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This essay comes from the Shell Guide to England, 1970. The Shell book I actually found for free in a shipping trunk. Inside are many starchy pieces of text on the English landscape and it gets a little dry at times. I guess even when it was published the essays were written to the wrong market, being more historical than artistic and most people would know a great deal of it. However, the most entertaining essay in the book is by Barbara Jones who uses all of her wisdom from her Follies & Grottoes books to give a brief account of the history of follies for the layman and where you might find some exciting examples. My copy of Follies & Grottoes is well read, it is exlibris of Laurence Whistler and found for a fiver. The illustrations here come from the two editions of it.

Barbara Jones – Follies & Grottoes, 1953 and enlarged in 1974.

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The English love to break down the natural scene. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the areas of natural heath and scrub left untouched by medieval husbandry were vigorously taken in hand and built upon, gardened, afforested and landscaped, most of England was arranged by man. In the nineteenth century the whole country was netted over with railways, and the cities grew; but, in fact, the scene was not altered very much. In this century we have come to accept that scene as natural, as the country”. We in our turn are trying to break it down, with motorways, industrial sites and new cities.

At all times since the end of the Tudor wars there have been English landowners, with anything from a ducal estate to a suburban front garden, who have not been content with other people’s ideas of breakdown, with the ordinary thing. Even if they have been able to commission idiosyncratic houses from great architects, they have still wanted something more, something wilder. The results of these impulses are scattered all over the country, and are called by the other English “follies”.

Follies take many forms. We may discount at once the follies in name alone, houses of which neighbours disapproved, or houses built too far from water, or with too little money to finish them, and also various clumps and belts of trees (the word was corrupted from feuillée). And the ordinary garden house, temple or gazebo does not qualify either. The element of eccentricity is essential; follies are fantastic, a little crazy in desire or design. Architecture is building for shelter; follies are building for building, a purer art. Towers and obelisks build upwards; labyrinths and tunnels build down. Other follies are aggregates of unlikely materials, abstractions of shells and minerals, bark and branches, nearer sculpture than architecture, the desire to amass solids in space.

The earliest folly I have found is Freston Tower in Suffolk, built in the middle of the sixteenth century, a brick tower on the banks of the River Orwell, near Ipswich. At the end of the century Rushton Triangular Lodge was built in Northamptonshire by Sir Thomas Tresham. Everything is in threes: the plan is triangular, each wall three times three times three feet, three sets of three-by-three triangles on top of the walls; three floors; three windows each side on each floor; trefoils and triangular pinnacles. Ten miles away at Lyveden is the shell of Tresham’s house, extending the arithmetic of three to five, seven and nine. More follies and conceits, and some tunnels, were built in the next century, mostly surviving only in visitors’ accounts of them, though there is a sinister temple of bark nailed over wood at Exton’ Park in Rutland, and there are fine grotto rooms of stone and shells at Skipton in Yorkshire and at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire.

In the eighteenth century follies became fashionable as well as eccentric; a nobleman’s estate positively needed one. Towers, tunnels, and grottoes continued in production, and all sorts of new follies were invented – sham castles and ruins, hermitages, labyrinths, obelisks, and eye-catchers. In the nineteenth century fewer follies were built, and those more by the rich than the noble, but druid circles were invented, and some superb folly gardens were laid out, with a curiosity round every corner. Late in the century fantastic gardening with broken china, slag, shells, flint, glass, coal, and coral became fashionable for the poor as well as for the rich. Only two or three dozen follies have been built in the twentieth century, but the little gardens continue, with gnomes added to the older materials.

