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John Nash – The Countryman

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The Countryman magazine was founded in 1927 by J. W. Robertson Scott, who edited it from his office in Idbury in rural Oxfordshire for the first 21 years, since then it has had many editors but is still going today. In the Spring issue of 1958 it described itself as “A quarterly non-party review and miscellany of rural life and work for the English-speaking world”. Its editor at that time was Johnathan Cripps.

The magazines are amazing things to look in as you never know what you will read, from blacksmiths who make Dragon shaped door locks to the development of archaeology and farming. The size is also charming, being A5 it slips in a bag better than most modern magazines. 

In 1959 the magazine was published quarterly, all four of the covers were designed by John Nash. Nash at this time lived in Bottengoms, a house in Wormingford, Essex, near Colchester. He taught botanical illustration at the Colchester School of Art in the 60s and 70s. He is most famous for his country paintings and was at the forefront of the revival of British landscape painting.

These copies with the John Nash covers are not that rare but many booksellers online have not noticed the illustrator.  

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Nash’s most important association with The Countryman was over the four cover designs he did for their 1959 issues. Prior to 1959 the covers had always tabled the list of contents, but Cripps wrote to Nash in May 1958 explaining that for some time he had been investigating the possibility of introducing an illustration onto the cover, and he invited Nash’s comments on the matter. Obviously this was an important step for such a well established periodical and one that could win or lose a lot of readers. John Lewis was also asked to come in on the project to advise on the design and layout of the new covers. It was decided that Nash would design the first four covers and Cripps wrote to him accordingly: 

… to confirm that you will prepare four roughs with some relation to the seasons, to occupy approximately the top half of the space on our cover now filled with the titles of articles and their authors. For these I would pay a total sum of thirty guineas.

By September 1958 Nash had done four designs which he sent to John Lewis for his comments. Nash apologised that they were carried out in biro, he also pointed out that his final drawings would be twice the size in order to simplify any cross-hatching work he had to do. The drawings were sent on to Cripps who then wrote back to Nash with various suggestions. 

He liked Nash’s drawing of Skye best and he asked him if he could perhaps include some lambs in the illustration so they could use it for the first cover for Spring. Nash checked to see whether there would in fact be lambs on Skye in spring and as there were be revised his drawing accordingly. 

The drawing for Winter of a lane at Stoke-by-Nayland was also approved of, but Cripps pointed out that as this design had trees in it, it would be inappropriate to precede it with Nash’s drawing for Autumn of a wood. Nash therefore produced

another drawing for Autumn, a more seasonal one of apple-picking with a sprig of a blackberry bush across the foreground. 

Nash’s fourth drawing of a lake in Cornwall also had to be re-done because the paper for the cover was too absorbent and would not pick up the detail in his design. This he substituted with the drawing of ‘A Suffolk Stream’. 

Apart from a somewhat lengthy discussion about whether there should be a line round Nash’s illustrations or not, and a few minor revisions to the positioning of the blackberry sprig for the Autumn cover, the printing went ahead according to plan. Nash’s designs were obviously a success because from now on all The Counterman covers were illustrated. The next six were on the same deep green paper, but in the autumn of 1961 this was replaced with a bright green and the design was inset on a white background. Nash was not asked to contribute further cover designs. †

† Clare Colvin – John Nash – Book Designs, p74, 1986

Rosemary Ellis

Rosemary Ellis née Collinson was born in Totteridge, North London in 1910. Her grandfather was the leading designer of furniture company Collinson & Lock and her father trained as a cabinet maker and started the firm Frank Collinson & Co.

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 Clifford Ellis – The Farm, 1945, from my collection.

Rosemary’s father served in WW1 in France and Italy. Having survived this conflict he died of Spanish Flu in 1919 and so Rosemary and her siblings moved in with her mother’s parents in their large house at Netley Marsh in the New Forest. In this environment she developed a love of the forest and its animals. Some time later, the family moved to London.

Rosemary went to study art at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1928. It was here that she met her future husband Clifford Ellis who was her tutor at the Polytechnic.

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 Rosemary Ellis – View of Holcombe from Dawlish, 1945, from my collection.

Clifford and Rosemary Ellis were at once husband and wife and an artistic partnership. Their collaboration began in 1931, the year of their marriage, and subsequently almost all their published freelance work is signed jointly. By the time the New Naturalist jackets were designed they had taken to using the cipher C&RE to express their joint authorship. Such consistent use of a joint cipher is unusual, and needs a little explanation. The initials were put in alphabetical order, not out of any sense of seniority. †

The couple as artists and designers joined the ranks of Ben Nicholson, Eric Ravilious, Barnett Freedman and Edward Bawden as artists who could create both posters for advertising and book dust jackets. They would join many of these artists in working for Shell Mex and for London Transport on posters.

