It would be fair to suggest that the antiques trade has never been more alive and buoyant. With the television full of shows like Antiques Roadshow, Antiques Roadtrip, Flog it and various shows about upcycling antiques and furniture it might be hard to ignore. But at the back of my mind is the dark future for the trade – it comes from housing and education.
Richard Bawden – Sitting Room of his Home, 1997
The housing problem today for antiques is, large furniture doesn’t sell, because people are living in smaller houses than they were. When it comes to the young people who would be the target demographic for buying antiques, most of them have small flats and houses they rent in the major cities. Cambridge, where I am from has this issue. One of the biggest dooms for renters is that many landlords now charge tenants for the damage to the walls of putting up pictures, so it isn’t uncommon to walk into someone’s flat and see there are no pictures on the walls at all.
David Gentleman – Illustration from Elizabeth Kendall’s Home from Home, 1962
I also find that books are the possessions of people I feel more affiliated with. In the days when I would date, a good test would be to see if they looked upon my book collection with horror or joy. To some people owning books is a waste of space; or they flaunt an education or social aspiration. Maybe it looked obsessive. A lot of the novels I had bought for the dust jackets because I liked the artists at that time.
My Bookcase.
When it comes to education I am less informed to make the argument, I can only go on my own education, artistically. That was when we were only taught about Pop Art and Impressionism. To me then, they were exciting movements but it doesn’t do much to teach people about craft. Our ceramics classes were about making hideous slab work boxes with wonky sides. We were never told about the ideals of pottery or the movement in studio pottery. I would have been more engaged if the ideals of Japanese craftsmanship were told to us, but I feel my education was a matter of ticking boxes in the curriculum with teachers who were not engaged. I am happy to report my latter education was much more interactive.
The Study of Peter Parker – World Book Day, 7 March, 2019
But as a reader of this blog I want to know if you too are worried about what will happen to the world of studio pottery, paintings… Will John Lewis and Ikea furniture rule the homes as much as they currently rule the landfill. These questions are all selfish really. I am asking ‘who will care for the things I care for’.
Kettles Yard, the House of Jim Ede.
The only antidote to my moral in Cambridge is to visit the house of Kettles Yard and avoid the gallery area. It’s a beautiful home with function and full of art. My friend’s homes are similar, and the more cluttered it is the more I admire them if it is full of items they have collected or love. As film sets go I always admired the sets of The Servant. A mixture of hip modern items and Georgian charm.
David Gentleman – Illustration from Elizabeth Kendall’s Home from Home, 1962
Above is a famous photograph of the Queen on her Coronation day. Though I don’t have a strong affection for the royals I do enjoy propaganda and symbolism and they are all in use in this wonderful photograph.
It is worth looking at one of the components that makes up the photograph and that is the dress. The dress was designed by Norman Hartnell, above is his original design for the dress.
The much celebrated British designer, Norman Hartnell, has been synonymous with elegance and glamour since the 1930s. As the royal dressmaker to the Queen, he was naturally the first choice to design H. M.’s dress for the big day in 1953.
Cecil Beaton was one of the most famous photographers of the day and his contacts with the fashion world and talent for both candid and formal photographs.
Cecil Beaton by Cecil Beaton, c1930
Cecil Beaton attended the ceremony, along with 8,000 other guests. He sat in a balcony close to the pipes of the great organ, recording his impression of the glorious pageant in animated prose and black ink sketches. After the ceremony he returned to the Palace to make final preparations for the official portrait sitting. †
Below are other variations of the same photo session and various tinted photos.
Queen Elizabeth’s Ladies in Waiting preparing her clothing for the photograph.
A contact sheet of final and edited proofs of the Coronation Day.
Green Line Bus Advert with Ravilious’s Suburban Home Wood-engraving, 1935
Some time ago I was looking at all the Ravilious wood engravings and their links to each other for a book called Ravilious Recycled. I still haven’t finished the book but in doing it I have made a few discoveries that would add to what is known about the work of Eric Ravilious.
One is a design for the Green Line, the ‘Suburban Home’ with the silhouette of a man in top hat and umbrella standing in the doorway. The house turns out to be the Old Vicarage in Castle Hedingham, the same in the background of Vicarage in Winter, 1935. The steps, the ionic colonnaded door and the window above all say so – it isn’t a fact I have seen in print before and a genuine discovery by myself.
