I recently bought a book called The Tranquil Gardener by Robert Gathorne-Hardy, it is illustrated by John Nash. These days Nash is known for his war art and being the brother of Paul Nash, but he is not as known for being a botanical illustrator and teacher.
From the dust jacket blurb: Robert Gathorne-Hardy has been an amateur gardener for as long as he can remember. In this book he describes three gardens with which he has been intimately connected-his own, his mother’s, and that of his illustrator, John Nash-each with its different soil, its different possibilities, its own invitations and its own snubs to give. He is, moreover, a plant collector of very considerable calibre, and there is the true biographical sapor to much of his description of individual plants. The text is superbly complemented by Mr Nash’s exquisite drawings.
During the 1920s John Nash taught at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and remained a teacher until the end of his life, inspiring many, including some of the best Kew artists. During most of the interwar years John Nash and his wife lived at Meadle in Buckinghamshire. From there both went on holidays all over England during which they filled numerous sketch books with pen, pencil and wash studies which developed into oil and watercolour compositions in their studio. Like Constable, Nash made annotations in these books about the weather on particular days.
John Nash had a great passion for plants and his technique as a plant illustrator deserves special notice as he excelled in the field. John Nash liked to use live specimen which sometimes was a problem when publishers asked for illustrations of plants which were not in season.
He often used his garden, which was planted with a wide variety of plants such as roses, irises, gentians and hellebores. John Nash had always been interested in botany even as a child he had won a Botany Prize and, like his friend Cedric Morris, he called himself an ‘artist plantsman’.
In 1940 Nash was commissioned as an Official War Artist in the Royal Marines, a role he did not especially enjoy, preferring to paint the English landscape, which he did after the war. From 1922 Nash had made many visits to Essex and rented a summer cottage at Wormingford, near Colchester and in 1945 he and his wife bought Bottengoms Farm where they lived until they died. When in Essex Nash taught at Colchester Art School and conducted yearly plant illustration courses at Flatford Mill. As one of the founders of Colchester Art Society (and later the Society’s President) and through exhibitions of his own work, he became closely connected with the Minories Art Gallery.
On his death he bequeathed his personal library and several of his paintings as well as the engravings recorded in this catalogue to the Gallery. Since then, the library, the paintings and most of the engravings were sold to the Tate.
There is no rule to be observed that an artist’s work has to become looser as he gets older. It is easy to think of some remarkable cases where this happened, but this is because the late works of more usual careers with comparatively little change are less prominent. John Piper’s latest exhibition shows paintings of a startling freedom, but in his whole long career he has always swung between detailed and exuberant manners, whether the detail is the precise outline of an abstract painting or of a window at Windsor Castle, or whether the exuberance is of a collage of marbled papers that became one of his pre-war landscapes or of the whirls and blotches that decorate his pottery of the last twenty years. He has not been able recently to travel to his subject, and has fallen back onto something that he has saved for years, the garden of his own house.
John Piper – Fawley VII, 1989.
Piper is one of the few modern figurative artists who has never painted, or even photographed, a view of his own studio, since he has not wanted to tell people about himself, or idolise his own art. He may in effect reveal much, but only by inference. Until recently he has rarely painted even the valley and farmhouse where he lives. During the 19805 more paintings of his house and garden were exhibited, and for the summer of last year he made a whole exhibition of paintings of blossoms and of the garden. ‘Pear Tree and X/all’ from that exhibition almost overlaps with the new paintings, as the twisted tree seemed to cavort unrealistically in some black space of its own, almost dancing with liveliness.
The paintings now shown by Piper are amongst the best of his whole career, for his painterly skills are more evident as the given structures of the subject dissolve, and rarely has his work seemed so very personal and without outside occasion.
In the last few years there have been in London several gardening exhibitions, mostly historical, presumably in sympathy with the more conservative taste that has become noticeable. Gardens however are not only for retreat or withdrawal. They are also the battlefield of nature against cultivation, and the life and death not only of all plants with the seasons but between competing growths, some of which can survive by fertilisation and seeding.
John Piper – Fawley X, 1989.
