Diana the Hunter, the image has grapes in bloom and bottles of champagne, warrants and travel cases. Below are some detail shots, the work in the image of line and shading is best seen in close-up. The bookplate was designed in 1931 for Duff and Lady Diana Cooper.

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Miranda and the Festival of Britain.

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 Arthur Fleischmann with his statue, Miranda, 1951

Arthur Fleischmann was a Slovak-born, London-based sculptor, who pioneered the use of Perspex in sculpture. He spent time in Bali, and in Australia, where he was at the centre of the Merioola Group, before settling in London in 1948. He married his wife Joy in 1959 and their son, the photographer Dominique Fleischmann, was born in 1961.

For the 1951 Festival of Britain, Fleischmann was commissioned to produce a sculpture entitled “Miranda”. The larger than life-size Mermaid was sponsored by the Lockheed Brake and Clutch Company. 

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 Miranda fountain in a press advert for the Lockheed Company, to the left the Festival of Britain and their logo’s are combined, 1951.

Miranda graced the exhibition area in Battersea Park and, after the Festival closed, it was transported to the Lockheed headquarters in Leamington Spa. 

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 Arthur Fleischmann with the statue and on the sofa, the model Joyce Odiase (née Taylor). Photo by Russell Westwood, NPG, 1951.

The statue stayed at the Lockheed headquarters for nearly 50 years before “disappearing” mysteriously over the Christmas holidays of 2000. 

A historic bronze statue by sculptor Arthur Fleischmann has been stolen from its home in Leamington Spa. Miranda, a bronze sculpture 2.5m long and 1.2m high, was stolen some time between 14 and 17 December 2001 from the main entrance of the AP (Automotive Products) company in Tachbrook Road. 

The sculpture, commissioned by AP’s predecessor, the Lockheed Hydraulic Brake Company, was created for the 1951 Festival of Britain and first displayed in London’s Festival Gardens. A spokeswoman for Leamington Spa police put the value of the work at between £50,000 and £100,000. So far police have no idea as to its whereabouts or who might have stolen it.

Miranda attracted a great deal of press coverage during the Festival of Britain, in part for its unconventional portrayal of a mermaid with two legs instead of a fish’s body, and fins instead of feet.

Mr Fleischmann said at the time: “I think that mermaids with fish tails are rather dull. “Why should not a beautiful mermaid have nice legs? She can still swim with her fins on her feet. At least that is how I imagine a mermaid.”

The work, intended as a tribute to the skill and industry of the people of Britain, took three months to create and involved two models. The bronze was cast by Vincent Galizia foundry at Battersea, south London, and was returned to Leamington Spa after the Festival closed. It was set in a fountain and was listed as a Grade II building, and remained on its site until the theft. 

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 Front cover of Precision Magazine, 1951.

The Henry-Moore Institute acquired two terracotta maquettes of Miranda created by Fleischmann in around 1948 (at the same time that he did the portraits of the actor Trevor Howard) and these are on display in the Institute gallery space in Leeds. When a cheeky reporter quipped at Fleischmann during the Festival that everyone knows a mermaid has a tail and not two legs with fins, my father replied that he had never seen a mermaid and so couldn’t comment.

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 Joyce Odiase (née Taylor) in a riske shot with the maquette of Miranda. 

Sources:
BBC News Website – 2002, Festival of Britain Bronze stolen http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1749497.stm
The Courtauld Institute of Art and Archiecture. http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/stories/fleischmann_fleischmann/fleischmann_fleischmann3.html

London Dockland.

This is a piece from Lilliput Magazine, 1946. I loved the photos and the history that goes with them. The photographs are by Bill Brandt.

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Below Tower Bridge: St Pauls Seen From Bermondsey.
As ships steam up the Thames towards Kings Reach, Tower Bridge looms up ahead of them.Off Shadwell, a mile below, they signal Cherry Garden Pier at Southwark; Cherry Garden telephones to the bridge master, and the great bascules rise to admit them to the heart of London. Above, the traffic waits, but only for ninety seconds: the bridge begins to close before the ships stern is clear. Tower Bridge was built in 1894 at a cost of one and a half million pounds. Beyond the bridge is the dome of St Pauls.