Eric Ravilious – Suburban Home, 1935
The advert was much smaller in printed size when in the newspapers than the other ‘banner’ like designs London Transport made around Ravilious blocks. It was not used on the Country Walks books. Nearby Greys Hall, in Sible Hedingham also became famous by proxy when used by illustrators Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone as the inspiration of Hell Hall in The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
The Old Vicarage, Castle Hedingham today.
In the memoir of Ravilious by Helen Binyon she writes of when Eric and Tirzah came to Castle Hedingham they didn’t know anyone in the village but soon befriended the Vicar and his wife, Rev. Guy and Evelyn Hepher.
The first time that Eric called at their large Georgian vicarage, he found the vicar having a bonfire of the temperance hymn books inherited from his predecessor – an activity that Eric certainly approved of. The vicarage was too large and uncomfortable to be easily run, but it afforded a refuge to the Raviliouses one very cold Christmas when all their pipes had frozen up. ‡
It was the same Christmas period in 1935 that Ravilious painted Vicarage in Winter below.
Eric Ravilious – Vicarage in Winter, 1935
Ravilious would go on to use Castle Hedingham for inspiration, as can be found in the Vicarage in Winter watercolour, started in the Winter of 1935. Tirzah writes in her diary that Eric’s paint had frozen on the brush and some days later Eric wrote to Helen Binyon
The snow picture is finished and not bad – rather pretty but so was the thing, like a Christmas card. ‡
The Old Vicarage, Castle Hedingham today.
This watercolour takes us back to the Green Line illustrations and in 1936 Ravilious used the cottage to the right in Vicarage in Winter for one of his wood-engravings for London Transport. According to Barry Kitts
Ravilious has transformed the slates on the Essex cottage – into thatch. †
The Vicarage can be seen from behind with the same greenhouse as in the painting still standing today.
The block shows a woman cutting the hedge by the path leading up to a V shaped Sussex style stile. It is the shape of the wall to the left of the engraving and the hedge in Vicarage in Winter that bind them together as the same location.
Eric Ravilious – Cutting the Hedge, 1935
In Castle Hedingham I found the lane from Cutting
the Hedge. Looking at the watercolour Vicarage In Winter
I just went to about the same view point and found it on
a village footpath. The photograph (below) shows the same
stepped wall. The house Pottery Cottage has had a lot
of work and is just recognisable. If Vicarage In Winter
were painted today it would be covered in various states
of mid century architecture. It’s a joy to stand on the spot of location and see the work of art before you.
Cutting the Hedge’s view today.
The Lane was named after Castle Hedingham Ware, potted by Edward Bingham between 1864 and 1901.
Eric Ravilious – Kynoch Press Block 121, 1932 and the original woodblock.
The V Stile also appeared in the Kynoch Press Notebook for 1933. The stile is on the page for the 8th May but its technical name is Block 121. The Notebook has 42 engraved vignettes of rural life.
Eric Ravilious – Cutting the Hedge, 1935
Below is the press advert, the text in the advert talks of the clean breeze of the downs.
Eric Ravilious – Cutting the Hedge as part of a Green Line Advert, 1936
† Ravilious – Engravings by Jeremy Greenwood, Wood Lea Press, 2008. ‡ Eric Ravilious: Memoir of an Artist by Helen Binyon, Lutterworth Press, 1983
Nevinson caused a sensation with his one man exhibition of war paintings in 1916. The images presented the modern age’s first industrialized war, often in bold modernistic style derived from Futurism, and the pictures all sold. †
Nevinson’s artistic legacy in Britain had been established by his two exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries in 1916 and 1918. It was his work during this time, documenting the First World War that gave him some fame. The works at this time being a mixture of abstraction and futurism. When he first went to New York, it was as a war hero, a survivor and documenter of war in a bold new ‘futurist’ way.
Nevinson was invited to New York in 1919 by David Keppel of the print publishers Frederick Keppel and Co, to exhibit his War prints. Manhattan’s architecture inspired him, not only by the sheer beauty of its skyscrapers. ♣
Nevinson made two trips to New York, the first in 1919 and again the following year. His first visit was to attend the exhibition of his war etchings and lithographs. This first exhibition held at Keppel and Co was a great success and the catalogue came with an introduction by the well known American critic and connoisseur Albert Gallatin.
