A Century of British Art: 1945-2010

A CENTURY OF BRITISH ART VOLUME T WO 1945 – 2010

Copyright © Chris Beetles Ltd 2021 8 & 10 Ryder Street St James’s London SW1Y 6QB 020 7839 7551 gallery@chrisbeetles.com www.chrisbeetles.com ISBN 978-1-914906-01-5 Cataloguing in publication data is available from the British Library A Chris Beetles Ltd Publication General Editor: Chris Beetles Researched and written by David Wootton Edited by Pascale Oakley and David Wootton Design by Pascale Oakley Photography by Alper Goldenberg and Julian Huxley-Parlour Reproduction by www.cast2create.com Colour separation and printing by Geoff Neal Litho Limited

Front cover: Pietro Annigoni, Head of a Young Woman [261] Front endpaper: Laura Knight, Sun Rays on the Malvern Hills [307] This page: Raymond Booth, Anguloa clowesii [detail of 271] Title page: Reginald Brill, Onlookers [287] Page 5: Edward Seago, North East Wind, Waxham Beach [detail of 318] Page 151: Rowland Emett, The Palace of Culture III [detail of 252] Page 191: Donald Hamilton Fraser, City Landscape at Night, September 1957 [detail of 331] Back endpaper: Ken Howard, Raw War: We Are Building a Better World [348] Back cover: Betty Swanwick, The Approach [297]

A Century of British Art VOLUME T WO 1945–2010

CHRI S B EE TLES GALLERY

con t e n t s 10: B ETWEEN TR ADI T I ON AND I NNOVAT I ON: FRANK D O B S ON, DO R A G O R DI N E A ND GLY N PHIL POT AT THE L EICESTER GA L L ERIES 6

1 1 : C HAR LES KNIGHT: IN C ONVE R S AT I ON W I T H C OT M A N 14

12: NEO - R O M ANT I C I S M 24

13: R OWL AND EMETT ’ S C A RTO ONS F O R P U NC H 50

1 4: PIETR O ANNIG ONI: AN I TA L I A N A RT I S T I N L ONDON 62

15; THE NAT U R AL W O R L D 74

16: THE BOOK JA C K E T S O F E R I C F R A S E R 84

17 : G ene r o u s S p i r i t s : Th e F i gu rat i ve A rt o f R eg i na l d Bril l , Eric Holt, N orma n N ea som a nd B etty Swa n wic k 93

18: SOME VERS I ONS O F L A NDS C A P E 106

B I O G R A P HI E S 151

I NDE X 190

C ATA L O GU E

10: Between Tradition and Innovation: Frank Dobson, Dora Gordine and Glyn Philpot at the Leicester Galleries Much of the best British sculpture of the twentieth century derives its vitality from a tension between tradition and innovation.

This is exempliBed here by the work of three sculptors who based themselves in London for most of their careers, and were all represented for a time by Ernest Brown & Phillips at the Leicester Galleries in Leicester Square, which did much to promote modern sculpture. Indeed, these sculptors had solo shows at the galleries in consecutive years: Frank Dobson (1931, his third there), Glyn Philpot (1932, his Brst there) and Dora Gordine (1933, her second there).

When Frank Dobson made his debut at the Leicester Galleries in 1921, he presented himself as a Modernist, exhibiting angular carvings that revealed his sympathy for the work of Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska had both been associated with 7orticism, a movement founded by Percy Wyndham Lewis that was itself inspired by Cubism and Futurism.

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However, by the time of his second solo show at the Leicester Galleries, in 1927, Dobson had changed direction and, working as both carver and modeller, had evolved a more adaptable curvilinear style that could encompass the greater degree of naturalism suited to commissioned portraits. He had done this as a result of his growing awareness of the Classical revival among contemporary European artists, from Aristide Maillol to Pablo Picasso, and the support that he was receiving from Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the leading Bloomsbury art critics and champions of ‘SigniBcant Form’. He may have seen the exhibition of sculpture

by Maillol (shown alongside paintings by Henri Matisse), which was held at the Leicester Galleries in 1919. He certainly became acquainted with the French sculptor during his visits to Paris in the 1920s.

Though the trajectory of Dora Gordine’s development was very di6erent from that of Dobson, she too became acquainted with Maillol in Paris in the 1920s, following her arrival in the French capital from Estonia in 1924. Maillol was one of the few living artists that she openly praised, and she absorbed his purity of line and solidity of form into her own burgeoning style.

Gordine would sometimes be compared to Dobson, and both would be considered in relation to Epstein*, particularly in their later phases when all three were perceived as ‘keepers of tradition’.

Yet, while she would dismiss the achievements of such leading Modernist contemporaries as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore as ‘mere fashion’ (in a late interview quoted by Michael R Gibson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), Gordine was, in her own way, pioneering and experimental. She found that her interest in Southeast Asian peoples and cultures bore successful fruit, in the heads that she exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1928, as well as in Paris and Berlin. So, as a result, she spent the early 1930s living and working in British Malaya, and exploring the surrounding countries. Her immersion in a non-Western aesthetic provided her with the strong and singular foundation on which she built her substantial career once she settled in Britain.

Glyn Philpot had already had a substantial career when, in 1932, he held the Brst of two solo shows at the Leicester Galleries in order to showcase a radical change of style. While that change was more obvious in his painting than his sculpting, such works as Echo and Narcissus [194] were instrumental in the process, and their presence in the exhibitions helped explain it. Again, an experience in Paris had provided a catalyst. However, Philpot’s engagement with the Classical aspects of contemporary French artistic practice had almost the opposite e6ect on his work than it had on that of Dobson and Gordine, possibly because he looked more to Picasso than Maillol. What it achieved was to help him break free of the traditional techniques of which he had proved himself a supreme master but which he had come to feel were conBning him. His new style was lighter and brighter, but it was also more solid and direct, as if he had applied the tactile act of sculpting to the application of paint. * For a portrait of Jacob Epstein, by Powys Evans, and for information about him, please refer to A Century of British Art, volume 1, page 45.

POW YS E 7AN S For a biography of Powys Evans, please refer to page 152.

193 Glyn Philpot ARA Inscribed with title below mount Pen and ink 5 ½ x 5 ½ inches

194 Echo and Narcissus (opposite) Numbered 7/8 Bronze; 22 inches high Literature: A C Sewter, Glyn Philpot 1884-1937, London: B T Batsford, 1951, Plate 117 Exhibited: ‘Recent Paintings and Sculpture by Glyn Philpot RA’, Leicester Galleries, London, June 1932 (Plaster); ‘Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by the Late Glyn Philpot RA (1884-1937)’, Tate Gallery, 1938 (Plaster); ‘Glyn Philpot 1884-1937: Edwardian Aesthete To Thirties Modernist’, National Portrait Gallery, 1984-85 (1968 Bronze); ‘Glyn Philpot, 1884-1937, The Bronzes’, Leighton House, London, 1986; ‘The Mythic Method: Classicism in British Art 1920-1950’, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, October 2016-February 2017 Glyn Philpot produced three plaster casts of Echo and Narcissus in about 1931, but no bronze casting was made of it in his lifetime. While one bronze was cast posthumously in 1968, the present work is from an edition of 8 cast in 1986, the year in which an exhibition of the artist’s bronzes was held at Leighton House, London.

10: BET WEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION

G LY N PH I L P OT Glyn Warren Philpot, RA ROI RP IS NPS (1884-1937) Glyn Philpot was one of the most interesting and ambitious artists working in Britain between the wars. In establishing himself as a painter, he emulated the Old Masters in style and technique, and gained international success, especially as a portraitist.

However, he believed that experimentation was essential to artistic development, and essayed a variety

of subjects, approaches and materials. This resulted in a small but impressive body of sculptures, and then, more radically, a signi cant change in his painting towards a decorative modernity.

For a biography of Glyn Philpot, please refer to pages 152-153.

Echo and Narcissus Though Glyn Philpot produced only a few sculptures, compared to the number of his paintings, they played an important role in his development as an artist, and may be considered outstanding achievements in their own right. He was probably self-taught as a sculptor, and possibly turned to the medium, in about 1906, in emulation of his mentor, Charles Ricketts, who similarly moved between two and three dimensions.

The activity gave both artists the opportunity to engage more physically with their representation of the human body and so a6ected the directions of their painting.

There is a particularly strong relationship between the sculpture that Philpot produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the evolution of his painting during the same period. Though Greek and Roman mythology had long provided him with a source of subject matter, he now revisited it in the light of a revival of Classicism among a broad range of artists, including Pablo Picasso and other Modernists, whose work he experienced while on an extended stay in Paris. The paintings and sculptures that resulted often have a direct, visceral and tactile quality.

Indeed, Echo and Narcissus is as much about the sense of touch as it is about the sense of sight. It shows the handsome youth, Narcissus, rejecting the advances of the nymph, Echo, and instead falling in love with his own re0ection. The pain of unrequited love is powerfully represented by two physically similar Bgures, in close proximity but separate, one oblivious of the other. Echo’s hand is raised against Narcissus’s back, but is unable to make contact, and instead creates a frozen rhythm. As Philpot’s champion, P G Konody, wrote in a review of his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1932, in this ‘very original’ composition, ‘the forms of the youth are not only re0ected by the mirror [or polished black marble] upon which the torso rests but echoed in plastic repetition’ (Observer, 1 May 1932).

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10: BET WEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION

F R A N K DO B S O N Frank Owen Dobson, RA ARBS PLG (1886-1963) Frank Dobson was the most pioneering British-born sculptor of his generation, who contributed much to the development and promotion of modern sculpture.