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As I Was A-Walking Down Nightingale Lane…
Nightingale Lane would send any rustic bird flying in terror for its life. A brutally uncompromising dockyard street, it wanders grimly between the Customs walls of St. Katharines and London Docks down to Wapplng High Street. But in the 17th century it was a simple country lane. It is recorded that Charles I hunted a stag from Wanstead and that the hill was made in a garden in this lane, to the detriment of the herbs in the garden. The name is actually derived from the knights whom Edgar I allowed to form a guild here it was first called Cnihten, and then Knighten, Guild.

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Wareshouses Along The South Bank.
Londons merchant princes may dress in black striped trousers and call themselves limited companies,but the goods they import are more rich and strange than any ever seen in Baghdad. Behind the walls of these drab warehouses lie spices and precious metals; tusks of ivory, furs, and casks of wine. The very grimness of the port is attractive to the visitor. If William Dunbar could return from the 15th century; he might well write again:
“Of merchants full of substance and of might, London, thou art the flower of cities all.”

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Shad Thames.
Along the river from St. Saviours Back to Tower Bridge winds a street which, with its bewildering mass of gantries and cranes, and its highly compressed activity, is typical of much of the Thames-side London which has been building up slowly from the time of Drake. Before our great Elizabethan sailors opened the ocean highways, there was a mere trickle of foreign shipping in the Thamesa trickle that was to swell to the greatest flood of shipping in the world. Shad is another name for herring, and as Shad Thames is a continuation of Pickle Herring Street, the name is perhaps not so,obscure as it first appears.

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Hermitage Stairs, Wapping.
It is no longer thought that the Romans built the first river wall, but it was already old when it collapsed in 1324 and the river streamed through to flood 100,000 acres of the land now occupied by the London and the St. Katharines docks. After the breach had been repaired people were encouraged to return to Wapping wall and settle, so that there might be someone with a personal interest in keeping the wall in repair. It was around this time that the hermitage is thought to have existed which gave Hermitage Lane its name. Waterman call the river here not the Thames, but the London river.

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Horselydown New Stairs, Bermondsey.
The palace, the monastery, and the Abbey that were in their turn the pride of Bermondsey are to-day not even memories. Just below the bridge on the Bermondsey side of the river, Horselydown Lane runs down to the water overground where formerly the houses of great nobles and prelates stood. Here also were the parish archery butts, set up in the reign of Henry VIII. The warehouses lining the dark alleys are not very old, but they have stood long enough to seem immutable, and to provide a dark challenge to town planners.

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Charles Browns, Limehouse.
Many of the old East End pubs have a rich historical background, real or synthetic,of piracy, smuggling, and general villainy. Charley Browns is the most famous of the old seafaring taverns, and still the first port of call for most sightseers in the East End. Sailors front all over the world used to bring their trophies to Charley, until the King of Limehouse, as he came to be called, had filled his pub with curios. When Charley died in 1932 ten thousand mourners followed his coffin: The pub is still a sailors, as well as a tourists,house.

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Wapping The Wharves.
Today Wapping is less exciting, and much more respectable, than it ever was in the past, when Ratcliffe Highway was the home of the land-shark and the downfall of the sailor. The Carron Wharf, on the right, belongs to a company which in the 18th century invented the carronade, a piece of ordnance which their ships mounted by Government licence. To prevent being mistaken for privateers these ships also carried the likeness of a cannon ball on their masts. This is the view across the river from St. Saviour’s Dock.

Walter Hoyle

Walter Hoyle is in danger of being one of the forgotten Great Bardfield artists due to the lack of information on him.

Hoyle was born in Rishton, Lancashire in July 1922. Hoyle’s artistic
education started at the Beckenham School of Art in 1938,

I persuaded my local art school to accept me, and presented as evidence of my serious intent, a series of drawings much influenced by Walt Disney. †

From Beckenham, Hoyle gained a place at as a student at the Royal College
of Art from 1940-42 and again from 1947-48 after serving in the
Second World War. During Hoyle’s time at the RCA one of his tutors was
Edward Bawden, who encouraged him to develop watercolours and
printmaking.