It would have been during this first trip that Nevinson started a whole series of new works based on New York City. Many of these works were made from sketches and studies he made from the first trip, but were sold during his second. Many of the works are harder to date, a lot of the works are considered 1919/1920 but many of the dates rely on the year they were sold, not the year they were made. The process of lithography and etchings needed to be made in the studio later, some were sold at an exhibition in 1921. It is likely that many of the works that are etchings where also made into oil paintings(The Great White Way, Three AM), but their location is currently a mystery.
C.R.W Nevinson – Temples of New York, 1919 (Etching)
C.R.W Nevinson – The Statue of Liberty from the Railroad Club, 1919 (Oil)
C.R.W Nevinson – New York, Night, 1919 (Oil)
The print below ‘Looking down Wall Street’ has a view of the Brooklyn Bridge in the top left corner, though only 30 something years old at the time, the bridge and its size were still a marvel of engineering.
C.R.W Nevinson – Looking Down into Wall Street, 1919 (Lithograph)
He was clearly captivated by the city, compared to the London of the 1920s it must have been something, the skyscrapers of the time in New York would have been the Woolworth Building (60 stories) and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower (50 stories), but most of the ‘skyscrapers’ of the early 1920s peaked around 30 stories tall. London didn’t start building above 20 stories until the 1960s. Nevinson is quoted below:
‘New York, being the Venice of this epoch, has triumphed, thanks to its engineers and architects, as successfully as the Venetians did in their time.. Where the Venetian drove stakes into his sandbanks to overcome nature, the American has pegged his city to the sky. No sight can be more exhilarating and beautiful than this triumph of man. ♥
C.R.W Nevinson – The Great White Way, 1920 (Lithograph)
Between the New York exhibitions of 1919 and October 1920 Nevinson exhibited in the Senefelder Club – Leicester Galleries in February 1920 and also at the Manchester City Art Gallery in July 1920. The Great White Way was shown first at the Senefelder Club and Three AM shown first at Manchester.
C.R.W Nevinson – Three A.M. – A Corner by Madison Square at Night. 1920 (Etching)
C.R.W Nevinson – Looking through Brooklyn Bridge, 1920 (Etching)
His second exhibition held at the Bourgeois Gallery was much larger, with a series of paintings and etchings of New York that failed to capture the attention of the public. The press were kind but the works did not sell well and there is little reporting of the second exhibition in comparison to the first. Nevinson hired a cuttings agency to collect all items about him that featured in the press.
Below is an extract from the New York Herald, 24th October, 1920.
“Art,” says Mr. Nevinson, “triumphs in utility, and the most beautiful products of the modern world are a Rolls-Royce car and a skyscraper. They have been built for strict utility; their lines are perfect and they must appeal to the genuine artist. New York will be remembered for its introduction of the architecture of the skyscraper long after its people have been forgotten for other things.“ ◊
New York should like Mr. Nevinson and his work, for surely he is her friend. No native could ever idealize America’s greatest city more than this foreigner. ◊
C.R.W Nevinson – Under Brooklyn Bridge, 1920 (Etching)
Here I start to look at the station and railway pictures. Here is a photograph of the Fulton Street Station and the Elevated railway. Railways like this started in London but were built of bricks with viaduct structures. In New York, the buildings were made of iron girders and so the railways were bridged with girders.
In a wonderful bit of research I found a photograph of the station at the intersection of Greenwich Street in Manhattan. When the railway line was taken down the World Trade Centre was built just to the left of this photograph.
Greenwich and Fulton Streets, 1914
The photograph shows the same view only 4 years before Nevinson stood in the same spot. Being able to pinpoint the location of the station has helped with the location of other works too.
C.R.W Nevinson – Third Avenue, Elevated Railway, 1920 (Drawing)
C.R.W Nevinson – Third Avenue, Elevated Railway, 1920 (Oil)
Critics have suggested that the almost Monet style of the oil painting Third Avenue, Elevated Railway is down to it being painted on the spot and not in Nevinson’s studio. The etching that would have been made later still has some of the free feeling that the painting has and is more pictorial and more photo accurate than many of his pictures are.
