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It’s not often that I see something so graphic it captivates me totally. As most people know, my obsessions tent to be for the Great Bardfield group of artists and the endless differences in their work. But what attracts me to a work really is the technicality of it.

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Long before I discovered the work of Great Bardfield, I was rather obsessed with the American artist Christopher Wool, having found a set of his books in the (now closed) Galloway and Porter shop in Cambridge. His work is rude, bold, graphic and he repeats images. It is likely as inspired by the screen prints of Andy Warhol as it is of graffiti. I had a large work by him that I managed to find in a London auction in 2005 that I sold to buy more ‘Bardfield paintings. It was a screen print on metal and over a metre in height.

Wood’s work tends to be simple typographic phrases or patterned designs. He has silk screens of different patterns that he uses over and over, mixing them with other designs and sometimes working hard to erase them with areas of colour or pure ink. With colour, smudged, warped by moving the plate while printing… the works are in a constant decay and evolution.

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The echos of this obsession were brought back to me when I discovered the work of William ‘Bill’ Bickerstaff, An artist who draws in fine pens and has created a set of drawings of the Cambridgeshire landscape.

What at first looks like a photograph with ink rollering over it turns out to be a set of intricate works and markings on paper with pen and roller ink, as seen in the details below.

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Some of the work would have been sublimely pretty and has echoes of Elisabeth Vellacotts detailed drawings of tree studies, but Bickerstaff takes these drawings and gives a danger to them. In many ways they remind me of Paul Nash works and what he would be doing today, if he were alive. They have the feel of a double exposure on a camera film, something that needs more attention from the viewer to decipher.

The ability to draw out the overlooked elements of life is something I admire and then to subvert it into something far more interesting is a rare thing to find. So many artists are armed with the skill to depict the world around them but few can push it further and make their own work far more textured than the reality.

The series below of linocuts layered in colour with erosion of the ink show far more awareness of textures to create a landscape than the typical use of linocuts with thick black inks and bold colours like a stained glass window, in Bickerstaff ‘s work way the ink is applied gives a texture that is much more photographic than you’d expect it to be, it has the feeling of a memory that is always being eroded by the mind’s own perception.

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Leslie Wood was an English artist and illustrator who worked on covers for Punch and during his time was rather famous but seems is only remembered by bibliophiles.

Born in Stockport, England he studied at the Manchester College of Art and Design. In 1943, Wood showed some of his work to Faber and Faber, and was soon commissioned to take over illustration of Diana Ross’ Little Red Engine books, and went on to illustrate many other children’s books.

Below are some examples of his work next to the final published ones. I have been buying up his works for some time and many of them are in the form of these storyboards that the publishers printed and returned to him after. This is a book by Erik Hutchinson, who wrote a few children’s books including this one of a swallow on it’s migration home.

One of the problems with collecting things is the volume of stuff you end up with that are interesting. This book is one of those. I don’t think it’s an interesting volume but what I liked was the Mudies Library sticker pasted inside the book and designed to hang over the outside.

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With some very crude photoshop I have re-designed how the original label would have worked and it’s really the simplicity of only using one label to brand the book for the library.

Charles Edward Mudie was a publisher and in 1842 founded a lending library, which he called Mudie’s Select Library. Subscribers paid one guinea per year for an unlimited number of books, but could only borrow one volume at a time. With branches all over London as you can free from six options in the label above.

In 1876 Heffers books were founded by William Heffer in Cambridge and soon they became a publisher too. With many shops in Cambridge, today we eulogise their gallery at 18 Sidney Street, Cambridge.

A major brand in Cambridge in the late 1990s they had six shops in the city, each catering to different areas of the business. The Trinity Street shop was the largest for both general books and text books. Rose Crescent – Classical Music, King Street – Art Supplies, Grafton Centre & St Andrews Street – General books.

The Sidney Street shop at that time was for new best sellers on the ground floor and stationary with an art gallery on the top floor. As seen in the photograph above, it was a traditional setting on two levels, with roof lights.

In 1949 Bryan Robertson became curator at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge and for a year he hired the Newnham student and cookery writer Jane Grigson to help run the gallery. Although he was only there for three years, he helped bring in fashionable artists and ceramics and helped change the gallery from selling reproduction prints of the university colleges and Victorian watercolours.