The commonest sort of folly, and the easiest to find, is that which is built upwards. There are a great many ordinary little ones, but there are also some magnificent towers, built to commemorate great happenings or to command great prospects. There is a nice triangular one in London, in Castlewood Park at Shooters Hill, 64 feet high, built in 1784 to the memory of Sir William James and to “Record the Conquest of the CASTLE OF SEVERNDROGG on the COAST of MALABAR which fell to his Superior Valour and able Conduct on the 2nd Day of April MDCCLV”. In the nineteenth century it was used for select parties, and now it is a tea shop. Another triangular folly is Haldon Belvedere, near Exeter, built by an ex-Governor of Madras, with a floor made of marble from Hyderabad, and really exquisite plaster work. At Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire is Hoober Stand, 1748, a superb 100-foot soot-stained golden tower on a triangular plan, its sides tapering to a hexagonal lantern. It was built by Thomas, Marquis of Rockingham, in honour of George II. Nearby is Keppel’s Pillar, built by the 2nd Marquis in 1782 to commemorate the British Fleet at Ushant. It soars up, supporting nothing, an amazing 150 feet. Also nearby is the Needle’s Eye, a tall stone pyramid pierced by an ogival arch and crowned by a lovely urn, built, the story goes, for a crack whip to drive through after he had boasted that he could drive a coach and horses through the eye of a needle. At Wentworth Castle there are more conceits.

Many follies have good stories attached: you may be told that the builder is buried under the floor because he quarrelled with the parson, or is there standing on his head, or with his favourite horse under him. One man seems to have deserved all the stories: Mad Jack Fuller, who built a Needle, a Mausoleum, a Tower, a Rotunda, and an Observatory at Brightling in Sussex, and at Dallington a neat cone called the Sugar Loaf, to justify a night-time statement that he could see Dallington church spire from his dining-room window. In daylight this statement proved wrong, but he made a sham spire just over the skyline, to be right for his next dinner-party. Attached to his pyramid tomb is the most persistent of all the legends: that he is sit at table inside, with a bottle and a bird before him.

At Tong in Shropshire are some pyramids with no legends at all, perhaps because the builder George Durant said exactly what everything was for – and imagination could invent nothing stranger. “Quaint buildings, monuments with hieroglyphs, and inscriptions alike to deceased friends, eternity, and favourite animals – were then to be found on every path of the demesne”, says an old local guidebook.

Pyramidal gate-piers are carved as though bound with heavy ropes, and such objects as lamps and snails are carved in panels on the walls. A gazebo called The Pulpit has animals and snakes. On a nearby farm there is also an Egyptian Aviary, a pyramidal hen-house labelled AB OVO. Durant was one of the few gentlemen of his time who not only longed to have a hermit in the grounds to show to visitors, but achieved a very contented one, for a gentleman who had fallen on hard times lived in a cave at Tong until he died in 1822. The contemporary terms for the employment of hermits were usually much alike: a cave (or a rustic hermitage of roots, branches and knotty wood) was provided, and a hermit was advertised for, to serve a period of seven years, living secluded, with hair long, and nails unclipped, never speaking, with good food sent down from the house daily. But it seems that few people are even mock hermits by nature, or few people know how to employ one kindly. One gentleman was forced to use a wax image; and there are many records of early failure – the hermit went away, or he was found drinking in the village and dismissed. One known success, however, was the Hermit Finch, whose Sanctuary lies down in the woods of the park at Burley on the Hill in Rutland, preserved with most remarkable and imaginative rustic architecture and furniture, a pebble-and-knuckle-bone floor, and even the hermit’s sacking bed.