C.R.W Nevinson – Under the Elevated, 1921 (Etching)
C.R.W Nevinson – New York: An Abstraction, 1921 (Etching)
C.R.W Nevinson – Fulton Station of 3rd Ave El, c1950
With the help of the drawing above and finding the location we can see that Nevinson was working in this part of New York on many views. The photo above is the same view as the etching above and the painting below. You can look at the metal fire escapes on either side of the buildings and find they match up. It is the view from the very end of the platform of the Fulton station. The skyscrapers become a theatrical fantasy.
C.R.W Nevinson – The Soul of the Soulless City, Previously known as New York – an Abstraction ,1920 (Oil)
The poor reception of this exhibition may have accelerated Nevinson’s disaffection with the city. His growing embitterment is perhaps reflected by the change of title. Originally exhibited in 1920 at the Bourgeois Galleries, ‘New York, as New York – an Abstraction’, it was re-titled ‘The Soul of the Soulless City’ in the Faculty of Arts Exhibition, Grosvenor House, London, in 1925 probably at Nevinson’s instigation. ♦
C.R.W Nevinson – Looking Down on Downtown, 1920 (Oil)
C.R.W Nevinson – New York, Night, 1920 (Mezzotint)
† Michael Walsh – A Dilemma of English Modernism: Visual and Verbal Politics in the Life and Work of C. R. W. Nevinson (1889-1946), 2007
♣ C.R.W. Nevinson 1889 – 1946 Retrospective Exhibition Of Paintings, Drawings And Prints: Kettle’s Yard Gallery 1988
♥ David Cohen – C.R.W. Nevinson, The Twentieth Century, p46, 1999.
◊ New York Herald, 24th October, 1920.
♦ Tate, London, T07448.
Paul Nash’s book ‘Places – 7 Prints’ has some curious works you might think were only made for the book. It is a rare book to find, being printed in 255 editions (55 of those a folio copy).
Many of the woodcuts also came with a poem following them. It was 1922 and a great time for poetry; it was just after the First World War and the Georgian Poets series of books published by Edward Marsh were popular. I can’t help but feel personally that Nash was only interested in poetry because Marsh made it fashionable and he was also a great patron of young artists. Marsh did go on to buy one of the pictures in this post, Tench Pond in a Gale in 1922 (Before the war Marsh wanted to publish a book of young artists work called Georgian Drawings, it never happened).
The cover features a woodcut ‘Meeting Place’ of two naked swimmers by a tree lined pond, printed in 1922.
Paul Nash – Meeting Place, 1922 (Woodblock)
Rather like what I have found with Eric Ravilious, many works are recycled from a sketch, to a woodcut and then a painting. It is all part of a long process – one at the time that would be new, ‘commercial art’ and in tow, printmaking; by this I mean that a woodblock printed book is more ‘mass production’ in the same way a limited edition print of 250 is.
It is nice to pin the location down to reality. The pond was in the garden of Claud Lovat Fraser’s parents’ home at Buntingford, Hertfordshire.
In preparation for the oil Nash wrote to the present works first owner, Desmond Coke, requesting ‘The Chestnut Waters I really do want photographed very badly because I am doing a large painting of that design for the show.’. †
He wrote again to Coke stating that the oil ‘is the best of the lot and nearest to being an achievement I think’ †
Paul Nash – Chestnut Waters, 1923 (Oil)
A year before the oil was made, Nash made a watercolour of the same location. What I always took to be a tree in the middle of the woodcut, appears in the Oil and watercolour to be heavy branches, laden down over the pond and the reflections. I rather think the oil painting is lovely in that Cézanne cubist style of colour shading light-to-dark. But the watercolour to me has a lightness more like a cathedral interior.
Paul Nash – Chestnut Waters, 1922 (Watercolour)
Below is an undated landscape in the Fitzwilliam, from what I can tell of the notes it is the back of another painting and so, likely unfinished. We can never say it is a relation of the paintings above, but there is a squared off pond lined with trees and could well be the plein air version made in the garden before working ‘Chestnut Waters’ up in his studio.
Paul Nash – Landscape, The Fitzwilliam Museum
The year before in Iden, Sussex, Nash drew one of his more famous works, Tench Pond in a Gale (Below). Is it a painting that puts to use all Nash’s wonderful skills of drawing trees but gives them a drama and movement unlike his other works.