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 Clifford and Rosemary Ellise – Appledore – ‘Shell Landmark’ Series No. 491

Work that would welcome further investigation includes posters by Barnett Freeman, Edward Bawden, Richard Guyatt and Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. Another area that was constrained from further investigation by lack of space was the way in which Beddington provided opportunities for women to produce art for commercial use. Women artists were given very little press attention in the 1930s and, although artists such as Barbara Hepworth were active exhibitors, critics rarely reviewed their shows. Apart from Vanessa Bell, six other women artists produced posters for Shell, including Pamela Drew, Eve Kirk, Cathleen Mann and Margaret Brynhild Parker. The reason for the prominence of women in poster design is a potentially interesting area of research that could illuminate issues of female participation in the arts, gender prejudice, and education in the 1930s. ‡

By the time of WW2 Clifford Ellis was the headmaster of the Bath School of Art. He then served as a camouflage artist and official war artist with Grenadier Guards during Second World War.

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 Rosemary Ellis – Tombstones, Bathampton Cemetery, Bath for Recording Britain, 1943, V&A.

Rosemary too was a official war artist working on the Recording Britain project with Clifford. Above is a beautiful view of a graveyard in Bath. It is one of the most gothic and romantic works she produced and looks more like a John Piper study. The painting above ‘View of Holcombe from Dawlish’ also has elements of John Piper in it: the loosely constructed house, the abstract boat off the shore and the dark sky.

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 Rosemary Ellis – Teignmouth Bay, 1945, from my collection.

The couple would also be selected as artists for the Lyon’s Lithograph series in 1947. The aim was to produce large lithographs that could cheaply be bought by members of the public but also be displayed to brighten up the tearooms Lyons owned. The Ellis’s submission of Teignmouth was described as almost being a painting rather than a lithograph.

Between 1946 and 1955 the company commissioned three series of prints, some 40 in all, from most of the leading British artists of the day. The lithographs were not advertising per se (the Lyons name only appeared in small type at the bottom of each), but they were branding by association. 

To help, he brought in the artist Barnett Freedman as the technical director. He had long experience as a lithographer and had been both an official war artist and a teacher at the Royal College of Art. ♠

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 R&CE – Teignmouth From the Lyons Lithographs First Series 1947.

The painting of Teignmouth Bay from 1945 would have been a study around the time of the Lyons lithograph above but looking back and forth onto each other.

Teignmouth Painted by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis: For the lithographs worked up at Chromoworks from originals, (Barnett) Freedman’s input at the proofing stage was crucial. In response to his comments about the proof of Teignmouth, for example, (Frank) Oppenheimer noted at the printers that they would ‘try a light grey printing over the sails etc … alter the colour of the light brown high light in the hills in printing [and] … make the colour of the sky and sea slightly warmer. ♣

Rosemary Ellis worked with her husband Clifford to design over 60 of the dust jackets for the New Naturalist book series, after volume 71 the artist Robert Gillmor took over.

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 R&CE – Butterflies by E. B. Ford, Collins, 1945

Today these jackets are their best-known work, though book lovers may know some of their other jackets before and after the war, for the Collins Countryside series in the 1970s, or their design for John Betjeman’s Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Within the art worked they are remembered more as innovative teachers, Clifford Ellis having run the Academy of Art at Corsham Court for a quarter of a century with his wife Rosemary as a leading member of the staff. †

The pair also designed two of the covers to the King Penguin Series.

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 R&CE – A Book of English Clocks by R.W.Symonds, 1946, King Penguin Books.

The original idea for King Penguins came from the small Insel-Verlag books which were published in Germany before the war. Why, we felt, should there not be a similar series of books in this country? The experiment, started a few weeks after war broke out, turned out to be successful. One of the most distinctive features of this series is their decorative covers. ♦

The King Penguin series itself struggled to make money, because of the costs of colour printing, and it was cancelled in 1957. ♥

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 R&CE – Flowers of the Woods by E.J.Salisbury, 1947, King Penguin Books.

† Collecting the New Naturalists by Tim Bernhard and Timothy Loe, 2015.
‡ Shell’s England by Malcolm V. Speakman, 2014.
♠ Bawden and battenberg by Michael Prodger, The Guardian 12 July 2013.
♣ Tea and a Slice of Art: The Lyons Lithographs 1946-1955 by Charlie Batchelor.
♥ Reading Penguin: A Critical Anthology by William Wootten and George Donaldson, 2014.
♦ Pevsner: The BBC Years: Listening to the Visual Arts – Page 75
Recording Britain. Volume 4, Edited by Arnold Palmer, 1949.

Afternoon Tea with Ravilious

The journey of any work of art can be interesting in how it is used, forgotten and then reused. As I write this I think it’s endemic of Ravilious’s life that there can be no area or topic on him that hasn’t been probed or turned into a book, but onward I go with my quest for originality.

