In 1876 Heffers books were founded by William Heffer in Cambridge and soon they became a publisher too. With many shops in Cambridge, today we eulogise their gallery at 18 Sidney Street, Cambridge.
A major brand in Cambridge in the late 1990s they had six shops in the city, each catering to different areas of the business. The Trinity Street shop was the largest for both general books and text books. Rose Crescent – Classical Music, King Street – Art Supplies, Grafton Centre & St Andrews Street – General books.
The Sidney Street shop at that time was for new best sellers on the ground floor and stationary with an art gallery on the top floor. As seen in the photograph above, it was a traditional setting on two levels, with roof lights.
In 1949 Bryan Robertson became curator at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge and for a year he hired the Newnham student and cookery writer Jane Grigson to help run the gallery. Although he was only there for three years, he helped bring in fashionable artists and ceramics and helped change the gallery from selling reproduction prints of the university colleges and Victorian watercolours.
One of his first exhibitions was of New Paintings by Francis Rose, Cecil Collins and Merlyn Evans held at Heffer’s Gallery in Cambridge in 1950. The next year Josef Herman exhibited in a solo show.
Merlyn Evans – Tragic Group, 1949
As curators changed over the years the gallery would have a routine of exhibitions of historical works, maps and archaeological prints, and then modern art. From the advert below from 1955 Heffer’s are promoting the latest new ceramics by Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach. By this time they had their own picture framing department, so it’s not uncommon in East Anglia to find the Heffer’s label on the back of pictures that were framed there.
The fate of the gallery came when Heffer’s sold the business to Blackwells in Oxford who closed many of the shops in the city in order to focus on the Trinity Street shop.
On the steps of Heffers Gallery: Cecil and Elizabeth Collins, Bryan Robertson, Lucy M Boston?, Elisabeth Vellacott and Merlyn Evans.
It was at the invitation of William Morris that Frederick H. Evans came to photograph Kelmscott Manor in 1896. The photographer was 43 and was also running a bookshop in London. Two years after these photos were taken he sold his bookshop to become a full time artist. Today he is remembered for his large photographic prints of the Cathedrals of Britain.
There are only two sets of these photographs, both in American museums. Even’s photographic style was of platinotype images, images of a subtle dusty tone and almost like a photogravure, printed on platinum with sepia tones.
Kelmscott Manor was the country home of the writer, designer and socialist William Morris from 1871 until his death in 1896. The house was originally constructed in 1570 with some additions in the 17th century. It is open to the public to visit and owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London.
For the first three years, the Morris’s shared lease of the house with Dante Gabriel Rossetti until 1874. Rossetti and Jane Morris used the house to continue their long affair while William was travelling in Iceland, their romance starting originally a few years before. The manor can be seen in the corner of this painting of Jane Morris by Rossetti below made during that summer.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Water Willow, 1871.
The following year Rossetti’s poems were published to poor reviews and he spent his time at Kelmscott drunk on whiskey or high on chloral. In 1873 he had returned to painting and his work had recovered but the following year Morris couldn’t keep the scandal quiet his wife and his business partner were having an affair, so he cut him out of the Morris company and was asked to leave the house in July, 1874.
The Morris’s stayed on renting the house until 1914, when Jane bought the house to give her daughters Jane and May some security.
May Morris died in 1938 and bequeathed the house to Oxford University, on the basis the contents were preserved and the public were granted access. The University were unwilling to preserve the house as ‘a museum piece’ and passed the house and land to the Society of Antiquaries in 1962.
Painted by John Sell Cotman and his son, Miles Edmund Cotman, this is a hypothetical scene of protest and anger.
John Sell and Miles Edmund Cotman – The Wreck of the Houghton Hall Pictures c1779
Robert Walpole had been made a prime minister under George I. He was from a wealthy family and had invested in the South Sea Company when stocks were cheap and sold them at a profit before the company’s collapse of an inflated share price. They traded in slaves, mahogany and rum. He used the money to build Houghton Hall. Over the years he collected good furniture and paintings, filling his home with the spoils of wealth. He died leaving massive debts and his estate to his son, who sold some of the works to keep afloat, however he only survived his father by six years and the estate and debts passed to his son George.