Paul Nash – Tench Pond in a Gale, 1921–2
Below is another woodcut from the 7 Places book. Not unlike the Tench Pond in a Gale picture, but not like it enough either.
Paul Nash – Black Poplar Pond, 1922
Most of the illustrations in 7 Places came with a poem by Nash. The poems here are not amazing and may be why they have been forgotten.
Paul Nash – Black Poplar Pond Black Poplars shudder in the sun. Erect or slanting, their whorled shafts project a glinting shower into the crowded scaffolding of trees. Blunt shards of pine absorb the falling beams which polished leaf and rounded bole reflect in myriad facets of fierce light. With height of noon floods of cool wind pass over the fields, shattering quiet. The corn stalks bend, boughs swing their burdens to and fro. Dark waters image changes in grimace. The choir of leaves opens its song.
Ponds were clearly an inspiration to Nash in his 7 Places, there are many examples of pond works from 1921 – 1922. The one below is a wonderful example with the textures in his trees.
Paul Nash – Landscape in pale tones, 1921
Paul Nash – Garden Pond, 1922
Paul Nash – Garden Pond With silence force the sun hurles down light, With no disturbance, with no sound it falls upon the trees, the grass, the waters of the pond. Noiselessly, without movement, light mutilates the trees, the grass, beats upon the waters. No tumult comes. There is no cry, no moan. The leaves glitter, the grass is shining, the waters flash in the still pond.
Paul Nash – Garden Pond, 1st Proof with studies to the sides, 1922
Paul Nash – Dark Lake, 1922
Paul Nash – Dark Lake In a black pine wood is a lake, an inscrutable, dark face, staring up at the sun or into the moon’s face or at the stars peering down. Above, the pines in tall columns and mighty domes and great arches stand nearly motionless. At the water’s edge rushes and irises mass their slender swords. The grey teeth of an old fence look ghostly against dark waters. Beyond a platform jutting out, a woman, naked gleams in this shadowy place.
Paul Nash – Winter, 1922
Paul Nash – Pond in the Fields, 1927
Paul Nash – Study for Paths into the wood, 1922
Above is a drawing dated 1921, dedicated to William Rothenstein from Paul Nash as a Christmas card in 1923.
Being the drawing that would have been used to carve a woodcut, the woodcut is in reverse and printed below. The figure is harder to see below in the woodcut.
It is always hard to say what the joy is in studio pottery, but I think it is knowing that it is crafted and made rather than mass produced in a factory. There has always been a tradition of decorated slipware in pottery as other than paintings, carvings in churches and textile embroidery there were few opportunities to ever see any decoration on items. If you did, it was normally because you too had money.
Thomas Toft – Staffordshire Slipware Dish, c1670-90
After the fashions of early slipware and large decorated chargers came the smaller refined pots that the public would buy in the Victorian periods. This followed the social change of home ownership and so factories had new markets to cater for. This is the time when Royal Doulton and Brannam Pottery both stopped making sewage pipes and chimney pots and started to make domestic kitchenware and vases.
Arthur Bamkin for Charles Brannam – Sgraffito Cup, 1898
After the fashions of early slipware and large decorated chargers came the smaller refined pots that the public would buy in the Victorian periods. This followed the social change of home ownership and so factories had new markets to cater for. This is the time when companies like Royal Doulton and Brannam Pottery both stopped making sewage pipes and chimney pots and started to make domestic kitchenware and vases.
Robert Wallace for Martin Brothers – Double Sided Face Jug, 1901
The Martin Brothers whose large birds command such high prices also demand a mention for they were the blurred line of Doulton’s factory made designs and Brannam Pottery’s craft. They created vases with bold and bright decoration before going into a series of ceramics with natural earthy tones. The most interesting thing about them is that they can be incredibly surreal, and, well, tacky. Some are beautiful, but I thought it was good to show some early surrealism.
Joseon Dynasty Moon Jar, 18c.
The moon Jar above is the most famous example of Bernard Leach’s effect on British Crafts. He bought the jar while out in the East and brought it back to Britain and when he died he left to Lucie Rie, who in-turn left it to the British Museum.