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 Eric Ravilious – Sketch for Tea in the Garden, 1936

In 1936 Eric Ravilious made a wood engraving for London Transport. Tea in the Garden was made to be used in newspaper advertisements for the Green Line bus service, a decorative vignette to go with commuter information. It is a rather abstract design but it was the start of the commuter lifestyle as London was building a new wave of suburbia and you can imagine the print being used with slogans like “home in time for tea” or “enjoy the garden, 20 mins from the city by bus”

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 Eric Ravilious – Finished print of Tea in the Garden, 1936

Soon after Ravilious reused the design for a commission with Wedgwood, he was so busy during this point that many designs where recycled from wood engravings to watercolours or china. Below you can see a sketch drawing for a teapot design using the woodblock above. Carving out the legs of the bench and inverting the colours of the table so when printed the transfer will be black and an enamel colour wash painted over.

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 Eric Ravilious – Sketched idea for Teapot design, 1938

The finished design below, with the colouring in yellow, blue and green. The design has been made simpler and the shading is able to be more subtle as it will be printed on a metal plate, so there is more detail in the halftone lines. It was first used on a preserve jar for Wedgwood.

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The preserve jar was introduced six months in advance of the rest of the pattern. The design was advertised in 1939 as being available also in breakfast and coffee sets; the war prevented production of these. At first unnamed, later called ‘Teaset’, the design was finally named ‘Afternoon Tea’.

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Here the tea-set is advertised in ‘The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art 1943-1948′ (the gap in printing is noted in the introduction due to WW2, lack of paper and designers being commissioned to do essential war work, this year book covers a wide range of time).

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The Bone china tea ware decorated with motifs illustrating Afternoon Tea, printed in sepia and hand-coloured green. Designed by Eric Ravilious A.R.C.A. for Josiah Wedgwood and Sons. †

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Here is a tea-plate from the set with the simple wave decoration on the perimeter of the plate and washed in blue enamel paint.

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 In this prototype photograph from 1938 the design is painted around with a pink glaze to the edge of the design and the Ravilious vignette and border uncoloured but printed in a brown sepia with the pink flooding over the whole plate. These are the rarest of all the designs as they were not put into production and the designs were modified to use less colour glaze after the war. 

Twenty five years later the original woodblock design would be resurrected and used in a reduced size for advertising and on the covers of Country Walks booklets.

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 Country Walks with the Ravilious Engraving on the cover, 1978

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 A rather fun and unusual poster for the Country Walks books by Harry Stevens, 1978.

Ravilious Engravings by Ravilious Jeremy Greenwood, Wood Lea Press, 2008.
Country Walks, London Transport, 1978.
Ravilious and Wedgwood: The Complete Wedgwood Designs of Eric Ravilious, 1995.
† The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art 1943-1948 
  

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Gentlemen Underground

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When he was commissioned to design murals for the platforms of Charing Cross underground station, artist David Gentleman (born 1930) chose as his theme the building of the medieval Charing Cross, one of the twelve memorial crosses commemorating Queen Eleanor (who died in 1290). He devised a scheme to take into account the architecture of the station, allowing spaces for entrances and exits and litter bins. He collaged together nearly 50 wood engravings which were then screen-printed onto melamine sheets by Perstorp Waterite Limited. This was the first large-scale application of wood engraving. †

A view of the station platform when decorated in 1979.

As with many works by any artist, what came before proved to be important. Before the Charing Cross commission Gentleman had been working in wood-engraving commercially for Penguin Books and their Shakespeare reprints. Steeped in a medieval theme and having to produce one image that would summarise a whole play it was useful training.

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 Penguin Books, Shakespeare collection with covers designed by David Gentleman.

The most interesting and taxing commission to come my way so far did not begin as an engraving job at all. Late in 1977 London Transport asked me to design a mural for Charing Cross Underground station. The practical aspects were clear enough; it was to be fabricated in screen-printed melamine laminate, curved to follow the profile of the tunnel; it would be about two metres high and it would have to find room not only for numerous platform entrances and London Transport roundels but also for various staff letter boxes, telephones, plus litter bins and wooden benches for people to sit on. The subject-matter however was pretty vague. At that time the words Charing Cross suggested little more than a closed-down hospital and a run-down British Rail terminus, and the only brief was that the mural should remind passengers of what the name Charing Cross had once meant. Graphically I was given a free hand, and also the vital assurance of being directly responsible to the two people with real authority: The Chairman, Kenneth Robinson and the Chief Architect, Sidney Hardy. ‡

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Having recently been working not only on the Shakespeare covers but also on lithographs for an American edition of The Ballards of Robin Hood, medieval imagery in illuminated manuscripts and paintings was still much in my mind, both for its epigrammatic clarity and for the way it often depicts a sequence of related events in one picture. This narrative technique suited the hundred-metre long strip of platform, and the idea of showing how the original Charing Cross had been constructed came to my mind straight away. ‡

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 Original Woodblock by David Gentleman

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 Here one of the early proofs of the woodcut above for the project before the black background had been carved out.

