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.
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.
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.
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. ‡
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.
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.
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
When I married Salvador Dali his moustache was. no bigger than a thread of silk,’ his wife Gala explains. ‘We lived in a one-roomed fisherman’s hut overlooking Port Lligat in Spain, and while I learned to fish and prepare lobsters à l’espagnole,
Dali struggled with surrealist paintings. Every six months both of them went to Paris and tried to sell his work. Today he places commissions on a three-year waiting list, and intimidates the world with a moustache capable of anything from a heavily waxed coil to a vertical sword thrust. ‘Sometimes,’ Mrs. Dali admits, ‘I worry in case he scratches his eyes out.’
The fisherman’s hut, too, has grown. ‘Our Hamlet’ is the way Mr. Dali describes it. Apart from three cottages and a rather new-looking hotel, Port Lligat is the Dali home. One by one, neighbouring cottages and outhouses have been given an extra storey, whitewashed, and added to the home structure. The result is a nest of twelve different roof levels set between terraced hills, with a tiny bay and four rowing boats just six steps down from the front door.
‘I still go fishing.’ says Mrs. Dali, ‘but the boats are fitted with motors now, and I no longer have to prepare the meal afterwards.’
She trained a staff of three–manservant-cum-chauffeur, chambermaid, and cook-to run the ten-roamed house so that she could deal with her own work as secretary, artist‘s model (she is the dark-haired beauty in most of his paintings), and keeper of the Great Privacy. ‘I arrange for us to have no telephone and no guest room,‘ she says with obvious satisfaction. ‘Visitors either come by yacht and sleep on board; or they take our mountain road, which is not good, and sleep at the hotel.’
In fact, the last stretch of road is so bad that the Dali Cadillac has to have a house and garden of its own in nearby Cadaques. ‘We complete our journey by local taxi, which is like riding a mountain goat.’
‘Cosmic inspiration’
In spite of their inaccessibility and a wish to safeguard privacy, the Dalis are not inhospitable, and friends are always welcome-after eight o’clock in the evening. ‘For six months of the year we live in American hotels,’ Salvador Dali explains. ‘I make big appearance for public and friends. I design nightclubs, create fantastic Dali parties. Port Lligat is secret place, where I was little boy, where I work always. I bring strong cosmic forces back from America, Gala brings canvas and brushes, and I paint in studio.’
He is now working on the Greatest Dali Masterpiece, a religious canvas over twelve feet high and nine feet wide. By using pulleys and a slot in the studio floor which opens on to cellars below, he is able to adjust the canvas to any working height or whisk it out of sight altogether. He hopes he can complete the work within six months. He then has fifteen commissioned portraits to paint-at an average fee of £7,000 for each one. ‘Money itself does not interest,’ he says. ‘Only the symbol is very strong in me.’
The studio, like the bedroom and the main sitting room, has a sloping, heavily beamed ceiling, and everything is distempered white. No artistic mess or muddle here, only a deliberate and persistent study in contrast. A life-size Apollo, for example, sporting a Davy Crockett hat ‘to keep the mind sparking’; a jewelled casket balanced on a tripod of French loaves.
‘Bread is obsession,’ he explains. ‘It captures many shapes for me. Like sea urchin which has cosmic inspiration, and rhinoceros for strong fear. I learn secret and use in my work.’
He has just completed a film (to be shown at the next Cannes Festival) which tells the story of his strange philosophy. It took him two years to make and he calls it The Prodigious History of the Rhinoceros and the Lawmaker.
These obsessions also play a decorative and oddly formal part in the home. Each room holds at least one secret. The main lounge, predominantly white with yellow upholstery and a floor of polished bricks, has two stuffed swans perched on the ‘canopy’ of books which divides the room; the entrance hall is furnished with a life-size bear wearing elaborate chains of office, and a couch inspired by the line of Mae West’s lips.
The bookcase has two stuffed swans looking down on the room.
The rooms themselves vary in size and shape, and they are all built on different levels. Most impressive is the hundred and-fourteen feet long, three-tiered bedroom, consisting of lower Sitting room with yellow pin-cushion settees, curio landing seven stairs up, decorated with elaborate jars of sugared almonds, and the bedroom proper seven steps above that. This has a red and blue canopy for the two divans, and a large fireplace with a walled-in sitting recess inspired by one of Dali’s sketches.
All the fireplaces at Port Lligat are based on designs by Salvador Dali, but Gala is the one who chooses the furniture and decides on the decor. Her approach is simple and effective. ‘A house must be warm,’ she says, ‘it must also be nourishing for the mind.’ She guards against the strong mountain wind (Lligat is on the East Coast some forty miles south of the French border) with central heating. She keeps the house ‘alive’ with hundreds of well-thumbed books, and a retinue of comfortable animals: she has white canaries in her bedroom, cats downstairs, and pigeons in a vast pagoda-style dovecote outside.
Although she is Russian by birth and international by upbringing, Mrs. Dali’s choice of furniture is mainly local. For the dining room she has fifteenth-century refectory~style pieces from a nearby monastery; she bought, and dismantled, a vintage black and gold Catalan bedstead to make headboards for the divans.
‘Silk and brocade is right for town,’ she says. ‘Here we need crisp white linen curtains. On the floor I have rush matting used for covering the local ox wagons.’ A samovar is her one concession to the past, but even this comes in useful on chilly evenings.