He rst made his name in the early 1920s with a number of striking angular carvings. Then, through the 1920s and 30s, he absorbed the in uence of, especially, Aristide Maillol, to evolve his mature style, which is characterised by serene, simpli ed female Head of a Girl Though Frank Dobson made his name as a sculptor of Modernist carvings, he soon gained a reputation for modelling, and his modelled portrait busts – in terracotta, plaster and bronze – became central to his mature practice. They range from the extremely smooth and highly polished bronze of the writer, Osbert Sitwell (1922, Tate), to the expressively handled posthumous bronze of the tea merchant and yachtsman, Sir Thomas Lipton (1953, lost). Among these, are several sensitive portrayals of girls and young women, including those of the artist’s daughter, Ann, and the unidentiBed sitter of the present work.

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195 Head of a Girl Bronze 12 inches high x 12 ½ inches wide x 9 ½ inches deep Provenance: James Butler, RA

nudes, but also exempli ed by many commissioned portrait busts. Bridging Modernist and Classical approaches, he worked equally well in stone, bronze and terracotta, and was increasingly considered alongside Jacob Epstein as a ‘keeper of tradition’.

For a biography of Frank Dobson, please refer to pages 154-155.

That Head of a Girl has survived is thanks to the sculptor, James Butler. During the early 1950s, he attended evening classes at the City and Guilds of London Art School. He recalls that, while he was working in one of its studios, the sitter came up to me … and gave me the bronze head … asking me if it was possible to melt bronze down …

She then went out and left me holding the head … I saw that the head was by Dobson, and couldn’t melt down another sculptor’s work, so I have kept it ever since.

10: BET WEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION

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10: BET WEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION

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196 Reclining Nude Signed and dated 47 Chalk 12 x 18 inches

Frank Dobson as a Draughtsman Drawing plays an important role in the artistic practice of many, perhaps most, sculptors. However, it was particularly intrinsic to that of Frank Dobson. He began as a painter and draughtsman, and, throughout his mature career as a sculptor, his solo shows invariably featured drawings. They were essential to his process of producing a sculpture, while often displaying great aesthetic merit of their own.

In drawing from life, Dobson greatly enjoyed employing chalks and pastels, as can be seen from the present examples. Remaining true to his skills as a modeller, he would, once he had outlined the human form, work the media with his Bngers, in order to create the shadows that suggest its solidity. While his Bnished sculptures often tend to a property of universality, his drawings have immediacy and warmth.

Though Dobson was a persistent and proliBc draughtsman, many of his drawings were destroyed by his widow following his death in 1963, on the grounds that they were explicitly erotic. The art critic, Brian Sewell, helped her clear his studio, and saved what he could. However, as he recalled in the Evening Standard in 1995, for the Bgures engaged in sexual congress, face to face, head to toe and doggy style as explicit as any by his old friend Eric Gill, Mrs Dobson would accept no plea that they were beautiful, no argument that they were Bred by a quality not to be found in the ‘pure essence’ of the torsos that survive, and like a ferociously implacable angel at the Last Judgment, she bent to the business of destruction.

10: BET WEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION

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197 Standing Nude Signed Chalk 20 x 13 inches

10: BET WEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION

DORA GORDINE Dora Gordine, FRBS (1895-1991) The Russian-born sculptor and painter, Dora Gordine, matched her extraordinary life with a body of work that spanned sensitive portrait busts and impressive public commissions. Inspired by the peoples and culture of Southeast Asia from early in her career, she spent ve years living and working in what was then known as British Malaya. Settling in Britain before the Second World War, she soon gained a critical reputation as ‘very possibly becoming the nest woman sculptor in the world’ (Jan Gordon, Observer, 6 November 1938).

In 2005, the leading modern sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro, paid tribute to her art, by describing it as ‘withheld, slowed down, as is the art of Maillol’, and adding that ‘when we place her work against that of the much more successful academic Sculptors of the time it is a million miles better’ (in Sara MacDougall and Rachel Dickson (eds), 2006, page 17).

For a biography of Dora Gordine, please refer to pages 156-157.

198 Dreamer Bronze 20 inches high Exhibited: Leicester Galleries, London, October-November 1945

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10: BET WEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION

The Crowning Glory Following the end of the Second World War, Dora Gordine consolidated her reputation as one of the leading sculptors working in Britain. The variety of commissions that she received during the late 1940s and 1950s is highlighted by the present work.

In 1947, Gordine was asked to produce a sculpture that would act as a trade symbol for Eugène Ltd, a company specialising in hair care products that described itself as ‘perfecters of the permanent wave’. In order to achieve a suitable expression of the company’s aesthetic, she drew on her studies of female temple dancers in Bali that she had made in the mid 1930s, while she was living in British Malaya. The resulting Bgure sits calmly in a cross-legged position while playing elegantly with her hair. It is her hair – arranged in a combination of tresses and top-knot – that is proverbially her ‘crowning glory’.

Eugène Ltd launched this new trade symbol in March 1947, at its stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition, organised by the Daily Mail and held at Olympia, in West Kensington. Its presentation related to a competition, with £3000 worth of prizes, to Bnd the most fashionable hairstyle using the Eugène perm, which was widely publicised in the press, including the company’s own magazine, The Eugène Waver.

199 The Crowning Glory Signed and numbered 2/6 Bronze 20 inches high Exhibited: Leicester Galleries, London, November 1949

Gordine’s bronze sculpture, produced in an edition of six, also became the prototype for 50 gilded plaster models surmounting an advertisement for ‘Registered Eugène Waves’, which were intended to adorn the windows of ladies’ hairdressers. It is said that she reacted negatively to this cheapening of her concept, and it was possibly her desire to reclaim a more digniBed status for the original that led her to include it in her Bfth and last solo show held at the Leicester Galleries in November 1949.

Whoever chose the title, ‘Crowning Glory’, for Gordine’s trade symbol, the name proved a success for Eugène Ltd. By the 1950s, the company was marketing a number of its products under that name, including a cream described as an ‘instant hair glamorizer’.

Eugène Ltd had been founded in 1919 by Eugène Sutter, a Swiss hairdresser and wig stylist, with a fashionable ladies’ salon in London’s West End. Building on earlier techniques for creating a permanent wave, he worked with the Spaniard, Isidoro Calvete, to produce an advanced electrical heating apparatus, which he then patented under his own name. As the company expanded internationally, it became involved in con0icts with others regarding patenting. However, it proved very successful, and continues to 0ourish as Eugène Perma.

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11: C HARLES KNIGHT: in conversation with cotma n Charles Knight developed his creative talent during the late 1910s and early 1920s, at a time in which the art and history of landscape painting in Britain, and especially that in watercolour, was undergoing a re-evaluation. Many artists and critics of the day reacted against the 7ictorian tendency to strengthen watercolour with other media, so that it could compete with oil, but they also reacted against the bravura handling of the succeeding generation of Edwardian Impressionists. Instead, they promoted the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century tradition in which strong linear drawing provided a framework for pure, 0at washes.

Central to this tradition was the Norwich-born artist, John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), and, during the early twentieth century, his work probably received greater attention and was better appreciated than ever before. In the early 1920s, in particular, Cotman featured in a number of publications, including The Norwich School (1920), edited by C Geo6rey Holme and H M Cundall, and was the subject of a major exhibition, held at the National Gallery between April and July 1922.

Among the emerging generation of artists to be a6ected by the example of Cotman, Charles Knight proved especially signiBcant, for he not only displayed the in0uence of Cotman in his early works, but also entered into a conversation with the past master that would last throughout his career.

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Knight probably discovered Cotman early in 1922, while he was a student at Brighton School of Art, in his native Sussex. He is likely to have attended the Cotman exhibition at the National Gallery, in London, and certainly responded enthusiastically to the reproductions of Cotman’s work that appeared in a volume that he borrowed from Charles Morris, his close friend and fellow student (a volume that could well be equated with Holme and Cundall’s The Norwich School). Such experiences would have prepared him for his Brst trip to the Continent, which he made later that year in the company of his mentor, Canon Elliott. In 1922, and again in 1923, he and Elliott travelled from Sussex to Normandy, staying in Rouen and exploring places round about, including some that had been visited and depicted by Cotman on his three tours of the region, made between 1817 and 1820.

Reviewers began to describe Knight’s landscapes as being in ‘the spirit of Cotman’ early in 1925, when he contributed to an exhibition of the Brighton Arts Club, which was held at the Goupil Gallery in London. If anything, this seems to have encouraged Knight in his devotion to Cotman, which he revealed as much in his desire to work in front of his characteristic motifs, as in any attempt to emulate his style. As a result, he made a sketching trip to Wales in the summer of 1925, and would continue to rehearse the Welsh tours of Cotman throughout the 1920s and 30s. In 1934, he visited Norwich to see Cotman’s paintings in the Castle Museum and the Colman Collection.

Then, again following in the footsteps of Cotman, he visited Yorkshire in 1936 and 1939.

After the Second World War, Knight appears to have consciously avoided Cotman’s haunts of Wales and Yorkshire. Instead, he went to Devon and Cornwall, and began to acquaint himself with the landscapes of Scotland. Increasingly, the results of his Scottish travels rehearsed a Romantic urgency that was removed from the restrained work of Cotman, and closer to that of J M W Turner, though the structure of the oils, in particular, continued to reveal his debt to Cotman.