The only proviso they made before they committed themselves absolutely to it was that a strip of it, about twenty yards long, but just as it would be finally, should be built (a mock up) in the disused Aldwych station where there are empty platforms available for such things and I got blown up (photographically) a few engravings and a few roundels… ♠ 

Underneath the roundel bulls-eye with ‘Charing Cross’ there was a bench where people can sit. So there was a bench built into the mock up, and then as the idea developed I got the idea that I could have the figures in my design sitting on the bench or using it as a work table. ♠ 

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Many stations also feature unique interior designs to help passenger identification. Often these have themes of local significance. Tiling at Baker Street incorporates repetitions of Sherlock Holmes’s silhouette. Tottenham Court Road features semi-abstract mosaics by Eduardo Paolozzi representing the local music industry at Denmark Street. ♥

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Building the first Charing Cross
The original Charing Cross was built in 1291-1294 by Edward I in memory of his wife, Queen Eleanor of Castile. It was the most splendid of the twelve Eleanor Crosses erected to mark the successive places where her body rested on its way from Lincoln to Westminster Abbey, and stood near here until it was destroyed in 1647.

Richard of Crundale and Roger of Crundale were the master masons. The stone came from Corfe in Dorset and Caen in Normandy; Richard of Corfe and John of Corfe cut the English stone. Alexander of Abingdon and William of Ireland carved the statues of Queen Eleanor which stood halfway up the Cross, and Ralph of Chichester carved some of the decoration. Many others whose names are forgotten took part in the work: quarry-men, rough-hewers, masons, mortarers, layers, setters, carpenters, thatchers, scaffolders, labourers, falcon or crane-men, apprentices, hodmen, drivers, horsemen and boatmen. These pictures of them are by David Gentleman ♣

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 The historical plaque with the text (above) and the enlarged wood engravings by David Gentleman. 

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† David Gentleman – V&A Website.
‡ The Wood Engravings of David Gentleman, David Esslemont p114, 2000.
♠ Oral History – David Gentleman – Reel 4, Imperial War Museum, 2008-07-03.
♥ London Underground – An overview. Pediapress
♣ Mural text in Charing Cross Station, London.
Guide to the Archive of Art and Design, Victoria & Albert Museum by Elizabeth Lomas, 2001.

Spender on Woolf

In The Listener, April, 1941, there is a tribute by Stephen Spender on the death of Virginia Woolf. Below is the full text.

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 Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of Virginia Woolf

In these dark times, the death of Virginia Woolf cannot strike her circle of friends and admirers except as a light which has gone out. Whatever its significance, her loss is irreparable. Her strength-and perhaps also her weakness lay in her rare mind and personality. Moreover, the quality of what she created had the undiluted purity of one of those essentially uncorrupted natures which seem set aside from the world for a special task by the strangest conjunction of fortune and misfortune.

Yet when one thinks of what Virginia Woolf achieved, her life appears far more a wonderful triumph over many difficulties than in any sense a defeat. In a different time or in different circumstances, she might well have died far younger and with far less finished. As it is, although she died at the height of her powers, she had completed the work of a lifetime. The history of other writers who have suffered from ill-health shows how much there is here to be grateful for.

Her best novels, or prose poems in the form of fiction, are The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves. Although all of these novels have tn common the qualities which distinguish her writing, they differ not merely in portraying different material, but in having different artistic aims. Indeed the artistic aims in Virginia Woolf‘s novels are far more varied than the material, which is somewhat narrow and limited.

Most novelists having achieved, by about their third novel, a mature style, continue to write novels in that style, but covering different aspects of experience. With Virginia Woolf, however, style, form and material are indivisible. With every new novel she was ‘trying to do something different’, especially with time. For example, the whole action of Mrs. Dalloway takes place in one day: the first long section of To the Lighthouse describes a scene lasting for perhaps an afternoon ; this is followed by a very short section describing the passage of several years, illustrated by the decay of an empty house. Orlando is a fantastic account of someone who lives for several hundred years. beginning as a man and turning into a woman. The Waves is a poetic account of people seen through each other’s minds through all their lives, speaking their thoughts in poetic imagery to each other. A new way of writing a book was simply a new way of looking at life for Virginia Woolf : she held life like a crystal which she turned over in her hands and looked at from another angle. But a crystal is too static an image; for, of course, she knew that the crystal flowed.

It is a well known device of composers to take a theme and write variations on it. The same tune which is trivial in one light passage in a major key is profound in a minor key scored differently; at times the original tune seems lost while the harmonies explore transcendent depths far beyond the character of the original theme; now the tune runs fleetingly past us; now it is held back so that time itself seems slowed down or stretched out. This musical quality is the essence of Virginia Woolf ’s writing. The characters she creates – Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay are well defined to be sure, but they are only the theme through which she explores quite other harmonics of time, death, poetry and a love which is more mysterious and less sensual than ordinary human love.