By mutual consent, Time, in the shape of a mad rococo clock, is firmly relegated to a decorative comer of the rock garden outside. They nevertheless follow a routine of work, breakfast, work-swim, work-siesta, and work which is governed in detail by the light, and Salvador Dali himself-self-acclaimed genius. ‘I am. fifty three,’ he says, ‘but even as a boy I paint With originality. Two times they expel me from college,
I am so good.’ He had a tempestuous school career at Figueras, twenty miles from Lligat, and his parents weathered his ‘Stone Period‘ with desperate patience. ‘I painted stones and tied them to‘ canvas,’ he says. Unfortunately, they were rarely secure, and his father would explain the noise to startled visitors: ‘It‘s nothing, just another stone that’s dropped from our child’s sky.’ Later he went to art school in Madrid, and on to Paris where he found the centre of surrealism and a fascinating but meagre living.
Pagoda-style dovecote decorated with pitchfork perches – is home to a hundred pigeons, and also an extension to the Dali game larder.
During one of his many return visits to Spain, he met Gala on holiday, courted her in French, and proposed with ninety red roses which he could ill afford. Encouraged by his wife, he clinched his reputation in Paris with some of his most brilliant work. and in 1935 decided to take a one-man show to America. The Dalis arrived in New York with thirty pieces of luggage, and the world’s biggest loaf for dramatic effect.
The loaf was ignored, but the paintings, were a fabulous success, particularly his portrait of Gala balancing a pair of chops on her shoulders. Questioned about significance, he replied: ‘I like Gala, also chops.’
At home he has always been quietly spoken and unexpectedly modest. Dark-haired and dark-skinned, he is an expert showman who delights in dressing up. He has an extensive ‘Spanish’ wardrobe, although most of his fancy Catalan shirts are in fact cowboy ones, bought from drugstores in America, and modified at home. ‘
“During the day I wear knee-length trousers; in the evening I always have them full length. She has dozens of pairs, mostly skin tight and all couturier-made.
The Dalis have one luxury bathroom with an excellent supply of hot and cold rain water, but mineral water is Gala’s great personal extravagance. ‘We buy it in bottles for cooking, but I use it for washing as well.’
The menu at Port Lligat is governed by Mr. Dali’s standards, ‘Food must have well-defined shape, so intelligence can grasp it,’ he says. ‘Shell fish and chop is good. Spinach bad.’ A weekly delivery of food supplies from Figueras is augmented by local fish, rabbits, and the famous Dali pigeons.
The kitchen, decorated with exhibition posters and presentation plaques, has an electric ’fridge (run off their own power plant) and an Open range for cooking, because the staff prefers to use charcoal. Life with Salvador is remote from local custom, but he does create fiestas of his own. He will organize a firework display for the fishermen and their children to celebrate the completion of a new work.
The bear in the hallway holds a lamp-stand and a basket for gloves.
He recently bought a barn in Cadaques which he plans to convert into a private cinema for Chaplin films and Dali premieres. He spends most of his evenings writing at home (he is working on his third book), but occasionally the local choir is invited for ‘champagne and songs’. In return, they bring gifts of fragrant herbs for the house. ‘They love Dali,’ his wife comments, ‘and understand him a little.’ Certainly they would have appreciated the way Freud described him after their one and only meeting: ‘I have never seen a more complete example of a Spaniard. What a fanatic!’
Last summer I was reading ‘A Crisis of Brilliance’ by David Boyd Haycock, it is a wonderful layer-cake of young artists lives as they study at the Slade School of Art on the eve of the First World War and a book I recommend to all to read.
Many of the artists featured are supported by a patron, Eddie Marsh, who not only bought their work but he entertained them and introduced them to people in society who would advance their careers.
Marsh was a strange and unique person. In his career as a civil servant he worked as Private Secretary to a succession of Great Britain’s most powerful ministers, particularly Winston Churchill.
He was the sponsor of the Georgian school of poets and a friend to many poets, including Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. He was a discreet but influential figure within Britain’s homosexual community.
Matthew Smith – Woman Reclining, c.1925–6
Some of the money Marsh had to spend on art was the remainder of a family legacy from the death of his great-grandfather, Spencer Perceval in 1812, the only British prime minister to have been assassinated. Parliament voted to settle £50,000 on Perceval’s children (today it would be around 8 million), with additional annuities for his widow and eldest son. 100 years later and Marsh was using the money to buy art.
Although Spencer Perceval possessed six sons and six daughters, some portion of this grant drifted down to Eddie Marsh through his mother. He refused to use any of what he called ‘the murder money’ for his personal requirements; it was from this fund that he bought, with taste and knowledge, the collections with which he has now enriched the public. †
William Roberts – Sam Rabin vs Black Eagle, 1934
After Marsh’s death in 1953 his friends collected accounts of him and published a booklet, edited by Christopher Hassall and Denis Mathews. As it is long out of publication, I have typed up John Rothenstein’s piece on Marsh’s art collecting below. All the pictures in this post were owned by Marsh.
Mark Gertler – Agapanthus, 1914
John Rothenstein on Eddie Marsh
There is a serious disadvantage to an upbringing in an artist’s household. Paintings, drawings, sculpture are apt to be so ubiquitous that they may fail to excite. My father being a painter and also a collector, it seemed to me in my early years that works of art were for the most part little more than part of the furnishing of our house. It is true, however, that when I visited other houses and found dull pictures on the walls or none at all, I was aware of an almost piercing sense of bleakness. But when I first visited Eddie Marsh’s chambers at Gray’s Inn, it was with no sense of bleakness but with the consciousness of something amounting almost to a new experience that I looked at his pictures.