Described as “the most ruined young man in England” George Walpole was frivolous with what money was left to him, gamling most of it away. In a scheme to make money he decided to sell his grandfather’s collection of furniture and art. In a deal negotiated by James Christie, founder of the auction house, the collection was sold to Empress Catherine the Great.
Their sale was seen as a public scandal as they collection included works such as: Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Teniers, Rubens, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Murillo.
John Sell and Miles Edmund Cotman – The Wreck of the Houghton Hall Pictures c1779
Following the outrage of the works sale, the painting was made by John Sell Cotman and his son, showing the bodies of dead sailors and works including the large Rubens washed up on the shore in ruins with other plunder from the estate. Though no misfortune ever happened in real life and the boats made it to Russia complete, there was an anger felt by the upper classes in Britain of the loss of such a collection that showed a different style of “lost treasure”. The boat had set sail from Kings Lynn harbour for Russia and as the Cotman’s were Norfolk artists this might be why they felt a betrayal of their fellow countryman, George Walpole.
When Welwyn Garden City was first imagined, it was to provide not only housing, but a social system that would sustain a utopian country town. Writing in his manifesto Garden Cities Of To-Morrow (1898), Ebenezer Howard has planned out how this was to be achieved in Victorian Britain. With his ‘Three Magnets’ diagram, he breaks down society into town and country, listing the pros and cons for both and combining them in the bottom part of the illustration as an early Venn diagram. “The town is the symbol of society — of mutual help and friendly cooperation, of fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood, sisterhood, of wide relations between man and man — of broad, expanding sympathies — of science, art, culture, religion. And the country! The country is the symbol of God’s love and care for man.”
His hope was to avoid the errors of the past in the mill towns of Britain, where factories popped up quicker than the homes for the workers could be considered, with slum housing erected to cope with demand. If towns were to be built afresh, they should avoid cheap ribbon building. Homes should have gardens, roads should be lined with trees; the town should have a large park, areas for offices, shops and factories for people to work in. Reflecting on Victorian British cities Howard wrote: “The well-lit streets are a great attraction, especially in winter, but the sunlight is being more and more shut out, while the air is so vitiated that the fine public buildings, like the sparrows, rapidly become covered with soot, and the very statues are in despair. Palatial edifices and fearful slums are the strange, complementary features of modern cities“.
After seeing his plan for a city implemented, Ebenezer Howard died and then the second wave of building was designed by two men: Louis Emanuel Jean Guy de Savoie-Carignan de Soissons (1890-1962) who had studied at the Royal Institute of British Architects before setting up his architectural practice De Soissons & Kenyon, alongside Arthur William Kenyon (1885-1969). Part of their plan was a large factory near the railway, and it was for Shredded Wheat.
Now in ruins, the can be seen from the trains that run through Welwyn Garden City. The silos have been preserved and shall be used in the redevelopment of the site.
The Shredded Wheat factory known locally as ‘The Wheat’, opened in 1926 and ceased production in January 2008. Originally designed by De Soissons and Kenyon. The site is to be redevelopment with flats and shops with the original factory made the centre of focus as a Grade II listed landmark building.
If you think Anna Winters was the original pioneer of Vogue, you’d be quite wrong. Audrey Withers was editor of Vogue from 1940-60, and she worked with many photographers to make the magazine stand out. One of the most remarkable photoshoots was this series by Cecil Beaton set in blitz bombed London.
Today I think, if you took these photos there would be an outcry of insensitivity, however, the contemporary opinion of these photographs were that London, like fashion, is indestructible.
The first woman to be issued a patent in an American court, was Margaret Eloise Knight (1838-1914) for a machine for folding and gluing flat-bottomed paper bags.
As a little girl, ‘Mattie’ (as her parents and friends nicknamed her), preferred to play with woodworking tools instead of dolls, stating that “the only things she wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet drill, and pieces of wood. She then made kites and sleds out of wood.