Piper has always avoided inventing figures in his work. The splendid Kings of Oundle College windows are translations of romanesque carvings and not his own figure studies. The figures in his photographs are obscured, either by fragmentation or by covering with foliage like a ’Wild Man’. He has admired the ’foliate heads’ of English gothic sculpture, and has two such heads in his studio, where he often places alongside them the gigantic drooping heads of‘sunflowers.
A favourite of his photographs is the ’lived Figure’ of Wotton, his title turning the name of the plant into a verb. It is only an extension of this where these new paintings are themselves ivied, or convolvolussed, herbascioussed and chrysanthemums. If the garden could be pruned, the statues, walls and paths would appear; but Piper has always fought against tidying up. This is an attitude of mind that opposed the clearing of buddleia from abbey walls by the Ministry of Works, and is also part of the sheer generosity of character that made those copious screenprints of well known and out of the way buildings, in extremes of light.
It is difficult to be certain in these new paintings whether the plants have covered the foreground or have somehow taken over the whole vision of the artist, leaving only a few spots of clear light. The overhanging eyebrows which looked so spooky in Phil Starling’s photograph of Piper on the cover of The Independent Magazine (10 December 1988) might have forced the vision back into the mind. These paintings were all begun with a wide brushed coating of white, mixed with sand to give a rough surface.
John Piper – Fawley VIII, 1989.
The prominent blacks almost obscure the light, left shining through in places like the opening of a cave. The flowers and leaves are in front of this blackness, things not quite known that are alive in this darkest part of the garden. Piper’s ordering of the colours still follows the discipline of his abstract paintings, which were themselves partly the result of his study of medieval stained glass painting.
The intense reds and blues of such windows, used sparingly but decisively within the design of heavy black outlines and borders, were models for his abstraction and have remained so most clearly whenever his painting has become less realistic. This harmony of colour is noticeable now more than ever, a harmony like Venetian and French painting that is a kind of eloquence based on patterns of contrast, and which gives the paintings a feeling of large scale.
John Piper – Fawley III, 1989.
John Piper’s studio with flower paintings on the easel.
There are many examples where book design is uniform, most famously Penguin Book’s ‘Stripe’ design by Edward Young and perfected by Jan Tschichold in 1935. Bold and colourful they were enormously successful and cheap to make being paperback. The colours they used to coordinate the books also made selecting a book a quicker process due to your preference, Crime-Green. Fiction-Orange. Cerise-Travel. Blue-Biographies. Red-Drama.
There where many other sets imitating Penguin’s success, most of them short lived. Below is a range of book jackets that Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious had been commissioned to do, but this time in hardback.
Edward Bawden & The Vanguard Library
The Vanguard Library (not to be confused with Vanguard Books, a US series from the 1930s) was a joint venture published by Chatto & Windus in association with William Heinemann Ltd. The joint venture was probably to combine the backlist of titles under copyright to both of these smaller publishers. The series was in print for only a few years in the early 1950s. The series consisted of back catalog titles, mostly modern fiction, a smattering of more and less serious fiction. †
The dust jacket of the Vanguard Library books originally featured a standard design by Edward Bawden of a Trojan warrior on a geometric background.
A page from Bawden’s Sketchbooks showing the designs being worked upon.
Although the series would go on with various designs and dust jackets, it is estimated that only twelve books with Bawden’s covers where issued, all in 1952 with his Trojan design but with colour variations.
The inspiration for the Trojan design is likely to have come from another book illustration commission Bawden had completed the year before, illustrating Rex Warner’s ‘Greeks & Trojans’.
Ravilious & Everyman’s Library The series Eric Ravilious was commissioned to re-design was to run far longer than Bawden’s. J. M. Dent and Company began to publish the ‘Everyman’s Library’ series in 1906. It was conceived in 1905 by London publisher Joseph Malaby Dent, whose goal was to create a 1,000 volume library of world literature that was affordable for, and that appealed to, every kind of person, from students to the working classes to the cultural elite.
An Everyman’s Library book with Ravilious’s designs to the cover 1935-45
After running for thirty years and likely with the new release of Penguin paperback books, the series went under a redesign in 1935. Eric Ravilious was asked to redesign the covers, end-papers and make graphic devices for each subject that would also be colour coordinated with the dust jackets, like penguin books were. Both publishers where aiming for the same thing, cheap books for the people.
