In what must have been one of the last poster schemes to use fine artists, the London Electricity Board commissioned a series of paintings. Many of the artists rather than looking at the technical production of power, chose to show subjects of how London is illuminated. Sam Rabinovitch using his poster to show a boxing match. But it is a curious collection
Here is more Great Bardfield paper paraphernalia, this time the New Scientist magazine covers by Chloë Cheese. There maybe more but so far I have only noticed three, but I think it’s a good example of a bold editor making the magazine look more colourful. I am guessing because they don’t have headlines all over the magazine cover, that it was also because most of their stock was sold from mail subscription – rather than newsagents, this would mean they can be bolder with their covers.
Chloë is the daughter of Bardfield artists Bernard Cheese and Sheila Robinson. She trained at Cambridge School of Art and the Royal College of Art 1973-76 under Walter Hoyle and Warwick Hutton. She works mainly as an illustrator and printmaker and it is amazing the places her work pops up in. In 1985 the British Council organised a Touring Exhibition entitled “British Illustrators from Caxton to Chlöe”.
The Christmas edition below has a full cover on the front and rear.
Chapbooks were produced cheaply on just one sheet of paper, sold for a ha’penny each by travelling salesmen (‘Chapmen’) and would often be the only books a child would own. Back in the 1800s, these books would be filled with poems, fairy tales and puzzles, and were a child’s first indoctrination into the world of literature.
I find printed ephemera fascinating and chapbooks are fine examples of beautifully printed items. As the quote above suggests, originally the Chapbooks where printed on a large sheet and folded up and more like pamphlets. Starting with crude arrangements of woodcuts and children’s songs or poems, they changed to stories of the day and moral tales of heroism or devotion. As the movement of social pamphlets took off, they became booklets of political theories and reports on social conditions.
The publisher of the book I have is William Davison (1781–1858). Born in Alnwick, he was an pharmacist, then spotting a change in new technology, he became a printer, engraver/etcher, and a bookseller of his works as he became a publisher who also sold the typefaces he used.
I really like this example of colour printing
Edward Montgomery O’Rorke Dickey – The Building of the Tyne Bridge, 1928
Edward Montgomery O’Rorke Dickey, known mostly as Dickey, was born in Belfast on 1 July 1894. He was educated at Wellington College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied painting under Harold Gilman at the Westminster School of Art. He was art master at Oundle School and then became professor of fine art and director of King Edward VII School of Art, Armstrong College, Durham University from 1926 to 1931. He was then staff inspector of art from 1931 to 1957 for the Ministry of Education.
E.M.O’R. Dickey – Figures on a Train, 1925
Dickey comes in to a lot of research of the War Artists in the Second World War as he was working for the Ministry of Information on the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, first as a secretary from 1939-42, and then joined the committee after. He was one of the people the artists could liaise with.
E.M.O’R. Dickey – Budleigh Salterton from Jubilee Park, 1925
Dickey became the first curator of The Minories, Colchester in the 1950s, a post he held for five years. He painted extensively on the continent, and showed at the RA, NEAC. Both Bawden and Gross spoke with enthusiastic memories of him.
E.M.O’R. Dickey – Kentish Town Railway Station, 1919
E.M.O’R. Dickey – Monte Scalambra from San Vito Romano, 1923
E.M.O’R. Dickey – San Vito Romano, 1923
This is a book of poems by Florence Elon and illustrated by Warwick Hutton in 1984, The Keepsake Press.
Florence Elon, A young poet of impressive range, who draws on continental European, Jewish and cosmopolitan roots, and whose sense of exile is pervasive.
MY EYELIDS OPEN
My eyelids open from a thought of you
to your half-covered shape beside me, blurred
as rain slanting against our window now:
chilled slopes & hollows of your face surprise
my fingertips, that slide across
flesh puckering between
each forehead line; a white flash of the sky
lights up your eyes.
Our bodies, turning towards each other, close
like halves of a book. Taut mass of your thighs
& torso, that my own curves press into,
burns as you sway: warm being next to mine,
in this full touch, clay moulding against clay-
beside which, other acts
are partial, all thoughts, substitutes-
change dream to fact.
LINES FOR AN ALBUM
For sport, long summer days,
falling in love, we took
snapshots of graves
on the outskirts of Rome.
Caged in gold wire
a stage crowned the headstone:
two angels in mid-air
hovered on silver wings,
holding lit bulbs
round a Madonna figurine-
rose-lipped, pearl-robed-
smiling into our lens.
I spread the finished prints
on our tile floor
one late September afternoon.
They show, in blacks & whites:
Madonnas’ teeth
missing, bulbs burnt-out,
& round the stone-
boll-wisp, wing-bone.
Though not a typical post for me I think it is good to investigate an artist and a muse. The X-STaTIC PRO=CeSS book by signer Madonna and photographer Steven Klein is a curious meeting of minds.
The images use the typical surroundings of the traditional muse, a bed, a chez lounge and the stage of a performer, all without any frills and stripped back. The clothes are by a range of designers but the impressive red dress is by Christian Lacroix
This last video was a photo animation. It was 8 x 26 feet.
Norman Parkinson was a celebrated British fashion and portrait photographer. Credited for inspiring important shifts in the trends of fashion photography, Parkinson left the more posed studio setting to take outdoor shots that were more dynamic and carefree than his contemporaries, adding inventive humorous elements in to his work.
Parkinson’s work regularly appeared in magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, earning a reputation for finely produced images that combined elegance with British charm. “I like to make people look as good as they’d like to look, and with luck, a shade better,” he once quipped.