After the early death of her father, Knight was forced to leave school aged 12 and work in the cotton loom mills in her town. After an accident at one of the mills where a shuttle flew off the loom stabbing a worker, she suggested a safety measure that was adopted with no credit to her.
Ill health ended her work in the mills but in order to survive she worked any job she could set her mind to. In 1867, she moved to Springfield, Massachusetts and was hired by the Columbia Paper Bag Company. She noticed that the envelope-shaped machine-made paper bags they produced were weak and narrow – unsuitable for groceries and hardware goods.
The British had been using paper bags since the 1840s and also had machines that made wider bags, however what Margaret Knight was to do was to make a machine that cut, folded, and glued paper to form the flat-bottomed brown paper bags familiar to shoppers today.
The trials to make the machine took three years and in order to obtain a patent a model of the machine was made in iron. During the manufacture, the design was stolen by Charles Annan, who had seen the prototype in the workshop of the company producing it and applied for a patent first. When Knight attempted to patent her work, she discovered Annan’s patent and filed a patent interference lawsuit in the autumn of 1870. She won the claim based on her journals, drawings and witnesses and was granted the patent for her machine. She was not the first woman to be awarded a patent but she was the first to win one in court.
With the patent she teamed up with a businessman and formed the Eastern Paper Bag Company. She received royalties from her invention that were capped at $25,000, around one million dollars today. Knight went on to be awarded another 26 patents and on her death an obituary was headlined as a “woman Edison”.
This is an interview with Michael Rothenstein. I think things like this are important to put online because there is too much artistic speculation today in replacement for research and facts.
Michael Rothenstein’s prints of cockerels make an immediate impression on you the moment you enter the 1981 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – beckoning the eye, their vivid contours eloquent of the printmaker’s art.
A graphic artist and printmaker, Rothenstein worked for many years in Great Bardfield, where in 1954, he founded the famous graphic workshop. Later he moved to his present studio a large barn at Stisted, near Braintree. Here, away from that hub of activity (the workshop at Great Bardfield attracted thousands of visitors every year) he feels he can work more privately. “Each technique has its own magic, and different artists come upon a technique which for them is magic at different times in their lives”, says Rothenstein, who did not himself discover printmaking until he was over forty. Once he had embarked on the process it took him over completely. “It was like a rebirth”, he says. Because printmaking had relatively passed him by when he was at art college, Rothenstein was able to convey the excitement of his own discovery in the books he began to write on printmaking. in the 1960s.
His graphics were immediately widely reproduced. Today from Stisted, working with Shelley Rose (a talented young printer who is his part-time assistant) his work is shown all over the world, rare for a graphic artist. Already this year there’s been a large retrospective exhibition in Scandinavia as well as exhibitions in West Germany, at the Tate and the V&A and his works on paper will be shown all summer in the prestigious Ljubljana Biennale.
Over the years Rothenstein has developed a finesse and precision hitherto unattained for such a revolutionary process. For many of his relief prints he uses huge tree-trunks which he obtains from Sible Hedingham. He also uses quite cheap crate wood waste from a factory in Braintree, as well as corroded iron and lino.
A lithe-bodied, charming man, his sustained vigour, evident during twelve gruelling weeks on the Royal Academy Senior Hanging Committee, left younger colleagues marvelling. “I put it down to a reformed diet”, he says. For the recipe-book by Royal Academicians, which the Royal Academy is to publish later this year, Rothenstein own contribution is an invigorating breakfast which includes muesli, homemade yogurt, lecithin, wheat-germ and blackcurrant juice, ideas inspired by the American “nutrition against disease” movement. His cover-illustration of this book, the cockerel, points again to how this virile theme runs constantly through his work. Rothenstein exhibition “Works on Paper” at the Minories, Colchester, took place in May. That same month his barn was the centre for an art exhibition by children from seven Essex schools, part of the Braintree Arts Festival – for Rothenstein is also: president of the Braintree Arts Association.
Next year he plans to exhibit in the gallery of Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury. Here a print workshop has been set up in the garden for artists who work in print, but have no presses of their own. There is a permanent portfolio of their work on show in the gallery itself.