Refreshed by new experiences, Knight was able, in the 1950s, to return to his favourite painting grounds in North Wales and the Wye 7alley. With a 0ush of self-conBdence, he also made forays, not only in Constable Country, on the borders of Essex and Su6olk (1952), but also into the heart of Cotman country, staying at Horstead, north of Norwich (1957).

Though commentators persisted in presenting him as the twentieth-century Cotman, Knight had long grown beyond the elementary lessons of that painter to become a distinct and substantial artistic personality. Admired by his peers and appreciated by the public, he could take his own place in the history of British landscape painting, standing alongside and conversing with the spirit of his great forebear.

The example of Cotman provided Knight with a model of classical clarity, by revealing to him how he might best achieve strong designs in watercolour, with light but precise pencil deBning an outline for the paint. However, it did not restrict the young artist’s progress or individuality, for he understood that Cotman had himself evolved in his approach. While maintaining his strong sense of design, Cotman had moved away from 0at, translucent washes towards a heightened palette and a thicker application of watercolour pigment, closer to oil.

Indeed, it was an oil by Cotman that Knight chose to replicate in 1924, for the second of two copies that he was required to make as a student of the Royal Academy Schools. This was Wherries on the Yare (circa 1808), which was then on show at the National Gallery (though it has since been transferred to the Tate, retitled Wherries on Breydon, and downgraded to an attribution to Cotman). As he gradually established himself as an artist, Knight would employ oil to make his large-scale Cotmaninspired statements, a strategy that seemed to leave him free to use watercolour to make a wide variety of stylistic and technical experiments, often in the open air.

In 1997, the Chris Beetles Gallery hosted ‘… More Than a Touch of Poetry’, an important retrospective exhibition of the work of Charles Knight, organised in conjunction with the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, and Hove Museum and Art Gallery. It was accompanied by this 96-page fully-illustrated catalogue, which included a biographical essay and lists of works shown at leading exhibiting societies.

11: CHARLES KNIGHT

C H A R L E S K N I GHT Charles Knight, ROI 7PRWS (1901-1990) The Sussex landscape painter, Charles Knight, channelled the tradition of English watercolour painting in order to produce his own original contribution.

As a result, he became a pillar of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours and received acclaim, from William Russell Flint, as the ‘star turn’ of the Recording Britain scheme.

For a biography of Charles Knight, please refer to page 158.

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200 The Abbey Mill, Tewkesbury Oil on canvas 19 ½ x 23 inches

The Abbey Mill, Tewkesbury During the summer of 1926, Charles Knight went on his second sketching tour of Denbighshire, in northeast Wales. He also took in the English counties along the Welsh border, staying in Malvern, and painting in Tewkesbury, Ledbury, Worcester and Powick.

While in Tewkesbury, he was attracted by the impressive structure of the Abbey Mill, which had closed only six years earlier. Working in emulation of John Sell Cotman, in whose footsteps he had visited Wales, he painted the mill with great clarity, and so created a memorial to a passing age.

In 1190, monks from Tewkesbury Abbey had constructed a channel between the Avon and the Severn in order to power a mill to grind their grain. The Brst mill survived for 600 years, until it was rebuilt and greatly enlarged in 1793 in order to incorporate four wheels. This building became known as ‘Abel Fletcher’s Mill’ from 1856, following the publication of Dinah Craik’s novel, John Halifax, Gentleman, which is set in a lightly disguised Tewkesbury, and contains among its characters the Quaker tanner, Abel Fletcher. The mill remained in operation until 1920, closing because it could not compete with the nearby Healing’s Flour Mill, which was larger and more modern.

11: CHARLES KNIGHT

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201 Farm at Sunrise Oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

Farm at Sunrise In painting the present work, Charles Knight not only demonstrated his masterly ability to capture e6ects of light; he also employed the backlighting of the dawning sun to emphasise his skill at articulating contrasting forms. Loose, light touches of the brush emphasise the height and the breadth of the trees, while extended horizontal strokes echo the length of the low farm buildings that hug the land on which they stand.

11: CHARLES KNIGHT

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Flint Church Charles Knight produced this watercolour of a quiet corner of a country churchyard during the late 1920s, while his emulation of John Sell Cotman was at its height. The crisp draughtsmanship, the simpliBcation of form and the 0at washes of a heightened palette of pure watercolour can all be traced to Cotman’s own depictions of church interiors and exteriors, and especially those of the years 1807-10.

202 Flint Church Signed on reverse Watercolour on tinted paper 14 x 10 ¾ inches Exhibited: Brighton Arts Club, 1928, No 110; ‘More Than a Touch of Poetry. Landscapes by Charles Knight RWS ROI (1901-1990)’, No 26: Chris Beetles Gallery, London, June 1997; Hove Museum and Art Gallery, July-August 1997

11: CHARLES KNIGHT

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203 Lavardin Signed Oil on canvas; 34 x 38 inches Literature: Michael Brockway, Charles Knight RWS ROI, Leigh-on-Sea: F Lewis, 1952, Catalogue No 58 Lavardin Charles Knight had made his Brst four trips to France in the years 1922-25, with his early mentor, the Reverend Gilbert Elliott (and, in visiting Normandy, had partly followed in the footsteps of John Sell Cotman)*. Then, in 1930, he returned to the country, accompanied by his former teacher and fellow painter, Louis Ginnett. Having trained in Paris, Ginnett could provide even more insights into aspects of French art and life than could Elliott. Knight later reminisced that ‘we often went on sketching holidays together, and through him I acquired a much greater understanding and appreciation of European culture’ (R T Hodges-Paul, ‘Charles Knight 7PRWS ROI’, The Old Water-Colour Society’s Club, vol XXX7I, 1961, page 49).

Knight and Ginnett spent most of their time in the area southwest of Paris, both in Chartres and in towns and villages of the Loir-et-Cher: 7endôme, Montoire-sur-le-Loir and Lavardin. Knight’s exhibits during the following few years demonstrated how much he had gleaned from the experience. In addition to his solo show of watercolours, oils and etchings, held at the Clarence Gallery, Brighton, in November 1932, he exhibited

Exhibited: Brighton Art Gallery, 1931; Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1937, No 184; ‘More Than a Touch of Poetry, Landscapes by Charles Knight RWS ROI (1901-1990)’, No 47: Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, March-May 1997; Chris Beetles Gallery, London, June 1997; Hove Museum and Art Gallery, July-August 1997 several watercolours of these places at the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours. However, the most signiBcant result of the painting trip was probably the present oil of Lavardin, which he showed at Brighton Art Gallery in 1931 and at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1937. While he used watercolour to make a wide variety of stylistic and technical experiments, he reserved oil for his more classical Cotman-inspired statements.

Knight’s almost birds-eye view of Lavardin looks south-westwards across the roofs of the town hall and the Church of Saint-Genest to the ruined Château de Lavardin. Initially built by Solomon of Lavardin in the eleventh century, the château was transformed by the Comtes de 7endôme between the late fourteenth and mid Bfteenth centuries. Having been taken by members of the Catholic League in 1589, during the French Wars of Religion, it was dismantled in 1590 on the order of Henri I7, who was Duc de 7endôme as well as King of France. * For examples of Charles Knight’s landscapes of Chartres and Montoire, please refer to A Century of British Art, volume 1, page 100.

11: CHARLES KNIGHT

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‘During the earlier part of the war the artist kept goats, which his wife milked, a.ording him a subject of which, as it was a daily occurrence, he could make frequent drawings and from them he produced the interesting composition illustrated here.

The radiation of the lines of parallel perspective made by the boarding and the hurdle, counteracted by the reverse lines of the hay-rack, forms the basis of the design, whilst the V-shape of the horns is reiterated by the straps of the dungarees and by the folds of the trousers.

Another version in tempera was exhibited at the RWS in 1942 under the same title.’

(Michael Brockway, Charles Knight RWS ROI, Leigh-on-Sea: F Lewis, 1952, page 73)

204 The Morning Milk Signed Oil on canvas 23 ½ x 19 ¼ inches

Literature: Michael Brockway, Charles Knight RWS ROI, Leigh-on-Sea: F Lewis, 1952, Catalogue No 189, Plate 51 Exhibited: Brighton Art Gallery, 1943; Royal Institute of Oil Painters, at the Royal Academy of Arts, 1945

11: CHARLES KNIGHT

Charles Knight in Scotland Following the end of the Second World War, Charles Knight began to take frequent holidays with the distinguished radiologist and amateur painter, Cecil John Hodson, who had Brst written to him in admiration of his work. Hodson introduced Knight to Scotland, and so revealed to him the landscape that would so strongly colour the character of his later work.

In the summer of 1947, Knight and Hodson travelled to the Isle of Skye, camping on the foreshore of Loch Brittle, and walking in the Cuillins. The stark grandeur of the hills confounded Knight in any of his attempts to depict them with neat outline and the light, 0at washes derived from Cotman. Instead it forced him to

employ more experimental means in order to capture structure and atmosphere accurately. As so often in his later oeuvre, he fused the materials and techniques of drawing and painting, and worked with apparently intuitive 0exibility in brush, pen and pencil on tinted paper.

However, The Cuillins: Isle of Skye and Glen Moriston (showing a view of the Highlands) both exemplify the degree to which the oils that resulted from these Scottish trips tempered such experimentation, and continued to absorb the architectonic qualities of Cotman’s compositions.