The desire to dig downwards is rarer than the desire to build up. It is also much more expensive; so the tunnellers had to be very rich or very determined. The 5th Duke of Portland’s underground rooms at Welbeck are the most famous mole-works. The Duke was said to speak willingly only to the men who dug the tunnels. Most excavations have an air of sadness. Many have walls of bare earth, or lined with cement, or strung along with a handful of cockle shells. But they were highly esteemed the last century, for the Catacombs at High Beech in Epping Forest were a pleasure resort. They are a wild descent into the dark earth of huge blocks of masonry said to have come from Chelmsford gaol, hidden under the garden. As well as the plain tunnels of compulsive digging, there are excavations of great beauty in the form of grottoes, where the surface has been decorated with glittering minerals, exotic shells, fossils, tufa – all the natural objects that became commonly wonderful in the eighteenth century. I have referred to the shell rooms at Skipton and Woburn; in both of these there is contemporary architecture with an overlay of shells. In the eighteenth century this style continued in fashion, greatly refined, culminating in the exquisite Shell House made by the 2nd Duchess of Richmond at Goodwood in Sussex. True grottoes, though not always underground, look like caves under the sea, spar and shells arranged in waves and stalactites. We have the name of Josiah Lane as builder, with his son, of a series of superb grottoes – at St Giles House, Cranborne, in Dorset, Fonthill in Wiltshire, St Anne’s Hill and Pain’s Hill in Surrey, amongst others. The two-roomed grotto at Wimborne St Giles is in the park and is shown with the house; it has been restored and is probably the finest shellwork of this sort that we have, a wonderful composition of surfaces and colours, the insides of shells gleaming against the
duller backs, small shells offsetting large.

At Stourhead in Wiltshire the National Trust owns a famous grotto, large and formal, built round one of the headwaters of the Stour, with fine statues of a nymph and a river-god. The walk round the lake runs through the grotto, a green, cool melancholy contrast to the splendid Capability Brown landscaping. Another remarkable grotto was built by Thomas Goldney in his garden on top of Clifton gorge at Bristol, with a cascade leaping from an urn held by Neptune, echoes from the wild water, a Lions’ Den and fine shells. All these grottoes are professional work, and look it, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century only amateur grotto-builders remained. The fashion spread wide; most towns, especially those by the seaside, have a bit of shellwork somewhere. There is a big one at Margate, probably made by two brothers called Bowles in an existing excavation. It was lost to sight for about thirty years, and found again in 1834 or 1835 by a schoolmaster’s son digging a duckpond. There is
almost no fantastic origin that has not been claimed for it – Cretans, Druids, even Tibetans, are supposed to have built it, and the simple amateur shellwork has been interpreted in a hundred gnostic symbols: we are a romantic-minded race. Druids were very fashionable in the first quarter of the century; there is a good sham Circle on the Yorkshire moors near Masham, a real prehistoric temple moved from Jersey to a back garden in Henley-on-Thames, and a Druids’ Table among the bone grottoes and bone-lined caves at Banwell on Mendip in Somerset, elaborated during the years after 1824 by the Bishop of Bath and Wells over and down some mine-shafts and two natural caves with stalactites and stalagmites. Ancient animal bones were ready on the floor, and the Bishop made the most of them.

Back to the eighteenth century, and back above ground. The Middle Ages and the Barons’ Wars became very modish, and Gothic architecture was admired again, not often for gentlemen’s houses, in spite of Walpole at Strawberry Hill, but certainly for follies. Suddenly hundreds of gentlemen wanted to see the ruins of a Gothic castle crumbling at a suitable distance from the house. A few of them had real ones; the others plunged into the fun of building fakes. Some of the sham castles were ruinous in design, like that at Wimpole in Cambridgeshire; some rapidly became so through being knocked up in a hurry or on the cheap; and some were built very crisp and new like Sanderson Miller’s Sham Castle outside Bath, a façade rising about forty feet on a hill-top, flat as a piece of scenery, which indeed it is, a wall without a room. Some castles were in fact made of painted canvas on wooden frames, so great was the scramble to get them up. Some were rich with Gothic detail, trefoils and quatrefoils, and castellations and arrow slits, but often reproduced on an absurdly large scale as there was no need to consider the strength of the wall, and defence could become decoration. Others were so ungothic that they could not be called castles; they were curious spiky constructions, often of flint, that were given names used for no other architecture, like eye-catcher, terminal, conceit, or vista-closer. Many of them were undoubtedly designed by eager amateurs of the arts, and put up by the estate workers; but a timid amateur could find plenty of help in the dozens of books on the Picturesque or the Grotesque that were published, with illustrations, plans, elevations and dimensions of every variety of hut, retreat, cascade, bathhouse, mosque and pagoda, from trifles made with Rude Branches to enormous Mauresque Pavilions beyond the Do-It-Yourself of all but the greatest estates.