Stanley Spencer – Apple Gatherers, 1912-13
I had not come to look at his pictures; I don’t suppose I was aware that he possessed any. Like many other young men I had come, either shortly before or after leaving Oxford, to consult this benevolent oracle about the perplexing problem of how best to spend my life. I can’t recall any word of advice he gave; but I do recall, almost as clearly as though it were yesterday, the immediate fascination exercised by the pictures which hung, frame to frame, from floor to ceiling, covering every vertical space, not only of wall but of door, and, no less clearly, the kindness with which Eddie responded to the interest his pictures stirred in me. We looked at everything there was to see. And what things there were! Wilson’s Summit of Cader Idris (his bequest of which to the National Gallery, he said, lent an added pleasure to his visits there, that of choosing the place where his ghost would see it on the walls) and Blake’s Har and Heva batbing.
Richard Wilson – Cader Idris, 1774 (Exhibited)
But it was the contemporaries that gave me the sharpest and most pleasurable shock: the works of painters with whom I already had some acquaintance. There were the splendid Self Portrait and the The Apple-gathers by Stanley Spencer (an artist who had not yet held an exhibition), The Dancer: and Parrot Tulip’s by Duncan Grant, The Cornfeild by John Nash, a water-colour of tall trees by his brother Paul, and a lamp-lit bedroom by Gertler.
John Nash – The Cornfield, 1918
The spectacle of so many line examples of the work of an emerging generation of painters, displayed with such affectionate, admiring confidence strengthened the impression I had that there was a school of painting in England deserving of much more respect than most of my contemporaries were inclined to accord to it.
Henry Moore – Woman Seated with Hands Clasped, 1929
My visit was followed by several others, but it was not until many years later that I came to know him well, when I had the good fortune to be associated with him in the running of two institutions particularly dear to him: the Tate Gallery, of which he was a Trustee from 1937 until 1944 and Acting Chairman during 1940 and 1941, and the Contemporary Art Society, of which he was Chairman from 1937 until 1952.
Duncan Grant – Parrot Tulips, 1911
What made this association particularly delightful for those who had a part in it was Eddie’s attitude towards these two institutions. For him the Tate and the Contemporary Art Society were never primarily institutions at all; they were friends to be fought for, to be enriched by his generosity and, from time to.time, to be gently chided. And as such they responded to his friendship with gratitude and affection.
Duncan Grant – The Dancers, 1911
Eddie was not only loved at both the Tate and the Contemporary Art Society, but he reposed in them a special degree and quality of trust. He was capable of a catholicity of taste that at moments provoked his friends to wonder whether there was any work of art which he didn’t like. In his heart, however, he remained faithful to the artists the Spencer and the Nash brothers, Grant, Gertler, and their contemporaries who had first aroused in him the lust of possession.
Paul Nash – Elms, 1914
The works of later painters he often, as he confessed, ‘took great though often in efficacious pains to understand and enjoy’; yet he never expected art to be changeless, and he desired the Tate and the Contemporary Art Society to collect in accordance with their most imperative convictions, whether or not these happened to conform to his own.
Christopher Wood – Siamese Cats, 1927
The last time I saw him, on is December 1952 at the last meeting of the Society’s Executive which he attended, it had been resolved, as a tribute to his unique services, to commission a portrait of him by Graham Sutherland.
A message from the artist was read out willingly accepting the commission but regretting that he could not undertake it until the autumn of 1953. In a voice that arrested by its intense melancholy Eddie exclaimed, ‘The sands are running out’. In the silence that followed could be read his friends’ mournful recognition that he had spoken the truth. Four weeks later he was dead.
Stanley Spencer – Self Portrait, 1912
Walter Sickert – The New Bedford, 1915.
Cedric Morris – Breton Landscape,1927
Eric Ravilious – The Yellow Funnel, 1938
Walter Monnington – Study of a Woman, 1934
Eddie Marsh – Sketches for a composite literary portrait of Sir Edward Marsh, Lund Humphries, 1953 † Paintings and Drawings from the Sir Edward Marsh Collection, The Contemporary Art Society 1953
This is a press piece by Valentine Dobree some years after the suicide of Mark Gertler and on the eve of a retrospective at Leicester Galleries. Gertler gassed himself in his London studio in 1939. He was suffering at the time from increasing financial difficulties, his wife had recently left him, he had held a critically derided exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, he was still depressed over the death of his mother and Carrington’s own suicide (both in 1932), and he was filled with fear over the imminent world war.
Valentine Dobrée was born Gladys May Mabel Brooke-Pechell in India. She studied art under Andre Derain but had no further formal education in art. In 1913 she married Bonamy Dobrée. From April 1914 until the outbreak of the War they lived in Florence. Returning to England she led a Bohemian life – she had an affair with Mark Gertler, who painted her portrait in 1919 and 1920, and became a close friend of Roland Penrose and Dora Carrington. In 1920 she exhibited with the London Group. Between 1921-25 the Dobrées lived in a French village in the Pyrenees. She published many books, the first novel was ‘Your Cuckoo Sings by Kind’. This was followed in 1929 by a second novel ‘The Emperor’s Tigers’. In the same year the Dobrées returned to England, settling at Mendham Priory, Harleston, Norfolk, near Diss. In her literary capacity, Dobrée was admired by T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene, she died in 1974.
The Works of Mark Gertler
The Leicester Galleries are holding a comprehensive exhibition of Mark Gertler’s painting. Even a year or two may help one to get a better perspective often artist’s work, and see him against the background of his time; especially now when the time of entre deux guerres has by the present violence been shunted to a premature past. The people who lived and worked in it, made it, and no longer seem its victims. All have become part of the continuity, and questions of development, experiments, influences seem to vanish as a mirage, for it is a very new past. Some of these questions don’t seem very important in Gerder’s work. He is a lonely figure, and followed his own way and was not often_ tempted to leave it. Because he was so highly individual, one cannot help thinking it will take some time before he is really appreciated. It is the penalty for not being in any particular movement ; the field is wide with no others to plot out or strike their claim in this or that area. But since he was an artist of great integrity, and since he made no easy communications, it might be worth while to examine one aspect of this integrity.
