Julius B. Stafford Baker was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. The family was artistic, his father, also Julius, was the creator of the Tiger Tim comic strip in the children’s comic The Rainbow. Julius senior had apprenticed under his uncle John Philip Stafford (1851–1899), an artist who also worked as a cartoonist for the magazine Funny Folks.

Julius took over his father’s illustration work on Tiger Tim while teaching himself how to paint. He painted many different scenes, working sometimes in watercolour and oil.

The painting of the windmill below from the 1930s, is one of a series of windmills he painted. It has all the feeling of the Recording Britain scheme that would happen later.

There is an interesting piece from a magazine showing a watercolour of the same scene from the Winter exhibition of Royal Society of British Artists.

He had a lifelong fascination with the Royal Air Force, which began as a messenger boy for the Royal Flying Corps in 1918, and during World War II he was in the Air Force attached to a radar unit, then became an intelligence officer, serving abroad. He would then spend his spare time painting the conditions.

The War Artists’ Advisory Committee bought hundreds of pictures of planes from him, which found their way into numerous public collections, including Imperial War Museum, British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum as well as his watercolours of atrocities of war wherever he travelled to. After the war continued as a children’s illustrator and showed at RA, in 1956 winning a Giles Bequest Prize at Victoria & Albert Museum for printmaking.

After serving with a radar unit during the Battle of Britain, he became an intelligence officer, and his artistic skills and his aeronautical knowledge made him a useful commodity, but he was never made an official war artist, primarily because the role was forbidden to those in the field of intelligence. In 1943 he was sent as courier on a flight behind enemy lines to Yugoslavia to deliver the letter from Churchill promising support to General Tito.

The most prolific painter of bombed Germany was Flight-Lieutenant Julius Stafford-Baker, who toured the country in the spring of 1945 as a RAF intelligence officer. George Orwell also visited Germany in this period as a war correspondent for the Observer. He told readers that the damage was on a totally different scale to Britain’s blitzed cities: “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation. The paintings the WAAC purchased from Stafford-Baker communicated little of the apocalyptic scale of devastation that he must have witnessed. Instead, his paintings acted to recast the nature of Bomber Command’s actions by emphasizing precision bombing and ignoring the mainstay of their operations, area bombardment.

Rebecca Searle – Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain During the Second World War, 2022

Stafford-Baker focused on damage to industrial, governmental or military targets. The titles of the paintings made clear that the ruins depicted were legitimate targets: A Pumping Station on the River Lippe; The Krupp Works at Essen; The Railway Station at Hanover; The Rhine Bridges at Wesel; A V2 Train in a Railway Cutting at Oyle; The Aircraft Works under the Templehof Air Port; The Headquarters of the SS: The Gestapo and the Security Police; The Headquarters of Goebbel’s Ministry of Propaganda; Direct Hits by RAF Bombs on the German Air Ministry; and The Chancellery: Hitler’s Headquarters in Berlin. Words in the titles such as ‘pin-point bombing’ and ‘direct hits’ suggested that these targets had been hit accurately and precisely and were not, as was usually the case, the result of blanket bombing across the area in which they were situated. Contrast can be drawn between these images of the British bombing of Germany, and those that Stafford-Barker painted of the German destruction of the continent, which were also purchased by the WAAC. In Holland, for example, he recorded the destruction of The Ancient Salt Gate and a bombed school, while his painting Ruined Warsaw depicted the whole city seemingly reduced to rubble. Through the language of ruins, these images reinforced the propagandist differentiation between the barbarous actions of the Nazis and the more legitimate nature of Britain’s use of air power.

Rebecca Searle – Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain During the Second World War, 2022

The WAAC acquired just a few images which depicted more general scenes of devastation. Anthony Gross and William Warden painted images of Cologne. Although both conveyed the extent of devastation, they each focused on the virtually intact cathedral. While Coventry Cathedral became a symbol of Britain’s suffering and endurance in the face of ruthless German bombing, during the war newspapers described Cologne Cathedral as deliberately spared to suggest that the Allies were more respectful in their bombing (whereas in fact it was likely spared as a navigational landmark).

Rebecca Searle – Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain During the Second World War, 2022

After the war he moved to 8 Stambourne Rd, Toppesfield, Essex and started to work in printmaking, with an extraordinary set of neoromantic works, inspired by the spirit of the age and likely Michael Rothenstein.

