Saved for the Nation

I love discovering interesting artists, the research and uncovering details of their life and then buying works to sell, but before the lock down, little did I know that I would buy a painting stolen from the Victoria and Albert Museum. I want to give it back to them but their staff are all furloughed until August.

The painting was a watercolour by Vincent Lines, an artist with an interesting past. Lines education started at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts, then in 1931 he was admitted into the Royal College of Art. He was influenced by A.S.Hartrick and Thomas Hennell. He worked as a watercolour artist and an illustrator. He became Principal of Horsham art school in 1935. He was one of the artists chosen to work on the Recording Britain project, and that is one of the things that attracted me to him.

During the Great Depression in America artists were employed by the state to make works for the public. It was called the Federal Art Project and from 1935 the project was mostly famous for many murals in post offices and public buildings across America, but it also covered sculpture and graphic design work. The project is said to have made 200,000 works from 1935 to 1943.

The director of the National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark was inspired by the Federal Art Project in the run-up to the Second World War. In 1940 the Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime (part of the British Ministry of Labour and National Service) launched a scheme to employ artists to record the home front, funded by a grant from the Pilgrim Trust. It ran until 1943 and some of the country’s finest watercolour painters, such as John Piper, Rosemary Ellis, Rowland Hilder, and Barbara Jones were commissioned to make paintings and drawings of places which captured a sense of national identity. Their subjects were typically English: market towns, villages, churches, country estates, rural landscapes; industries, rivers, monuments and ruins. They were documenting characteristic scenes in a way never undertaken before.

So how did I discover my purchase was stolen? I bought the painting at auction over the internet and had it posted to me, when it arrived the glass was broken, so I took it apart. Unusually it had no tape on the back and it was in a cheap clip frame giving easy access to the back; I thought this was odd as the auction house could see it was titled but they had called it “landscape with farm worker” and I assumed when buying it, that was the title. On the back of the painting it had the full details, Vincent Lines, and the name “Vale of Shalbourne”. Did they Google the real title “Vale of Shalbourne” and found the same listing on the V&A website? Who knows but it feels unusual for an auction house not to research a painting they are consigning.

Further-more, I had taken the back off the picture and at first I found a stamp for Recording Britain, then the allocation number. The code when typed into the V&A website comes up with a listing for “The Vale of Shalbourne” by Vincent Lines, is is listed as “In Storage”. Being listed with the code it couldn’t have been a rejected work by Lines for the project. The Recording Britain board chose what they bought, leaving more prolific artists some works to sell, but these were not stamped. Though the Pilgrim Trust funded the scheme they gave all the works, over 1500, to the Victoria and Albert Museum to document and keep. Due to the large number of works created, many works were given to regional collections and it is likely this painting was either stolen or wrongly disposed off by one of these regional collections or a council disposing of work. From the frame the watercolour came in, the style of mount and the amount of dirt on the glass I would guess this was framed in the early 1990s. When it was stolen I couldn’t guess, nor why.

I have emailed the V&A but had nothing back due to Covid Lockdown, but I will wait and see what they say. It would be curious to know if it was loaned out to regional collection or if it was stolen from London. The plot thickens. It is my intention to return it to them. Though technically I lost money from this there is a satisfaction of having done the right thing and returning a work to it’s home. Other collectors of Vincent Line’s work were the King, the Government Art Collection, Hertfordshire Pictures for Schools and the Royal Library. Thankfully I legitimately own the Hertfordshire Pictures for Schools painting as they were all sold off when the council wanted to make some money, but that is another story.

—————————-

I love discovering interesting artists, the research and uncovering details of their life and then buying works to sell, little did I know that I would buy a painting stolen from the Victoria and Albert Museum. I gave it back, losing in money but gaining in spirit.

It was by Vincent Lines, an artist with an interesting past. Lines education started at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts, then in 1931 he was admitted into the Royal College of Art. He was influenced by A.S.Hartrick and Thomas Hennell.He worked as a watercolour artist and an illustrator. He became Principal of Horsham art school in 1935. He was one of the artists chosen to work on the Recording Britain project and that is one of the things that attracted me to him. 

image

During the Great depression in America artists were employed by the state to make works for the public. It was called the Federal Art Project and from 1935 the project was mostly famous for the murals in post offices, but it also covered sculpture and graphic design work. The project is said to have made 200,000 works from 1935 to 1943. 

The director of the National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark was inspired by the Federal Art Project in the run-up to the Second World War years. In 1940 the Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime, part of the British Ministry of Labour and National Service, launched a scheme to employ artists to record the home front, funded by a grant from the Pilgrim Trust. It ran until 1943 and some of the country’s finest watercolour painters, such as John Piper, Sir William Russell Flint, Rowland Hilder, and Barbara Jones were commissioned to make paintings and drawings of places which captured a sense of national identity.

Their subjects were typically English: market towns, villages, churches, country estates, rural landscapes; industries, rivers, monuments and ruins. They were documenting characteristic scenes in a way never undertaken before.