Some people, having built one folly, went on. Hawkstone in Shropshire was an estate with many fine follies. The hermitage, with mock hermit, and an ornamental windmill have disappeared, but half a dozen survive, including a marvellous labyrinth that rises to the sunlight on top of a rocky bluff. Stourhead has a Rustic Convent, St Peter’s Pump, and Alfred’s Tower, as well as the grotto, and West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire has a Mausoleum, St Crispin’s Cottages – built to look like a church from the house – a Sham Lodge, and caves, now with son et lumière, Today, the folly impulse is concentrated in the small gardens, the miniature model villages that have succeeded the real ones of the rich, and a continuing tradition of topiary, we still have such gardens as the breath-taking solid geometry clipped from yew at Levens in Westmorland, that has been clipped since 1689. And there is a new one in Wolverhampton that has privet topiary of sixteen Scotch terriers, two cats and a rat.

Mass Observation was probably the largest investigation into popular culture to be carried out in Britain this century. It took place between 1936 and 1947. Originally established by a small group of intellectuals, writers and artists the idea was a sociological thermometer of the nation. Photographs were taken of people out on the streets and at work and paintings made too. The observers were sent out to streets, bus stops and art galleries to trail people and write down their opinions. During World War II the Government took over M.O.’s fact collecting organisation for propaganda purposes and to keep in touch with public morale. After the War M.O. became a limited company and turned to consumer research.

Mass Observation described its observers as ‘the cameras with which we are all trying to photograph contemporary life’ but photography itself played a small part in the project and very little film was shot. Humphrey Spender, M.O.’s ‘official’ photographer, was only able to spend short periods of time on the project. The work that he did for M.O. remained virtually unknown for almost forty years until the publication of Britain in the Thirties in 1975 and The Real Thing and Worktown exhibitions. The photographs, observers’ reports and diaries are now part of the Mass Observation.

The photos below are some of the few photos taken by Julian Trevelyan.

Julian Trevelyan – Advertising hoardings

Julian Trevelyan – Lines of washing

Julian Trevelyan – Children playing in the street on washing day

Julian Trevelyan – Teapot Cafe, Blackpool

Julian Trevelyan – Street scene with advertising hoardings

Julian Trevelyan – London Scene, 1935

Phyllis Dodd – Tirzah Garwood, 1929

This is a magazine cutting about the Tirzah Garwood memorial exhibition of Tirzah Garwood at the Towner Art Gallery.

Eillen Lucy Garwood – a memorial exhibition of whose work will be held at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, from 12th April to 11th May – was the third child of the late Lieut-Col. F.S. Garwood, of Upperton, Eastbourne, hence her name, from Tertia. When she died in March 1951, after a long and painful illness, she was not quite 42; yet in that brief span she had borne three children to one of England’s leading watercolourists and designers, Eric Ravilious, also an Eastbourne man, whom she met while a student at the School of Art; and she had made a personal contribution as an artist in her own right, which the author of this memoir is not alone in considering unique among women. A small selection of her work appeared earlier in the year in London, and one painting formed the cover of The Listener for 17th January.

Her career was curiously personal. When 21, she sent two wood-cuts to the annual exhibition of the Society of Wood-Engravers, and they were good enough to be noticed by the critics of The Times and the New Statesman, along with the work of artists already famous, or destined to achieve fame soon. The cuts were the fruit of work which at the time consisted mainly of satires on middle-class society: shoppers in Kensington, the inmates of hotels, family circles of varying degrees of horror (although her own was happy), a study of Crufts in which animal and human relations were traced with a not loving hand, a macabre study of a middle-aged woman yawning. The occasional children, on the other hand, were always drawn more kindly.