Julius Stafford-Baker for his linocut Underground , an unusual and yet evocative work in its shifting mosaic of blacks and blues.

The Studio, 1957

In the duller weather there are still good photos to be found. While I keep on writing on new projects for next year my blog has been side-lined a little. So I present to you some photos of a wet shire.

There is a depressing state of shopping for art in Cambridge. Many new galleries are selling the most derivative art one could imagine. For a time I thought that most of it was chinese made or AI, but it seems there are people making these works. I pity writing about them, but it should be done, there is a taste vacuum in the city where for the same price you could have a piece by an artist with history, legacy and talent.

The most curious discover in these galleries is the progress of the “Unique Studio Edition with Textured, Hand-Painted Finish”. What does this mean? In some cases it’s a print that has been painted with brush marks of varnish, in others it’s a giclée with pallet knife paint added. Tacky stuff. But the meaning is so vague that it could be a print and then paint thrown over the top to mimic detail.

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I should say, if you read this and feel rather insulted by my points of view, then good. I am not sure you are the target for my blogs that are aiming to highlight the good in the past. I feel the need to write this to point out the ghastly modern taste. This sort of art is so disposable has no talent, it is the outcome of the Coldstream Report of 1960, fifty years on. This was when William Coldstream presented a paper to government about how art should be taught in schools. Moving away from traditional painting and sculpture, where students would study from a model and learn how to paint. Art Schools since then have been in a slow rate of decline, where a pupil with little talent will learn how to market the poor productions they make as something radical.

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Cambridge is a city where the university own a large amount of the shops and have very few cares if the units remain empty due to the high costs. So it is a city with fewer small shops selling antiques and twentieth century art. So the only businesses that survive are large shops that sell posters or pages from the books of David Hockney as if they are numbered limited edition pieces commissioned by the artist.

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I have been trying to rationalise a conclusion but there is none, this is just a rant about how the sort of artwork found on a gift card is packaged and sold as high art. I tend to feature work more to my taste on this blog, so other posts might help you more.

In my researches on another book I have strayed onto the wonderful and bizarre world of the Tirchborne Trial, the scandal of the Victorian age. But while looking into this case in other books, I found a wonderful account of other imposters over time, the list is so endless I thought it would make a wonderful (if short and off topic) blog.

And without referring to the very recent Tichborne trial, in which no less than eighty-five witnesses under the most rigorous and vigorous cross-examination that possibly the world has ever seen-maintained positively that a certain Englishman was Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, a baronet, while a corresponding number were equally unshaken in their conviction that he was Arthur Orton, a Wapping butcher.

The books are full of puzzles of this nature. Jack Cade, the pretended Mortimer; Lambert Simnel, the false Earl of Warwick; Perkin War-beck, the sham Duke of York; the various personators of Don Sebastian, the lost King of Portu-gal; Jemeljan Pugatscheff, the sham Peter III; Padre Ottoman, the supposed heir of the Sultan Ibrahim; Mahommed Bey, the counterfeit Viscount de Cigala; the case in 1748, of the false Prince of Modena; the monk Otrefief, claiming to be Prince Dimitri; Joseph, the pretended Count Solar; John, claiming to be the Earl of Crawford; John, claiming to be Sir William Courtenay; James Annesley, calling himself Earl of Anglesea; Hans, claiming to be Earl of Huntingdon; Rebok, the counterfeit Voldemar, Elector of Bradenburgh; Arnold Du Tihl (or Dutille) the pretended Martin Guerre, who successfully deceived the living wife so far as to live with her three years, surrounded by four sisters and two brothers-in-law, and beget two children before his discovery, and whose case came before the Parliament of Toulouse in 1560, wherein forty witnesses on each side swore to his personality; Pierre Mege, the fictitious DeCaille; Michael Feydy, the sham Claude de Verre; the claimants to the Banbury and Douglass Peerages; James Percy, calling himself Earl of Northumberland; Alexander Humphreys, the pretended Earl of Stirling: William George Howard, the false Earl of Wicklow; the numerous so-called heirs of the Stuarts; John Hatfield, claiming to be the Hon. Alexander Hope; Thomas Provis, calling himself Sir Richard Smythe; Lavinia Jannetta Horton Byves, who is now, or was within a few months living in England, calling herself Princess of Cumberland; Amelia Radcliffe, pre-tending to be Countess of Derwentwater.”

