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Ralph Nicholas Chubb – Image from Woodcuts, 1928

Ralph Nicholas Chubb was an English poet, printer and artist. Heavily influenced by Whitman, Blake, and the Romantics, his work was the creation of a highly intricate personal mythology, one that was anti-materialist and sexually revolutionary.

Ralph Nicholas Chubb – The Enchanted Valley, 1925

He was born in 1892, he was educated at St Albans School and won a scholarship to Selwyn College, Cambridge in 1910. After Cambridge he studied art at the London School of Art for a year in 1913, before becoming an officer in the First World War. He served with distinction, became a captain, but developed neurasthenia (shell shock), and he was invalided out in 1918.

Ralph Nicholas Chubb – Unfettered Joy, 1922

After the war in 1919 he studied art at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks. There he befriended Leon Underwood who had also served in the war and Chubb wrote poems of Underwood’s short lived magazine The Island.

Ralph Nicholas Chubb -Portrait of a Seated Female Nude (likely painted at the Slade School of Art)

Unable to support himself through his work he moved with his family to the village of Curridge, near Newbury in Berkshire. He set up his own printing press in 1921, making books of woodcuts and poetry, and then in 1924 became a part time art master at Bradfield College.

The printing press he used was made by his brother Lawrence out of an old carpenters bench, the typesetting was arranged by his sister Ethel. They must have been a remarkably understanding family of his rather amorous homosexual artworks and poems. To get around the horror of typesetting Ralph later used lithography to make his books, so he could hand-draw his script.

A page from Chubb’s The Secret Country – or tales of Vision, 1938-39.

Other themes run through all of Chubb’s work. He was forever haunted by the memory of a young chorister at St Albans who disappeared from Chubb’s life just as he had summoned up the courage to speak to him. Similarly, a brief sexual relationship with another boy when Ralph was 19 seemed to serve as a template for future visions of paradise. Chubb’s books become progressively more self-involved and paranoid. Seeking to articulate his pederastic desires, he created a personal mythology which explained everything in terms only he could understand. Nonetheless, Chubb’s work is of fascinating psychological significance; each of the various angels, knights, seers, and boy-gods in his dream world represents an aspect of his introspective and persecuted self.

Ralph Nicholas Chubb – The Bathers, 1924

Bibliography:

• MANHOOD: A POEM. Curridge 1924. 8vo. 200 copies. Printed by Chubb in metal types.
• THE SACRIFICE OF YOUTH: A POEM. Curridge 1924. 8vo. 45 copies. Printed by Chubb in metal types.
• A FABLE OF LOVE AND WAR: A ROMANTIC POEM. Curridge 1925. 8vo. 200 copies. Printed by Chubb in metal types.
• THE CLOUD AND THE VOICE (A FRAGMENT). Newbury 1927. 8vo. 100 copies. Printed commercially for Chubb.
• WOODCUTS. London, Andrew Block, 1928. 4to. 235 copies. Chubb’s only commercially published book.
• THE BOOK OF GOD’S MADNESS. [Newbury 1929.] 100 copies. Printed commercially for Chubb.
• AN APPENDIX. Newbury 1929. 4to. 50 copies. Mimeographed by Chubb. Not for sale.
• SONGS OF MANKIND. Newbury 1930. 4to. 100 copies. Printed commercially for Chubb.
• THE SUN SPIRIT: A VISIONARY PHANTASY. [Newbury 1931.] Folio. 30 copies. Lithographed by Chubb.
• THE HEAVENLY CUPID: OR, THE TRUE PARADISE OF LOVES. [Newbury 1934.] Folio. 43 copies. Lithographed by Chubb.
• SONGS PASTORAL AND PARADISAL. Brockweir: the Tintern Press, 1935. The first book printed on a private press owned by Vincent Stuart.
• WATER-CHERUBS: A BOOK OF ORIGINAL DRAWINGS AND POETRY. [Newbury 1937.] Folio. 30 copies. Lithographed by Chubb.
• THE SECRET COUNTRY: OR, TALES OF VISION. [Newbury 1939.] Folio. 37 copies. Lithographed by Chubb.
• THE CHILD OF DAWN: OR, THE BOOK OF THE MANCHILD. Newbury [1948]. 4to. 30 copies. Lithographed by Chubb.
• FLAMES OF SUNRISE: A BOOK OF THE MANCHILD CONCERNING THE REDEMPTION OF ALBION. Newbury [1954]. 4to. 25 copies. Lithographed by Chubb.
• TREASURE TROVE: EARLY TALES AND ROMANCES WITH POEMS. Newbury [1957]. 4to. 21 copies. Lithographed by Chubb.
• THE GOLDEN CITY WITH IDYLLS AND ALLEGORIES. Newbury [1961]. 4to. 18 copies. Lithographed by Chubb and posthumously published by his sister, Miss Muriel L. Chubb.