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 Walter Hoyle at home in Great Bardfield, NPG, taken by Geoffrey Ireland.

It was 1940, the phoney war was to about to end and the college was evacuated from London to Ambleside in the Lake District, famous for poets rather than artists. It was here that I was first introduced to printmaking – lithography – by a friend called Thistlethwaite, a fellow student from Oswaldtwistle (although these names are true, I mention them only because I like the sound they make). He prepared a litho stone for me with a beautiful finely ground surface and instructed me how to draw in line and wash. 

In 1948, During the RCA Diploma show, a visitor was so impressed by Hoyle’s work that he was offered seven months’ work in the Byzantine Institute in Istanbul, Hoyle accepted, the work he saw there made a strong impression. Italian art and architecture also influenced him at that time.

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 Walter Hoyle – Church Moon, Little Samford (In My Collection) ,1957.

Early in 1951 when Bawden was commissioned by the Festival of Britain to produce a mural for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion on the South Bank,
it was Hoyle that he chose to assist him on account of his great talent. During that summer Bawden invited Hoyle on a holiday to Sicily.

Edward asked to see my watercolours. He looked very carefully and quizzed me about them, and in general was complimentary and encouraging. I felt I had passed some kind of ‘examination. ♠

It was this holiday together that Hoyle would scribe into a limited edition booklet of 10 in 1990 and into a book in 1998 – “To Sicily with Edward Bawden” a limited edition of 350 copies with a forward by Olive Cook.

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 Walter Hoyle – Hill town in Sicily, ex Cambridge City Council, 1951.

In 1952 Hoyle took over the painting of another mural, the dome of St Mary Abchurch, London. The church had been blitzed in September 1940,
and the original mural was being restored by E. W. Tristan, but when Tristan died, Hoyle completed the work. ‡

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 Walter Hoyle – The cover for the Great Bardfield Exhibition booklet.

The move to Great Bardfield:
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. He lived and worked in the Great Bardfield area for twenty-two years and exhibited with the Bardfield artists in 1954, 1955 and 1956 when they would open their houses to the public for one weekend a year, rather than relying on London galleries. Hoyle met his wife, the ceramists and poster designer
Denise Hoyle at at one of the Great Bardfield “open house” exhibitions in 1956, when his work was on show at George Chapman’s house.

It may have been Edward Bawden’s painting classes and lectures at Brick House, or being in the hilly Essex countryside but it around this time that Hoyle became interested in English romantic painting: the work of Turner, Blake and Palmer and also in French art. Like other members of Great Bardfield, Hoyle designed for interiors with wallpapers and fabrics for Coles, Sandersons and the Wallpaper Manufacturers Limited.

One of Hoyle’s most popular works for book illustration came with a commission for the Folio Society in 1968 with Shirley by Charlotte Bronte.

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 Walter Hoyle Design for Sandersons

Teaching:
Walter Hoyle has taught at various art schools: St. Martin’s, London, 1951-60; the Central School of Art, London, 1960-64; and the Cambridge School of Art, 1964-85.

Walter Hoyle left Great Bardfield and moved to Bottisham, Cambridgeshire, to teach at the Cambridge School of Art in their printmaking department. While at Cambridge, he launched the Cambridge Print Editions, publishers of the magazine of the Cambridge School of Art, “Private View” co-edited by Warwick Hutton, which he started and which included interesting extracts from the work of famous artists and writers such as Patrick Heron and Edward Ardizzone, as well as articles by
students and graduates of the school.

Hoyle took over the collection of ‘Original Works for Children in Cambridgeshire’, an art project for City of Cambridge Committee for Education. Hoyle donated a picture and convinced other artists to give works to the project too. He retired from teaching in 1985 to move to Hastings and Dieppe. Hoyle died in 2000.