Mark Gertler – Portrait of a Girl, 1912
Christian Zervos reports that Picasso, in conversation, said: ‘It is my misfortune and perhaps my joy that I give things their place according to my love for them. What an unhappy plight for a painter who loves blonde women, but who feels himself forbidden to put them in the picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! What misery for a painter who detests apples to feel obliged to use them always because they go with the table-cloth. I put in my pictures all the things that I love. Tant pis pour les chases, they just have to settle it between themselves’.
Mark Gertler – Mandolinist, 1934.
There is one of the roots of integrity, and if Gertler could speak now, and look back with us on his life’s work, that might very well be what he would say, ‘I put in my pictures all the things that I love’. And as is so often the way, the things that he loved were the things of his youth: the interior, the lace-veiled front room, with its ornaments, the bright ruched cushions, the slightly dusty artificial flowers, all a little crowded, and presided over by the monumental figure of his mother. The grandeur, the scale, were those a child sees. Anyone, who knew him at the time, will remember his delighted discovery, when he felt that he could discard the unpractical, because fleeting, real flower for the artificial one, which would always be there. Practical? Yes. His technique was evolved from a long and careful study of the object, and he nearly always painted from life.
Mark Gertler – The Artist’s Mother, 1911.
But also something more than practical; he painted those cotton roses and tulips with zest. This zest too is evident in his best portraits: those of simple people, the little servant girl, the Scots nursemaid, and above all his mother. The same bias is shown in some of his’ landscapes; the most successful being when the scene itself collaborated, and was as still as an interior. Looking at the present exhibition, it seems that here is an interesting and powerful link with the Victorian age. Fin de siécle sounds a curious word ‘to use for such a vigorous painter, yet in one sense it fits very aptly: in the sense that the glory had passed, and artificial silk had come on the market. One feels, here is a man who loved permanence; permanence in the way a Victorian would have understood it; the permanence achieved by making as complete a statement as possible. Nearly all his pictures are highly wrought.‘
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, comes. into one’s mind, and with it all the mockery that has been aimed at the first rate swotter. Yet, if the taking pains is fortified by a constant and enduring passion, this is certainly the right description. This constant and enduring passion of Gertler showed itself in his refusal to be lured away by movements or fashions. It shows itself in one of those last magnificent still-lives: the work of a man who is prepared to take every step of the way, and who has held back nothing. Success opened to him the doors of London the metropolis , at heart, though, he remained the provincial Londoner. He accepted what was often intractable material, he had no agility in avoiding problems , but he had wisdom, for he knew that the artist is the most fated of mortals. He must remain faithful to the first imprint, retain his innocence. The pattern may refine, develop, extend, but in an artist of integrity, and there are no others, the pattern is not distorted or blurred; such as it is, it shines out.
Mark Gertler – Violin Case and Flowers, 1930.
The Listener, 15th May 1941. Wikipedia – Mark Gertler Valentine Dobree – Liss Fine Art
In the copy of The Listener from March 1941, there is a piece by the artist Keith Henderson on his first year as a War Artist with the Air Ministry.
Before any artists had been appointed by the Air Ministry, William Rothenstein had requested permission to make portraits of airmen at bases in Scotland. Rothenstein pre-empted Keith Henderson, the official artist, in working at Leuchars base, which meant there was nothing for Henderson to do; Rothenstein was often referred to in print as an “official artist”, although at this time, it was not the case.
Henderson was one of the first two artists, alongside Paul Nash, appointed as a full-time salaried artist to the Air Ministry by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, WAAC. Rothenstein’s work ended up with Henderson having to concentrate on ground crew, aircraft hangars, repair shops and runways for subjects. Although the painting ‘An Improvised Test of an Under-carriage’ provoked fury in the Air Ministry and contributed to Henderson’s six-month contract not being extended, it was among the artworks shown at the first WAAC ‘Britain at War’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 1941. The painting shows a man jumping up and down on the wing of a Lockheed-Hudson to test the undercarriage.
Keith Henderson was a Scottish painter who worked in both oils and watercolours, and who is known for his book illustrations and his poster work. He had a long professional career that included periods as a war artist in both the First World War, in which he served in the trenches, and in the Second World War. The muted colours and tones of his work remind me of Eric Ravilious, it is that style too, but Henderson’s work was between Ravilious and Christopher R. W. Nevinson.
Keith Henderson – An Air View of Montrose, Angus, 1940.
War-time notes of a Peaceful Artist.
Turning over the pages of a diary that I began last April on being appointed one of the two official artists to the Air Ministry, I now read over passages here and there with reminiscent amusement and, yes, a certain genuine pleasure too. During the last war I kept a diary, not only while with my regiment but after being seconded to Intelligence with the XV Corps Squadron, and then Fifth Army Headquarters. The new diary, the one for this war, begins:
Keith Henderson – A North-East Coast Aerodrome, 1940.