Above is the decorative knot used on the front covers of the books from 1935-1945. Signed ER in the corner. The carving on the top and bottom spikes seemed to lack some detail that would be expected from his normal standard. In two letters to his lover Helen Binyon, Ravilious writes about how the work is rushed and from all accounts takes three months from January to March:
3rd February 1935 …Dents have sent along a proof of the new book which is bad but not very bad, and I am hoping at the eleventh hour to do part of the job again. Unfortunately there is a hurry for it. ‡
21st March 1935
…Everyman is out at last, and seeing six new volumes this morning they looked alright – the one blue Chesterton even rather good. ‡
Below are a selection of some of the dust-jacket colours and devices used for the different subjects and featured on the title page of the book. Perplexingly the designs are not featured on the book spines:
Left to right is Oratory (Red), Reference (Pink), Romance (Orange), Poetry & Drama (Green).
Left to right: Science (Grey Blue), Young People (Bright Blue) Travel and Topography (Green), Essays & Bells-Lettres
Looking at the devices under magnification, there is every evidence that the engravings were made in a considerable hurry with engraved lines carrying on where they should have stopped and inadequate clearing of background details, none the less they represent a considerable imaginative achievement and are most effective. ‡
From 1945, the abstract knot was replaced on some volumes with a clam-shell like design overlaid with an ‘EL’, and from 1951 it was used on most jackets until the design was replaced in 1953.
A section of the end paper, with a star like repeat design by Ravilious for the series, it was used from 1935-1953.
An alternative end-paper that was briefly used in 1935 but suspended for the star patterned paper above.
William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, now mostly lost, has slipped into legend. Sensational as it was, it was painted and studied by many artists contemporary to the construction, one of these was Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Beckford, born in 1760, is mostly remembered for being an author and a showman who inherited a fortune and squandered it on a building that partly collapsed and withered away over the next 50 years. Although he died in 1844, during his life he had a natural talent for self promotion. The building was Fonthill Abbey, a mansion with a tower constructed to make a statement, but it was also built to house his collection of fine works of art and keep the complete library of Edward Gibbon he had bought.
The stained glass windows in the building were painted by Francis Eginton. Other works in Beckford’s collection for the Abbey were Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Raphael, Agony in the Garden and Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan by Bellini, Philip IV in Brown and Silver by Velázquez. In time when the estate was sold off the list of possessions would show the near shop-a-holic mania of his collection.
It was in the early days of Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey obsession he invited Turner to paint seven large watercolours of the house and it’s grounds. Turner spent three weeks at Fonthill in August, 1799 making drawings for the commission. His sketchbooks from this time show the building under construction and the five watercolours eventually completed, show the abbey from different vantage points and at different times of day.
In having Fonthill Abbey documented by a fashionable young artist (Turner was 24 at the time) he would have no doubt hoped that by association, he and his building would too become fashionable. Various scandals in Beckford’s past had lead to him taking a self imposed and strategic exile from Britain, now returning to build the Abbey he was upsetting neighbours and the Royal court by outbidding them for contractors in their building programs.
Beckford had also invited the President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Benjamin West, and Henry Tresham to join Turner on his visit.
When Turner arrived at Fonthill, its building was in full flow. The speed and scale of the work were exceptional. Turner sat and sketched the workmen whom Beckford was employing around the clock in night and day shifts. In another sketch he captured the vast brown scar on the hill on which the building was positioned, created by the small forest of trees that Beckford had felled for the work.
As for Beckford himself, he was rarely seen. The group of artists ate their meals with Williams, Beckford’s steward, rather than being entertained by the patron himself, who spent much of his time engaged in supervising the work on the house as well as riding in his extensive grounds. ♠
At the point when Turner returned to Fonthill its master was losing his battle to regain social acceptability and was already showing the signs of a man who preferred his own company. Beckford was beginning to see his abbey as less a summer pleasure house with which to impress guests, and more a fortress against the wider world. What time Turner did get with Beckford, however, was sufficient to impress on him the profoundly dark tone of his patron’s mind. ♠
In the end Beckford only purchased one of the paintings of Fonthill from Turner. The rest were exhibited by the Artist at the Royal Academy in 1800.