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205 Glen Moriston (above) Signed Oil on canvas 24 x 30 inches Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1952, No 223; ‘More Than a Touch of Poetry Landscapes by Charles Knight RWS ROI (1901-1990)’, No 110: Chris Beetles Gallery, London, June 1997; Hove Museum and Art Gallery, July-August 1997

207 The Cuillins: Isle of Skye The Approach from Glen Brittle (opposite below) Signed Oil on canvas 20 x 30 inches Literature: Michael Brockway, Charles Knight RWS ROI, Leigh-on-Sea: F Lewis, 1952, Catalogue No 289 Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1948, No 17

11: CHARLES KNIGHT

206 Salmon Waters, Old Bridge and Rocks, Scotland (above) Signed Pen ink, watercolour and bodycolour on tinted paper 15 x 22 ½ inches Exhibited: ‘More Than a Touch of Poetry, Landscapes by Charles Knight RWS ROI (1901-1990)’, No 85: Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, March-May 1997; Chris Beetles Gallery, London, June 1997

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11: CHARLES KNIGHT

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Penrhyndeudraeth, The Mawddach Valley Charles Knight’s trips to new painting grounds, such as those made to Scotland in the late 1940s, allowed him to see old haunts with fresh eyes, when he returned to them during the 1950s. So, in 1951, he rediscovered the small town of Penrhyndeudraeth, then in Merionethshire (now in Gwynedd), and toured the surrounding area of Snowdonia. Penrhyndeudraeth sits between the rivers Glaslyn and Dwyryd, though the present work may show the Mawddach 7alley, which is about 15 miles to the south. It exempliBes the great freedom that Knight exercised in his later watercolours.

208 Penrhyndeudraeth, The Mawddach Valley (above) Watercolour with pencil and wax 11 x 15 inches Provenance: The Artist’s Studio Exhibited: ‘More Than a Touch of Poetry, Landscapes by Charles Knight RWS ROI (1901-1990)’, No 127: Chris Beetles Gallery, London, June 1997

209 Spring on the Downs (opposite above) Signed Watercolour with pencil and wax 10 ½ x 15 inches Exhibited: ‘More Than a Touch of Poetry, Landscapes by Charles Knight RWS ROI (1901-1990)’, No 129: Chris Beetles Gallery, London, June 1997

Views of the Downs (opposite) Though Charles Knight travelled widely across Britain in search of subjects to paint, he never tired of depicting his home ground around Ditchling, Sussex, near the east end of the South Downs.

He used it as something of an open air laboratory for his technical experiments and, as exempliBed here, produced many vital images, both of its undulating terrain and the skies above it.

210 Sunset, South Downs (opposite below) Watercolour with pencil and wax 11 x 15 ½ inches Provenance: The Artist’s Studio Exhibited: ‘More Than a Touch of Poetry, Landscapes by Charles Knight RWS ROI ( 1901-1990)’, No 105: Chris Beetles Gallery, London, June 1997

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12: NEO-R OMANTICISM In Britain, ‘Neo-Romanticism’ is generally used to characterise a rich, if loose, a'liation of cultural activities that took place during a period of about two decades, from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s, and which centred on the Second World War. However, a number of key Bgures associated with Neo-Romanticism remained true to its sensibilities until the end of their careers, while some other, younger artists long continued to draw inspiration from its achievements. Essentially, it revived the Romantic qualities that lie deep within our native culture, including an instinctive and individualistic association with the spirit of both speciBc places and the wider natural world.

The term ‘Neo-Romantic’ was Brst employed in the British context in January 1935, when the critic, Raymond Mortimer, discussed the photographs of Paul Nash in the article, ‘Nature Imitates Art’, published in The Architectural Review. He associated Nash’s experiments with French Surrealism, and considered both to be participating in a ‘neo-romantic revolt against reason’, which ‘in life … is entirely disastrous’, but ‘in art … explores a new and valid avenue to poetry’ (page 28).

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Seven years later, in March 1942, Mortimer expanded on his understanding of Neo-Romanticism, when he published a review in The New Statesman and Nation of an exhibition at the London Museum entitled ‘New Movements in Art: Contemporary Work in England’. In that review, he attempted to relate a group of major artists, slightly younger than Nash, who did not readily fall into existing schools and ‘isms’, including Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. He stated that ‘their work can be considered the expression of an identiBcation with nature’ (page 208).

The years between the publication of these two articles may perhaps be considered the Brst phase of Neo-Romanticism.

During this phase, painters, photographers and other artists reconsidered and reworked the native tradition of topography.

They employed personal and poetic perspectives that were informed by Continental Modernist idioms, including the forms and colours of Pablo Picasso and André Masson, and the dreamlike qualities of the work of the parallel French Neo-Romantics (notably Christian Bérard, the Berman brothers and Pavel Tchelitchew). However, these perspectives were as often inspired by the British Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including William Blake, Samuel Palmer, J M W Turner and William Wordsworth. With the onset of war, and the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany, the Neo-Romantic approach took on an increasingly nationalistic aspect.

During the war, the Neo-Romanticism of the older generation was accepted as something of a national style. Major commissions came from the Royal Family for Piper to paint Windsor Castle; from the Anglican cleric, Canon Walter Hussey, for Moore and Sutherland to produce work for the Church of St Matthew, Northampton; and more generally from the War Artists Advisory Committee, which was guided by the taste of its chairman, Sir Kenneth Clark.

This generation was also in0uencing many of the younger artists who were establishing studios in London, including Michael Ayrton; Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde; John Craxton and Lucian Freud; and John Minton and Keith 7aughan. Their work characterises a second and somewhat di6erent phase of Neo-Romanticism, in which the anthropomorphic potential of landscape is made more explicit, and the human form more vulnerable, to powerfully expressive ends. This made them successful as illustrators of literature and designers for the theatre, as well as painters. Indeed, Neo-Romanticism in all its phases, like Romanticism before it, was acutely interdisciplinary, with, for instance, such artists as Piper and Ayrton working as both critics and creative writers, and mixing in literary and musical circles.

While the younger artists were especially alive to the anxieties of the Post-War era, engendered by austerity, and intensiBed by the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the Neo-Romantics in general were also able to celebrate the dawning of a new Elizabethan era, and the cultural possibilities that it suggested. Piper, Sutherland, Ayrton and Minton made major contributions to the Festival of Britain, while Piper and Sutherland provided decorations for Coventry Cathedral, rebuilt following wartime bombing to the designs of Basil Spence.

Despite its promotion by such organisations as the Arts Council and the British Council, Neo-Romanticism fell out of fashion as new movements – notably Abstract Expressionism, Hard-Edge Painting and Pop Art – increasingly in0uenced the British cultural scene. However, established Neo-Romantics of both generations, including Piper and Ayrton, continued to work fruitfully within its range. In addition, some younger artists of a more independent turn of mind revealed their clear appreciation of Neo-Romanticism as the latest manifestation of a long native tradition of visionary engagement with landscape.

Consider the cases of Alan Reynolds and Keith Grant, four years apart in age. For a decade, until 1958, Reynolds created intense, uncanny images that seemed to provide the epitome of Neo-Romantic landscape. However, from that point and for the next 50 years, he eliminated mimetic appearance entirely from his art in order to explore underlying structures through geometric abstraction. By contrast, Grant has developed a 0exible approach across an equally long career, by which a precise experience of a particular landscape has ensured the distinctive character of each work – and, in so doing, has sustained the Neo-Romantic impulse.

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JO H N PIPE R John Egerton Christmas Piper, CH LG (1903-1992) From the outset of his career, John Piper proved to be multi-talented, for he earned his living as an art and theatre critic while establishing himself as a painter and stained-glass designer. Though central to the Modern Movement in Britain during the 1930s, he soon moved away from pure abstraction to a personal form of Neo-Romanticism inspired by many aspects of landscape, both native and foreign.

Instrumental in reviewing notions of Englishness, he

wrote British Romantic Artists (1942) and was an ideal choice for involvement in Recording Britain (1940) and as an oScial war artist (1944). Sustaining a radical versatility, his later achievements included a notable series of settings for the operas of Benjamin Britten, as well as impressive bodies of oils, watercolours, murals, prints and illustrations.

For a biography of John Piper, please refer to page 159.

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211 St Thomas Becket, Fair eld, Kent Signed Watercolour with ink and bodycolour 14 x 19 inches

St Thomas Becket, Fair eld, Kent The tiny church of St Thomas Becket stands isolated on Romney Marsh, the village that it served having long since disappeared.

It was originally constructed in the twelfth century of a wooden frame and walls of wattle and daub. Then, in the eighteenth century, the walls were rebuilt in brick, and the interior transformed by a triple-decker pulpit and box pews, all painted in white. John Piper was greatly drawn to this space, which seems to combine the architectural and the organic, and included a watercolour of it in his book on Romney Marsh, which was published as a King Penguin in 1950.

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212 Foliate Heads Signed Watercolour, bodycolour and ink 21 ½ x 28 inches

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Foliate Heads From early in his life, John Piper was attracted to the image of the ‘Green Man’. This symbol of rebirth was central to British folklore and traditional art for many centuries, and often appears in carvings on the ecclesiastical buildings that Piper loved. It was the main inspiration for the ‘foliate heads’, which he began to draw and paint in 1953, and which so pervaded the various aspects of his creativity that it became one of his signature motifs.

The present work is likely to be one of Piper’s earliest essays on the theme, and relates closely to two coloured lithographs, also of pairs of heads, which were produced in 1953 (Nos 83 & 84 in Quality and Experiment: The Prints of John Piper – A Catalogue Raisonné 1932-91, London: Lund Humphries, page 199). Many further prints, of both individual and paired heads, followed. While most were lithographs, others were screenprints (1975) and etchings with screenprint (1983).