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

Exhibitions and Collections:
Hoyle exhibited internationally working outside of the Bardfield set. Exhibitions were not only at the Byzantine Institute Gallery in Paris in 1950, but in 1952 he showed at the Leicester Galleries, London. He was featured in many mixed exhibitions in London and the provinces, including the Royal Academy summer exhibitions and Kettles Yard, Cambridge (1972). Walter Hoyle is represented in many public and private collections, among them the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, the Victoria and Albert and the British Museums, the Tate Gallery, the Walker Art Gallery, the Whitworth Art Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Sheffield Art Gallery, the Manchester City Art Gallery, Editions Alecto Gallery, London, and the Palace of Westminster and the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden.

He painted murals for the Natural History Museum, for the Jamestown Festival, USA, and for the Sealink ship “St. David”.

Editions of his prints have been commissioned by Editions Alecto, Christie’s Contemporary Art, Neve International, the British Oxygen Company, the Folio Society and St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

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 Walter Hoyle – St Catherine’s with Acanthus, (In My Collection), 1966

Printmaking Today, Volume 7, 1998. page 9-10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary_Abchurch
To Sicily with Edward Bawden, Previous Parrot Press, 1998.
The  Great Bardfield  Exhibition  by  Gerald  Marks,  Realism,  August  —
September  1955
♣ http://www.fryartgallery.org/the-collection/search-viewer/691/artist/15/Walter-Hoyle–/22

Dali at home in ‘57

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When I married Salvador Dali his moustache was. no bigger than a thread of silk,’ his wife Gala explains. ‘We lived in a one-roomed fisherman’s hut overlooking Port Lligat in Spain, and while I learned to fish and prepare lobsters à l’espagnole,

Dali struggled with surrealist paintings. Every six months both of them went to Paris and tried to sell his work. Today he places commissions on a three-year waiting list, and intimidates the world with a moustache capable of anything from a heavily waxed coil to a vertical sword thrust. ‘Sometimes,’ Mrs. Dali admits, ‘I worry in case he scratches his eyes out.’

The fisherman’s hut, too, has grown. ‘Our Hamlet’ is the way Mr. Dali describes it. Apart from three cottages and a rather new-looking hotel, Port Lligat is the Dali home. One by one, neighbouring cottages and outhouses have been given an extra storey, whitewashed, and added to the home structure. The result is a nest of twelve different roof levels set between terraced hills, with a tiny bay and four rowing boats just six steps down from the front door.

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‘I still go fishing.’ says Mrs. Dali, ‘but the boats are fitted with motors now, and I no longer have to prepare the meal afterwards.’

She trained a staff of three–manservant-cum-chauffeur, chambermaid, and cook-to run the ten-roamed house so that she could deal with her own work as secretary, artist‘s model (she is the dark-haired beauty in most of his paintings), and keeper of the Great Privacy. ‘I arrange for us to have no telephone and no guest room,‘ she says with obvious satisfaction. ‘Visitors either come by yacht and sleep on board; or they take our mountain road, which is not good, and sleep at the hotel.’

In fact, the last stretch of road is so bad that the Dali Cadillac has to have a house and garden of its own in nearby Cadaques. ‘We complete our journey by local taxi, which is like riding a mountain goat.’

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‘Cosmic inspiration’
In spite of their inaccessibility and a wish to safeguard privacy, the Dalis are not inhospitable, and friends are always welcome-after eight o’clock in the evening. ‘For six months of the year we live in American hotels,’ Salvador Dali explains. ‘I make big appearance for public and friends. I design nightclubs, create fantastic Dali parties. Port Lligat is secret place, where I was little boy, where I work always. I bring strong cosmic forces back from America, Gala brings canvas and brushes, and I paint in studio.’

He is now working on the Greatest Dali Masterpiece, a religious canvas over twelve feet high and nine feet wide. By using pulleys and a slot in the studio floor which opens on to cellars below, he is able to adjust the canvas to any working height or whisk it out of sight altogether. He hopes he can complete the work within six months. He then has fifteen commissioned portraits to paint-at an average fee of £7,000 for each one. ‘Money itself does not interest,’ he says. ‘Only the symbol is very strong in me.’

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The studio, like the bedroom and the main sitting room, has a sloping, heavily beamed ceiling, and everything is distempered white. No artistic mess or muddle here, only a deliberate and persistent study in contrast. A life-size Apollo, for example, sporting a Davy Crockett hat ‘to keep the mind sparking’; a jewelled casket balanced on a tripod of French loaves.

