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Recently a series of wood engraving blocks by Eric Ravilious, Tirzah Garwood, John O’Connor and John Nash turned up on eBay. This was a bit of a sensation as most of the blocks are in museums or with the family estate, so how did so many blocks end up for sale in one go?

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Many of these blocks were created during the 1920s and 30s. Some were used in the Fleuron Press series The Woodcut, an Annual printed by the Curwen Press. (The image below was the frontispiece for the limited edition copy of the II volume) and others where in books the Curwen Press printed.

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The most curious thing about the Ravilious blocks was how quickly they disappeared from the eBay. The family had reported them as Stolen / Missing some time ago, when it appears that the blocks where given to a publisher and not returned. Ella Ravilious (Eric’s Grand-daughter) got in contact with the seller and they returned them to the family.

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This leaves an interesting question for the provenances and ownership of the other blocks. John Nash’s estate was run by Ronald Blythe, and I don’t know who is in charge of it now. John O’Connor’s estate was with his wife, but it is unclear who is in charge of that now too. Joc’s artistic estate was being managed by the Rocket Gallery but I also think that is no longer the case.

Because these woodblocks where not returned after the production they were loaned for, the ownership of them is in limbo. Technically they should have been returned to the estate and there might be the demand back from the family or estates still.

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The other problem with the blocks is that where sold belonging to John Nash and John O’Connor is that these estates are still under copywrite. So even if you own the block, it doesn’t mean you have the right to make reprints without the estates permission.

The three John Nash blocks were of Sheep, Spurge Laurel (from his book Poisonous Plants) and A Rustic Seat Beneath a Tree Canopy.

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Julia Ball is a name known to most interested in art in Cambridge. Her home off Newmarket road has been the site of various Open Studios over the years. The scheme was started by a group of artists in the Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors. Over the years a series of potters and other local painters turned it into the Cambridge Open studios, Julia being one of these.

Ball was born in Devon in 1930, and studied at the School of Art at Reading University where she studied printmaking. A lot of her early career was in printmaking and illustration. She then moved to Cambridge, teaching at the school of art and then became an examiner in the 1970s working with Warwick Hutton marking work. There were a large amount of prints made during the 1960s, of abstract architectural details and seascapes and she would also let other local artists use her printing presses to produce their work.

Julia Ball’s linocuts and relief prints for the most part are strongly architecturally structured interpretations of Byzantine and Greek churches, in muted colours and most pleasantly done. They are drawings done with self-assured skill, and while not in the least profound, they are intellectually satisfying and highly decorative. The Oxford Magazine, 1965

Ball illustrated Dildrum King of the Cats for Frederick Grice and Julia did illustrations for the Cambridge literary magazine, Delta in 1969. Over the years she would illustrate many poetry books too, from Harriet Tarlo, Peter Riley and The Ghost of Jimi Hendrix at Stokesay Castle by John James.

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Her move to Cambridge also signalled a move into painting when she was in her forties inspired by various painters such as Sonia Delaunay. In the early 1970s she travelled to Iran where a series of dome paintings were made in abstract vivid colours.

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In Cambridgeshire Ball became friends with Nan Youngman and joined the Painters and Sculptors society. Early members where Cecil and Elisabeth Collins, Bettie Rea, and Elisabeth Vellacott. In this company and with Nan’s natural talent as a promoter from her years running the Pictures for Schools exhibitions, she helped make many of the local artists well known.

Many of the Cambridge artists would holiday and paint plein air on the North Norfolk coast and Youngman used to take painting holidays there with friends. Some of Balls early painted works can be seen of beaches and dunes around Brancaster and Titchwell.

Ball then started to use the flatness of the landscape around Cambridge in a series of abstract colourful landscapes, partially in the fens. Into the 1980s, these landscapes were focused on the fenland waterways of Wicken Fen and Quy Fen showing the long ditches and fields in all weather conditions throughout the year. Ball would work painting watercolours and then taking them to her studio to be worked up into larger pieces. Throughout her career she has always used a very similar palate of colours that are mixed when painting.