April 19, 1940. Started with Helen from home yesterday evening towards the east coast, leaving snow on our Lochaber mountains and daffodils under the wintry trees. Curlews calling from every direction. Tomorrow…
April 20. This my first day of official duty has been a hideous failure. A guard at the aerodrome entrance, I drive in superior and nonchalant, returning the sentry’s salute. On to the Orderly Room. Adjutant, Commanding Officer, Intelligence Officers. Nervous as a cat, I hope they will not see through my calm affability. Cigarettes and a stroll towards the Mess. The ante-room is enormous: African buck, markhor, and other trophies of the chase branch out one above the other towards a lofty ceiling. The leather armchairs are so ample that officers reclining in them appear to be asleep. Crowds of others standing about, all very much alike. They observe that the Commanding Officer has a guest. Introductions, a glass of sherry. Presently through swing doors into the Mess Room, which is enormous. Lunch with one of the Wing Commanders, very friendly. But the afternoon, oh, the afternoon was hell. During a conducted tour round the hangars l saw nothing whatever that I particularly wanted to paint. The wind was hideously cold, the light bleak, and I had an exhausting stomach-ache. Violent and continuous noises of engines being tested. No ideas.
Keith Henderson – Night: An Air Gunner in Auction Turret, 1940.
April 22. Serene spring weather. All has gone well, so well that I’have had to steady myself with thoughts of the horror of the conquered in Poland, Norway, and elsewhere. A man’s philosophy is usually in accord’ with his circumstances, both interior and exterior. Optimists do not have stomach-aches. Mine had vanished. From the high control tower at least three marvellous possibilities appeared. Two sinister and monstrous bombers were awkwardly entering their hangar. They have the eyes, the mouths, legs, bodies, wings of elephantine obscene. insects, but stupid insects. Prod them and they will not move away or retaliate. There is no mind within. They are utterly vacant. I must paint them like that. How lucky am I to have been appointed to this delightful work.
April 24. Three pictures have now been begun. I am using a monochrome mixture of white, yellow-ochre, and a little raw umber. This will make any alterations to the composition easier before a more or less rapid final painting begins.
Keith Henderson – Study of Royal Air Force Machine Gunmen, 1939.
May 5. From the ground this strangely retarded spring is at last clearly visible. Trees are in bud and millions of small dowers give an impression of Chaucerian gaiety. Up in the air scarcely any of this tiny brilliance shows yet. There are just stretches of moorland and of ploughland in various shades of pale buff and maroon, with here a diaper dressing of lime, there a flutter of gulls, a few sombre forestry plantations and many lesser woods wherein only’an occasional pale willow is conspicuous, old stone farmhouses with their haystacks in rows, a ruin near a newer castellated mansion, small lochs all silvery grey, an appearance of desertion far and wide. From the air the earth has no flowers. Eastward is the wonderful coast-line, red sandstone mostly, fretted away into natural arches and pinnacles. The jade green sea is as lovely from above as I remember it in the last war. Those white festooned breakers along the Beaches seem without sound.
Keith Henderson – An Improvised Test of an Undercarriage, 1940.
May 6. Today I tried the experiment of taking up more than mere notebooks. I took a canvas, a dozen brushes and a full set palette. The Palette was disastrous. Within a few moments of taking off, I noticed Indian red on my sleeve. The observer crept forward to the navigator’s seat where I was, and shouted into my ear, ‘Have you got everything you want?’ ‘Yes, thank you’ I shouted back, ‘but you have got some ultramarine on your cheek. I remembered noticing an air gunner holding the palette at a dangerously acute angle as he handed it to someone. And worse. Nearly all the so carefully arranged large clumps of paint round the palette’s edge were, I saw now with dismay, gone. They had evidently slipped off or been smeared off. But I could not be Without them. They must be found, scraped up penuriously from the floor or anywhere. Then I saw the legs of the air gunner. My precious cadmium red! The observer, the pilot even, all were strangely daubed handed round proved in that cramped space more distributive than cleansing. Their hands, their faces, their flying kit were crimson, blue, white, black, yellow, or tartan. It was a great success.
Keith Henderson – Camouflage Hangars and Gas Gong, 1940.
May 7. My bedroom at the aerodrome is quite comfortable. I shall never forget my astonishment when an efficient batman offered me early tea. I was then getting up at 4 am. for a dawn picture. This morning it had to be 3.30. As we rose into the upper air through ground mist three swans also rose through the ground mist. They Hew north. I found myself thinking: ‘Where exactly is the centre of the Universe?’ And I answered myself: ‘ Wherever you happen to be at the moment’. In mid air ’the centre of the Universe is definitely not on the earth’s surface. All who fly will agree about that. Suppose yourself flying west. You wish to turn south. The great rigid wings slant over. But for all the planetary pull of gravitation, it is not the aircraft which appears to be askew. Not at all. The earth on the other hand has gone mad. It has heaved itself up, sea and all, steeply into space, a huge menacing wave that will not subside until the dial shows the wings horizontal. They will be in a moment. Now they are. Now the earth is itself again, flat, detached inhuman, without laughter or any birds singing.
May 8. A letter from the Air Ministry. I wrote some time ago ‘asking for permission to go to Narvik or Stavanger on a bombing raid’. The Air Commodore at Whitehall answers, ‘Under present conditions it is quite out of the question that you should visit Norway‘. Right. Well, that exonerates me. I am certainly not going to do fancy war pictures from photographs and descriptions.
Keith Henderson – Loading Gantry for Pluto, 1940.
May 9. Home for another short rest, tired. No, not depressed. There must be no regretting all that I have not accomplished, but simply a ‘proud delight in all that I have accomplished. Let me be luxuriously lazy. For several days on end I need not do anything. I loll in this white window Seat looking down the length of the room towards Aunt Nell‘s two rococo mirrors on either side of the Chinese lacquer cabinet. One of the dogs in the farmyard barks. I love the faint pink, wallpaper with its bunches of blue-grey and white flowers. I am happy. I think I have been asleep. I must go and see how things are coming on in the walled garden.