How did I discover it was stolen? I bought the painting at auction and had it posted to me, when it arrived the glass was broken so I took it apart. Unusually it had no tape on the back and it was in a cheap clip frame giving easy access to the back; I thought this was odd as the auction house could see it was titled but they had called it “landscape with farm worker” and I assumed when buying it, that was the title. Did they google the real title “The Vale of Shalbourne” and found the same listing on the V&A website? Who knows but it feels unusual.

image

So I had taken the back off the picture and at first I found a stamp, then the allocation number. Stamp Above, Number below. The code when typed into the V&A website comes up with a listing for “The Vale of Shalbourne” by Vincent Lines, is is listed as “In Storage”.

image

Being listed with the code it couldn’t have been a rejected work. The Recording Britain board chose what they bought, leaving more prolific artists some works to sell, but these were not stamped. Though the Pilgrim Trust funded the scheme they gave all the works, over 1500, to the Victoria and Albert Museum to document and keep. Due to the large number of works created, many works were given to regional collections and it is likely this painting was either stolen or wrongly disposed off by one of these regional collections or a council disposing of work.

From the frame the watercolour came in, the style of mount and the amount of dirt on the glass I would guess this was framed in the early 1990s. When it was stolen I couldn’t guess, nor why.

I called the V&A and …

Though technically I lost money from this there is a satisfaction of having done the right thing and returning a work to it’s home. Other collectors of Vincent Line’s work were the King, the Government Art Collection, Hertfordshire Pictures for Schools and the Royal Library. 

Map Making

In my isolation I thought it would be fun to make a map of where the Great Bardfield artists painted from. To pinpoint the locations and tag the work. Well that is what I have done, so now you can sit at home and traverse their work using a modified version of Google Maps. I have also added a few more of the Fry Galleries other artists like Paul Beck.

The artists are colour indexed.
The House Pin – location of an artists home.
Camera Pin – The pins of from where the work was painted (I thought it would be more fun for people to stand in the spot where an artwork was painted)

Click here for the map

Forthcoming – A New Great Bardfield Autobiography

Before and After Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Lucie Aldridge

Once considered lost, the forthcoming autobiography of Lucie Aldridge is released in the Summer of 2020. It covers her childhood in rural Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century, her sisters, the Suffragette movement, her first marriage during WWI, and her life in London. That ‘London’ life was a release from the conventions of her childhood. She notes the famous parties of Cedric Morris and the Bright Young Things; meeting John Aldridge and finding herself in Majorca with Robert Graves and Laura Riding. There are too many people to list.

Following the success of Long Live Great Bardfield, The autobiography of Tirzah Garwood, Lucie’s book is a autobiography comes with a postscript by Inexpensive Progress detailing frankly the life and trials Lucie would go on to have in that Essex village.

If anyone has ever met Lucie, has any information on her, or her work (paintings and rugs) do please let me know at frozenocean18@hotmail.com but time is short!

image

 Lucie by John Aldridge, 1930 (Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum)

image

Paul Nash Portraits

Many people might be unaware that Paul Nash did portraits, few are finished works but some are in illustrated letters. To me they are rather pleasing and the dress and hair of the sitters is also of the era. I picture them being drawn in a 1930s sitting room by a fire.

image

 Paul Nash – Margaret Nash, 1919

Margaret Theodosia Odeh was born in Jerusalem, Nash grew up in Cairo. She was the daughter of an Anglican minister. Shortly after moving to London in 1908, she became involved in the suffrage movement and the Tax Resistance League. One of the founding members of the Committee for Social Investigation and Reform, Nash offered rehabilitation and opportunities for women working as prostitutes. With funding from donors including Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Anderson, the Women’s Training Colony in Berkshire was established. Women could stay at the retreat and learn arts and crafts, including millinery. The initiative was inspired by the Arts and Crafts objective to improve people’s lives through craft. She also worked on textiles at the Omega Workshops run by the Bloomsbury group. She married Paul Nash in 1913. 

image

 Paul Nash – Portrait of Alice Daglish, 1921

Alice (nee) Archer is known mostly for The Land of Nursery Rhyme, 1932, a book she co-edited with Ernest Rhys. It was illustrated by Charles Folkard. She married Eric Fitch Daglish in 1918 and lived to be 103.

image

 Paul Nash – Yvonne, 1922 (Maybe Yvonne Gregory)

image

 Paul Nash – Douglas Goldring

Douglas Goldring was an English writer and journalist. He became known mostly as a travel writer. In the late 1930s Goldring came to prominence in two ways. He was Secretary of the Georgian Society, which he helped to found after writing in the Daily Telegraph in 1936, with Lord Derwent and Robert Byron. Inspired by the ideas of William Morris, Goldring helped transform it in 1937 into the Georgian Group, a section within the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, on the advice of Lord Esher. 