In 1983 she visited the Greenham Common anti nuclear women’s camp. When asked many years later about her feelings she said “It was also a place where I think … you didn’t talk about it very much unless people asked you. It wasn’t something that you could personally claim pride in. I mean, I know, I thought I had to be careful, not careful, but I was aware that it was something deeper than that. You weren’t just being a heroine, or hero, it was more fundamental. And that sort of boasting about it would be detrimental to the whole thing. It wasn’t boasting, it was just part of your life.

Over her life she had many exhibitions, most notably including at the Bluecoat Gallery – Liverpool, 1978; Kettle’s Yard – Cambridge, from 1980 with the Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors; Karen Wright’s Hobson Gallery, 1982, University of Nottingham, 1986; New Hall College, Heffer’s Gallery and the Lynne Strover Gallery, Fen Ditton in 1994.

Her studio sale in 2024 was a celebration of her work.

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Robert Nichols today is remembered for being a war poet during World War One. He was the son of poet and painter John Nichols, educated at Winchester and then Trinity College Oxford and commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery in 1914.

Robert Nichols was brought up in an atmosphere of ancient houses and connoisseurship; he imbibed taste and the historic sense as simply as babies imbibe milk.

William Rothenstein – Twenty-four Portraits (1923)

His first published work was in 1915 in the Oxford Poetry Anthology, followed by a book Invocation: War Poems and Others (1915) was an early example of war poetry before the Georgian Poets became popular. At the age of 24 having served on the front lines for three years he started to give poetry readings. He attended the King’s literary meetings and met the war correspondent Cecil Roberts in Harold Munro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury. Roberts remembered Nichols as “an emotional and histrionic reader of his own verse”.

This sort of networking got him a trip to America to give readings to the public as part of the propaganda campaign to get the Americans to join the war. After the war he moved in the fashionable sets. Becoming a close literary friend of Edith Sitwell and a pal of Aldous Huxley.

He had a love affair with Nancy Cunard who became his muse for Aurelia (1920), but moved to Japan to teach English Literature for four years. On a trip home he met and married Norah Madeline Denny,

They moved to Canada and America before returning to the UK. In 1928 he co-wrote the play Wing’s Over Europe, about the building of an Atom bomb. It was a success and ran for 90 performances.

From 1933 to 34, Nichols lived in Germany and Austria, moving to the south of France until 1940 when the war made residing there impossible.

I can’t find any record for his wifes death or if they divorced. In 1944 Nichols is living at 12 Newnham Terrace with the artist Cecil Collins. This friendship might have inspired Collins to write his first book of verse, Vision of the Fool, penned around this time and published in 1947. Collins has been toying with poetry and an early work of his was published in the New English Weekly in 1936 that was included in the International Exhibition of Surrealism two years later. Having a poet in the house must have been a good motivation and sounding board. In 1948 Collins lodged with Enid Welsford, author of The Fool: His Social and Literary History, living in the old stable at 7 Grange Road.

However a few months later Nichols died in December 1944 and was buried in St Mary’s Church, Lawford in a plot with his father.

In 1985 he was inscribed into Westminster Abbey for a plaque of War Poets with fifteen other names.

Here are a series of illustrations Shell commissioned for the Shilling Guides with BP in the early 1960s. These guides were designed to be used when driving and only had a few pages, with colour illustrated covers, folded in half.

In all 48 Shilling guides were made and these are few of the covers designed by leading artists of the day. Later the same artworks were turned into posters that were used in schools. Some of the illustrations were used in other Shell books, but it is an interesting collection, something that should have been bought for the nation.

Of all the churches with Angel roofs to be found in Britain, around 70 percent of them are in East Anglia.  Though some churches only mange a few of these carved spirits, others have become more famous for them, like St Wendreda’s Church in March.