Bernard Leach was raised in the days of the British Empire. His father worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and as a child he was based in Hong Kong and in Japan before returning to Britain to attend schooling. He attended the Slade for a time and then the London School of Art in Kensington where he was taught etching by Frank Brangwyn. Leach was at this time very fond of Etching and returned to Japan with the intention of teaching it to the Japanese.
Bernard Leach – A London Scene (Etching), 1908-9. (Leach-Redgrave Restrike)
While in Japan Leach became obsessed by the craft of pottery and took lessons with Urano Shigekichi. After learning the industry for a year he set up his own pottery in Japan before moving to China. He exhibited his works and this lead to the introduction to Shōji Hamada.
Bernard Leach – Leaping Fish Vase, c1965
Hamada was deeply impressed by a Tokyo exhibition of ceramic art by Bernard Leach, who was then staying with Yanagi Sōetsu, and wrote to Leach seeking an introduction. The two found much in common and became good friends, so much so that Hamada asked and was granted permission to accompany Leach to England in 1920 when the latter decided to return and establish a pottery there.
Edgar Skinner – a friend of Leach’s father introduced him to the St. Ives Guild of Handicrafts which was supported by local wealthy philanthropist called Francis Horne who lived at Tremorna in Carbis Bay. She offered him a capital loan of £2500 to set up his pottery with Hamada and also an assured income of £250 for 3 years.
The Leach Pottery was founded and over the next ten years they would experiment with the clays, slips and glazes in the UK and different woods to burn in the kilns. In 1923 Michael Cardew joined the pottery and left some years later to found Winchcombe Pottery.
The Leach Pottery took on various students to work there: Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, Norah Braden, Charlotte Epton and Dorothy Kemp. It was not the only pottery but I think it is honest to say the Leach pottery and the skills learnt in Asia have made him important. His influence would go on when there was a serge in home pottery in the 1960s and people copied his designs and used his glaze recipes.
Charlotte Epton – Jar and Lid, c1930
The other pottery that helped the surge of British Studio Pottery would be at Dartington Hall. Bernard Leach helped set up the pottery in the late 1920s. He recommended Sylvia Fox-Strangeways who was the first potter at Dartington. She was joined by Marianne De Trey who would later run it and education pupils.
Many other potters were forging the way in Studio Pottery in the interwar years: William Staite Murray, Dora Billington, Lucie Rie, Ursula Mommens, Ray Finch and Hans Coper. But to list the styles they made, the shapes of pots and their individual glazes would make this post too long
In the 1960s and 70s in the UK there was a boom in the amount of small potteries. Some looked back at the methods of making pottery in the Leach-Asian tradition, some went on to make domestic wear, others just experimented with styles. There are so many wonderful potters from all over Britain and their decorations and ways of potting are all so different. To collect it now doesn’t have to be expensive as some galleries would have you believe and I have been both collecting and selling pots in Cambridge for years.
Peter C Arnold for Alderney Pottery – Pot and Lid, c1970
I don’t know if the modern potters would call it their moment of postmodernism, but there are many craftsmen out there who are experimenting with the size and form of things. Below is plate by Dylan Bowen who has an amazing eye for almost careless slip designs.
Dylan Bowen – Plate, c2015
Now some potters make record amounts at auction and museums have exhibitions of their pottery, like Kettle’s Yard with Jennifer Lee. In the 1990s David Bowie invested in the Leaping Fish Vase by Bernard Leach and in the sale of his collection of art it broke the record for a Leach work at £32,500.
Robin Darwin – Near Dedham, Suffolk, 1956, Government Art Collection
Sir Robert Vere “Robin” Darwin KCB CBE RA RSA PRWA NEAC has more names and honours to his name than you would think possible, so why isn’t he better known?
He was the son of the golf writer Bernard Darwin and his wife the engraver Elinor Monsell. His aunts were Gwen Ravarat and Margaret Keynes. One of his sisters was the potter Ursula Mommens who married and divorced Julian Trevelyan before Mary Fedden. He was a great-grandson of the naturalist Charles Darwin. Robin was both an artist and an educator.
Robin Darwin – The Thames at Kew, Oliver’s Island, 1954
Robin started off at Eton and then went on to the Slade art school, under Henry Tonks he lasted only a term. When the Second World War came he found himself as an artistic administrator in the Camouflage unit under the Ministry of Home Security in Leamington Spa designing things from inflatable rubber tanks to working out how to disguise large factories from the air with trees and their shadows. He went back to teach art at Eton and there set up the school’s famous ceramics department.