A passage from To the Lighthouse will illustrate the ’ beauty which she could achieve Mr. Ramsay, who is a philosopher – almost a great Victorian – faces the sense of his own an failure: and what are two thousand years? (asked Mr. Ramsay ironically staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still. (He looked into the darkness, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then could blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of stars, if before death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead at his post, the line figure of a soldier. Mr. Ramsay squared his shoulders and stood very upright by the urn. This passage has all Virginia Woolf ’s virtues, and perhaps some of her defects. It starts off by being very faithful even in its irony to the thoughts of Mr. Ramsay. She takes one of those plunges beyond the present situation of her character into the past and the future which strikes one often in her writing as a night of pure poetic genius. But then the focus shifts and the writer has forgotten her character’s thoughts, or perhaps she is regarding him from the outside. But the image of the leader of the expedition in the snow is a little too general, and one begins to wonder whether she hasn’t strayed too far from the particular.

As with the impressionist painters, there are opposing tendencies in her novels. The one is centrifugal, the tendency for everything to dissolve into diffused light and in the brilliant detachment with which their surroundings flow through her characters’ minds. The other is centripetal-the tremendous preoccupation with form which nevertheless holds her novels together and makes them far more significant than if they were just the expression of a new way of looking at life. This doubtless reflects an acute nervous tension in her own mind between a two great sensitivity which tended to disintegrate into uncoordinated impressions, and a noble and sane determination not to lose hold of the central thread.

To have known Virginia Woolf is a great privilege, because it is to have known an extraordinary and poetic and beautiful human being. Some critics describe her as forbidding and austere. Her austerity was not that of a closed-in or a prudish mind. As with all genuinely intelligent people, one could discuss anything with her with the greatest frankness; she was far too interested in life to make narrow moral judgements. Perhaps she was a little too impatient towards stupidity and tactlessness; it is a gift to writers to suffer fools gladly. To be with her was a joy, because her delight and her awareness of everything around her communicated themselves easily and immediately to her friends. What was written on her beautiful unforgettable face was not severity at all, though there was some melancholy; but most of all there was the devotion and discipline which go with the task of poetic genius, together with the price in the way of nervous strain and physical weakness which doubtless she had to pay.

Sneazing Searle

Ronald Searle was born in Cambridge and studied at the Cambridge School of Art for two years. Aged 19 in April 1939, realising that war was inevitable, he abandoned his art studies to enlist in the Royal Engineers. In January 1942, he was stationed in Singapore. After a month of fighting in Malaya, he was taken prisoner along with his cousin Tom Fordham Searle, when Singapore fell to the Japanese. He spent the rest of the war a prisoner, first in Changi Prison and then in the Kwai jungle, working on the Siam-Burma Death Railway. 

Searle contracted both beri-beri and malaria during his incarceration, which included numerous beatings, and his weight dropped to less than 40 kilograms. He was liberated in late 1945 with the final defeat of the Japanese. After the war in 1961 he worked as a courtroom artist for the Adolf Eichmann trial.

The illustrations here are from Lilliput in 1946. It was the start of a flood of illustration work for Searle in magazines, it was just as he was developing the ideas for the ‘St Trinian’s’ books. Searle’s job here is to illustrate is a set of quotes about being ill. The original layout is at the bottom of the post. One signed in full and the other monogrammed RS.

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Last Saturday night I came home, and the drab had just washed my room, and my bed-chamber was all wet, and I was forced to go to bed in my own defence, and no fire: I was sick on Sunday, and now have got a swingeing
cold… I detest washing of rooms; cant they wash them in a morning, and make a tire, and leave open the windows? I slept not a wink last night for hawking and spitting: and now everybody has colds. 
– ‘The Journal to Stella’ by Jonathan Swift. 1711.

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I am at this moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose,
green in the gills, damp in the ,eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in
the temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold, caught the other day, I suspect, at Liverpool, where I got exceedingly wet…
– Charles Dickens to H. Ainswarth. 1843

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…it seems the Duchess had caught a violent cold by a hair of her own whisker getting up her nose and making her sneeze …“
– Horace Walpole to Lady Harvey. 1758

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Afterwards I happened to be alone with this charming Princess, and her sister Elizabeth, in the Queens dressing-room. She then came up to me: Now will you excuse me, Miss Burney, if I ask you the truth of something I have heard about you? … It is such an odd thing, I dont know how to mention it; but I have wished to ask you about it this great while. Pray is it really true that, in your illness last year, you coughed so violently that you broke the whale bone in your stays in two? As nearly true as possible, ma’am; it actually split with the force of the almost convulsive motion of a cough that seemed loud and powerful enough for a giant. I could hardly myself believe it was little I that made so formidable a noise.
– Diary. Frances Burney 1786

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Rex Whistler Pops Up

I collect many books, but I have a passion for old travel books and it is while shopping I came to pull this book off the bookshelf outside the shop.