Piper also introduced foliate heads into many of his design projects, of which the following examples from across four decades indicate the range. In 1955, two heads appeared on a screen-printed cotton furnishing fabric (for David Whitehead and Sons of Rossendale, Lancashire). In 1964, twelve of them featured in the stained glass panels of a screen (in the Wessex Hotel, Winchester). In 1975, a single head dominated a tapestry (commissioned by Orde Levinson, and executed by Ibenstein Weavers of Dordabis, Namibia). Then again, in 1989, a single head provided the basis for ‘The Green Man Plate’ (for Wedgwood).

Like these many manifestations of Piper’s favourite motif, the present work displays the artist’s delight in exuberant fantasy and his ability to reinterpret an ancient symbol through such Blters as a knowledge of English Romanticism and an experience of working in the theatre.

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213 Bastle House, Doddington, Northumberland Signed and inscribed with title Watercolour, bodycolour and ink 22 ½ x 14 ¾ inches

Bastle House, Doddington, Northumberland In the middle of the village of Doddington, Northumberland, stand the ruins of a once outstanding example of a ‘bastle’ (or ‘bastille’) house, a type of fortiBed tower house, of which there are many examples along the Anglo-Scottish border. The local landowner, Sir Thomas Grey of Chillingham, built it in 1584 as one of several defences against incursions from the Scots.

It remained intact until 1896, when the eastern part collapsed in a gale. Soon after, the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne became involved in preserving its remains. It is now part of a working farm.

John Piper was familiar with Northumberland from at least as early as 1941, when he produced a number of paintings and drawings of the Baroque country house, Seaton Delaval Hall, designed by Sir John 7anburgh. His extensive knowledge of the county is recorded in part by the archive of his photographs (now in the Tate collections), which includes an image of Doddington’s Bastle House. While the photograph includes most of the features that appear in the present watercolour, its lacks any of its atmosphere.

The watercolour emphasises the looming presence of the narrow three-storey tower and the Romantic drama of its setting.

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214 Long Melford Church Signed and numbered from an edition of 275 Lithograph printed in colours 18 x 24 inches Long Melford Church John Piper developed the habit of ‘church crawling’ while young, and by the age of 17 was keeping topographical notebooks that included drawings, photographs and summaries of guidebooks. While he initially focussed on his home county of Surrey, family holidays soon allowed him to widen his attention to take in East Anglia, among other regions of England. The broad experimental artistic practice that he developed ensured that he could record vernacular buildings and landscapes thoroughly and in an appropriate medium or style. From 1923, when he reached the age of 20, those media encompassed various types of printmaking, including, from 1929, lithography. (Lithography is a method of printing based on the immiscibility of oil and water, and traditionally employs stone as a support for the materials.)

In 1936, John Piper formed ‘Contemporary Lithographs Ltd’ with Robert Wellington, who ran the Zwemmer Gallery, in order to publish autolithographs by young artists through the Baynard and Curwen Presses.

Autolithography o6ered a much more direct means of reproduction than photographic processes, and so provided an a6ordable form of artwork for the general public and a ready market for the artist. Piper’s own lithographs, whether intended for this company or elsewhere, as independent print or illustration, demonstrate the full range of the medium’s techniques, including solid lines, quick washes and resists.

In 1964, Piper showcased his mastery of lithography in A Retrospect of Churches, a portfolio of 24 lithographs of English churches that Orde Levinson has called ‘Piper’s masterpiece of printmaking’ (The Prints

Provenance: Edward Atkin, Director of the Cannon Rubber Manufacturers Ltd Literature: Orde Levinson, The Prints of John Piper: Quality and Experiment.

A Catalogue Raisonné 1923-1991, London: Lund Humphries, 2010, Page 148, No 336

of John Piper: Quality and Experiment. A catalogue raisonné 1923-1991, London: Lund Humphries, 2010, page 21). At the same time, it is a celebration of the subject matter with which he is most identiBed, Levinson noting that he ‘is the Brst English artist since Cotman to concentrate on churches and in particular those of England and Wales’ (page 84).

While Piper did not include any Su6olk churches in this portfolio, he had long been aware that the county was famed for its ecclesiastical architecture, and recorded its buildings in a number of paintings, drawings and prints.

The Bfteenth-century Perpendicular Gothic church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, epitomises this rich heritage in its cathedral-like scale and Bne stained glass. In 1966, Piper produced an evocative wraparound cover for a guidebook of the church written by his mentor, the poet, Edmund Blunden, who made his last home in Long Melford. During the same period, the church provided the venue for weekends devoted to the music of J S Bach, which were organised by another of Piper’s friends and collaborators, the Su6olk-born composer, Benjamin Britten.

In 1982, The Cannon Rubber Manufacturers Ltd commissioned Piper to produce the present lithograph of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, in order to mark its ‘happy association’ with the area, it having a production plant at the nearby village of Glemsford. A year later, the company presented one of the edition of lithographs to Holy Trinity, and this remains on display in the church to the present day. One of Piper’s last and largest lithographs, it comprises a summation both of the quality of his art and the grandeur of the building.

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JOHN M I N TON Francis John Minton, RBA LG (1917-1957) John Minton was one of the most signi cant British painters, illustrators and designers of the Post-War period, working in many formats and on a range of scales, from delicate vignettes to monumental canvases.

Central to the development of Neo-Romanticism, he was inspired by Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland, and befriended Michael Ayrton, Keith Vaughan and

the ‘Two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde. Indeed, his charisma and generosity brought him celebrity in bohemian London and made him a highly popular and in uential teacher.

For a biography of John Minton, please refer to pages 160-161.

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The Queen of Sheba John Minton executed this fascinating etching in about 1937, while he was a member of S R Badmin’s class at St John’s Wood Art School, and it survived the artist’s student days by entering Badmin’s collection. Though Minton’s early work was inevitably eclectic, the literary subject, the architectural setting and the technique of this etching all relate in some way to his contemporary paintings. Stylistically, it is very close to the handling of Duncan Grant in his sketchbook drawings, which is perhaps no surprise, as Minton had entered the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group by receiving a prize from 7anessa Bell at the St John’s Wood Sketch Club and visiting her at Charleston Farmhouse. Grant had produced a painting of the Queen of Sheba in 1912 (Tate), though it shows the Biblical monarch deep in conversation with King Solomon rather than travelling by palanquin.

215 The Queen of Sheba S R Badmin has signed, inscribed and dated this below mount: ‘The Queen of Sheba by John Minton. Done in my class at St John’s Wood Art Sch. 1937 approx. S R Badmin RE’ Etching 5 ½ x 7 ¼ inches Provenance: The Estate of Stanley Roy Badmin

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216 The Railway Arms Watercolour, bodycolour, ink and crayon 9 ½ x 6 inches

The Railway Arms Suggestive of a sign for a public house, this watercolour by John Minton combines the best of his work as a painter and graphic artist during the 1940s and early 1950s. In that period, he produced many atmospheric images of the London docklands, as freestanding images, as illustrations for books and periodicals, as designs for book jackets, and as a poster for London Transport. As with the present work, they often contain narrow streets, tall buildings, bridges and cranes. For instance, the oil on canvas, Street and Railway Bridge (1946, Tate), includes a very similar bridge.

It is uncertain if The Railway Arms is topographical or if it was intended as a design for an actual pub sign. While there are, or

were, several public houses in London called The Railway, The Railway Tap and The Railway Tavern, there was only one in the area of the docklands that was called The Railway Arms. This was at 60 Sutton Street, Shadwell, until it was closed in 2001 and demolished in 2014. Minton was certainly an habitué of pubs, though usually those of Soho rather than of the East End. The combination of word and image is also reminiscent of a design for a book jacket, a format that Minton had mastered through the 1940s. However, ‘The Railway Arms’ seems never to have been used as the title of a book.

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CI RCL E OF JOHN M IN TO N

217 The Prostrate Victim I Pen and ink 5 ½ x 8 ¾ inches

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219 The Donkey Herders Pen and ink 5 ½ x 8 ¾ inches

218 The Prostrate Victim II Pen and ink 5 ¾ x 9 inches

A Set of Illustrations These nine powerful narrative illustrations are close in style to the work of John Minton, and were surely produced by an artist within his circle, and possibly by one of the students that he taught at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, the Central School of Arts and Crafts or the Royal College of Art. They exhibit the raw vitality of Minton’s working drawings, and may have resulted from a classroom project. Though the text that they illustrate has yet to be identiBed, they suggest a dark fantasy in which contemporary teenagers have been transported back to a primitive forest inhabited by semi-naked, fuzzy-headed men armed with spears. A number of the images foreground a single teenager, as if he or she is remembering or dreaming the depicted event, and this gives to them an almost psychological depth.

220 The Sunset Glow Pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour 4 ¼ x 7 ¼ inches

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221 The Gathering Warriors Pen and ink 5 ¼ x 8 ½ inches

222 The Woodland Glade Pen and ink 5 ½ x 9 inches

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223 The Horned Helmet Pen and ink 5 ½ x 8 ¾ inches

225 The Icy Wind Pen and ink 5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches

224 The Sacri cial Ceremony Pen and ink 5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches

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MICH A E L AYRTO N Michael Ayrton, RBA (1921-1975) Michael Ayrton was a veritable twentieth-century Renaissance man, whose relatively short career encompassed a wide range of creative achievements.

He was a painter, illustrator, sculptor and stage designer, and also a novelist, poet, critic and broadcaster. His varied output reveals a fascination with mythological subjects, and especially those concerning ight, mazes and mirrors.