The eclarity and the finish of these works were masterful, and she received a number of commissions from patrons who included the BBC. For them she designed the first coat of arms used in official publications, and various illustrations for plays and booklets, that incidentally showed up her weakness in imagining scenes not immediately beneath her austere and merciless eye.
This early success was destined to be her one and only public appearance for many years. She was discouraged by adverse criticism of her imaginative work; and she had married. Occasionally, she helped her husband, as in the decoration of a hotel at Morecambe Bay. Later, with Charlotte Bawden, she revived the craft of marble papers, of which rather an indifferent example may be seen in the endpapers of the modern Everyman; but only the Japanese seem to have taken official notice, although the designs enjoyed a success among limited aesthetic circles, locally in Essex, where she was living, and in London.

She also made about 45 pencil sketches of her children, and the familiar village scene, of unexampled accuracy and delicacy, in drawing books characteristically later given up to childish scribbling. It was only after the death of her husband on active service as a war artist that she slowly resumed more ambitious work, mainly in the form of paper “models” of houses, mounted in frames, which, year by year, headed the poll of the exhibitions organised for children by the movements for Education in Art. Beside paper, she employed various other materials, like velvet and stuff retrieve from drawers and cupboards, as children would have done, and do, but with a clarity and skill of hand that far exceeded any child’s.

Her subjects were first the small farms of Essex, and streets in the market towns. Later, she ranged farther afield, improving her technique all the time, to produce a child actually swinging beside a romantic villa in Walton, or a blue and white house in the Vale of Heath, in Hampstead, to which she moved. An amateur bull on the shutter of a butcher’s shop in Islington attracted her attention, and she executed it in depth, with meat and butchers made of pyruma, and a shutter that could be pulled up and down. She often said that her last year was the happiest of her life, for then, when she was largely bed-ridden, and often in pain, she was able to concentrate almost exclusively on her work, which now took the form of paintings in oil. She completed twenty, to add to those she had already painted sporadically; and they form her most considerable work. In them she returned largely to her first love, birds and beasts and flowers, done with affection but without a trace of sentiment, in the firm hand that could draw a straight line much straighter than many can rule it.

All the subjects needed to be copied but the copies were related in terms of her imagination. With the flowers, she often associated objects of the new industrial age. Thus, an early Stephenson toy train in her possession stands in red and yellow, against the downs near Lewes, dun and earthy, farmhouse and stacks and fifty individual sheep in the background, on a base of poppies and corn. Georgian toy horses, very red and white, stand in front of a manger, hanging like a poem by de la Mare in a field of poppies that overtop the roof.

A picture of orchids hunters in Brazil illustrates the working of her imagination; for we learn from diaries that the subject had probably lain in her main for sixteen years, since someone reported a conversation with a gardener on Lord Gage’s estate at Firle. With one exception, the pictures that she painted show nothing at all of the fear of death, but only this simple delight in the thing in itself: flowers from friends, a cluster of mares tails, a cinnabar moth and bees, a tortoise and toad, her cat returning triumphant in the dawn, an early aeroplane (taken from a period Eastbourne postcard) hovering like a mosquito over a lintel of spring flowers. The solitary exception was a grey Spanish water jug, self coloured, in the form of a tall lady in the sprigged costume of the late nineteenth century, whoes colour in any case demanded the dun and deep blue landscape of owls and mysterious stars and palest daffodils. Tirzah Garwood was a rare spirit, absolutely clear, humorous, sometimes cruel, always herself with a gift of peach rare in this generation, only achieved by ruthless disciplining of a naturally passionate nature. Her art, limited though it is, is of the highest possible quality. One of her paintings, of a house at Canna in the Hebrides, hangs in juxtaposition to a Picasso and a Henry Moore; although totally different in every respect, it is not diminished in that company.