‘Bread is obsession,’ he explains. ‘It captures many shapes for me. Like sea urchin which has cosmic inspiration, and rhinoceros for strong fear. I learn secret and use in my work.’

He has just completed a film (to be shown at the next Cannes Festival) which tells the story of his strange philosophy. It took him two years to make and he calls it The Prodigious History of the Rhinoceros and the Lawmaker.

These obsessions also play a decorative and oddly formal part in the home. Each room holds at least one secret. The main lounge, predominantly white with yellow upholstery and a floor of polished bricks, has two stuffed swans perched on the ‘canopy’ of books which divides the room; the entrance hall is furnished with a life-size bear wearing elaborate chains of office, and a couch inspired by the line of Mae West’s lips.

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 The bookcase has two stuffed swans looking down on the room.

The rooms themselves vary in size and shape, and they are all built on different levels. Most impressive is the hundred and-fourteen feet long, three-tiered bedroom, consisting of lower Sitting room with yellow pin-cushion settees, curio landing seven stairs up, decorated with elaborate jars of sugared almonds, and the bedroom proper seven steps above that. This has a red and blue canopy for the two divans, and a large fireplace with a walled-in sitting recess inspired by one of Dali’s sketches.

All the fireplaces at Port Lligat are based on designs by Salvador Dali, but Gala is the one who chooses the furniture and decides on the decor. Her approach is simple and effective. ‘A house must be warm,’ she says, ‘it must also be nourishing for the mind.’ She guards against the strong mountain wind (Lligat is on the East Coast some forty miles south of the French border) with central heating. She keeps the house ‘alive’ with hundreds of well-thumbed books, and a retinue of comfortable animals: she has white canaries in her bedroom, cats downstairs, and pigeons in a vast pagoda-style dovecote outside.

Although she is Russian by birth and international by upbringing, Mrs. Dali’s choice of furniture is mainly local. For the dining room she has fifteenth-century refectory~style pieces from a nearby monastery; she bought, and dismantled, a vintage black and gold Catalan bedstead to make headboards for the divans.

‘Silk and brocade is right for town,’ she says. ‘Here we need crisp white linen curtains. On the floor I have rush matting used for covering the local ox wagons.’ A samovar is her one concession to the past, but even this comes in useful on chilly evenings.

By mutual consent, Time, in the shape of a mad rococo clock, is firmly relegated to a decorative comer of the rock garden outside. They nevertheless follow a routine of work, breakfast, work-swim, work-siesta, and work which is governed in detail by the light, and Salvador Dali himself-self-acclaimed genius. ‘I am. fifty three,’ he says, ‘but even as a boy I paint With originality. Two times they expel me from college,

I am so good.’ He had a tempestuous school career at Figueras, twenty miles from Lligat, and his parents weathered his ‘Stone Period‘ with desperate patience. ‘I painted stones and tied them to‘ canvas,’ he says. Unfortunately, they were rarely secure, and his father would explain the noise to startled visitors: ‘It‘s nothing, just another stone that’s dropped from our child’s sky.’ Later he went to art school in Madrid, and on to Paris where he found the centre of surrealism and a fascinating but meagre living.

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 Pagoda-style dovecote decorated with pitchfork perches – is home to a hundred pigeons, and also an extension to the Dali game larder.

During one of his many return visits to Spain, he met Gala on holiday, courted her in French, and proposed with ninety red roses which he could ill afford. Encouraged by his wife, he clinched his reputation in Paris with some of his most brilliant work. and in 1935 decided to take a one-man show to America. The Dalis arrived in New York with thirty pieces of luggage, and the world’s biggest loaf for dramatic effect.

The loaf was ignored, but the paintings, were a fabulous success, particularly his portrait of Gala balancing a pair of chops on her shoulders. Questioned about significance, he replied: ‘I like Gala, also chops.’