In time Turner’s sketchbook became an important document to Fonthill’s structure as by 1825 the majority of the building had fallen down. Beckford however had cunningly sold the estate some years before and moved on to building another tower in Bath.
The picture of the completed building painted by Turner was based on the architectural plans and projections and finished five years before the building was, the final building ended up with no spire. During the building process the tower would get higher and higher, maybe one reason for it’s downfall, the foundations where not strong enough for this babel like building.
J.M.W. Turner, Projected Design for Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, 1798
Beckford’s fascination with his pet project meant that he spent no time at all keeping the family business – the foundation of his wealth – active. The family owned a series of sugar plantations in Jamaica but due to the 1807 abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and Beckford’s poor business management meant that by 1822 he is seriously in debt. Selling the estate, he moves to Bath where he builds a neoclassical tower to house his collection. Below is an account of the sale of the Abbey:
Mr. Beckford, on coming possessed of his fortune, made the grand tour, and resided many years in Italy; it was here that he improved that exquisite taste and love of the Fine Arts, for which he is pre-eminent. On his return to England, he resolved on building Fonthill – which he accomplished; and in August, 1822, he as hastily determined to dispose of it – and accordingly gave directions to that eminent auctioneer, Mr. Christie, of Pall-Mall, London, to dispose of it; and so great was the anxiety to view the splendid edifice, that upwards of 9000 catalogues, at one guinea each, were sold before the day of the sale; on the day preceding which, to the surprise and mortification of the public, notice was given that the estate of Fonthill, with all its immense treasures, was sold to Mr. Farquhar for 300,000l. This gentleman has since employed Mr. Phillips to sell the whole of the effects, which will occupy thirty-nine days!
We are told the possessor of this splendid treasure left it almost without a pang. His first resolution was to build a cottage lower down in the demesne, near the fine pond, and let the Abbey go to ruin. ”I can live here,” he said to his woodman, ”in peace and retirement for four thousand a year – why should I tenant that structure with a retinue that costs me near thirty thousand?” Subsequently, however, he resolved to part with the entire, and announced his intention without a sigh. ”It has cost me,” said he (gazing at it), ”with what it contains, near a million. Yet I must leave it, and I can do so at once. Public surprise will be created, but that I am prepared for. Beckford, they will say, has squandered his large fortune: to me it is a matter of perfect indifference.” It would much exceed our limits to attempt even a description of this justly celebrated Fonthill. †
In his later life and typical of the showman act, Beckford would later go on to show off his Turner and describe him thus,
He took me to a small room, where there was a water-colour drawing of Fonthill Abbey. “Ah” “ah there’s the abbey,” he literally exclaimed, pointing to it. I asked him by whom it was painted.
“Turner.”
“Turner?” I asked; “he does not paint like that now.”
“Oh! gracious God! no! He paints now as if his brains and imagination were mixed up on his palette with soapsuds and lather. One must be born again to understand his pictures.” ‡
It maybe that Turner painted Fonthill Abbey so far away due to the noise and confusion of the building site, or that he preferred to be a landscape artist and thought it more romantic to have it pictures from a-far. Either way Beckford’s quip about ‘soapsud’ watercolours is something that haunted Turner in the later days as his work became more abstracted.
Beckford’s Turner was originally listed in the Christies sale as lot 112 on the 8th day of the 9 day sale.
† Arliss’s Literary Collections. p105 1830.
‡ The New Monthly Magazine, ‘Conversations with the Late W.Beckford, Esq’. 1844.
♠ Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner by Franny Moyle. 2016. 9780670922697
Here are a set of adverts out of various magazines from 1932-34 for the Westminster Bank. They are very similar in style to the adverts running at the same time by Guinness and Twinings. The first four illustrations are by Edward Bawden, then Ardizzone and Rothenstein.
There are many more illustrations with all the artists work on the internet but these were the ones I had found in my magazines so far, the text and pictures show the spirit of the age with travel and empire; to the technology of cars and steam liners, simple but beautiful I think.
The Documentary Credit, whereby the Exporter is assured that he will receive payment immediately his goods are shipped, and the Importer that his money will not be paid over except in exchange for the good he has contracted to buy, is the subject-matter of The Financial Machinery of the Import and Export Trade, a copy of which will be gladly sent on receipt of a postcard to the Manager.