Tirzah Garwood – Orchid Hunters in Brazil, 1950

Eric Fraser – The Tempest, 1951

Sometimes you really want to write about an artist but you don’t know what works to talk about and then inspiration comes upon you. On a trip to Booton Church (Bawden had painted it) there was a book stall in the lifeless church and on it found The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by Peter Alexander. The plates were designed by Eric Fraser in 1951.

Eric Fraser – The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1951

1951 was the year of the Festival of Britain and the Royal Shakespeare Company staged The Tempest. The Festival gave the nation a feel good feeling that publishers were quick to notice and promotions of nationalistic icons are bought out to reaffirm Britishness in the post-war era. It happened again in the ‘80s when there was a spike in the middle classes going to look upon National Trust houses and English Heritage homes.

Eric Fraser – Hamlet, 1951

Born Eric George Fraser on 11 June 1902 in Vincent Street, London. He was educated at Westminster City School and attended Walter Sickert’s evening classes at Westminster School of Art. In 1919, he won a scholarship to Goldsmiths’ College School of Art.

In his working life he illustrated scenes from mythology, such as Beowulf fighting the dragon and it might have been this that got him the job illustrating Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings for the Folio Society. He also designed the LP Cover for the BBC’s Radio Drama.

He took on many adverts and dust jackets, indeed almost too many to narrow down. As a young designer, the first book I bought for my collection of dust jackets was Frasers cover of The Simplicity of Science, 1962.

What is the most popular photograph in the world? Well it might be the photograph below by John Hedgecoe. It has appeared internationally on over two hundred billion stamps in Britain and the Commonwealth. He was a photographer who lived in Little Dunmow, Essex.

In 1966, he was approached by the postmaster general to take a portrait of the Queen. A session took place in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace and, despite the quantity of film expended, lasted only 20 minutes. When the Queen inquired whether he had finished – “So soon, Mr Hedgecoe?” – he seized the opportunity for a second impromptu shoot in the music room. The Queen selected her preferred image and the sculptor Arnold Machin then made a plaster bust, which Hedgecoe photographed for the stamps.

John Hedgecoe obituary, The Guardian, 2010

Below are a selection of other photos that Hedgecoe took in the session with the queen, both with a background and some as a silhouette.

Both were used to make Arnold Machin’s sculpture relief of the queen seen here in different light and at a slight angle to each other.

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Here is a design Arnold Machin submitted in 1968 when the Royal Mint were looking to replace the currency for decimalisation in 1970. This without the text. The winning front side of the coin was by Robin Ironside.

Hedgecoe was born in Brentford, Middlesex, the son of a banker. Becoming interested in photography when he was 14. During the Second World War his family moved to Gulval, near Penzance in Cornwall. Hedgecoe attended Guildford School of Art (now University for the Creative Arts), while also completing his National Service with the RAF. During his service with the RAF, Hedgecoe experimented with aerial photographic surveys of bomb damage from the war. In 1957, he started work as a staff photographer at a magazine, until 1972. He worked at the RCA as a professor of Photography and died in 2010.

As well as over ten books on photography Hedgecoe wrote one novel, Breakfast with Dolly, illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Harold Stanley Ede, known as Jim Ede was born in Penarth, Wales. The son of solicitor Edward Hornby Ede and Mildred, a teacher.

Ede studied painting under Stanhope Forbes at Newlyn Art School between 1912 and 1914. Called up to fight in September 1914 during the First World War, he served with the South Wales Borderers and the Indian Army. He relinquished his commission in consequence of ill health, and was granted the rank of captain, 29 July 1919.

After the war, he continued his studies at the Slade School of Art. In 1921, Ede became assistant curator at the National Gallery of British Art (later the Tate Gallery) in London whilst continuing to study part-time at the Slade. Shortly after, he married Helen Schlapp whom he had met in Edinburgh. Whilst working at the Tate, he tried to promote the work of contemporary artists, including Picasso and Mondrian. However, he was often thwarted by the more conservative attitudes of the gallery directors. During his time at the Tate, Ede formed numerous friendships with avant-garde artists of the day. In the process, he acquired many works of art that were largely under-appreciated at the time. In particular, he secured much of the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska from the estate of Sophie Brzeska. The collection included numerous letters sent between Henri and Sophie, and Ede used these as the basis for his book Savage Messiah on the life and work of Gaudier-Brzeska, which in turn became the basis of Ken Russell’s film of the same name.