Robin Darwin – Suffolk Landscape, c1935
He then moved on to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in 1945, looking at the post-war reconstruction of London. Then he was appointed education officer in the newly formed Council of Industrial Design. It was under the Board of Trade and a propaganda unit for British Design. Under the leadership of Gordon Russell and Paul Reilly it became the Design Council.
Robin Darwin – The Wittenham Clumps
He was also involved with the Festival of Britain but he is now famous for being the rector of the Royal College of Art from 1948 until 1971.
Through his reforming leadership of the Royal College of Art, Robin Darwin had an enormous impact on C20 art and design. As a subsequent Rector of the RCA, Sir Christopher Frayling, points out in his introduction to this first biography of Charles Darwin’s great-grandson, Darwin’s influence at the College has lasted for over sixty years, far longer than the Bauhaus existed (thirteen years) or Black Mountain College’s celebrated twenty-year heyday.
Thorpeness is a curious place on the Suffolk coastline. Between Aldeburgh and Sizewell, it is a toytown. There are some old properties in the village but many of them are 20th century.
In 1910, Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie, a Scottish barrister who had made his money building railways around the world, increased the family’s local estates to cover the entire area from north of Aldeburgh to past Sizewell, up the coast and inland to Aldringham and Leiston.
Most of this land was used for farming, but Ogilvie developed Thorpeness into a private fantasy holiday village, to which he invited his friends’ and colleagues’ families during the summer months. A country club with tennis courts, a swimming pool, a golf course and clubhouse, and many holiday homes, were built in Jacobean and Tudor Revival styles. Thorpeness railway station, provided by the Great Eastern Railway to serve what was expected to be an expanding resort, was opened a few days before the outbreak of World War I. It was little used, except by golfers, and closed in 1966.
For three generations Thorpeness remained mostly in the private ownership of the Ogilvie family, with houses only being sold from the estate to friends as holiday homes. In 1972, Alexander Stuart Ogilvie, Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie’s grandson, died on the Thorpeness Golf Course. Many of the houses and the golf course and country club had to be sold to pay death duties.
In many ways Thorpeness reminds me of Frinton-On-Sea, a protective elite of housing owners, but Frinton (though also hellish) has some fantastic art deco properties. Thorpeness is a poorly maintained theme park of some strange Tudor England. It reminded me of the home-made houses for tri-ang train sets and early dolls houses.
Tri-ang dollhouses #93
While walking around I kept thinking of the quote below by Linda Smith on golf courses vs the countryside. To me Thorpeness is fake architecture vs historical homes.
People say ‘it’s out in the countryside’, a golf course is not the countryside – it’s the countryside tidied up, it’s the countryside for people who wished the countryside had wipe clean surfaces, it’s the countryside for people whose gardens are full of conifer and heather.
Edwin Smith is renowned for being a photographer but few knew that he was a painter as well. His wife Olive Cook was a self taught painter and was educated at Benton End under Cedric Morris on weekends.
Edwin Smith – Self Portrait, 1970
He was born in Canonbury, Islington, London, the only child of Edwin Stanley Smith, a clerk, and his wife Lily Beatrice. After leaving school he was educated at the Northern Polytechnic, transferring to the architectural school at the age of sixteen. He then won a scholarship to the Architectural Association, but gave up his course and worked as a draughtsman for several years. He became a freelance photographer in 1935, working briefly for Vogue as a fashion photographer. However he concentrated his artistic efforts on subjects such as the mining community of Ashington in Northumberland, the docks of Newcastle, and circuses and fairgrounds around London.
In 1935 Smith married Rosemary Ansell, but the marriage ended in divorce two years later. A few years later Smith was living with Olive Cook, whom he married in 1954.
The Fry Gallery holds a great deal of Smith’s painted works and they are naive but I would say competent; I think there is something free and wonderful in them.
Edwin Smith – Stacking Peas with a view of Waveney Church, Norfolk
In this post I look at the artworks of events at Dunkirk in 1940. Some would have been sketched or observed on the day, others were painted with eye-witness reports and photographs. Many were finished in a studio in the weeks and months after.