A large building in an unremarkable town, John Betjeman quipped it was ‘worth cycling forty miles into a head wind‘ to see. Altogether the church features 118 angels arranged in rows attached to the doubled hammer beams of the roof. The whole thing feels at first rather Germanic, like a wall of antlers due to the size of the angel’s wings. Most of these have been restored over the years since their original construction 600 years ago, but they remain a wonderful example of how churches were once places of artistic glory, craft and colour before the dissolution of the monasteries and the reformation of what East Anglia suffered more than most being the homeland to Cromwell.

Thankfully it was more effort for Cromwell’s cronies to reach them, and so many survive. The town was rather prosperous in the Elizabethan era, having a workable river port and large areas of fertile arable land. This is also a reason for the large church.

When the railways where built in Britain a large yard was built and the sidings became the largest in Britain, however the demand for goods by railway receded with the introduction of lorry haulage and the yard eventually was sold off in the 1990s and the government built Whitemoor Prison on part of the site. 

March was home to a few curious people, one being Eric Sherbrooke Walker, whose Treetops hotel in Kenya was the place Queen Elizabeth II was with her husband Philip when her father George VI died. However the Queen only discovered her Accession when she was staying at Sagana Lodge in another part of Kenya.

            The town of March, much like Ely, was an island before the draining of the Fens. The town’s name comes for it’s record in the Norman Domesday book, Merche and likely from the Old English world Mearce meaning Boundry. It might have felt like the end of the world when the landscape was surrounded by water until the Romans built causeway roads over the areal from Denver south of Downham Market, with Whittlesey and March being on the route, joining other roads at Flag Fen near Peterborough.

          

South from Linton is the village of Bartlow on the edges of Essex. Here in the centre of the village, hiding behind the trees are the largest Roman burial mounds in Britain and it is said, the largest North of the Alps. Inside these Roman burial hills were chambers containing the cremated remains in urns.

Excavations from 1832 found all seven mounds contained grave-goods of roman glass, bronze and enamel; sadly these are mostly lost due to a fire where they were stored in 1847. To seek these hills out the best route is from the footpath from Camps Road, into the churchyard and following the path left, some 200 metres up ‘Tin Alley’, where you will cross over a young stream tributary of the River Granta and over an old, and now defunct railway bridge.

Then you will be confronted with the fifteen metre high mounds. There are now four large mounds left out of seven, three easily assessable with steps leading to the top. They date from the latter end of 1^st Century AD into the 2^nd and it’s likely they were made for Romanised British nobles in the area, likely rich from arable farming. A villa is known to have been in the area around the mounds until the 4th century.

In 1865 when the railways came to the area the route destroyed  three of the hills and the spoil used to level off different areas of the railway line with embankments. The station in the village served two different lines, one from Great Shelford and one from Audley End, both axed in 1967 and the tracks removed. The church in Bartlow, dedicated to St Mary, is a rarity, one of two round towered churches in Cambridgeshire.

There are three main wall paintings in the church and date from the 1400’s. The church interior is likely to have been whitewashed with the Reformation from the 1530’s, there being no mention of them in 1643. Since then, some of the wall paintings have been uncovered, one noted by Olive Cook in 1953: “The round-towered church is known for it’s frescos, though they are now no more than shadows.’” The paintings look to have been cleaned up since Cook visited, but not to a great extend. St Christopher is seen with the Child, Christ on his left shoulder.

Frances Hodgkins was staying in Willie Lott’s Cottage at Flatford, Suffolk during the September and October of 1930. She is pictured below while preparing for an exhibition. You can see one painting on the floor that is unfinished. The area is famous for John Constable who painted the environs around the village as his father owned Flatford Mill and Constable is celebrated for his work The Hay Wain.

I am in good vein. Such deep peace & I really am in tune with my surroundings – no interruptions, not even a fly settles on me but sometimes a butterfly.

Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Miss Harmston (08 Aug 1930)

Although the weather was grim, Hodgkins was able to work hard and enjoyed her time in Suffolk. This painting is made from inside the mill looking outwards on the bridge.

The same bridge above can be seen to the left in the picture below.

The picture below shows the boathouse from the Mill looking towards Willy Lott’s Cottage.