Below are a few of his paintings made all in one year, 1928.

Harold Stanley Ede – Trees by a Lake, 1928

Harold Stanley Ede – House with Red Roof, 1928

Harold Stanley Ede – Scottish Hayricks with Sea Beyond, 1928

Although the first sewing machine was in 1755 it took some years for people to understand the potential of it. It was a chain-stitching machine, though we are used to lockstitch machines. It was Barthélemy Thimonnier, who invented something what we would consider to be a sewing machine in 1829 but it was large and cumbersome and only really practical for stitching ships sails.

It was in 1851 that Isaac Merritt Singer invented the Singer Sewing machine, a more compact and ergonomic design with table top surface and a crank handle. In the 1870s the treadle base was introduced allowing the operator self power the stitching and have two hands free to guide the fabric. In the 1930s the sewing machine locked into the table top to make a flat table, this was the marketplace revolution that meant the sewing machine could be in the home as a piece of furniture as well as something useful. When electricity came to the home motors were designed for Singer machines but it is surprising how long singer were selling the tredal bases for.

The invention of the sewing machine had several very significant impacts. Firstly, it changed the domestic life of many women. As more households began to own sewing machines, women, the ones who traditionally stayed home to do chores including making and repairing clothing, found themselves with more free time. When previously several days a week would be dedicated to sewing clothing for herself and her family, a housewife could now complete her sewing in a mere several hours, allowing for more free time to pursue hobbies and attain new skills.

When Isaac Merritt Singer was born to immigrant parents in America, though his parents divorced and as the youngest of eight children and feeling abandoned he ran away from home to join a travelling group of actors called the Rochester Players. He found work as a machinist and worked in machine workshops working lathes. He patented a machine to drill hard rocks in 1839 and sold it to the Illinois and Michigan Canal Canal building company for $2000. With some money behind him, bizarrely he returned to acting. In 1849 he patented a carving machine. While working on this project he looked at sewing machines and realised they could be manufactured and operated much more successfully.

By the time he died in 1875, he had fathered 24 children. He was worth $13 Million ($310 in today’s inflation). Though he was born in New York and extremely wealthy he was buried in Torquay. In 1871 he had built an extraordinary house called Oldway Mansion in Paignton, Devon and with a grand vision in 1904 his son Paris, remodelled the house on the Palace of Versailles.

Isaac Merritt Singer’s funeral was an elaborate affair with eighty horse-drawn carriages, and around 2,000 mourners, and at his request in three layers of coffin (cedar lined with satin, lead, English oak with silver decoration) and a marble tomb. The SS Isaac M Singer was named after him in 1943.

After Isaac’s death his wife Isabelle remarried to an abusive belgian violinist called Victor-Nicolas Reubsaet. It is rumored he sexually and domestically abused his new daughters, including Winnaretta Singer. She was one of Isaac’s many daughters and in 1887 Winnaretta married Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard really to gain control of her inheritance, escape the abusive household and to live among Parisian artists and musicians. She studied painting under Félix Barrias and for a time was in Manet’s studio.

Winnaretta Singer – Self Portrait, c1885

She was a lesbian. On her wedding night she climbed on top of a wardrobe, brandishing an umbrella and said “I am going to kill you if you come near me!” After two years the marriage was annulled on the grounds it was unconsummated.

In 1893 Winnaretta later married the 59 year old Prince Edmond de Polignac, a rather cash-strapped man and homosexual, having little sexual interest in each other suited them well. He mixed in the artistic circles she had hoped to be in and befriended Gabriel Fauré, Chausson, Debussy, Wagner, Proust and Delafosse to name a few. Prince Edmond was a composer. Together they moved from Paris to Venice, buying the Palazzo Contarini Polignac on the Grand Canal. With some restorations they entertained people from Monet to Stravinsky there.