For a biography of Michael Ayrton, please refer to pages 162-163.

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The Acrobats Having turned to sculpture in 1951, Michael Ayrton produced an astonishing series of drawings, lithographs and sculptures on the theme of ‘Bgures in balance’ during the period between 1954 and 1958. Many of these – including the present work – were exhibited in a well-received solo show at the Leicester Galleries, in London, in March 1957. Then, in the early 1960s, Ayrton made two prototype bangles, one in gold and the other in bronze, which incorporated pairs of acrobats (the one in gold being acquired by the actress, Elizabeth Taylor).

A highly expressive writer as well as artist, Ayrton explained his fascination with the theme in a monograph that was Brst published in 1962:

More recently, his biographer and step-granddaughter, Justine Hopkins, has suggested sources for these Bgures in movement: He did not use models but drew and sculpted from his prodigious memory and the sketchbooks he had Blled over the years with the antics of Tuscan street urchins and Neapolitan Bsherboys; the 0air of Parisian circus performers and the deft manoeuvres of the Provençal bull-runners. (Michael Ayrton: a biography, London: André Deutsch, 1994, pages 198-199)

The Brst point about the Bgures in balance is their state of tension. They are studies in strung sinew. The second is their articulation, the third their state of equilibrium.

Purely physically these factors excite me, but they also possess for me another relevance. They represent an oblique comment on the human condition – or at least upon my own. They are also ironic, since I myself am an arthritic and can neither bend my permanently rigid back nor, for the most time, move easily. I can achieve no athletic movement. (C P Snow (foreword), Michael Ayrton: Drawings and Sculpture, London: Cory Adams & Mackay, 1962, page 25)

226 The Acrobats Signed and dated ’56 Pencil, watercolour and bodycolour 19 ½ x 13 ½ inches Exhibited: ‘Michael Ayrton: Bronzes and Drawings’, Leicester Galleries, London, March 1957, No 20

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36 227 C P Snow [II] (above) Signed and inscribed ‘for Kingsley/from/Michael April 1964’ and dated 7.4.63 Pencil with pen and ink 16 x 19 ½ inches Provenance: Kingsley Martin

228 C P Snow [I] (below) Signed and dated 30.3.1963 Ink 19 ½ x 25 ½ inches

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C P Snow (opposite) The novelist and chemist, Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow (1905-1980), is best remembered for his series of novels, ‘Strangers and Brothers’, and for The Two Cultures and the Scienti"c Revolution (1959), a lecture that lamented the gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals.

The text of the lecture was published in the magazine, Encounter, in two parts, in June and July 1959, and the August number then contained a set of responses, including one by Michael Ayrton. Ayrton felt that the divorce of the visual arts from mathematics had driven the arts into isolation.

Probably as a result of this meeting of minds, the two men became friends and, in 1962, Snow wrote an introduction to the volume, Michael Ayrton: Drawings and Sculpture, in which he commented that ‘it has always seemed to me that structurally Ayrton’s mental temperament is scientiBc’ (London: Cory Adams & Mackay, 1962, page 9).

Ayrton and Snow were members of the Savile Club, and the club possesses a portrait by Ayrton of Snow, and another by Ayrton of Kingsley Martin, editor of The New Statesman and Nation, with whom they would both dine. Ayrton gave one of the two present drawings of Snow to Martin [229].

229 Kingsley Martin Inscribed with title and dated 3.1.67 Watercolour with pencil; 19 x 15 ½ inches Literature: C H Rolph, Kingsley: The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978, Front Cover

Kingsley Martin (above) The political journalist, Kingsley Martin (1897-1969), was editor of The New Statesman and Nation for 30 years from 1930 to 1960, and did much to make it ‘the 0agship weekly of the left’ by maintaining its loyalty to Labour while creating ‘a valuable forum for dissent’ (Adrian Smith in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Michael Ayrton acknowledged the importance of The New Statesman in the development of his own political consciousness during his teenage years (as Kingsley Martin would recount in his 1968 autobiographical volume, Editor).

Ayrton had certainly met Martin by 7 January 1947, when they appeared together as panellists on the popular BBC Home Service radio programme, The Brains Trust. By the following decade, Ayrton was contributing articles and reviews to The New Statesman. They were also fellow members of the Savile Club, and the club possesses a portrait by Ayrton of Martin.

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MICHA E L Ay RTO N 230 Eroded Silver Signed and dated 2.8.64 Watercolour with bodycolour 15 ½ x 19 inches Provenance: Carter Collection, Johannesburg Exhibited: Athens-Hilton Gallery, Athens, October 1964, No 16

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Eroded Silver The travels in Greece that Michael Ayrton undertook from 1957 not only helped to stimulate his interest in Classical culture, and especially mythology, but also sparked a series of abstracted landscapes that are at once sumptuous and spare. Beginning with a group entitled ‘Cycladics’, he launched into an abundance of formal and technical experimentation in order to capture the essence of Hellenic topography. Many of the works, including the present one, were showcased in Greece itself, at the Athens-Hilton Gallery, in October 1964.

According to Ayrton’s biographer, Justine Hopkins, The increasing abstraction of his Greek landscapes … represent his growing sense of the universality of his imagery – the plastic equivalent of his belief that myth moves in the human mind so that the mind is gradually, imperceptibly, changed as the landscape is modiBed by erosion and 0ood and sun and wind. (a letter, dated 31 August 1996, written to Jacob E Nyenhuis, and quoted by him in his book, Myth and the Creative Process: Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, The Maze Maker, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003, page 224)

However, for Ayrton, erosion may not only have paralleled the universal e6ect of myth on the human mind but also (in a Neo-Romantic example of pathetic fallacy) the personal e6ect of exhaustion on his own body. In 1952, over a decade before he produced Eroded Silver, he made the following, darkly humorous, comment in a letter to his patron, Ben Pomerance: Your concern for my health is well-founded in that I am being gradually worn away by nervous and other non-clinical complaints. So worn am I that Henry Moore has chosen me for Reclining Figure 1580 on the grounds that I resemble a stone inBnitely eroded by the elements … not to fear. I am still ornamental and can be placed against a yew hedge or on any open stretch of lawn (quoted in Justine Hopkins, Michael Ayrton: a biography, London: André Deutsch, 1994, pages 179-180) Eroded Silver shows that, if this relationship between body and eroded stone intensiBed through the ensuing years of Ayrton’s career, it did so with exquisite results, as if the wearing away of matter revealed, and even released, an extremely beautiful spirit.

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A L A N R E YN O L D S Alan Munro Reynolds (1926-2014) For ten years, from 1948 to 1958, Alan Reynolds was supremely successful as a Neo-Romantic landscape painter. He then turned to abstraction and, in 1967, abandoned painting in favour of constructions. For the last 30 years, he made only white reliefs, tonal drawings and woodcuts.

For a biography of Alan Reynolds, please refer to page 164.

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231 A Little Drawing Signed and dated 53 Pen ink and watercolour 5 ½ x 8 inches

A Little Drawing During the early 1950s, Alan Reynolds made landscape sketches in both his native East Anglia and his adoptive Kent, and then returned to his studio to develop them into Bnished drawings and paintings. He explained in the catalogue to his 1953 exhibition at London’s Redfern Gallery that he was interested in reconciling the poetry of nature ‘with the elements of design and composition’.

As a result, he would often combine natural elements with the geometric shapes of buildings in order to create an organic abstracted whole. In the present example, the downward diagonals of domestic roofs knit with the upward reaching curves of trees.

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232 Evening Spring Signed and dated 55 Watercolour with bodycolour 19 ¼ x 11 ¼ inches Provenance: Redfern Gallery, London, February 1956

Evening Spring The present work exempliBes a type of composition to which Alan Reynolds returned frequently during the 1950s. Michael Harrison has described the type as ‘combining landscape and plant studies against twilight skies’ and so ‘setting microcosm against macrocosm’ (Alan Reynolds. The Making of a Concretist Artist, Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2011, page 42). According to Harrison, Reynolds himself made a musical association with the suggestions of dawn and dusk in the song cycle, Liederkreis (opus 39), by the German Romantic composer, Robert Schumann.

The speciBc motif of a tall, umbellifer-type plant, with detaching seed heads, appears among the pages of A Small Romantic Herbal, an album of works from 1950 to 1956, which Reynolds gave as a wedding present to his wife, 7ona, in 1957. The motif has its ultimate expression in Reynolds’ large oil on board, Spring (1955, National Gallery of 7ictoria, Melbourne), which is itself one in the major series of ‘The Four Seasons’, Brst exhibited in the solo show of the same name at the Redfern Gallery in 1956.

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233 Nocturne Quartet Signed, inscribed with title and ‘For Robert and Lillian, with love from Alan, 55’, and dated 1955 Provenance: Robert and Lillian Melville Watercolour with bodycolour 18 x 13 inches

Nocturne Quartet Like Evening Spring [232], the four studies that comprise Nocturne Quartet relate to Reynolds’ large oil on board, Spring (1955, National Gallery of 7ictoria, Melbourne). Despite their diminutive scale, the studies contain much of the strength of the Bnal work in encapsulating the potential of plants on the very verge of bursting into life. Their visionary quality alludes to and vies with the landscapes of both the Romantic painter, Samuel Palmer, and the older Neo-Romantic, Graham Sutherland, both of whom, like Reynolds, lived and worked in Kent.

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AL A N RE yN O L D S

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Forms: Blue, Black and Russet One in the series entitled ‘Forms’, Blue, Black and Russet was produced by Alan Reynolds in the mid 1960s, about a decade after the other three of his works included here. A striking visual statement in itself, it also represents a transitional phase in the artist’s development, between his powerful, passionate Neo-Romantic landscapes and his cool, controlled constructions.