One of his first exhibitions was of New Paintings by Francis Rose, Cecil Collins and Merlyn Evans held at Heffer’s Gallery in Cambridge in 1950. The next year Josef Herman exhibited in a solo show.

As curators changed over the years the gallery would have a routine of exhibitions of historical works, maps and archaeological prints, and then modern art. From the advert below from 1955 Heffer’s are promoting the latest new ceramics by Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach. By this time they had their own picture framing department, so it’s not uncommon in East Anglia to find the Heffer’s label on the back of pictures that were framed there.

The fate of the gallery came when Heffer’s sold the business to Blackwells in Oxford who closed many of the shops in the city in order to focus on the Trinity Street shop.

It was at the invitation of William Morris that Frederick H. Evans came to photograph Kelmscott Manor in 1896. The photographer was 43 and was also running a bookshop in London. Two years after these photos were taken he sold his bookshop to become a full time artist. Today he is remembered for his large photographic prints of the Cathedrals of Britain.

There are only two sets of these photographs, both in American museums. Even’s photographic style was of platinotype images, images of a subtle dusty tone and almost like a photogravure, printed on platinum with sepia tones.

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Kelmscott Manor was the country home of the writer, designer and socialist William Morris from 1871 until his death in 1896. The house was originally constructed in 1570 with some additions in the 17th century. It is open to the public to visit and owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London.

For the first three years, the Morris’s shared lease of the house with Dante Gabriel Rossetti until 1874. Rossetti and Jane Morris used the house to continue their long affair while William was travelling in Iceland, their romance starting originally a few years before. The manor can be seen in the corner of this painting of Jane Morris by Rossetti below made during that summer.

The following year Rossetti’s poems were published to poor reviews and he spent his time at Kelmscott drunk on whiskey or high on chloral. In 1873 he had returned to painting and his work had recovered but the following year Morris couldn’t keep the scandal quiet his wife and his business partner were having an affair, so he cut him out of the Morris company and was asked to leave the house in July, 1874.

The Morris’s stayed on renting the house until 1914, when Jane bought the house to give her daughters Jane and May some security.

May Morris died in 1938 and bequeathed the house to Oxford University, on the basis the contents were preserved and the public were granted access. The University were unwilling to preserve the house as ‘a museum piece’ and passed the house and land to the Society of Antiquaries in 1962.

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Painted by John Sell Cotman and his son, Miles Edmund Cotman, this is a hypothetical scene of protest and anger.

Robert Walpole had been made a prime minister under George I. He was from a wealthy family and had invested in the South Sea Company when stocks were cheap and sold them at a profit before the company’s collapse of an inflated share price. They traded in slaves, mahogany and rum. He used the money to build Houghton Hall. Over the years he collected good furniture and paintings, filling his home with the spoils of wealth. He died leaving massive debts and his estate to his son, who sold some of the works to keep afloat, however he only survived his father by six years and the estate and debts passed to his son George.

Described as “the most ruined young man in England” George Walpole was frivolous with what money was left to him, gamling most of it away. In a scheme to make money he decided to sell his grandfather’s collection of furniture and art. In a deal negotiated by James Christie, founder of the auction house, the collection was sold to Empress Catherine the Great.

Their sale was seen as a public scandal as they collection included works such as: Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Teniers, Rubens, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Murillo.

Following the outrage of the works sale, the painting was made by John Sell Cotman and his son, showing the bodies of dead sailors and works including the large Rubens washed up on the shore in ruins with other plunder from the estate. Though no misfortune ever happened in real life and the boats made it to Russia complete, there was an anger felt by the upper classes in Britain of the loss of such a collection that showed a different style of “lost treasure”. The boat had set sail from Kings Lynn harbour for Russia and as the Cotman’s were Norfolk artists this might be why they felt a betrayal of their fellow countryman, George Walpole.

