Tag: The Saturday Book

Inspiration from the Home

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 14th December 2017

Great Bardfield being a small community of artists, it is only natural that they would borrow ideas, items and homes from each other to work in. Here are a few examples of connections in illustrated books by the people in the community that all were published within a few years of each other.

Edward Bawden – Sunday Evening, 1949 (Life in an English Village)

The picture above shows the sitting room at Ives Farm, Great Bardfield. Tom Ives is pictured in the corner with his pipe. It’s depicted in a lithograph by Edward Bawden from the King Penguin book ‘Life in an English Village’ (1949), around the same time Aldridge himself used this house in a book illustration for ‘Adam Was A Ploughman’ (1947) by Clarence Henry Warren.

John Aldridge – Living Room, 1947 (Adam Was A Ploughman)

On the fireplace you can see a Staffordshire figure of a lion by a tree, it was illustrated again on another page in ‘Adam Was A Ploughman’, pictured below.

John Aldridge – Lion, 1947 (Adam Was A Ploughman)

The photograph below is from Volume Five of The Saturday Book (1945), in a chapter by Edwin Smith on ‘Household Gods’ and is the same Staffordshire Lion.

Edwin Smith – Lion, 1945 (The Saturday Book)

Back to the drawing of Ives farm living room is a corn-dolly hanging up, below in the King Penguin book ‘Life in an English Village’ I have picked it out in yellow.

John Aldridge – Living Room, 1947 (Adam Was A Ploughman)

Edward Bawden – Corn-dollies, 1949 (Life in an English Village)

To the bottom right of the image above is also the bell used in the Pub lithograph below. Below the bell, the one-eyed man is Fred Mizen, a gardener and thatcher who also had a talent for making corn-dollie, it is likely all of them are by him.

Edward Bawden – The Bell (detail), 1949 (Life in an English Village)

Michael Rothenstein – Clock and Candlestick, 1942

The painting by Rothenstein above is a curious still life of a table and village scene. Curiously enough these items appear again in fifth Volume of The Saturday Book, along with the Aldridge Lion photograph. The article mentioned the clock ‘flanked by exotic shapes contrived from coloured balls on candlesticks’ it is wisely assumed that the picture is from Rothenstein’s house.

Edwin Smith – Clock and Candlestick, 1945 (The Saturday Book)

Clarence Henry Warren – Adam Was A Ploughman, 1947
Leonard Russell (Editor) – The Saturday Book, 1945
Noel Carrington – Life in an English Village, 1949

Tags Edward Bawden, edwin smith, Fred Mizen, great bardfield, John Aldridge, King Penguin Books, Michael Rothenstein, The Saturday Book

Childhood

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 23rd November 2017

Here is a poem found in Volume 13 of the Saturday Book by Gerald Bullett, from 1953. The illustrations are by John Nash.

Now as my lamp burns low
I remember a green land of long ago,
A plum-coloured train chuffing and puffing about,

And me, lucky, carefully lifted out
And led away into heaven through a White wicket,
Proudly surrendering half a railway ticket.
Between the shafts of a high dogcart stood
A patient pony, warm and brown and good,
Good to touch and fondle, with oily eyes
Incapable of anger or surprise,

Who at a word, a lifting of slack reins,
Carried me and my cousins along the lanes,
Past wooded meadows and the enormous stare
Of cattle, and gray sheep, browsing there.
The sky moment by moment growing dim
While still the sun burned on the western rim,
Rooks home-going, hedges warm with scent,
I rode into my kingdom of content:
So found the farm, Aunt Jinnie, Uncle Ned,
The sleepy supper and the dreamless bed,
To wake next morning in a world new-made.

O Earth and Sky, most tried of comforters:
O morning glory aslant across the years
From far fields, where every blade and weed
Miraculously nourished my heart’s need:
It is here on the map, my joy-bright country
Where grief has brief being, despair no entry,
And in this aged almanack I can trace.

The year, the very hours, of blessedness.
But their unique conjunction, place and time,
Is now no more than a remembered rhyme
Quickening the drowsy blood. Too soon, alas,

The dews dissolve on leaves and shining grass.
Too soon the glossy chestnut, newly come
From silken fold, his paradisial bloom
By malice of corroding time must lose,

The sun droop, the flower of morning close.
80 shall my Eden, as all memories must,
When this my lamp goes out,
Dwindle into a little heap of dust,
Resolving faith and doubt …
In whose hand held, or what abysm lost?

THE POEM BY GERALD BULLETT
THE ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN NASH

Tags Illustration, John Nash, The Saturday Book

A Holiday Afloat by Ardizzone

Post author By Robjn Cantus
Post date 17th May 2017

Featured in The Saturday Book #11 there is a drawn graphic diary by Edward Ardizzone. A Holiday Afloat is listed as having ‘a slight misspelling or two’. It includes 20 pen drawings, most of which depict the artist and his family.

Some of the Ardizzone sketchbooks later developed into illustrated diaries, but on certain occasions Ardizzone would start with a diary in mind from the beginning. As an illustrator, the conjunction of text and drawing attracted him and he enjoyed the making of a written and pictorial record. After the war he made a number of small diaries.

The first was of A Holiday Afloat when he took a boat with his wife and his youngest child, Nicholas, in September 1949, and journeyed from Lechlade to Oxford. There were miseries and mishaps but some good moments, and the weather was awful, cold and wet.

The drawings are some of his happiest in this vein and at the end the reader is left wishing for more. A Holiday Afloat was later published with some spelling mistakes in The Saturday Book, edited by Leonard Russell (1951). †

† Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator by Gabriel White p99, 1979.

Tags Ardizzone, british art, edward ardizzone, The Saturday Book