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George Borrow’s ‘The Bible in Spain’, it is thankfully not too religious. It has three photogravure plates and a pull out map at the back. The main reason for buying the book however was the ex-libris bookplate and the name pencilled inside. 

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The book is signed Violet Granby, who was Marion Margaret Violet Lindsay, Marchioness of Granby, Duchess of Rutland. It is dated, Madrid, 1906. Under the name is a sketch of sorts, the outline of a bay or mountain. 

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Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners was one of Violet Lindsay’s daughters (Diana’s biological father was the writer Henry Cust but she grew up thinking Violet’s Husband, Henry Manners was her father). Diana married 1st Viscount Norwich, Duff Cooper, a British Conservative Party politician, diplomat and author.

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The bookplate inside is for Duff Cooper by Rex Whistler. It is likely the book was inherited and he pasted in his bookplate over the drawing on the end-papers. Whistler was a fashionable artist and illustrator of the 20s and 30s, one of the Bright Young Things.

With Lady Diana comically decorated as a bust of Diana the Hunter, the image has grapes in bloom and bottles of champagne, warrants and travel cases. Below are some detail shots, the work in the image of line and shading is best seen in close-up. The bookplate was designed in 1931 for Duff and Lady Diana Cooper.

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Miranda and the Festival of Britain.

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 Arthur Fleischmann with his statue, Miranda, 1951

Arthur Fleischmann was a Slovak-born, London-based sculptor, who pioneered the use of Perspex in sculpture. He spent time in Bali, and in Australia, where he was at the centre of the Merioola Group, before settling in London in 1948. He married his wife Joy in 1959 and their son, the photographer Dominique Fleischmann, was born in 1961.

For the 1951 Festival of Britain, Fleischmann was commissioned to produce a sculpture entitled “Miranda”. The larger than life-size Mermaid was sponsored by the Lockheed Brake and Clutch Company. 

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 Miranda fountain in a press advert for the Lockheed Company, to the left the Festival of Britain and their logo’s are combined, 1951.

Miranda graced the exhibition area in Battersea Park and, after the Festival closed, it was transported to the Lockheed headquarters in Leamington Spa. 

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 Arthur Fleischmann with the statue and on the sofa, the model Joyce Odiase (née Taylor). Photo by Russell Westwood, NPG, 1951.

The statue stayed at the Lockheed headquarters for nearly 50 years before “disappearing” mysteriously over the Christmas holidays of 2000. 

A historic bronze statue by sculptor Arthur Fleischmann has been stolen from its home in Leamington Spa. Miranda, a bronze sculpture 2.5m long and 1.2m high, was stolen some time between 14 and 17 December 2001 from the main entrance of the AP (Automotive Products) company in Tachbrook Road. 

The sculpture, commissioned by AP’s predecessor, the Lockheed Hydraulic Brake Company, was created for the 1951 Festival of Britain and first displayed in London’s Festival Gardens. A spokeswoman for Leamington Spa police put the value of the work at between £50,000 and £100,000. So far police have no idea as to its whereabouts or who might have stolen it.

Miranda attracted a great deal of press coverage during the Festival of Britain, in part for its unconventional portrayal of a mermaid with two legs instead of a fish’s body, and fins instead of feet.

Mr Fleischmann said at the time: “I think that mermaids with fish tails are rather dull. “Why should not a beautiful mermaid have nice legs? She can still swim with her fins on her feet. At least that is how I imagine a mermaid.”

The work, intended as a tribute to the skill and industry of the people of Britain, took three months to create and involved two models. The bronze was cast by Vincent Galizia foundry at Battersea, south London, and was returned to Leamington Spa after the Festival closed. It was set in a fountain and was listed as a Grade II building, and remained on its site until the theft. †

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 Front cover of Precision Magazine, 1951.

The Henry-Moore Institute acquired two terracotta maquettes of Miranda created by Fleischmann in around 1948 (at the same time that he did the portraits of the actor Trevor Howard) and these are on display in the Institute gallery space in Leeds. When a cheeky reporter quipped at Fleischmann during the Festival that everyone knows a mermaid has a tail and not two legs with fins, my father replied that he had never seen a mermaid and so couldn’t comment.

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 Joyce Odiase (née Taylor) in a riske shot with the maquette of Miranda. 

Sources:
† BBC News Website – 2002, Festival of Britain Bronze stolen http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1749497.stm
The Courtauld Institute of Art and Archiecture. http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/stories/fleischmann_fleischmann/fleischmann_fleischmann3.html

London Dockland.

This is a piece from Lilliput Magazine, 1946. I loved the photos and the history that goes with them. The photographs are by Bill Brandt.

