Shãh-Rak-Uen

This is a post about a Japanese Garden in Scotland that was constructed in the years before the First World War under the patronage and enthusiasm of Ella Christie.

Ella Christie was born in 1861 and her family bought Cowen Castle in Clackmannanshire in 1865. Ella inherited the estate in early part of the twentieth century and traveled all over the Orient, from India to Tibet and Malay in 1904 and then to China, Russia and Japan from 1906 to 07. While in Kyoto, she met the du Cane sisters Ella and Florence who were in Japan researching and writing a book that caused a sensation when it was published, The Flowers and Gardens of Japan (1908). They inspired Christie to return to Scotland and make a Japanese garden.

To make her plans a reality, Ella Christie looked at the grounds around her family castle and dammed up the local river on the estate to make a lake. For two months she hired Taki Handa, a garden studio from Studley College of Horticulture for Women and they collaborated on how to re-landscape the area. They called the garden the Shãh-Rak-Uen, The place of pleasure and delight.

Cowden Gardens in 1909
Ella Christie in her garden in 1909

With the help of other Japanese garden designers and horticulturalists the gardens were developed and the planting continued. The Head of Soami School of Imperial Garden Design, Professor Suzuki came to the gardens to teach the local gardeners the art of pruning trees and shrubs as well as advising on the locations of planting. Suzuki referred to the gardens as ‘the best in the Western World’. In the years to come with the publication of the du Cane’s book in America and other books by authors like James Condor, Japanese garden design took over the world.

One of the first places the West would have seen a Japanese garden was at the World’s Fair in Vienna, 1873 as part of the Japanese pagoda. It caused a hype as illustrated newspapers depicted it, as seen in the illustration below of the Empress visiting the gardens in front of bowing officials, on a bended bridge, more familiar to people from the willow pattern of China, the other popular reference for the masses.

Ella Christie had created a beautiful garden at the right time, for in 1910 was the Japan-British Exhibition in Shepherd’s Bush. Lasting for six months, it sparked a revival of interest in oriental design and gardening with over 8 million visitors. It sparked a large range of chinoiserie decor, from screens and fans, to furniture and tin-tea caddies.

In 1925 Shinzaburo Matsuo moved to Scotland to become the garden keeper for Ella Christie, having lost his family in an earthquake in Japan. He worked the garden for twelve years until he retired in 1937. Christie died in 1949 and the castle was demolished in 1952. The gardens survived until 1963 when teenagers vandalised the site, pushing the stone lanterns into the lake and burning down the teahouse and bridges.

Cowden Gardens in 1955

The gardens underwent an extensive restoration in 2008 by Ella’s great-great niece and since then bridges have been replaced and the lanterns restored from the lake with a review of the plantation of the site.

This restoration inspired me, for though our visions of labour might have been set in to motion, in the end, nothing is ever lost.

A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit

The Long Flight Home

Leslie Wood was an English artist and illustrator who worked on covers for Punch and during his time was rather famous but seems is only remembered by bibliophiles.

Born in Stockport, England he studied at the Manchester College of Art and Design. In 1943, Wood showed some of his work to Faber and Faber, and was soon commissioned to take over illustration of Diana Ross’ Little Red Engine books, and went on to illustrate many other children’s books.

Below are some examples of his work next to the final published ones. I have been buying up his works for some time and many of them are in the form of these storyboards that the publishers printed and returned to him after. This is a book by Erik Hutchinson, who wrote a few children’s books including this one of a swallow on it’s migration home.

Mudies

One of the problems with collecting things is the volume of stuff you end up with that are interesting. This book is one of those. I don’t think it’s an interesting volume but what I liked was the Mudies Library sticker pasted inside the book and designed to hang over the outside.

With some very crude photoshop I have re-designed how the original label would have worked and it’s really the simplicity of only using one label to brand the book for the library.

Charles Edward Mudie was a publisher and in 1842 founded a lending library, which he called Mudie’s Select Library. Subscribers paid one guinea per year for an unlimited number of books, but could only borrow one volume at a time. With branches all over London as you can free from six options in the label above.

Heffers Gallery

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.

Kelmscott Manor, 1896

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.

A protest

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.

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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.

Shredded Wheat

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.

A Way of Life?