Claude Monet – Palazzo Contarini, 1908.

Edmond died in 1901 and Winnaretta became a patron for composers, arranging performances and festivals of their but, but also sponsoring them to write pieces. Ravel dedicated Pavane pour une infante défunte to her. She commissioned many works including Satie’s La mort de Socrate and Poulenc’s Concerto pour 2 pianos. She owned many works of art including Les Dindons by Monet.

Claude Monet – Les Dindons, 1877.

Polignac had a relationship with painter Romaine Brooks, which had begun in 1905, and which effectively ended her affair with Olga de Meyer, who was married at the time and whose godfather (and purported biological father) was Edward VII. Composer and conductor Ethel Smyth fell deeply in love with her during their affair. In the early 1920s, Polignac became involved with pianist Renata Borgatti. From 1923 to 1933, her lover was the British socialite and novelist Violet Trefusis,[5] with whom she had a loving but often turbulent relationship. Alvilde Chaplin, the future wife of the author James Lees-Milne, was involved with Singer from 1938 to 1943; the two women were living together in London at the time of Winnaretta’s death.

This is the illustration for ‘April’ in the Good Food cookery book by Ambrose Heath in 1932. Rather like Ravilious, Bawden used the local area around Great Bardfield for illustrations. The farm scene is from Bluegate Hall Farm, Great Bardfield.

Edward Bawden – April, 1932

The barns and tree still stand today but there are a multitude of modern barns around the yard.

Edward Bawden – Bluegate Hall Farm

A few decades later John Aldridge painted the farmyard.

John Aldridge – Bluegate Hall, Great Bardfield, 1952

Below is the view from the other side of the tree, notice the gate behind the tree in Bawden’s illustration, is now in front.

John Aldridge – Bluegate Hall, Great Bardfield

I remember when I first saw some of John Piper’s etchings on the wall of a friends dining room at a party. From across the room I thought them to be French mid-century prints that one finds Montmartre. Etchings in colour, to me always make me think of French influence and the 50s. In fact in Britain coloured etchings were the sacrilege of a pure artform that had mostly survived unadulterated in Britain until the Second World War.

Produced in a bound book called Brighton Aquatints in 1939, Pipers etchings were produced in both colour (in an edition of 50) and black and white (in an edition of 200).

John Piper – Chapel of St George, Kemp Town, 1939

In trying to form his own original ideas Piper took to collage and quick abstracted drawings of the landscape around him. Maybe to fit in with the artists based in St Ives he turned to the sea. In the drawing below you can see Piper has used ripped paper to give the colour and then a simple line drawing on top, making the paper the dramatic element from being ripped to when it is harshly cut. The brickwork in the etching above is made from type collage.

John Piper – Littlestone on Sea, 1936

John Piper – Near Dungeness, 1933

I believe it was in these ripped lines of paper that Piper learnt how to apply colour, as painted solid slabs with texture added. As in the two paintings below. It would also be the way he approached printmaking and lithography.

John Piper – Interior of Coventry Cathedral, 15 November 1940

John Piper – Entrance to Fonthill, 1940

Though originally designed the Brighton etchings as monochrome illustrations these etchings by Piper still demanded he thought about the drama of the buildings and their shadows. It’s a much freer hand than traditional etching giving them a more modern feel. Here he has used those blocks of colour aquatint over the etching.

John Piper – Kemp Town, 1939

I found the Piper prints work contemplating, looking at the railings, the balconies and the architecture of Brighton. The original book by Piper now makes around two thousand pounds.

John Piper – Brighton from the Station Yard, 1939

John Piper’s Brighton: The Story of Brighton Aquatints with a foreword by Alan Powers is out now, available from the Mainstone Press. £35