When Welwyn Garden City was first imagined, it was to provide not only housing, but a social system that would sustain a utopian country town. Writing in his manifesto Garden Cities Of To-Morrow (1898), Ebenezer Howard has planned out how this was to be achieved in Victorian Britain. With his ‘Three Magnets’ diagram, he breaks down society into town and country, listing the pros and cons for both and combining them in the bottom part of the illustration as an early Venn diagram. “The town is the symbol of society — of mutual help and friendly cooperation, of fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood, sisterhood, of wide relations between man and man — of broad, expanding sympathies — of science, art, culture, religion. And the country! The country is the symbol of God’s love and care for man.”

His hope was to avoid the errors of the past in the mill towns of Britain, where factories popped up quicker than the homes for the workers could be considered, with slum housing erected to cope with demand. If towns were to be built afresh, they should avoid cheap ribbon building. Homes should have gardens, roads should be lined with trees; the town should have a large park, areas for offices, shops and factories for people to work in. Reflecting on Victorian British cities Howard wrote: “The well-lit streets are a great attraction, especially in winter, but the sunlight is being more and more shut out, while the air is so vitiated that the fine public buildings, like the sparrows, rapidly become covered with soot, and the very statues are in despair. Palatial edifices and fearful slums are the strange, complementary features of modern cities“.

After seeing his plan for a city implemented, Ebenezer Howard died and then the second wave of building was designed by two men: Louis Emanuel Jean Guy de Savoie-Carignan de Soissons (1890-1962) who had studied at the Royal Institute of British Architects before setting up his architectural practice De Soissons & Kenyon, alongside Arthur William Kenyon (1885-1969). Part of their plan was a large factory near the railway, and it was for Shredded Wheat.

Now in ruins, the can be seen from the trains that run through Welwyn Garden City. The silos have been preserved and shall be used in the redevelopment of the site.

The Shredded Wheat factory known locally as ‘The Wheat’, opened in 1926 and ceased production in January 2008. Originally designed by De Soissons and Kenyon. The site is to be redevelopment with flats and shops with the original factory made the centre of focus as a Grade II listed landmark building.

David Bomberg was an artist from the golden age of the Slade School of Art in London where he studied next to Isaac Rosenberg, Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer to name a few. In the years just before the First World War, Bomberg went from an artist in the Camden Town style to being part of the radical scene of Vorticism; angular shapes of abstracted forms, his pictures at this time made him famous but also alienated the public.

He married his first wife Alice Mayes before setting off to the frontline in 1916. The bubble of the Vorist movement popped after the First World War. Bomberg went on to take the abstracted forms and work his paintings into something new and unlike the other artists. He worked with a few lines of paint to make his painting. It took another forty years for his work to be seen as the radical movement that it was. Due to that after WWI his work didn’t command the same level of attention or patronage from London Galleries to become respected, he spent most of his life on borderline poverty and on the charity of his sister Kitty, he was working in Dagenham at the local art school in 1944, during the Second World War when there were fewer critics around to his teaching and this is where he first met Dorothy Mead, a new young student.

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Mead was born in London and adopted at three months old to a family in Walthamstow who moved to Romford when Mead was aged three. In 1944 She studied at South East Essex School of Art at Dagenham where she first encountered Bomberg. Mead took Bomberg’s teaching and added a feminine intuition for form and beauty. Her work falls into that cliché of being better in the flesh, photographic reproductions do not do justice to confidently she handled paint. The works are planned out but then executed quickly in oil paint, so that there is a rhythmic movement in the brush strokes.

After a year of teaching from Bomberg at Dagenham, Mead followed him to the City Literary Institute in London where Cliff Holden was also studying under Bomberg too, and then Bomberg taught his two pupils at the Borough Polytechnic in 1946. Holden then organised the founding of the Borough Group, a collective of artists (mostly at the Polytechnic) inspired by the teaching of Bomberg.

Members included Bomberg and his second wife Lilian Holt; as well as students: Leslie Marr, Dennis Creffield and Dorothy Mead. This allowed them to get more attention when exhibiting together over the coming years. As a teacher Bomberg ignored perspective in favour of composition. His training at the Slade had given him a respect for the old master paintings. Alice Mayes wrote “David explained that the modern pictures had their beginning with the Old Masters and Michael Angelo was the chief of these”.