Though clearly abstract, it retains the sophistication of colour and the delicacy of handling of his earlier watercolours, and still feels rooted in observation as well as composition. As such, it exempliBes the signiBcant in0uence on his art of the Swiss-German Modernist, Paul Klee.

234 Forms: Blue, Black and Russet Signed Watercolour and bodycolour 11 ¾ x 10 ¼ inches Provenance: Redfern Gallery, London

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ER NE ST G R E E N WO O D Ernest Greenwood, PRWS (1913-2009) Though the painter and printmaker, Ernest Greenwood, rst established himself with portraits and gure subjects, including murals, he became better known for his gentle Neo-Romantic landscapes, which ‘often have a Palmeresque atmosphere of mystery’ (Alan Windsor (ed), Handbook of Modern British Painting 1900-1980, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992, page 123).

A successful teacher and administrator, he also helped revive the fortunes of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, while he was its President.

For a biography of Ernest Greenwood, please refer to page 165.

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235 Köfels, in Austria Watercolour, bodycolour and ink 15 ½ x 21 inches Exhibited: Possibly the work exhibited at the Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1958, No 845

Köfels, in Austria Köfels lies in the Ötztal 7alley of the Austrian Tyrol. Ernest Greenwood visited the hamlet in or before 1958, the year in which he exhibited an image of it at the Royal Academy of Arts, possibly the very work shown here. It is less a topographical view than a beautifully designed impression, in which the glow of moonlight uniBes a composite of steep-roofed houses, onion-dome-topped churches, high mountains and broad valleys.

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236 St-Just-en-Bas Inscribed with title and dated 23.8 Watercolour, bodycolour and chalk on tinted paper 15 x 21 ½ inches

St-Just-en-Bas The village of St-Just-en-Bas, in Central France, lies between Clermont-Ferrand and Lyon, quite close to the upper reaches of the River Loire. At its highest point stands the late Bfteenth-century church of St Just, the tower of which provides the focus of the present watercolour by Ernest Greenwood. Around it cluster houses and trees in a strongly constructed yet gently articulated composition, suggestive of a synthesis of the work of Paul Cézanne and Samuel Palmer.

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237 The Sluice, Canal du Midi Signed and dated 70 Watercolour, bodycolour and ink 20 ½ x 31 inches Exhibited: Possibly the work exhibited at the Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1972, No 651

The Sluice, Canal-du-Midi The present work, dated 1970, was possibly exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1972. It is one of a series of watercolours and acrylic paintings that resulted from one or more working cruises that Ernest Greenwood took with his artist wife on the Canal du Midi, in Southwest France.

Much later, in October 1990, the artist published an article in the magazine, Leisure Painter, in which he gave a tutorial on producing Canal du Midi, another of the works in the series. In so doing, he shared a number of insights into his approach. He explained that, my aim … was to achieve as far as possible (a) a varied and rich tonality, (b) the preservation of draughtsmanship and (c) a structured design … As topographical painting never interested me, I began working exclusively from

drawings rather than sketching and completing a painting on location. This method of working provided more scope for invention and a greater opportunity for the rearrangement of selected material …

On the Canal du Midi … the vessel moved slowly, at a walking pace, through lovely countryside which enabled me to observe and record from a moving, rather than a stationary position. This helped to give to some sketches an immediacy, a shorthand, which helped to record only essentials. One of these small sketches, here illustrated, formed the basic material for one of a series of ten large paintings upon which I worked for more than two years.

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KEITH G R A N T Keith Frederick Grant (born 1930) One of the greatest living British landscape painters, Keith Grant has travelled extensively, and has confronted the elements in order to produce extraordinary, resonant images of nature, especially in the north. Recently, he has preferred to recollect his

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experiences in the tranquility of his studio in Norway, and work imaginatively to produce an exciting series of what he calls ‘autobiographical’ paintings.

For a biography of Keith Grant, please refer to pages 166-167.

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The Dorset Mural Dorset has had a particular resonance for Keith Grant since the late 1950s, while he was a student at the Royal College of Art. He was drawn to the county as a result of reading Jacquetta Hawkes’ A Land and of looking at the work of Paul Nash, both of which conBrmed his passion for landscape, and especially landscape in which natural and human history intersect. Works with Dorset subjects were showcased at the New Art Centre, the Belgravia gallery run by Madeleine Ponsonby and Carol Winnery, and especially at his Brst solo show, held there in February 1960.

The Dorset Mural was generated by Keith in his desire to produce a composition on a large-scale, possibly in emulation of a tapestry.

He gave the resulting painting to Carol and her husband-to-be, the artist, John Hubbard, and they hung it in their house near Bridport, in west Dorset. Some years later, the Hubbards gave it to their friend, John Sainsbury, and it then hung in Basingstoke, at the regional headquarters of J Sainsbury plc. Its acquisition by the Chris Beetles Gallery provided Keith with the opportunity to return it to its pristine state.

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238 The Dorset Mural Signed and dated ‘Keith Grant 1959/2019/Pascale Oakley’ Oil on canvas 97 x 162 inches In 2019, Keith Grant received studio assistance from Pascale Oakley in returning The Dorset Mural to its pristine state.

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K E I TH G RA N T

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239 Roman Wall, Verulamium Signed Signed and inscribed with title and ‘Royal College of Art’ on reverse Oil on canvas 27 x 35 ¼ inches Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1959, No 462; New Art Centre, London, 1959

Roman Wall, Verulamium While Keith Grant was studying at the Royal College of Art, between 1955-58, he responded strongly to such Neo-Romantic painters as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. He was not only in0uenced by their styles, but also enthused by their interests, such as their fascination with the evocative historical traces of mankind in the British landscape. Additionally inspired by Jacquetta Hawkes’s highly original geological and archaeological history, A Land (1951), he visited Roman remains and Iron Age hill forts, and wrote a well-received thesis, entitled ‘Myths, Monuments and Men’.

Among the remains that Keith Grant visited were those of the Roman city of 7erulamium, in St Albans, Hertfordshire. His visits resulted in both a group of landscape paintings and a mural for the 7erulamium Museum, depicting artefacts recovered from archaeological excavations. Unfortunately, the mural was dismantled and destroyed in about 1958, following a change of

director at the museum, and even Keith himself has only partial photographic evidence of its appearance. However, the landscapes survive and well demonstrate his development, as is evidenced by the present work.

Roman Wall, Verulamium resulted from a sketching outing that Keith Grant made with his fellow student, Derek Hyatt, and was painted very early in 1959. Keith has written that ‘I am very fond of this particular painting since it marked a deBnitive progression of style’ (in an album of images of his early work known as the ‘Cathedral News Cuttings Book’). That progression of style was in part achieved through his engagement with the paintings of Paul Nash, and especially those that combine solid form and deep perspective with a strong sense of atmosphere, such as The Shore (1923, Leeds Art Gallery) and Pillar and Moon (1932-42, Tate).

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S H A N D H U TCHI S O N Shand Campbell Hutchison, SSA (1920-2015) Shand Hutchison was a leading Scottish artist and art educator of the second half of the twentieth century.

His paintings combined his intimate experience of the landscapes of the Lothians and Berwickshire with the in uence of such signi cant English Neo-Romantics as Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash.

For a biography of Shand Hutchison, please refer to page 168.

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240 Secret of the High Cli Signed and dated ’58 Signed, inscribed with title and ‘exhibited Royal Scottish Academy 1958’, and dated ’58 on reverse Oil on canvas 20 x 38 ½ inches Exhibited: Royal Scottish Academy, 1958

Detail of 240

13: R OWL AND EMETT’S CARTOONS FOR PUNC H Rowland Emett is perhaps best remembered for transforming the delicate inventions of his imagination into three-dimensional, large-scale, fully-working machines. Following the commission to design a railway for the Festival of Britain’s Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park in 1951, he became increasingly involved in constructing such contraptions by working at a blacksmith’s forge near his Sussex home, and on more complex projects with teams of assistants. The results proved highly popular, both on Blm – in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) – and in public settings.

This popularity culminated in 1988 in an exhibition, originally devised by the Chris Beetles Gallery, in which several machines were shown at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The appeal of these machines was broad and manifold, for they elicited immediate delight from a wide general audience of adults and children, while also attracting the attention of those with a more serious interest in both the arts and the sciences (and not long after C P Snow had lamented the gulf between these ‘two cultures’). They may also be considered to constitute one extreme of the range of kinetic sculpture, a medium that came to the fore, both nationally and internationally, in the period following the Second World War. Indeed, Emett himself described them as ‘Gothick-Kinetic’ in his entry in Who’s Who.

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The present group of cartoons appeared in Punch between 1942 and 1951. As a result, they do much to chart the development of Emett’s imagination, preoccupations and style during the decade that led up to his beginning to make machines. The earliest of these cartoons were produced while he was engaged in war work, combining his artistic and technical skills by leading a team of draughtsmen to design elements of Frank Whittle’s jet engine for its use in the Gloster Meteor. The later ones were drawn while he was establishing himself as an artist and illustrator, and his cartoons were appearing regularly, Brst in periodicals and then in collections published by Faber & Faber.

The world that Emett presents in these cartoons is gentle and genteel, and would already have looked old-fashioned in the 1940s. It is more redolent of a time before the First World War, and possibly founded on memories of the artist’s own childhood.