Visitors who stay at Grosvenor House will find a branch office of the Westminster Bank at their disposal in the north angle of the building, where they may cash their Letters of Credit or enjoy any of the other services the Bank can offer. They will also doubtless appreciate the double convenience which a temporary banking account affords in enabling them to make any payment by cheque or the Bank, or to pay in, on the spot, any money they may receive during their stay.
Many thousands of people have nominated the Westminster Bank as their Executor, and their numbers are increasing day by day. These men and women have given very careful consideration to this most important subject, and have decided that the advantages of appointing a Corporate Executor enable them to rest content that their wishes will be faithfully and efficiently carried out. Should you not take the same step now? Your local Branch Manager will be please to institute inquiries on your behalf, and if you wish will put you in touch with one of the Bank’s Trustee Branches were experienced staffs are available to discuss your own particular problem.
Edward Ardizzone
How often, in your personal affairs, do you come upon some problem of business or finance in which a little expert guidance would be welcome? Upon such occasions you will be wise to ask the Manager of your local Westminster Bank branch for advice, His wide business experience and intimate knowledge of local conditions are entirely at your disposal; his aim – which is that of the Bank it’self – is on of service to the community. He will be glad to tell you of the many ways in which the Westminster Bank can be of service to you.
Michael Rothenstein
By the ability of any of its branch offices to obtain passports and to establish credits with foreign agents or make any other necessary arrangements for money requirements abroad, the Westminster Bank is able to relive its customers of some of the more irksome preliminaries of a journey overseas. The Manager of your local branch will be glad to tell you more about these and other banking facilities.
Magazines in second hand book and charity shops are treated with various levels of scorn, I am guessing it’s because they don’t stack on a shelf easily and can look untidy. It’s a shame as some are full of adverts and illustrations that are not found anywhere else.
Here is one piece illustrated by Barnett Freedman from the Housewise Magazine in the 1950s. Although there maybe more, I have never seen Freedman illustrate a magazine artical. It’s a simple monochrome print with the focus was on the draftsmanship.
Many of Freedman’s book dust jacket designs are like this too, but with a simple colour wash behind them, he was very economic with colour – in printing terms. With his marvellous free-drawn typefaces and grainy illustration, with closer views you can see the picture is of a theatre and the balcony with the audience looking down on the artical. The heroin is in a locket cameo to the left and the hero to the bottom right. Short simple and I hope an unusual sight for those who know Freedman’s work.
Cantab by Bretherton / Bunbury. Image from the British Museum collection.
Yesterday I bought an etching. Printed in 1772 by James Bretherton after the drawing by Henry William Bunbury. It’s shows a man, likely a priest, travelling by the river. The church in the background is Chesterton church (back then it was surrounded by fields) and the path there left the river toward the town.
His direction confused me for a short while until I remembered there were no bridges on the lower end of the Cam, only ferrymen. The sign to the left shows, he was heading To Cambridge, so not yet there, hence Chesterton.
Detail of Cantab by Bretherton / Bunbury.
Although many of the prints published by Bunbury were satires, I am unsure of the joke; it may just show the wealth of the clergy in the time of George III and the purpous of the dogs in the bottom left to be the poor. Even without the comedy it’s a beautiful picture in it’s original frame and glass.
In the Archives of the Tate are over a thousand photographs taken by Paul Nash that were donated by the Paul Nash Trust in 1970. Many of the photographs by Nash where studies for paintings but on their own they are surreal marvels. Mostly taken during the 1930s and 40s, the photos sometimes have no date and a guessed idea of the location.
Below are my favourite out of all of the pictures processed, I chose 17 in all. A good deal of them have not been editioned in books or as prints. I have tried to order them in a way I think looks pleasing.
The text I have taken from the large Fischer Fine Art folio of 25 prints by Paul Nash in 1978, in the 25 photographs John Piper picked out, it’s curious how I have selected none of the same images. I have included it as it’s the best and most brief summery of Nash’s talents, and it’s always nice to hear from John Piper.