Born on April 21, 1913 in London, England, he began his photography career as an apprentice to Speaight and Sons court photographers in 1931. He would later take over as official court photography to the British monarchy following the death of predecessor, Cecil Beaton, in 1975. Parkinson would create many indelible portraits of the royal family, and was the recipient of the title Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. He died on February 15, 1990 while on assignment in Singapore.
Norman Parkinson – Régine Debrise wearing a Balenciaga ball gown, 1950
Norman Parkinson – Wenda Parkinson (née Rogerson), 1947
Norman Parkinson – The daughters of William Bramwell Booth (Olive Emma Booth; Dora Booth; Catherine Bramwell-Booth), 1981
Norman Parkinson – Anne Chambers (Owena Anne Chambers (née Newton), 1949
Norman Parkinson – Margot Fonteyn; Sir Robert Murray Helpmann, 1951
Norman Parkinson – Kathleen Ferrier, 1952
Norman Parkinson – Edward Bawden with Walter Hoyle to his left and Sheila Robinson to his right, 1951
Norman Parkinson – (John) Christopher Heal, 1953
Norman Parkinson – Joan Cox with thirty-five school children, 1955
Norman Parkinson – Wenda Parkinson (née Rogerson), 1951
Norman Parkinson – Carmen Dell’Orefice, 1980
Norman Parkinson – Dame Barbara Hamilton Cartland, 1977
Norman Parkinson – Dame Margaret Rutherford as the Duchess; Paul Scofield as Prince Albert; Mary Ure as Amanda in ‘Time Remembered’, 1955
Norman Parkinson – The Young Look in the Theatre, 1953
Norman Parkinson – Charles Alexander Vaughan Paget, Earl of Uxbridge; Lady Henrietta Charlotte Eiluned Megarry (née Paget), 1953
Norman Parkinson – Virginia Ironside with three children
History is full of artists that made amazing works and were forgotten, often in the case of women artists they studied, worked and then ceased painting when they got married. I don’t know if this happened to Peggy Rutherford or not, but she is mentioned in various reports and papers in clippings and periodicals in the 1930s, most notably from Apollo Magazine in 1931 she was mentioned as deserving ‘special praise’ for her painting ‘The Purple Magnolia’. Rutherford had a studio flat in Fitzroy Street in London. From an artistic family her aunt was Maud Rutherford who married George Hall-Neale, both portrait painters.
Rutherford studied at the Grosvenor School Of Modern Art under Iain Macnab and alongside Rachel Reckitt and Suzanne Cooper. It is clear that she favoured flower paintings and many of the works here from the 30s have a strong Bloomsbury influence as well. The Grosvenor School was a private British art school and gave the country some of the best inter-war avant garde artists; they nurtured the talents of the some of the most talented women students, Suzanne Cooper, Rachel Reckitt, Alison Mckenzie, Sybil Andrews, Lill Tschudi, Ethel Spowers, Eveline Syme and Dorrit Black to name a few. Some like Rutherford have been less documented than others.
Peggy Rutherford exhibited at the Society of Women Artists, National Society of Painters, Sculptors & Printmakers, (1936) at the Royal Academy with a watercolour called ‘Flower-piece’ (1936). She is in the correspondence of John Piper, and lived at New Malden and Chelmsford.
In 1930, two couples, Henry & Irina Moore (married in 1929), and John Skeaping & Barbara Hepworth (married in 1925) holidayed together at Church Farm, Blacksmiths Lane, Happisburgh, on the Norfolk Coast. The holiday was intended as a working one and it was hoped the time in a new location might help Skeaping / Hepworth marriage, but it did not.
In 1931 Hepworth met Ben Nicholson and later invited him and his wife Winifred Roberts to join them on another trip with the letter below:
I enclose a photo of the farm – the colour is very lovely. The country is quite flat but for a little hill with a tall flint church and a lighthouse… The beach is a ribbon of palesand as far as the eye can see. The Moore’s and ourselves should be so pleased if you came… If you can get away the farm will be less full the first week we are there – 9 Sep – 16 Sep †
Winifred was looking after their three children (Jake, Kate and Andrew) and stayed with her family in Boothby, Cumbria, while Ben went to the farmhouse. The Skeaping / Hepworth marriage hadn’t resolved itself and divorce had been spoken of before the holiday, so at first John Skeaping stayed in London. On changing his mind to join his wife in Norfolk, he found she had fallen in love with Ben Nicholson. The next week into the holiday they were joined by Ivon Hitchens and Mary and Douglas Jenkins.
(left to right) Ivon Hitchens, Irina Moore, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Mary Jenkins, Happisburgh in Norfolk, 1931. Mary’s husband Douglas took the photograph.
Left: Ben Nicholson and Ivon Hitchens
Right: Henry Moore carrying stone
Ben Nicholson with camera
Barbara Hepworth and Ivon Hitchens, by the Church Farm Gate, 1932
Skeaping divorced his wife in two years later. But it wasn’t until 1938 that the Nicholsons got a divorce. In 1932 Hepworth found herself pregnant with Nicholson’s issue, she gave birth to triplets: Rachel, Sarah, and Simon. This would mean Ben Nicholson was the father of six children by two women.
The rest of the photos are taken in 1932 and show the fashion for naked bathing and games. I am sure one day a scriptwriter will turn what must have been an emotionally tense holiday into a screenplay.
† A nest of gentle artists in the 1930s Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, 2009