At home he has always been quietly spoken and unexpectedly modest. Dark-haired and dark-skinned, he is an expert showman who delights in dressing up. He has an extensive ‘Spanish’ wardrobe, although most of his fancy Catalan shirts are in fact cowboy ones, bought from drugstores in America, and modified at home. ‘

“During the day I wear knee-length trousers; in the evening I always have them full length. She has dozens of pairs, mostly skin tight and all couturier-made.

The Dalis have one luxury bathroom with an excellent supply of hot and cold rain water, but mineral water is Gala’s great personal extravagance. ‘We buy it in bottles for cooking, but I use it for washing as well.’

The menu at Port Lligat is governed by Mr. Dali’s standards, ‘Food must have well-defined shape, so intelligence can grasp it,’ he says. ‘Shell fish and chop is good. Spinach bad.’ A weekly delivery of food supplies from Figueras is augmented by local fish, rabbits, and the famous Dali pigeons.

The kitchen, decorated with exhibition posters and presentation plaques, has an electric ’fridge (run off their own power plant) and an Open range for cooking, because the staff prefers to use charcoal. Life with Salvador is remote from local custom, but he does create fiestas of his own. He will organize a firework display for the fishermen and their children to celebrate the completion of a new work.

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 The bear in the hallway holds a lamp-stand and a basket for gloves.

He recently bought a barn in Cadaques which he plans to convert into a private cinema for Chaplin films and Dali premieres. He spends most of his evenings writing at home (he is working on his third book), but occasionally the local choir is invited for ‘champagne and songs’. In return, they bring gifts of fragrant herbs for the house. ‘They love Dali,’ his wife comments, ‘and understand him a little.’ Certainly they would have appreciated the way Freud described him after their one and only meeting: ‘I have never seen a more complete example of a Spaniard. What a fanatic!’

Eddie Marsh

Last summer I was reading ‘A Crisis of Brilliance’ by David Boyd Haycock, it is a wonderful layer-cake of young artists lives as they study at the Slade School of Art on the eve of the First World War and a book I recommend to all to read.

Many of the artists featured are supported by a patron, Eddie Marsh, who not only bought their work but he entertained them and introduced them to people in society who would advance their careers.

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Marsh was a strange and unique person. In his career as a civil servant he worked as Private Secretary to a succession of Great Britain’s most powerful ministers, particularly Winston Churchill.

He was the sponsor of the Georgian school of poets and a friend to many poets, including Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. He was a discreet but influential figure within Britain’s homosexual community.

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 Matthew Smith – Woman Reclining, c.1925–6

Some of the money Marsh had to spend on art was the remainder of a family legacy from the death of his great-grandfather, Spencer Perceval in 1812, the only British prime minister to have been assassinated. Parliament voted to settle £50,000 on Perceval’s children (today it would be around 8 million), with additional annuities for his widow and eldest son. 100 years later and Marsh was using the money to buy art.

Although Spencer Perceval possessed six sons and six daughters, some portion of this grant drifted down to Eddie Marsh through his mother. He refused to use any of what he called ‘the murder money’ for his personal requirements; it was from this fund that he bought, with taste and knowledge, the collections with which he has now enriched the public. †

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 William Roberts – Sam Rabin vs Black Eagle, 1934

After Marsh’s death in 1953 his friends collected accounts of him and published a booklet, edited by Christopher Hassall and Denis Mathews. As it is long out of publication, I have typed up John Rothenstein’s piece on Marsh’s art collecting below. All the pictures in this post were owned by Marsh.

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 Mark Gertler – Agapanthus, 1914

John Rothenstein on Eddie Marsh

There is a serious disadvantage to an upbringing in an artist’s household. Paintings, drawings, sculpture are apt to be so ubiquitous that they may fail to excite. My father being a painter and also a collector, it seemed to me in my early years that works of art were for the most part little more than part of the furnishing of our house. It is true, however, that when I visited other houses and found dull pictures on the walls or none at all, I was aware of an almost piercing sense of bleakness. But when I first visited Eddie Marsh’s chambers at Gray’s Inn, it was with no sense of bleakness but with the consciousness of something amounting almost to a new experience that I looked at his pictures.