On 10 May 1940, Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, pushing the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), along with French and Belgian troops, back to the French port of Dunkirk. A huge rescue, Operation ‘Dynamo’, was organised by the Royal Navy to get the troops off the beaches and back to Britain. ‡
‘Dynamo’ began on 26 May. Strong defences were established around Dunkirk, and the Royal Air Force sent all available aircraft to protect the evacuation. Over 800 naval vessels of all shapes and sizes helped to transport troops across the English Channel. The last British troops were evacuated on 3 June, with French forces covering their escape. Churchill and his advisers had expected that it would be possible to rescue only 20,000 to 30,000 men, but in all 338,000 troops, a third of them French, were rescued. Ninety thousand remained to be taken prisoner and the BEF left behind the bulk of its tanks and heavy guns. All resistance in Dunkirk ended at 9.30am on 4 June. ‡
When I saw the Richard Eurich picture below, the sea was so well painted it looked like glass. It was at an exhibition in the Queens House, Greenwich. It is a fantastic picture that viewed in a book or on the internet doesn’t comprehend. It was also used by the Navy as its Christmas card for 1940.
Richard Eurich – Withdrawal from Dunkirk, 1940
Charles Cundall – The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, 1940
John Spencer-Churchill – Dunkirk from the Bray Dunes, 1940
Below is a painting by Wilkinson who to my eye is the master of painting seascapes. He has a wonderful repertoire of boats and the lighting in this painting is a marvel. Though beautiful, it also shows the hellish chaos of the day.
Norman Wilkinson – The Little Ships at Dunkirk, 1940
The Little Ships at Dunkirk: June 1940, by Norman Wilkinson. The gently shelving beaches meant that large warships could only pick up soldiers from the town’s East Mole, a sea wall which extended into deep water, or send their boats on the beaches to collect them. To speed up the process, the British Admiralty appealed to the owners of small boats for help. These became known as the ‘little ships’. ‡
Newspaper with the small announcement under ‘War Artists’.
On Thursday, 7th March, 1940, three days before his 37th birthday, it was announced in the British papers that Edward Bawden and Barnett Freeman were to become Official War Artists on behalf of the British War Office.
In the first days of April, Ardizzone (Edward) and Bawden took rooms for a while in the hotel Commerce in Arras, fussed over by a shared batman. They enjoyed the local wine and hospitality, before being billeted separately. Arras was dour, small and grey, It was also the GHQ for the British Army in France. †
Arras in France is just over fifty miles away on a map, from April to May the retreat to Dunkirk was rapid and not an inspiring start for a war artist. In this short time Bawden said he was passed from regiments and groups rapidly as none of them wanted the alien burden of an artist to deal with, but being on the move a lot may have prepared his sketching style ready for Dunkirk where rapid copy was needed.
On his way to Dunkirk, Bawden has rolled up his paintings in a cylindrical tin which he clutched under his arm. †
Approaching the port, he ditched all his equipment except his art materials (what would the Germans have done with them?) Marching into the town, they ran the gauntlet of ragged French soldiers jeering them. It discomforted him, as did the looters sweeping like locusts through abandoned houses. †
Edward Bawden – Dunkirk: Embarkation of Wounded, May 1940
Edward Bawden – Dunkirk – The New World, 1940
Edward Bawden – Boys Serving Coffee, Dunkirk, 1940.
He reached the quayside in the company of a Canadian major, and they watched with dismay the frantic self-preservation of a group of British generals on the Dunkirk quayside, the swagger sticks pointing at likely boats bound for England. He turned to the major, with a wry smile. ‘Rats always go first’ he said. †
Edward Bawden – Dunkirk – Embarkation of Wounded, 1940
Edward Bawden – The Quay at Dunkirk, 1940.
In the watercolour above, notice the fires along the jetty. The men in the foreground descending into a air-raid shelter and the bomb craters on the ground. The air raid shelter is likely to be the same one below, but in the chaos who could tell.
Edward Bawden – The Entrance to an Air Raid Shelter, Dunkirk, 1940
Edward Bawden – In an Air Raid Shelter, Dunkirk: Bombs are dropping, 1940
† The Sketchbook War by Richard Knott, 2013 978-0752489230
‡ Imperial War Museum – Dunkirk