May 11. Back at the aerodrome. The usual crowds assemble as soon as I set up my easel for a large picture to be called ‘Repairs to a Bomber’. Since last night when I came round to see that all was in order, the men have produced, in the most frightful raw flat yellow, on the side of the particular aircraft that I am painting, a huge figure of Donald Duck. They want me to put this into the picture, but I really cannot. It would spoil the whole thing. The effort to find words that might show them why it would spoil the whole thing is almost too much during working hours.
Keith Henderson – Dawn: Leaving for North Sea Patrol, 1940.
May 12. On other machines they have now painted other grotesques, including the wholly inexcusable Popeye. A sergeant pilot says that these effigies will ‘cheer up the Jerries’. And this while the news becomes more serious than any news ever announced in the world before.
Keith Henderson – Wings over Scotland, 1940.
May 16. While I was touching in the ‘horns’ of the bomber a young pilot who had been standing beside me asked: ‘How do you begin a picture?’ My answer, which was regrettably long, failed to give satisfaction. I could feel that. There was silence; and then – would I come for a flit with him? When? This afternoon? Well, I did rather want to get on with that thing of the coastline…. He went off at once and came back to say that all had been fixed. We were to go in the Jewel. On my way to the Mess I reflected that a machine called the Jewel sounded pleasantly airworthy. Later I discovered my mistake. Not Jewel, but Dual, a machine with dual control. ‘You must take a turn’, he offered. I made no answer, doubtful as to what this implied. When the parachutes and Mae Wests and other paraphernalia for all concerned are collected we drive across to the Dual. The engines have of course been sending out dust gales to the rear for a good while. We heave ourselves in. Before taking off, the pilot looks round and holds up his right thumb. The rest of the crew hold up theirs. All is well. The noise increases, is doubled, trebled, deafening in spite of ear plugs. We are moving forward, moving more swiftly. We have left the ground. As soon as we are at the right height I begin sketching. The time goes by. I muse vaguely about art meanwhile. Art is more than national, more than international; it is supernatural-magic-always* has been since cave days, always will be. There. The drawings are finished. We may return. Presently the pilot nudges my elbow. I am sitting on the learner’s seat close beside him. What is it now? What? He points to the controls and points at me. Does he mean that I am to ‘take a turn’? I hesitate. His reply to my very sensible hesitation is to cross his arms and lean heavily with his head on one side as if sound asleep. Something must be done. I seize the crescent. He is awake again, ready. We have lost height. I pull back. We rise, rise higher. The North Sea is empty of shipping. No, there’s a distant convoy. So it is. This is rather delightful. At a pinch, if the pilot were to become a casualty, could I carry on ? I might, I really might. But I certainly could not land. I should just have to go on and on, flying round the world indefinitely.
Keith Henderson – Repairs to a Bomber, 1941.
May 23. Abbeville fallen. Boulogne fallen. Well, as to our next move, that rests with the Higher Command, not with me. Defeat ? That is an idea that I’ve never even glanced at. Have any of us ? Probably not. Better not. In the evening I have just finished a life of Wallenstein, and am beginning Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s Letters.
June 13. At home fér another rest. More carrots sown and the artichokes, thinned out to three feet apart, should do well. The Germans are only sixteen miles from Paris.
Keith Henderson – Gas Practice in a Hangar, 1940.
June 14. The first flowers of Campanula Carpatica have appeared, and Helen this afternoon made a delicious cinnamon cake. All down the steep brae towards the river there are foxgloves in full bloom. While raking beechmast into heaps on either side of the drive, I have been watching the cows. They are let out from the byre. They walk very slowly for about five yards, looking straight ahead. Then one of them stops. Gradually they all stop. Why? Two of them move slowly forward a few steps. A long pause. A few others follow and stop again. Another long pause. Do they want to go anywhere in particular? Why need they? A strawberry Ayrshire slowly turns her head. She looks at me for a long while without interest. Then she turns away, having learned nothing. They have nothing to do all day long. A black Galloway, with bracken in her tail, sits down, slowly and heavily. Five minutes later a polled Angus sits down, slowly and heavily. At the end of half-an-hour they have all sat down. Absolute peace here, and news has just come that the Germans have entered Paris.
Keith Henderson – Ascent of the Met Balloon, 1940.
So the diary goes on – a continual contrast between busy warlike aerodromes and exquisite days on leave. That was almost a year ago. How angry we felt then and how obstinate. Today, even more angry and more obstinate, we are surely, I think, feeling much more hopeful. –
The painting ‘An Improvised Test of an Under-carriage’ provoked fury in the Air Ministry and his six month contract as a war artist had come to an end. His work was exhibited at the time but unlike Eric Ravilious his work has more or less been ignored.
In the archives of Augustus John at the University of
Liverpool there is an invitation (August 1931) to Charles Reilly to stay with John at his country home of Fryern Court, Fordingbridge for a portrait to be painted. John was looking to build a new studio in the grounds of his home and so having an eminent architect as a sitter, he asked his advice.
Augustus John – Portrait of Charles Reilly, 1931.
While staying with his old friend and colleague Augustus John at Fryern Court, Fordingbridge, during the early autumn of 1931 in order to sit for his portrait, Reilly wrote a series of letters to his wife. In one of these he states ‘I have suggested his (John) building a large new studio, modern, in ferro concrete, and he likes the idea.’