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 Stanley Spencer – Apple Gatherers, 1912-13

I had not come to look at his pictures; I don’t suppose I was aware that he possessed any. Like many other young men I had come, either shortly before or after leaving Oxford, to consult this benevolent oracle about the perplexing problem of how best to spend my life. I can’t recall any word of advice he gave; but I do recall, almost as clearly as though it were yesterday, the immediate fascination exercised by the pictures which hung, frame to frame, from floor to ceiling, covering every vertical space, not only of wall but of door, and, no less clearly, the kindness with which Eddie responded to the interest his pictures stirred in me. We looked at everything there was to see. And what things there were! Wilson’s Summit of Cader Idris (his bequest of which to the National Gallery, he said, lent an added pleasure to his visits there, that of choosing the place where his ghost would see it on the walls) and Blake’s Har and Heva batbing.

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 Richard Wilson – Cader Idris, 1774 (Exhibited)

But it was the contemporaries that gave me the sharpest and most pleasurable shock: the works of painters with whom I already had some acquaintance. There were the splendid Self Portrait and the The Apple-gathers by Stanley Spencer (an artist who had not yet held an exhibition), The Dancer: and Parrot Tulip’s by Duncan Grant, The Cornfeild by John Nash, a water-colour of tall trees by his brother Paul, and a lamp-lit bedroom by Gertler.

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 John Nash – The Cornfield, 1918

The spectacle of so many line examples of the work of an emerging generation of painters, displayed with such affectionate, admiring confidence strengthened the impression I had that there was a school of painting in England deserving of much more respect than most of my contemporaries were inclined to accord to it.

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 Henry Moore – Woman Seated with Hands Clasped, 1929

My visit was followed by several others, but it was not until many years later that I came to know him well, when I had the good fortune to be associated with him in the running of two institutions particularly dear to him: the Tate Gallery, of which he was a Trustee from 1937 until 1944 and Acting Chairman during 1940 and 1941, and the Contemporary Art Society, of which he was Chairman from 1937 until 1952.

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 Duncan Grant – Parrot Tulips, 1911

What made this association particularly delightful for those who had a part in it was Eddie’s attitude towards these two institutions. For him the Tate and the Contemporary Art Society were never primarily institutions at all; they were friends to be fought for, to be enriched by his generosity and, from time to.time, to be gently chided. And as such they responded to his friendship with gratitude and affection.

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 Duncan Grant – The Dancers, 1911

Eddie was not only loved at both the Tate and the Contemporary Art Society, but he reposed in them a special degree and quality of trust. He was capable of a catholicity of taste that at moments provoked his friends to wonder whether there was any work of art which he didn’t like. In his heart, however, he remained faithful to the artists the Spencer and the Nash brothers, Grant, Gertler, and their contemporaries who had first aroused in him the lust of possession.

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 Paul Nash – Elms, 1914

The works of later painters he often, as he confessed, ‘took great though often in efficacious pains to understand and enjoy’; yet he never expected art to be changeless, and he desired the Tate and the Contemporary Art Society to collect in accordance with their most imperative convictions, whether or not these happened to conform to his own.

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 Christopher Wood – Siamese Cats, 1927

The last time I saw him, on is December 1952 at the last meeting of the Society’s Executive which he attended, it had been resolved, as a tribute to his unique services, to commission a portrait of him by Graham Sutherland.

A message from the artist was read out willingly accepting the commission but regretting that he could not undertake it until the autumn of 1953. In a voice that arrested by its intense melancholy Eddie exclaimed, ‘The sands are running out’. In the silence that followed could be read his friends’ mournful recognition that he had spoken the truth. Four weeks later he was dead.

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 Stanley Spencer – Self Portrait, 1912

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 Walter Sickert – The New Bedford, 1915.

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 Cedric Morris – Breton Landscape,1927

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 Eric Ravilious – The Yellow Funnel, 1938

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 Walter Monnington – Study of a Woman, 1934

Eddie Marsh – Sketches for a composite literary portrait of Sir Edward Marsh, Lund Humphries, 1953
Paintings and Drawings from the Sir Edward Marsh Collection, The Contemporary Art Society 1953