Paul Nash took photographs for the last sixteen years of his life; that is to say, from 1930 when he was given an American Kodak. The camera was adequate to his purpose and he never became involved enough in the technique of photography to buy himself a more elaborate one or bother with wide-angle or other lenses or even to use a tripod. But his snapshots were neither indiscriminate nor trigger-happy.
As in everything, he was as professional as he needed to be. If he wanted to take something and the sun was not out, he would wait for it; if he wanted a shadow at a certain angle, he would wait for it. He would stalk the Uffington White Horse or Maiden Castle or the stones at Avebury until the place and the light were right and his friends who drove him would have to wait and stalk too. It was often anxious for them and difficult for him since he was seldom well and that kind of effort and concentration was exhausting.
Paul had an economical and obsessive eye and his new toy at once became a valuable weapon. The very first photographs that he took on the way to the United States related to the preoccupations of his painting; a ship’s mast and rigging was a slender echo and anticipation of the open cage structure he often used, the complicated interplay of hard edges and hollowed shadows within the curve of a life-boat proclaimed his interest in the mystery of ordinary things seen from unordinary angles.
No one could have been a less doctrinaire or literary surrealist but he had a punning vision which, with his aptitude for analogue, made his instinctive reaction to the world very close to the more self-conscious and sophisticated surrealist one. His wit with the camera was a natural extension of the wittiness of his words and of his attitude to life. He loved to see the funny side of things without being destructive so the objects that he photographed at Swanage, for example, for his article “Seaside Surrealism” – absurd concrete seats, huge pretentious lamp standards, three concrete steps isolated in a bed of pebbles – all have a double life of incongruity and of beauty.
While on the one hand he used his photographs as immediate aides-memoire to pin down a fleeting glimpse of the famous “Genus Loci” or to record the particular lie of a dead tree or a shadow on a wall, on the other hand he recorded aspects of the countryside that he was never tempted to paint directly but whichhe translated into the magic of his painting. Stone upon stone in miles of dry stone wall, the endless meeting and parting of furrows in an enormous field, layers of cork drying, stacked and roofed like rows of stone fishing huts, the invisible but eloquent bones of a landscape under stretches of featureless grass, all these ancient repetitions, natural or man-made, extend the more immediate subjects of his work and give them their timeless quality.
Paul Nash always had a feeling for the horizontal, at once boundless and embracing, and this is especially noticeable in his photographs. His Kodak, whether by chance or intention, took an exceptionally wide picture. But he always expected things to work for him and they usually did.
– John Piper. 1977.
White Horse, Uffington
A Woman on a Lawn, Raffia in Her Hair
Nest of the Skeletons, Maiden Castle
Vickers Wellingtons and steam roller
Study of Waterlilies, Hungerford
Demolition Landscape
Oast House Roof
Mrs Bertram and a dog in the garden at the Manor House
The Penguin Illustrated Classics were a series of books published by Penguin to showcase wood-engraving. Only ten were issued, all in May 1938. Robert Gibbings was the Series Editor and he also illustrated a book too.
Here is the book illustrated by Gertrude Hermes. Normally her woodcuts are fantastically expensive but as it’s a paperback book, this edition can be found easily and cheaply. A year later Hermes would illustrate another book for Penguin, (the eleventh classic) ‘The Complete Angler’ by Izaak Walton.
Gertrude Hermes was born on 18 August 1901 in Bickley, Kent. Her parents, were from Altena, near Dortmund, Germany. In about 1921 she attended the Beckenham School of Art, and in 1922 enrolled at Leon Underwood’s Brook Green School of Painting and Sculpture, where other students included Eileen Agar, Raymond Coxon, Henry Moore and Blair Hughes-Stanton, whom she married in 1926, though they separated in 1931, and were divorced in 1933.
Hermes exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1934, and showed at the Venice International Exhibition in 1939. In 1937 Hermes produced a commission for the British Pavilion at the Paris World Fair. She worked in Canada from 1940 to 1945. She taught wood engraving and linocutting at Central School of Art in London from the late forties to early fifties. She also took a drawing class to London Zoo. She taught wood and lino block printing at the Royal Academy Schools, from 1966. She was elected associate to the Royal Academy in 1963, a full member in 1971 and was appointed an OBE in 1981.