Frontispiece to Chubb’s – A Fable of Love & War, 1925

Photo of Lehmann painting a mural at the Wardens’ Club, St Pancras ARP headquarters in London, 21st August 1940.

Born in Catemu, Chile, to a father of German and French descent (born in Paris) and a Scottish mother, Olga Lehmann was educated at Santiago College, Santiago, and in 1929 moved to England, where she was awarded a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, London University.

 Olga Lehmann – Figure Painting, Slade School First Prize (Equal), 1931

At the Slade she studied fine art under the tutelage of Henry Tonks and Randolph Schwabe, specializing in theatrical design under Vladimir Polunin and in portraiture under Allan Gwynne-Jones. Awarded prizes in life painting, composition, and theatrical design, she visited Spain in the early thirties; Spanish and Moorish themes were subsequently reflected in her art.

Her productive working life as an artist spanned almost six decades, from the 1930s to the 1980s. Throughout the 1930s she acquired a reputation in the fields of mural painting and portraiture.

She exhibited her work at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1933, and with the London Group in 1935. Later sitters of note consisted of people associated with the film or record industries such as singers Edric Connor, Carmen Prietto, conductor Richard Austin, and actors Dirk Bogarde and Patrice Wymore. During the Blitz in 1940, her studio-flat in Hampstead was destroyed by a bomb, and much of her early work was lost. She worked as an artist throughout the war, painting murals in canteens and offices.

Olga Lehmann – Mural design for the Canteen in the Censorship Division.

After World War II, her name chiefly became associated with graphic design for the Radio Times, and designing for the film and television industries. She was nominated for several Emmys for her costume designs.

Olga Lehmann – Design for Ivanhoe, 1981

1977: Lehmann received an Emmy nomination for outstanding costume design on The Man in the Iron Mask.
1978: Lehmann received an Emmy nomination for outstanding costume design on The Four Feathers.
1981: Lehmann received an Emmy nomination for outstanding costume design on A Tale of Two Cities. Lehmann designed costumes for Rosemont’s television films Ivanhoe and Witness for the Prosecution.
1984: Lehmann received an Emmy nomination for outstanding costume design on The Master of Ballantrae.

She also worked as an illustrator of many record covers including the famous BBC recording of Under Milk-Wood by Dylan Thomas. Her stage and set designs are some of her most collectable paintings.

Olga Lehmann – Cover for Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

In 1939 she married author and editor Edward Richard Carl Huson, by whom she had one son, author and television writer and producer Paul Huson. She was predeceased by her husband in 1984, and she moved to Saffron Walden into one of the ‘Artisans Dwellings’, a row of houses designed for artists and weavers of the town. Because of her history and that she lived for some time in Saffron Walden, Lehmann’s work can be found in the Fry Art Gallery.

From the Plague Journal 12/07/2020

At midday from Cambridge Station I got onto one of the cleanest railway carriages I have seen in years to Liverpool Street. Being so late in the day may have been why I had the carriage to myself, and even as I travelled south through various cities, no one else joined me, it was quite luxurious, I would say there were twenty people onboard the whole train.

It was nice to sit and forget about the world, to not be in my house and to feel normal again, even with a facemask on and the perfume of alcohol hand gel. The one thing I love about travelling by train is the views, looking into peoples homes and gardens, looking in at their world and thinking that the trampoline that likely means they have children, or the various conservatories and extensions properties have had. I even enjoying seeing how the blurred scenery changes from houses to fields and then to the industrial Tottenham Hale in a series of scattered wipes.

Into a tunnel lit by white disco balls the train slides with a La Monte Young symphony of train break screams into Liverpool Street Station, the railway cathedral of Edward Bawden made of iron.

The station is now one way and the flow of traffic pulled me towards Old Spitalfields Market where I met my friends Mark and Lawrence. Lawrence runs an art stall. If you don’t know the history of the market, there has been a market on the site since 1638 when King Charles I gave a licence for flesh, fowl and roots to be sold on Spittle Fields, then a rural village. In the Victorian era was known mostly for selling fruit and vegetables. The market was acquired by the City of London Corporation in 1920, to serve as a wholesale market and in 1991 the market was in the heart of the city and made it harder to trade from, so it moved to New Spitalfields Market, Leyton, and the original site became known as Old Spitalfields Market.

On Lawrence’s art and sculpture stall was a had a painting by Fred Dewbury. It is odd how a painting catches your eye and the infatuation of owning something takes hold. I asked the price and orbited the market to think about it. Rather like my train journey in I kept seeing the painting from different angles and view points as I circled around. On the train the houses and trees were blurred as I was moving past and as people got in the way or the sides of the wooden market stalls blocked my view point I realised it was the picture looking at me. Needless to say I bought it, but it’s rare to look at anything from such different angles in London these days unless it is St Pauls.

On my train journey home the same buildings and trees past me but it had started to rain and was getting dark, the stage scenery was the same but the lighting director had gone to work. The square windows of someone’s home became Christmas lights for me, a glitter covering the towns as my train washed down the tracks like a duck on a river.