There is no other documentary evidence to suggest that Reilly had any other hand in what eventually was built. John’s chosen architect, Christopher Nicholson – younger son of the painter Sir William Nicholson – produced two designs. The first was a looser interpretation of Modernist principles , and the second and executed design was, as David Dean notes, ‘built to a precise mathematical grid, the reinforced concrete frame has been raised for maximum light on stilts, in the approved Corbusian manner. †
Christopher Nicholson’s second design for John’s Studio.
Augustus John’s studio was Nicholson’s first major commission and an opportunity to put into practice the ideas he had been developing since leaving Cambridge. In 1930 Nicholson visited Paris, where he had the opportunity to see modern studio buildings by Mallet-Stevens, Le Corbusier, Lurcat and Perret. One of the most striking – and an important source for the John studio – was the studio-house built by Le Corbusier for Ozenfant House near the Pare Montsouris. ‡
Nicholson then had his architectural practice at 12 Old Church Street, a one-roomed office over a chemist’s shop, shared with his partner, Hugh Casson. ♠
The finished studio in 1933.
Christopher Nicholson’s plan for the upstairs of the studio.
In Le Corbusier’s style, Nicholson design the building lifted up from the ground with only a picture store under.
Christopher Nicholson’s plan for the ground floor of the studio.
When the studio was completed John wrote to Reilly in Febuary 1935, about the studio being a success and how John was working with renewed energy.
Augustus John lived in Fryern Court from 1927 until his death, at the age of 83, in 1961. At the height of his career, the charismatic Welshman was considered one of Britain’s leading portrait painters. He was a well-known figure in the village of Fordingbridge and one of his favourite town watering holes now bears his name, having formally been known as the Railway Hotel.
The studio was located in the corner of the garden away from the main house of Fryern Court, so that the views and light of the countryside could flood into the windows.
Interior of Augustus John’s Studio.
Interior of Augustus John’s Studio.
Interior of Augustus John’s Studio with the radiators under the seating.
In 2011 a fire ripped through the main house. More than 60 firefighters were called to Fryern Court near Fordingbridge, the fire crews used water from the swimming pool of the Grade II listed building to douse the flames as they engulfed the roof and first floor. The studio was unaffected.
Christopher Nicholson designed many other buildings in his life, but one regarding his death is apt. He designed the building for the London Gliding Club, Tring Road, Dunstable.
London Gliding Club. Tring Road Dunstable
A gliding enthusiast, Nicholson died at age 44 on 28 July 1948 in a gliding accident during the World Gliding Championships at Samedan in the Graubünden, in Switzerland
The interior of the bar was designed by Hugh Casson for Christopher Nicholson, about 1935.
A newspaper clipping reporting Nicholson’s death
‡ The British Art Journal, Volume 2, Issues 1-3, 2000. † Marketing Modernisms: The Architecture and Influence of Charles Reilly, 9780853237563, 2001 ♠ Artists and bohemians: 100 years with the Chelsea Arts Club, 9781870948609, 1991.
In the short time that Eric Ravilious was of working age he produced a massive amount of work for such a young man. He died while serving as an official British War Artist when the aircraft he was aboard crashed off Iceland. He was 39 years old.
At the time of Ravilious’s death there were various projects underway that the war disrupted. As manufacturing was halted, these commissions were put on hold while the country had to economise.
Eric Ravilious – Design for London Underground Plate, 1939.
One of the projects Ravilious had started was for a commemorative plate for the ‘New Works Programme’ of 1935-40 that London Transport had begun.
It was an ambitious extension of the Northern and Bakerloo lines northwards, and the Central line both east and westwards. Although the engineering work was well advanced by the outbreak of war, the project had to be abandoned and was only partly realised in the post-war years. Thus the commemorative plate designed by Ravilious was never produced.
The early Underground train lines, originally owned by several private companies, were brought together under the ‘Underground’ brand in the early 20th century and eventually merged along with the sub-surface lines and bus services in 1933 to form London Transport under the control of the London Passenger Transport Board (L.P.T.B.).
The ‘New Works Programme’ was to develop many aspects of the public transport services run by the L.P.T.B. and the suburban rail services of the Great Western Railway and London and North Eastern Railway.
The investment was largely backed by government assistance as well as by the issuing of financial bonds and was estimated to cost £42,286,000 in 1936 (approximately £2.59 billion today).
Of the four vignettes Ravilious chose, three were of construction and one was of the predicted Grand Opening, with a tube train and swash bunting along the platform.
One of the vignettes of construction show men being lowered in buckets into the tube shaft. These were likely non-station locations where the soil was excavated out and the steel and concrete lowered in, like the workers. It was a typical practice in mining.
Men in a small-scale drop lift.
Another of the pictures shows workers putting up the frames for the tube tunnels and station platforms. The wiring being bunched on the sides of the tunnel.
The two workers pictured here are bolting the rivets of the metal into place. The image when manufactured, would have been a black and white transfer and the colour would have been a translucent enamel paint.
The three heraldic devices show the county badges of Essex, Hertfordshire and Middlesex.
Middlesex Heraldry
Buckinghamshire Heraldry
Hertfordshire Heraldry
The plate would have been one of the last commissions of Frank Pick, chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board. Pick, who retired in 1940 and died the next year, had worked for the Underground since 1906.
Pick had become publicity officer responsible for marketing and it was at this time that, working with the company’s general manager Albert Stanley, he began developing the strong corporate identity and visual style for which the London Underground later became famous, including the introduction of the ‘Underground’ brand.