A Treatise on the Law of Identification by George E. Harris

Angus Davidson is mostly known for working as an editor and Italian translator at the Hogarth Press, but both he and his brother, the painter Douglas Davidson were rather involved with the Bloomsbury Group. Today his most well known book is his volume on Edward Lear, published in 1938, it was published by Penguin books in the 1950s. Duncan Grant painted a portrait of Davidson, as did Vanessa Bell and Cedric Morris.

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Angus was one of the many lovers of Duncan Grant and so it is no surprise that Grant was given the commission of decorating Angus’s home in 1930. At this time Angus was living at 3 Heathcote Street, London, not far from King’s Cross Station. The photographs are curtesy of the RIBA.

Angus Davidson also lived in decorative splendour, owing to his friendship with Duncan. Certain staple ingredients recur in these decorations: jugs, flowers, musical instruments, curtain swags, simple ornamental patterns and loose imitation marbling.

Frances Spalding – Duncan Grant

The photograph above shows a large mural over the fireplace, painted tiles around the harth and one of Duncan’s tapestry design on a square foot stool, likely embroidered by his mother.

Above is a painted cabinet with a Bloomsbury Rug

A painted freeze and what is likely a Quentin Bell sculpture

A painted freeze behind a painted set of drawers.

Above is a painted mural and I think the fireplace board masking the air from the electric fire is likely a simpler work by Grant.

In 1982 The National Portrait Gallery in London staged a hugely influential exhibition of Bill Brandt’s Portraits, one of the last major exhibitions of Brandt’s lifetime. The Hyman Collection is delighted to include several of Brandt’s great portraits including pictures of Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Henry Moore.

Bill Brandt – Edith and Osbert Sitwell beneath the Family Group by John Singer Sargent, Renishaw Hall, Yorkshire, 1945

Bill Brandt – Henry Moore, 1946

Bill Brandt – Francis Bacon, 1963

Bill Brandt – Self Portrait, 1966

Bill Brandt – Henry Moore, 1946

Bill Brandt – Joan Miró, 1968

Bill Brandt – David Hockney, 1980

John Stanley Coombe Beard FRIBA (1890 – 1970) was born in 1890, son of Percy Edward Beard, founder of the London Spiritual Mission alongside Percy’s brothers Ernest and Glen. He was educated at King Alfred’s School, Wantage, Berkshire before training in architecture and going into practice with Alfred Douglas Clare. Their practice specialised in designing art deco cinemas.

He lived in Hampstead, where one night he heard noise coming from the room below his bedroom. His wife became the first person to dial the emergency services on 999 in 1937, resulting in the burglar Thomas Duffy being arrested.

My wife made use of the new signal that we were instructed to use yesterday on the telephone, and as a result of using that signal almost instantaneous connection was made with the police station, and in less than five minutes this man was arrested… It struck me, as a householder and a fairly large taxpayer, that we are getting something for our money, and I was very impressed by it.

John Beard in The Times

This emergency number was originally only open to the residence of Central London, but soon Glasgow got the system for the number and the service was only nationalised in the 1950s, you were still put through to an operator. Only in the 1970s when switchboards were replaced with an automatic system, where the calls able to to be put through to a call centre. The original number of 999 was chosen because it was the end of the turning dial of a phone, and in smoke, or London smog, anyone could use the phone by touch.

I try not to shy away from the unpopular points of view, to think over a problem you need to see it from many perspectives, so I pose a question out there that I think is unspoken, but worth mentioning. Was the death of Eric Ravilious the best thing that happened to Tirzah Garwood?

We know that while Eric was alive she had more or less stopped working on her art, turning to craft like many of the Bardfield wives, in order not to conflict with their husbands work. The only example who did keep her work up, was one of the younger artists in the village, Sheila Robinson, whose work was in demand from designing stamps to working with major publishers and brands as an artist and designer i the 1960s when social conditions had loosened up. But in the time of Tirzah’s life, she was expected to support her husband more and look after the children.

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We know from her biography that Eric had intended to leave her and they had agreed to separate. This was a period when Eric was having an affair with Helen Binyon and Tirzah was having an affair with John Aldridge. Having been jilted by both their lovers, the Raviliouses came back together more in the hope that something was better than nothing.

When Eric died, Tirzah started to become an artist and painted many works. As she was being treated in Copford nursing home when she was dying from cancer, the works got more surreal as the medication she was on took hold of her more.