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Below Tower Bridge: St Pauls Seen From Bermondsey.
As ships steam up the Thames towards Kings Reach, Tower Bridge looms up ahead of them.Off Shadwell, a mile below, they signal Cherry Garden Pier at Southwark; Cherry Garden telephones to the bridge master, and the great bascules rise to admit them to the heart of London. Above, the traffic waits, but only for ninety seconds: the bridge begins to close before the ships stern is clear. Tower Bridge was built in 1894 at a cost of one and a half million pounds. Beyond the bridge is the dome of St Pauls.

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As I Was A-Walking Down Nightingale Lane…
Nightingale Lane would send any rustic bird flying in terror for its life. A brutally uncompromising dockyard street, it wanders grimly between the Customs walls of St. Katharines and London Docks down to Wapplng High Street. But in the 17th century it was a simple country lane. It is recorded that Charles I hunted a stag from Wanstead and that the hill was made in a garden in this lane, to the detriment of the herbs in the garden. The name is actually derived from the knights whom Edgar I allowed to form a guild here it was first called Cnihten, and then Knighten, Guild.

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Wareshouses Along The South Bank.
Londons merchant princes may dress in black striped trousers and call themselves limited companies,but the goods they import are more rich and strange than any ever seen in Baghdad. Behind the walls of these drab warehouses lie spices and precious metals; tusks of ivory, furs, and casks of wine. The very grimness of the port is attractive to the visitor. If William Dunbar could return from the 15th century; he might well write again:
“Of merchants full of substance and of might, London, thou art the flower of cities all.”

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Shad Thames.
Along the river from St. Saviours Back to Tower Bridge winds a street which, with its bewildering mass of gantries and cranes, and its highly compressed activity, is typical of much of the Thames-side London which has been building up slowly from the time of Drake. Before our great Elizabethan sailors opened the ocean highways, there was a mere trickle of foreign shipping in the Thamesa trickle that was to swell to the greatest flood of shipping in the world. Shad is another name for herring, and as Shad Thames is a continuation of Pickle Herring Street, the name is perhaps not so,obscure as it first appears.

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Hermitage Stairs, Wapping.
It is no longer thought that the Romans built the first river wall, but it was already old when it collapsed in 1324 and the river streamed through to flood 100,000 acres of the land now occupied by the London and the St. Katharines docks. After the breach had been repaired people were encouraged to return to Wapping wall and settle, so that there might be someone with a personal interest in keeping the wall in repair. It was around this time that the hermitage is thought to have existed which gave Hermitage Lane its name. Waterman call the river here not the Thames, but the London river.

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Horselydown New Stairs, Bermondsey.
The palace, the monastery, and the Abbey that were in their turn the pride of Bermondsey are to-day not even memories. Just below the bridge on the Bermondsey side of the river, Horselydown Lane runs down to the water overground where formerly the houses of great nobles and prelates stood. Here also were the parish archery butts, set up in the reign of Henry VIII. The warehouses lining the dark alleys are not very old, but they have stood long enough to seem immutable, and to provide a dark challenge to town planners.

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Charles Browns, Limehouse.
Many of the old East End pubs have a rich historical background, real or synthetic,of piracy, smuggling, and general villainy. Charley Browns is the most famous of the old seafaring taverns, and still the first port of call for most sightseers in the East End. Sailors front all over the world used to bring their trophies to Charley, until the King of Limehouse, as he came to be called, had filled his pub with curios. When Charley died in 1932 ten thousand mourners followed his coffin: The pub is still a sailors, as well as a tourists,house.

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Wapping The Wharves.
Today Wapping is less exciting, and much more respectable, than it ever was in the past, when Ratcliffe Highway was the home of the land-shark and the downfall of the sailor. The Carron Wharf, on the right, belongs to a company which in the 18th century invented the carronade, a piece of ordnance which their ships mounted by Government licence. To prevent being mistaken for privateers these ships also carried the likeness of a cannon ball on their masts. This is the view across the river from St. Saviour’s Dock.

Walter Hoyle

Walter Hoyle is in danger of being one of the forgotten Great Bardfield artists due to the lack of information on him.

Hoyle was born in Rishton, Lancashire in July 1922. Hoyle’s artistic
education started at the Beckenham School of Art in 1938,

I persuaded my local art school to accept me, and presented as evidence of my serious intent, a series of drawings much influenced by Walt Disney. †

From Beckenham, Hoyle gained a place at as a student at the Royal College
of Art from 1940-42 and again from 1947-48 after serving in the
Second World War. During Hoyle’s time at the RCA one of his tutors was
Edward Bawden, who encouraged him to develop watercolours and
printmaking.

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 Walter Hoyle at home in Great Bardfield, NPG, taken by Geoffrey Ireland.

It was 1940, the phoney war was to about to end and the college was evacuated from London to Ambleside in the Lake District, famous for poets rather than artists. It was here that I was first introduced to printmaking – lithography – by a friend called Thistlethwaite, a fellow student from Oswaldtwistle (although these names are true, I mention them only because I like the sound they make). He prepared a litho stone for me with a beautiful finely ground surface and instructed me how to draw in line and wash. †

In 1948, During the RCA Diploma show, a visitor was so impressed by Hoyle’s work that he was offered seven months’ work in the Byzantine Institute in Istanbul, Hoyle accepted, the work he saw there made a strong impression. Italian art and architecture also influenced him at that time.