What does it mean for British Culture when Kettle’s Yard start to charge for the viewing of the house? A large amount of the population don’t go to art galleries. They think it will be boring or the spaces too austere. For many members of the public it is hard to see art in situ of a home, and Jim Ede’s home has been a place where many people started to become curious of art. But now Kettle’s Yard are charging for the public to view the house. £10.50 (£12 with a donation). It might not be a lot to some of  you, but it will ban many people who are facing enough economic hardship.

They say the Gallery hasn’t recovered since Covid 19, however, the problem of Kettle’s Yard is the distance between the house and the gallery. The gallery has been hosting, what I would say were uninteresting and pretentious exhibitions that have failed to capture the public’s attention. The current show of Lucie Rie that is touring around UK venues is rare because it is extremely popular, but the curators of the gallery can’t see that the public and art fans want exhibitions like this – shows that reflect the collection of the House and the values of Jim Ede. What has happened is the house and the exhibition centre have been moving drastically in opposite directions, it feels more like Kettle’s Yard is being used as a trampoline to get the current curators jobs at more radical and lucrative galleries for their careers.

For a while now the Kettle’s Yard team have been messing with the house, subtle things like putting works of art in parts of the property that have been in their exhibitions in order to validate the works. These are not works Ede collected, but by doing this it feels they are trying to make it look like they are given Ede’s stamp of approval.

But this isn’t what Ede wanted. When he left Kettle’s Yard to Cambridge University, Ede was horrified to find the curator Jeremy Lewison had started to move works around in the house, to the point Ede left written instructions of how the house was to be treated after he had left.

Ede maintained an ‘open house’ each afternoon from 2pm to 4pm, giving any visitors, particularly students, a personal tour of his collection. He enjoyed peoples reactions to his works of art and he didn’t charge them. I would imagine he would be disgusted by the idea of making people pay for the privilege of looking at his home. He didn’t see it as a space that would be monetised like a static National Trust house, he thought of it as a home, with art in.

Kettle’s Yard is now to be another place lost to people who were curious of art but were delighted and inspired by the setting of a beautiful home.

While the house is open free to people under 25 years, the link of the property being owned by Cambridge University can only suggest this is really to give the majority of their students free access to the house, more than it is to help young minds. But the questions stand: should it be free? Do you think people will miss out on the space because of the charge? Do you think this will have wider repercussions for the state of Arts in Britain?

The legacy of the curator is that one of the most accessible art institutions in the country is now another money making venture. Slow hand clap.

Dorothy Mead

David Bomberg – The Mud Bath, 1914

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

Lost from Landbeach

Landbeach Church

A curious thing happened when I was doing some research this week. I discovered the Landbeach church once had a master painting in it. It was Pieter Aertsen’s The Nativity, 1562.

Pieter Aertsen – The Nativity, 1562

Robert Masters, Rector of All Saints’ church, Landbeach, Cambridgeshire (1746-97) and bequeathed by him to that church in 1787. Removed in 1868 to the Rectory, where it remained until 1976. Deposited at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and subsequently the Fitzwilliam Museum until 1981.

Sold by order of the Diocesan Council; Sotheby’s, London, 9 December 1981, lot 20 as Joachim Beuckelaer (£21,000). Anon. sale, Sotheby’s, London, 5 July 1989, lot 59 (£48,000=$78,000).

Masters demolished one of the Lady Chapels in the church and also cut down part of the chancel screen and replaced the font. The painting was sold to pay for repairs to the roof in 1981.

Born at Hetherset, Norfolk, he was descended from William Master of Cirencester. He was admitted to Corpus Christi College in 1731; graduated B.A. in 1734, M.A. in 1738, B.D. in 1746; and was fellow and tutor of the college from 1738 to 1750. On 14 May 1752, he was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He continued to reside in college till he was presented by that society to the rectory of Landbeach, Cambridgeshire, in 1756. Matthias Mawson, bishop of Ely, collated him to the vicarage of Linton, which he resigned for that of Waterbeach in 1759. This latter benefice he with the bishop’s permission resigned in 1784 to his son William, for whom he built a house.

Masters was in the commission of the peace for Cambridgeshire, and acted as deputy to William Compton, LL.D., chancellor of the diocese of Ely, who resided abroad. In 1797, he resigned the living of Landbeach in favour of Thomas Cooke Burroughes, senior fellow of Caius College, who, immediately upon his presentation, married Mary, Masters’s second daughter. Masters continued to reside in the parsonage with his son-in-law and daughter until his death on 5 July 1798. He was buried at Landbeach, where a monument was erected to his memory.