I always thought Tirzah was a better wood engraver than Eric. She had learnt his style, but it wasn’t so stiff. She had humor in her work and on a whole was less pastiche. Many of the wood engravings come from finding joy in the confines of the stuffy Edwardian upbringing she had.

Free of Eric she married again and found a husband that supported her both emotionally and creatively. Henry Swanzy was unlike Eric in many ways but he wanted what was best for his wife, where as Eric was a brilliant artist, but a selfish rotter, who if he was dating a friend of yours, you would tell them to leave him immediately.

In the time I have been blogging, there is a suburban calendar ideal of Ravilious, that if he was a wonderful painter, he must have been a huge loss to the world, but I think by the time he died he had expressed everything he had in him as an artist. There is a feeling of a holy nature about the man, thanks to a few bad documentaries that failed to get to any grit about his personal life and ended up being more about the celebrities point of view than about the character of the artist. So now Ravilious a pin up of the moment, but with little context about the life he lead or how it affected Tirzah. His work is banded about with the same sickening misplacement as the hype for Constables Haywain painting was in the 1970s and 80s, where the image would appear on placemats, waste paper bins, coasters, ‘collectable’ plates and a myriad of trash that one can see in any dead end charity shop.

There. I told you it was an unspoken point of view. This isn’t to say his work is without merit, the public enjoy the work because it has a nostalgic feeling and many of the paintings feel like places we know. The joy about Eric’s work in Essex is how many of the views still are recognisable today, but it is undeniable that the moment Eric died in the Atlantic that Tirzah was able to come alive.

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Stanley Clifford Smith is one of the forgotten artists of Great Bardfield. It isn’t because he is less talented, or there are fewer works, but mostly because his legacy hasn’t been part of the weaving of history penned by the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden. They own no works by him and have refused donations due to the sizes of some of the works. So with this stalemate situation, he is likely to be overlooked for years to come.

It’s a shame as his work is different to the other artists, it is a raw abstraction that Michael Rothenstein and George Chapman flirted with and would make the collection less bucolic.

Stanley was born in 1906 in Reddish, Stockport, Cheshire and was educated in Manchester and Paris. He worked as a designer at first, drawing up carpets for James Templeton & Co in Scotland but he saved money from his job to paint, much like Keith Vaughan. It was at this time that he first began to paint. He moved to London and served in the forces during World War Two.

He married Joan Glass (1915-2000), an artist, potter and designer. The couple left London for Suffolk in 1947 and then to Great Bardfield in 1952. In ‘Bardfield he was able to work in a large studio and paint in a French abstract way. His works are brash, colourful and quite exciting. Most of the artists in the village were all quite different in style to each other, meaning that there was no great influence or jealousy between each other, unlike in St Ives, Cornwall, where most of the artists were sticking to a harsh religion of abstraction that Ben Nicholson has introduced, having stollen it himself.

It was Clifford-Smith who encouraged the idea of doing Open House exhibitions, where for a weekend the artists would open their doors and use their homes as galleries. The idea was popular with the public who at this time thought the world of artists to be strange and full of bohemian ways; and it was popular with the artists who wouldn’t have to hand over any fees to galleries.

With the help and promotion of various people, including John Rothenstein at the Tate (Michael’s brother) the village became flooded with the art loving and nosey public, keen to see art and interiors. The shows ran from 1954, 55 and then 1958. After this the community in the village started to disintegrate as many of the artists where dead, divorced or moving to larger towns.

Benjamin Britten bought one of his paintings and so it can be seen in his old home at Aldeburgh, Suffolk; and another fine example can be found in a new position in the church at Thaxted.

It’s been brooding on my mind why I dislike the work on John Bratby. I have always thought his work to be quite dreadful and quite depressing. I thought I would give him the benefit of my endless doubt and I started reading up on him. It turns out that his work might have been more expressive than I could have imagined as he was jealous man, twisted in emotion and subjected his wife Jean Cooke to physical and mental abuse. This abuse included locking her in rooms, stopping her from painting freely and slashing her canvases up.

He has been championed by many, including the RA, focusing on the violence of his painting, but maybe it is time to cancel him, and his dreadful output. With the greater understanding of him as a man and of his work I still find it quite curious his work achieves such prices at auction.

In her filing for divorce Jean alleged “habitual violence since the date of the said marriage causing her injuries” . Her allegations were dramatic . Bratby’s assault in front of their children caused them anxiety .