Rothenstein feels strongly that there should be a centre in North Essex where the many distinguished graphic artists who work there could have their work permanently available to the public. “There is nothing like this at present in the area and they deserve it!” he says.
Mauve is a synthetic dye named in 1859. Chemist William Henry Perkin, then eighteen, was attempting in 1856 to synthesize quinine, which was used to treat malaria. Though his experiment failed, Perkins found that the solution in the bottle was a purple colour, stained fabrics and would not wash out. He had discovered the first aniline dye. Perkin originally named the dye ‘Tyrian purple’ after the historical dye – but he filed for a patent in August 1856 (patent No. 1984). The product was renamed mauve after it was marketed in 1859 to Perkin’s mauve, mauveine, or aniline purple.
Choice of mauve shades of paint
He established a factory in Greenford Green called Perkin and Son and in 1860, Queen Victoria wore a silk dress dyed in the colour. The public went wild from this royal patronage and the introduction of this new colour caused a craze that took over the public’s imagination. Everything that could be dyed mauve, was. The previous fashions in colour were brown or beige and dyes were made from insects or botanical substances, that needed large quantities and made them expensive.
The passion for this colour also fuelled a race in chemistry to find the next wonder dye to be a colour of the moment.
David Bomberg was an artist from the golden age of the Slade School of Art in London where he studied next to Isaac Rosenberg, Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer to name a few. In the years just before the First World War, Bomberg went from an artist in the Camden Town style to being part of the radical scene of Vorticism; angular shapes of abstracted forms, his pictures at this time made him famous but also alienated the public.
David Bomberg – Washing of the Feet, Church of St James, Jerusalem, 1925. The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University
He married his first wife Alice Mayes before setting off to the frontline in 1916. The bubble of the Vorist movement popped after the First World War. Bomberg went on to take the abstracted forms and work his paintings into something new and unlike the other artists. He worked with a few lines of paint to make his painting. It took another forty years for his work to be seen as the radical movement that it was. Due to that after WWI his work didn’t command the same level of attention or patronage from London Galleries to become respected, he spent most of his life on borderline poverty and on the charity of his sister Kitty, he was working in Dagenham at the local art school in 1944, during the Second World War when there were fewer critics around to his teaching and this is where he first met Dorothy Mead, a new young student.
Mead was born in London and adopted at three months old to a family in Walthamstow who moved to Romford when Mead was aged three. In 1944 She studied at South East Essex School of Art at Dagenham where she first encountered Bomberg. Mead took Bomberg’s teaching and added a feminine intuition for form and beauty. Her work falls into that cliché of being better in the flesh, photographic reproductions do not do justice to confidently she handled paint. The works are planned out but then executed quickly in oil paint, so that there is a rhythmic movement in the brush strokes.
David Bomberg – The Canal Lock, 1951
After a year of teaching from Bomberg at Dagenham, Mead followed him to the City Literary Institute in London where Cliff Holden was also studying under Bomberg too, and then Bomberg taught his two pupils at the Borough Polytechnic in 1946. Holden then organised the founding of the Borough Group, a collective of artists (mostly at the Polytechnic) inspired by the teaching of Bomberg.
Members included Bomberg and his second wife Lilian Holt; as well as students: Leslie Marr, Dennis Creffield and Dorothy Mead. This allowed them to get more attention when exhibiting together over the coming years. As a teacher Bomberg ignored perspective in favour of composition. His training at the Slade had given him a respect for the old master paintings. Alice Mayes wrote “David explained that the modern pictures had their beginning with the Old Masters and Michael Angelo was the chief of these”.
Philip Vann – Dorothy Mead, 2014
Dorothy Mead – Bathers after Cezanne, 1965
The Borough Group’s activates only lasted until 1951 when many of them graduated and Bomberg moved on as well.