A large painting of Willy Lott’s Cottage from the promenade around the edge of the millpond.

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These Cigarette Cards are by Alexander (‘Alick’) Penrose Forbes Ritchie. They are remarkable cubist portraits made in 1926.

Alexander Penrose Forbes Ritchie was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1868, the tenth surviving child of Patrick D Ritchie, a mercantile clerk, and his wife Agnes.

He studied free of charge at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Antwerp before settling in London in 1892 as an illustrator, poster designer and caricaturist. His work appeared in, among other journals, The Pall Mall Budget, The Sketch, The Bystander and Vanity Fair.

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In the summer of 1899 he married Josephine Urania Avierino, and their daughter Irania was born in 1904.

In 1912 he wrote and illustrated Y?, a book described as “Studies in Zoo-All-Awry, Compiled, Invented, Designed, Rhymed, and Pictured by Alick P F Ritchie” and featuring such creatures as ‘The Octopussycat’, ‘The Buffalocust’, ‘The Porcupython’ and ‘The Chimpanzeebra’.

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During the First World War several illustrators and cartoonists made ‘Lightning Artist’ films in which they drew propaganda cartoons, sometimes including animation. In 1915 Ritchie made A Pencil and Alick P F Ritchie for Favourite Films, which can be viewed via BFI Player (see link below). Despite the title many of the sketches are drawn in chalk on a blackboard, creating a good, crisp image and producing some nice design by blocking out some areas of white. The film contains some animation, but although well designed and smoothly executed they are rather pragmatic, existing only to serve the narrative, and do not attempt to bring the picture to life. Ritchie went on to produce two more films for Favourite under the series title Alick Ritchie’s Frightful Sketches.

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After the War he continued to design posters, including some for London Underground between 1930-1.

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He also designed three series of cigarette cards. In 1926 he designed a set of 50 caricatures, the iconic Straight Line Caricatures built up from geometric shapes, for Player’s cigarettes. In 1934 he created Animalloys, an ingenious set of 48 cards for W D & H O Wills: designed in sets of three, they consisted of the head and forelegs, torso, and hind quarters of various animals with the name of the animal similarly divided into three parts. Cards from different sets could be put tugether to make nonsense animals such as the HIPP-ELO-TOR or the ARM-OPA-MUS. He returned to coventional caricature in 1936 with Shots from the Films, a set of 50 cards for Hignett and Ogden.

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Alick Ritchie died in Hammersmith in 1938.

It is interesting how artists make a home their own. In this post there are some pictures (of the now lost) murals in John Aldridge’s home. There is some debate over who painted them. It was likely John Aldridge assisted by his friend and maybe lover, Basil Taylor, who had worked for Sadlers Wells. The scale of the work seems to fit the camp work of Basil, and he was known to have painted murals for friends before this.

At the time of this mural’s painting Taylor was living with John and Lucie, trying to sober up outside of London and enjoying the country lifestyle. John and Basil were also collaborating with the New Zealand artist and animator Len Lye on a project called Quicksilver at this time too – a ballet based movie.

It seems that when Aldridge died in 1983 and his house sold, the room was repainted white. Owners that came after this have told my friends how they peeled away John’s ‘Bardfield Wallpaper’. Regardless, the house now has good owners who share John’s passion for plants and history.

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At the invitation of Jim Anderson I have loaned fifteen works from my collection to his gallery cum workshop to be viewed by the public. They are by Chloe Cheese and Sheila Robinson and designed to be a compliment to the current exhibition “Working Women” at the Fry Art Gallery. I picked out works that the Fry don’t have on show.

Jim is a painter, printmaker and mural designer and gives up space in his workshop each month to different exhibitions. Linton Art can be found at 113 High Street, Linton, Cambridge. CB21 4JT.

It is open Monday – Friday 10-4 and weekends by appointment, but I would suggest calling before any visit to make sure it is open. The gallery over the road also has a display of works by Great Bardfield artist Denise Hoyle. The telephone number is in the image at the top of his post.