One of Pick’s responsibilities was to increase passenger numbers, and he believed that the best way to do so was by encouraging increased patronage of the company’s services outside peak hours. He commissioned posters which promoted the Underground’s trains and London Transport buses as a means of reaching the countryside around London and attractions within the city. Throughout Pick’s career his over-riding passion was for architecture and design, and his adventurous approach and choice of collaborators is famous.
Ravilious had other work planned for London Transport, some posters and wood engravings. During his lifetime he did see some of his work used, a set of his wood-engravings were used for the covers of the Country Walks books in 1936.
1936 cover to Country Walks, 3rd Series with a Ravilious Design of Two Cows.
The Country Walk books were by Charles White and printed for London Transport to show people the possibilities of using the Underground and Bus network. Inside they had maps and planned walks showing how to get to the locations using London Transport.
Each of the three volumes had a wood engraving by Ravilious on the cover. The second volume had a Mill, the third featured the Two Cows wood-engraving.
A print from the original woodblock with Two Cows to the left, and Hull’s Mill, Castle Hedingham to the right. 1935.
The two images were engraved on the same block of wood and printed together as one proof. On the left a cow and a bull in a field, separated by a stone wall; on the right a horse standing next to a mill stream, with watermill (based on Hull’s Mill, Castle Hedingham, near Great Bardfeild) in the background.
Below is the original drawing for Two Cows, reversed in design as a woodblock always prints backwards.
Eric Ravilious – Two Cows, preliminary study for a woodcut, 1935.
The pencil design is remarkable for another reason: part of the design was turned into a watercolour featuring two Cows in the same pose.
Eric Ravilious – Two Cows, The Fry Gallery, 1935.
The book Away We Go by Oliver Green and Alan Powers, documents more of the other work that both Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden did for London Transport, mostly their designs for press adverts.
Ravilious Engravings by Jeremy Greenwood, The Wood Lea Press, 2008. Moving Metropolis by Sheila Taylor and Oliver Green, Laurence King, 2001. Ravilious and Wedgwood by Robert Harling, Dalrymple Press, 1986
During last summer I visited Ickleton Cemetery Chapel, between Ickleton and Hinxton. The chapel is Victorian and Grade II listed. Built in 1883, in an Early English style, flint with limestone dressings and knapping to the sides and a slated semi-circular roof end.
With double doors to the side is a mortuary chapel and a coffin cart rests inside.
In the graveyard are a set of unusual metal sand cast headstones. Probably made by a company who made fireplaces. An old chap who looks after the graveyard told me that some of them had been stolen, probably for scrap metal as a piece of corrugated iron on top of the compost heap had also been stolen.
The painted grave is one of his relations, and he had repainted them to look as they did when put in. Others have rusted however.
One of the best books I read in 2016 was Emma Smith’s Maidens’ Trip, a story about life on the wartime canals. In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters.
The Canal system had been in some decline since the rise of the railways in the 1880s, but wartime efforts to save money on fuel and get maximum efficiency out of the countries infrastructure facilitated a temporary change.
The Re-issued cover of the book.
Smith set out with two friends on a big adventure: three eighteen-year-olds, freed from a middle-class background, precipitated into the boating fraternity. They learn how to handle a pair of seventy-two foot-long canal boats, how to carry a cargo of steel north from London to Birmingham and coal from Coventry; how to splice ropes, bail out bilge water, keep the engine ticking over and steer through tunnels. They live off kedgeree and fried bread and jam, adopt a kitten, lose their bicycles, laugh and quarrel and get progressively dirtier and tougher as the weeks go by. I was rather annoyed to have missed the BBC Radio4 adaptation of it but hope to see it on BBC Radio4Extra in the coming year.
While reading the Smith book, for reference I had the ‘The Canals of England’ by Eric de Maré with his beautiful photos of 1950s Britain. Below are a selection of the pictures.
By the end of the nineteen-sixties a lot of the canals where in poor condition and it was only until the mid nineteen-nineties that they were cleared out and seen as tourist attractions.
Eric de Maré – The Canals of England, The Architectural Press, 1950 Emma Smith – Maidens’ Trip, Putnam & Company, 1948
On my bookcases I have a rotation of new and old books that I face out, depending on the designer. Some John Minton or Edward Bawden dust jackets, or pamphlets. But the book I normally put out, for the absolute beauty of the illustration is Roof Over Britain. It is illustrated by Abram Games and for the beauty of it, it is normally to be found for under five pounds. I have contemplated getting another to frame on the wall.
The topic is of the Anti-aircraft defences during the Second World War. It is an odd thing how patriotic the art of WW2 makes one feel. The lines of the soldiers face are almost like a German statue, it is all very modern.
The Front Cover of ‘Roof Over Britain’, 1943.
Born in 1914 to Latvian and Russo-Polish parents in Whitechapel, East London, Abram Games joined the Army in 1939 and was quickly designated the role of draughtsman. By 1942 he had been promoted to captain and was the only Official War Poster Artist for the rest of the Second World War.
Abram Games in his studio, 1941
After the war his freelance career went from strength to strength with commissions for the Festival of Britain, the United Nations, Shell, Guinness and the BBC. After a career spanning over 60 years, Games died in 1996 leaving a legacy of daring, distinctive and elegant images.
Justly famous for his innovative and bold poster commissions, Games claimed that the perfect design employed ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’. As a design student they are words I loved, communication first as part of design.
The Back Cover
Abram Games – Salute the Soldier – National Army Museum, 1944
The model for the booklet looks to have been one Games used many times judging by the similarity of the ‘Salute the Soldier’ poster.
In 2014 Games’s image was used on a stamp for the Remarkable Lives series for Royal Mail.
Abram Games, 1st Class Stamp, Remarkable Lives Set, 2014.