In the early 1950s Mead spent two years in Spain with Clifford Holden, her partner, after a tour of Paris and Amsterdam wrote she had admired Rembrandt’s work in Amsterdam, and of the contemporary painters in Paris she was less impressed: ‘I got the feeling that… imperfect though some of our paintings are we at least have higher aims than many of the painters here.‘ †
In 1956 Mead and Holden visited Sweden where Holden had got a job designing textiles and fabrics in Gothenburg. In 1956 Mead got into the Slade School of Art as a mature student, maybe in the footprints of her old tutor. Remembered today for smoking a pipe and playing Mahler loudly on a Dansette record player in the Slade’s basement. In the 1950s the Slade was the school for artists, while the Royal College of Art was for arts into industry.
In 1958 Mead won the Slade’s prize for Figure Painting and then the Steer Prize for Landscape Painting. Mead became the first woman president of the Slade’s student exhibiting society, the Young Contemporaries. The next year Mead became at loggerheads with the principle William Coldstream as she refused to take the Slade’s course on perspective, likely thinking it would damage her work and go against the teachings of Bomberg she said “perspective has no place in art” and wrote a thesis on that aim, but it was refused, so she was asked to leave the Slade. In 1960 a similar argument broke out at the Royal College of Art between Robin Darwin and student David Hockney over the latter’s refusal to complete the general studies course.
Unabashed she exhibited that year in a touring exhibition Figure Variations in Paris, London the USA touring exhibition British Aquarelles. The triumph in face of the Slade’s rejection came in 1964 when the Arts Council England created a touring exhibitions titled ‘Six Young Painters’, Dorothy exhibited alongside artists including Peter Blake, William Crozier, David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Euan Uglow and if it wasn’t for her early death in 1975, today it’s likely she would have been as famous as they are. In 1959 Mead joined the London Group of artists, and was their first female president holding the chair from 1971-1973.
John Russell Taylor – The Painter’s Quarry: The Art of Peter Prendergast
Mead lectured and taught Goldsmiths as a guest lecturer from 1964, at Morley College (1963-65 & 1973-75) and Chelsea College of Art (1962 -64). She worked in landscapes and figure paintings and towards the end of her life started to experiment with still life and Egyptian scenes, likely after seeing The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit at the British Museum in 1972.
Dorothy Mead – Ancient Egyptian figures, 1972
Dorothy Mead died in 1975 aged just 46. During her life she never had a solo exhibition and her work only really peaked the public’s curiosity in 1992 at the exhibition Bomberg and his Students held at the South Bank University in 1992. Mead’s first retrospective came in 2005 at the Boundary Gallery and then a studio sale of works belonging to one of her sisters Val at Waterhouse & Dodd in 2013.
David Sylvester remarked she “tends to affirm the supremacy of light, as women’s painting often does.” While Holden, her ex-partner said “Dorothy sticks to her principals, but like myself and Bomberg was an outsider.”
Seventeen of her works are held by the London South Bank University as part of the Sarah Rose collection of works by Bomberg and his pupils, other works are in the Tate, the Government Art Collection, the Arts Council Collection.
Dorothy Mead – Standing Female Figure, 1962 The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University
Around the time of the retrospectives, a rumour started that some of Mead’s paintings were stolen after her death, although no evidence to substantiate this or it’s origin.
Philip Vann – Dorothy Mead, 2014 † Alicia Foster – Tate Women Artists, 2004
When Barnett Freedman was asked to illustrate Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, it was likely a bit of an avantgarde choice for the time, but the publishers Faber and Faber would have known Freedman had a wonderful talent of draftsmanship and imagination.
Barnett Freedman’s Cover of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.
It is likely that the same choice of imagination was why the Folio Society gave Paul Hogarth the same job of illustrating Sassoon’s famous memoir.
One of the most interesting elements Hogarth adds is colour, so many of the illustrators to tackle war stories tend to keep it monochrome. Hogarth’s work is rather brash and he is famous for his journalistic eye of drawing from books like Looking at China (1956), Majorca Observed (1965), Paul Hogarth’s American (1973) and I can’t help feeling his depictions come off feeling a little frivolous of the subject and fail to convey a lot of the turmoil of the trenches.
Paul Hogarth – The Raid, 1981 Paul Hogarth – The Battle, 1981 Paul Hogarth – No Mans Land, 1981