Philip Vann – Dorothy Mead, 2014

The Borough Group’s activates only lasted until 1951 when many of them graduated and Bomberg moved on as well.

In the early 1950s Mead spent two years in Spain with Clifford Holden, her partner, after a tour of Paris and Amsterdam wrote she had admired Rembrandt’s work in Amsterdam, and of the contemporary painters in Paris she was less impressed: ‘I got the feeling that… imperfect though some of our paintings are we at least have higher aims than many of the painters here.‘ †

In 1956 Mead and Holden visited Sweden where Holden had got a job designing textiles and fabrics in Gothenburg. In 1956 Mead got into the Slade School of Art as a mature student, maybe in the footprints of her old tutor. Remembered today for smoking a pipe and playing Mahler loudly on a Dansette record player in the Slade’s basement. In the 1950s the Slade was the school for artists, while the Royal College of Art was for arts into industry.

In 1958 Mead won the Slade’s prize for Figure Painting and then the Steer Prize for Landscape Painting. Mead became the first woman president of the Slade’s student exhibiting society, the Young Contemporaries. The next year Mead became at loggerheads with the principle William Coldstream as she refused to take the Slade’s course on perspective, likely thinking it would damage her work and go against the teachings of Bomberg she said “perspective has no place in art” and wrote a thesis on that aim, but it was refused, so she was asked to leave the Slade. In 1960 a similar argument broke out at the Royal College of Art between Robin Darwin and student David Hockney over the latter’s refusal to complete the general studies course.

Unabashed she exhibited that year in a touring exhibition Figure Variations in Paris, London the USA touring exhibition British Aquarelles. The triumph in face of the Slade’s rejection came in 1964 when the Arts Council England created a touring exhibitions titled ‘Six Young Painters’, Dorothy exhibited alongside artists including Peter Blake, William Crozier, David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Euan Uglow and if it wasn’t for her early death in 1975, today it’s likely she would have been as famous as they are. In 1959 Mead joined the London Group of artists, and was their first female president holding the chair from 1971-1973.

John Russell Taylor – The Painter’s Quarry: The Art of Peter Prendergast

Mead lectured and taught Goldsmiths as a guest lecturer from 1964, at Morley College (1963-65 & 1973-75) and Chelsea College of Art (1962 -64). She worked in landscapes and figure paintings and towards the end of her life started to experiment with still life and Egyptian scenes, likely after seeing The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit at the British Museum in 1972.

Dorothy Mead died in 1975 aged just 46. During her life she never had a solo exhibition and her work only really peaked the public’s curiosity in 1992 at the exhibition Bomberg and his Students held at the South Bank University in 1992. Mead’s first retrospective came in 2005 at the Boundary Gallery and then a studio sale of works belonging to one of her sisters Val at Waterhouse & Dodd in 2013.

David Sylvester remarked she “tends to affirm the supremacy of light, as women’s painting often does.” While Holden, her ex-partner said “Dorothy sticks to her principals, but like myself and Bomberg was an outsider.”

Seventeen of her works are held by the London South Bank University as part of the Sarah Rose collection of works by Bomberg and his pupils, other works are in the Tate, the Government Art Collection, the Arts Council Collection.

Around the time of the retrospectives, a rumour started that some of Mead’s paintings were stolen after her death, although no evidence to substantiate this or it’s origin.

Philip Vann – Dorothy Mead, 2014
† Alicia Foster – Tate Women Artists, 2004

When Barnett Freedman was asked to illustrate Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, it was likely a bit of an avantgarde choice for the time, but the publishers Faber and Faber would have known Freedman had a wonderful talent of draftsmanship and imagination.

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It is likely that the same choice of imagination was why the Folio Society gave Paul Hogarth the same job of illustrating Sassoon’s famous memoir.

One of the most interesting elements Hogarth adds is colour, so many of the illustrators to tackle war stories tend to keep it monochrome. Hogarth’s work is rather brash and he is famous for his journalistic eye of drawing from books like Looking at China (1956), Majorca Observed (1965), Paul Hogarth’s American (1973) and I can’t help feeling his depictions come off feeling a little frivolous of the subject and fail to convey a lot of the turmoil of the trenches.