Goldring soon became unhappy with the Georgian Group’s political conservatism and left it. He was also noted, at the same period, as a radical journalist and prolific contributor to left-wing publications. Goldring described his political views as socialist. In his last years, Goldring contributed reviews to the Socialist Labour League magazine Labour Review.

image

 Paul Nash,  Barbara, c1910

image

 Paul Nash – Self Portrait, 1922

More Random Photos

Here are a set of nice but random photographs I have taken over the past few months. Anyone who knows me would know that I take hundreds of photos every week and so it is always hard to edit it down. 

image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image

Rosemary Rutherford

image

Rosemary Ellen Rutherford, was an artist and designer of stained glass windows. She was born in Kings Norton, Worcester in 1912. Her father was Revd John Finlay Rutherford.  She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and in 1939 she became an artist and part-time teacher at St Cedds School, Chelmsford, living at The Vicarage, Broomfield, Chelmsford with her parents.

She also was a student of painting with Cedric Morris at Benton End, Hadleigh, Suffolk. Rutherford was among the earliest students joining the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in 1939 at the age of seventeen. Many of her oil paintings have the colour tone and brushwork similar to Cedric Morris.

image

On the outbreak of the Second World War, Rosemary joined the Red Cross as a volunteer when she performed a variety of jobs, including driving a mobile canteen round gun batteries on the east coast and working as a nurse in hospitals and convalescent homes for servicemen.

She was given permission by the War Artists Advisory Committee (W.A.A.C) to record her work artistically. Many of the works of the time are simple line drawings with watercolour made on the spot, I haven’t seen any other examples of them having been worked into oil paintings after. Despite this she is principally known as a stained glass artist.

image

Her work is in the Suffolk churches at Boxford, Walsham le Willows and in Hinderclay, where her brother, John Allarton Edge Rutherford (1910-2005), was the incumbent, she also completed stained glass windows in several Essex churches and as distant as West Heslerton All Saints, Yorkshire in 1964. She was of The Priory, Walsham le Willows, when she died at Lambeth, London on 20 June 1972.

The Escaped Cock

image

This is a simple post on beautiful illustrations inside The Escaped Cock by D. H. Lawrence, this was Lawrence’s preferred title for this tale but it has also been printed under the title The Man Who Died by some later, more prudish publishers.

In February 1930, the dying Lawrence was negotiating about an unlimited edition with the London publisher, Charles Lahr. Lahr asked for the title to be changed to The Man Who Died and Lawrence eventually agreed, insisting that the original title should be retained as a subtitle. This projected Lahr edition failed to appear, and the first English edition was eventually published by Martin Secker in September 1931 as The Man Who Died, a title never approved by the author. 

image

The first edition was illustrated with wood-engravings by John Farleigh.
Farleigh was born in London. He was apprenticed to the Artists’ Illustrators Agency and later studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, learning engraving from Noel Rooke. He taught for many years at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He was also a founder and long time Chairman of the Crafts Centre of Great Britain.

image
image
image
image

† Wikipedia – The Escaped Cock

The Whealy Friendly Mine

I thought I would feature this Mine as an unlikely source of inspiration. I came across two works on the same day and I thought it was nice to show an alternative to artistic inspiration in Cornwall other than St Ives.

 Sammy Solway – Wheal Friendly Mine, 1905

The Wheal Friendly Mine in Cornwall was a small tin mine at St Agnes which formed part of the more famous and rich Wheal Kitty tin mine. It was operating prior to 1863 but was out of use and abandoned by 1930. Below it is imagined  when working from a 1966 Match box cover.

image

Below is a photograph of the mine by John Piper taken when he was researching the Shell guide for Cornwall. It is a romantic ruin but also looks like an outpost for Mars. 

image

John Piper – Wheal Friendly tin mine engine house, St Agnes, Cornwall, 1933

The last picture is a painting by Olive Cook for the Recording Britain project. For Olive Cook it is a rather lovely watercolour. 

image

Olive Cook – Tin Mine, St. Agnes, North Cornwall c1940.

When We Were Young

Here is a series of prints I made as a student. Time gives a distance of how you feel about work made but I was clearly angry about the wars happening and going on in these prints. Many of the images were constructed and then printed after. 

I liked the mess of printing things wrong, I thought it gave more texture to it all and I enjoyed the abstract nature of making things. At this time I only really knew the works of Michael Rothenstein and had seen a few Robert Rauschenberg prints in books. 

image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image

Ely in the Mouth

I found myself looking at the vinyl re-release of Pink Floyd’s ‘Division Bell’ in a record shop. Being twelve inches it is much larger than the CD format of five inches, but still people fail to notice what is between the mouths of the sculptures, Ely Cathedral.

The photographs were taken by the difficult to like Storm Thorgerson. In a past life I have many debates over what makes a great album cover, but in the end there is nothing other than public exposure that makes a record cover great in the public’s mind. The Dark Side of the Moon record sleeve with the simple design is beautiful, but the best way to make something iconic is for it to be seen everywhere, like an icon. The photographs of Division bell are beautiful.

image

Storm Thorgerson’s cover to Pink Floyd’s Division Bell.

image

The original sculpture design was by Keith Breeden. They look like African masks and jet engines. They are an intriguing design. The eyes look like RAF logos. Being curved and shaped as they are, the light affects them at different times of the day and locations giving the photographer a lot to work with.

image

Keith Breeden’s original sketched design for the heads.

image

Below the sculptures can be seen being wheeled into the V&A for the Pink Floyd exhibition held in 2017.

image