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 Walter Hoyle – Church Moon, Little Samford (In My Collection) ,1957.

Early in 1951 when Bawden was commissioned by the Festival of Britain to produce a mural for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion on the South Bank,
it was Hoyle that he chose to assist him on account of his great talent. During that summer Bawden invited Hoyle on a holiday to Sicily.

Edward asked to see my watercolours. He looked very carefully and quizzed me about them, and in general was complimentary and encouraging. I felt I had passed some kind of ‘examination. ♠

It was this holiday together that Hoyle would scribe into a limited edition booklet of 10 in 1990 and into a book in 1998 – “To Sicily with Edward Bawden” a limited edition of 350 copies with a forward by Olive Cook.

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 Walter Hoyle – Hill town in Sicily, ex Cambridge City Council, 1951.

In 1952 Hoyle took over the painting of another mural, the dome of St Mary Abchurch, London. The church had been blitzed in September 1940,
and the original mural was being restored by E. W. Tristan, but when Tristan died, Hoyle completed the work. ‡

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 Walter Hoyle – The cover for the Great Bardfield Exhibition booklet.

The move to Great Bardfield:
Hoyle moved first to Great Bardfield in 1952, living for a time in a farm cottage on the outskirts of Bardfield near Great Lodge Farm. He lived and worked in the Great Bardfield area for twenty-two years and exhibited with the Bardfield artists in 1954, 1955 and 1956 when they would open their houses to the public for one weekend a year, rather than relying on London galleries. Hoyle met his wife, the ceramists and poster designer
Denise Hoyle at at one of the Great Bardfield “open house” exhibitions in 1956, when his work was on show at George Chapman’s house.

It may have been Edward Bawden’s painting classes and lectures at Brick House, or being in the hilly Essex countryside but it around this time that Hoyle became interested in English romantic painting: the work of Turner, Blake and Palmer and also in French art. Like other members of Great Bardfield, Hoyle designed for interiors with wallpapers and fabrics for Coles, Sandersons and the Wallpaper Manufacturers Limited.

One of Hoyle’s most popular works for book illustration came with a commission for the Folio Society in 1968 with Shirley by Charlotte Bronte.

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 Walter Hoyle Design for Sandersons

Teaching:
Walter Hoyle has taught at various art schools: St. Martin’s, London, 1951-60; the Central School of Art, London, 1960-64; and the Cambridge School of Art, 1964-85.

Walter Hoyle left Great Bardfield and moved to Bottisham, Cambridgeshire, to teach at the Cambridge School of Art in their printmaking department. While at Cambridge, he launched the Cambridge Print Editions, publishers of the magazine of the Cambridge School of Art, “Private View” co-edited by Warwick Hutton, which he started and which included interesting extracts from the work of famous artists and writers such as Patrick Heron and Edward Ardizzone, as well as articles by
students and graduates of the school.

Hoyle took over the collection of ‘Original Works for Children in Cambridgeshire’, an art project for City of Cambridge Committee for Education. Hoyle donated a picture and convinced other artists to give works to the project too. He retired from teaching in 1985 to move to Hastings and Dieppe. Hoyle died in 2000.

 Walter Hoyle – Great Lodge Farm, 1952 (In My Collection)

Exhibitions and Collections:
Hoyle exhibited internationally working outside of the Bardfield set. Exhibitions were not only at the Byzantine Institute Gallery in Paris in 1950, but in 1952 he showed at the Leicester Galleries, London. He was featured in many mixed exhibitions in London and the provinces, including the Royal Academy summer exhibitions and Kettles Yard, Cambridge (1972). Walter Hoyle is represented in many public and private collections, among them the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, the Victoria and Albert and the British Museums, the Tate Gallery, the Walker Art Gallery, the Whitworth Art Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Sheffield Art Gallery, the Manchester City Art Gallery, Editions Alecto Gallery, London, and the Palace of Westminster and the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden.

He painted murals for the Natural History Museum, for the Jamestown Festival, USA, and for the Sealink ship “St. David”.

Editions of his prints have been commissioned by Editions Alecto, Christie’s Contemporary Art, Neve International, the British Oxygen Company, the Folio Society and St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

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 Walter Hoyle – St Catherine’s with Acanthus, (In My Collection), 1966

† Printmaking Today, Volume 7, 1998. page 9-10.
‡ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary_Abchurch
♠ To Sicily with Edward Bawden, Previous Parrot Press, 1998.
The  Great Bardfield  Exhibition  by  Gerald  Marks,  Realism,  August  —
September  1955
♣ http://www.fryartgallery.org/the-collection/search-viewer/691/artist/15/Walter-Hoyle–/22