The polite Bgures who inhabit this world tend to wear Edwardian

dress, reside in neat villas and lead sedate lives, doing their best to accommodate change. Into this world are introduced surprising, sometimes alarming elements, usually, though not always, of a vehicular character. In war-time, these may indicate an alien, if allied, in0uence, such as a Wild West locomotive (complete with ‘Red Indians’) [243] or a Mississippi show boat [244]. Outside of it they may suggest progress, though progress that is rarely, if ever, straightforward. For instance, solar power is harnessed by the most basic of (former) steam engines [248], and a forklift truck is accepted as the latest family runabout [247]. The antiquarian nature of much of Emett’s engineering may link him to Neo-Romanticism; the good-humoured determination of those who operate it relate them to the heroes of the Ealing Comedies.

Inevitably, Emett calls to mind the work of William Heath Robinson*, and he was undoubtedly in0uenced by it. It is clear to see that both artists devised absurdly complex machines and set them in similar, quintessentially English, contexts. Nevertheless, they are, if anything, the obverse of each other. Heath Robinson delineated his inventions with such detailed exactitude that his drawings convince the observer that they would work – but they don’t.

Whereas, Emett elaborated his inventions with so much apparently extraneous decoration that they look as if they wouldn’t work – but they do. Furthermore, when Robinson’s drawings were translated into three dimensions, as for the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition of 1934, the results were cumbersome, charmless, even ugly. Whereas, Emett’s machines comprise the logical conclusion of the original idea, and constitute poetry in motion. Emett was more practical and more worldly than Robinson, and it was not for nothing that he had patented inventions from the age of fourteen. Likewise, beneath its mild appearance, his humour could be more piercingly satirical, even acerbic, especially when targeted at bureaucracy or technology. He engaged signiBcantly with the modern world, and was well placed to provide a comic commentary upon it. * For a work by William Heath Robinson, and for information about him, please refer to A Century of British Art, volume 1, pages 165 & 224.

ROW L A N D E ME T T Frederick Rowland Emett, OBE (1906-1990) Rowland Emett established himself as the creator of elegant and whimsical cartoons during the late 1930s, while working as an industrial draughtsman. In 1951, he reached a wider public with his designs for the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway, which was sited at Battersea Park during the Festival of Britain.

Gradually, he converted more of his illustrations into increasingly complex three-dimensional machines.

Both drawings and inventions helped cheer a nation fed up with years of austerity.

For a biography of Rowland Emett, please refer to page 169.

In 1988, the Chris Beetles Gallery mounted ‘Rowland Emett: From “Punch” to “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” and beyond’, a major retrospective exhibition that travelled to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, where it was augmented by a number of the machines. It was accompanied by this 108-page fully-illustrated catalogue, which included a biographical essay.

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High time they did something about a bath-chair man-power pool ...

At a sedate British seaside resort, elderly gentlemen are transported uphill in a train of Bath chairs, a forerunner of the invalid carriage often seen at spas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rowland Emett’s ingenious idea of linking them in trains provides one solution to the reduction in size of the

241 High time they did something about a bath-chair man-power pool ...

Signed Inscribed with title and publishing details on mount Pen ink and watercolour 9 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches Illustrated: Punch, 2 December 1942, Page 462 Exhibited: ‘Marvellous Machines: The Wonderful World of Rowland Emett’, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, May-September 2014; ‘The Magical Machines of Rowland Emett’, Ditchling Museum, May-September 2015

242 ... And there’s just one slight formality – I gather you are rather expected to do the lawns, topiary work and kitchen gardens up at the hall Signed Inscribed with title below mount Pen ink and watercolour 7 ½ x 9 ½ inches Illustrated: Punch, 28 February 1945 Exhibited: ‘The Magical Machines of Rowland Emett’, Ditchling Museum, May-September 2015

able-bodied male civilian workforce during the Second World War. The cartoon, … And there’s just one slight formality … [242] similarly alludes to the ‘servant problem’, and especially the sta'ng of large country estates, during the war.

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243 ... Something to do with Lease-Lend, I expect ...

Signed Pen ink and watercolour 9 ¼ x 10 ½ inches Illustrated: Punch, 31 March 1943, Page 262; Sidings, & suchlike. explored by Emett, London: Faber & Faber, 1946 [unpaginated]; The Early Morning Milk Train. The Cream of Emett Railway Drawings, London: John Murray, 1976 [unpaginated]

American In uence in the United Kingdom during the Second World War Providing two glorious variations on the stereotypical British view of Americans, these cartoons were published soon after the United States had entered the western campaign of the Second World War in November 1942.

The caption of the Brst cartoon mentions the Lend-Lease policy, enacted in 1941, under which the United States supplied the United Kingdom and other allied nations with food, oil and equipment, including weapons. Though it did supply railway locomotives, they went mainly to the Soviet Union. The cartoon

suggests that, had they come to the UK, they might have looked like something straight out of a Western, complete with marauding ‘Red Indians’ disturbing the peace of Bishops Snoring.

After a lull, the Western Blm genre had seen something of a revival in 1939, with major studio productions that included Cecil B De Mille’s Union Paci"c, which concerned the building of the transcontinental railroad. The Blm and the posters that advertised it may have directly inspired Rowland Emett to produce this cartoon.

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244 ... Coming over to entertain the American troops, or something ...

Signed Pen and ink 10 x 12 ½ inches Illustrated: Punch, 22 September 1943, Page 246; Sidings, & suchlike. explored by Emett, London: Faber & Faber, 1946 [unpaginated]; Alarms & Excursions & other Transports trans"xed by Emett, London: John Murray, 1977, [unpaginated]

The second cartoon relates to the United Service Organizations Inc, which was founded in 1941 to provide live entertainment and other services to United States troops and their families.

The Brst units to provide such ‘Camp Shows’ to troops stationed in the United Kingdom arrived in April 1942. The cartoon imagines them arriving on a ‘Show Boat’, one of the 0oating theatres that frequented American rivers, and especially the Mississippi and Ohio, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The idea of the show boat had been popularised by

Edna Ferber’s novel, Show Boat (1926), and even more by Kern and Hammerstein’s Broadway musical, which was based on the novel and had the same title (1927). The Brst London production of the musical was mounted at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1928, with a cast that included Paul Robeson as Joe, a part that had been written for him, but which he had not been available to perform in New York. He also appeared in the Brst full Blm version of the musical, which was directed by James Whale and released in 1936.

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245 And THAT’S said to be the most painted village in England (above) Signed Inscribed with title below mount Pen and ink 10 x 11 inches Illustrated: Punch, 10 July 1946, Page 34; Rowland Emett, Home Rails Preferred, London: Faber & Faber, 1947; Russell Brockbank (ed), Motoring Through Punch, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970, Page 60; Alarms & Excursions and other Transports trans"xed by Emett, London: John Murray, 1977 Exhibited: ‘Marvellous Machines: The Wonderful World of Rowland Emett’, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, May-September 2014

246 Some say it’s haunted by the First Earl AND the Ninth Earl ... I wonder how they’d get on together ... ? (opposite) Signed Inscribed with title below mount Pen and ink 18 x 13 inches Illustrated: Punch, Almanack for 1949, 1 November 1948, Page 24; Alarms & Excursions and other Transports trans"xed by Emett, London: John Murray, 1977

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247 Any more for the Roman villa ...?

Signed Inscribed with title below mount Pen and ink 12 ¼ x 14 inches Illustrated: Punch, 5 April 1950, Page 376; Rowland Emett, The Forgotten Tramcar (and other drawings), London: Faber & Faber, 1952; The Best Cartoons from Punch, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952, [unpaginated]; Alarms & Excursions and other Transports trans"xed by Emett, London: John Murray, 1977 Exhibited: ‘Marvellous Machines: The Wonderful World of Rowland Emett’, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, May-September 2014

Any more for the Roman villa … ? (above) The ballista was an ancient missile weapon that projected bolts or stones. From the late nineteenth century, and more successfully the early twentieth century, experimental archaeologists attempted to reconstruct such weapons as accurately as possible, and were aided in their endeavours by Bnds on excavated military sites.

The mobile type envisaged in the present cartoon, which was drawn by horses or mules, was known as a carroballista. It is, by any reckoning, a particularly large example, but then it does need to be able to launch humans and transport them to the Roman villa on the distant hill!

Annals of a Branch Line No 11: Example of Fuel-Economy System in Operation (opposite) Though the machines of Rowland Emett are always elegantly absurd, they are often grounded in scientiBc fact and based on advances in engineering. So, his solar-powered railway engine, Sun God, postdates by 37 years the Brst entire solar engine system, which was patented in 1912 by the American inventor, Frank Schuman. Developed with the help of the British physicist, Charles 7ernon Boys, it did involve the use of mirrors re0ecting light onto water. However, the Brst fully solar-powered train was tested only in 2017, by the Byron Bay Railroad Company, in New South Wales, Australia.

Emett’s drawing is equally suggestive of the e6ects of a heatwave, with his characteristic moustachioed men lounging languorously on the beach. The last record-breaking heatwave in the United Kingdom had been in July 1921, when Central England was at its warmest since 1852. The next would be in July 1976, when Cheltenham would reach 39.5ºC.

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248 Annals of a Branch Line No 11 Example of Fuel-Economy System in Operation Signed Inscribed with title below mount Pen and ink 12 x 16 inches Illustrated: Punch, 8 June 1949, Page 623

Exhibited: ‘Marvellous Machines: The Wonderful World of Rowland Emett’, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, May-September 2014; ‘The Magical Machines of Rowland Emett’, Ditchling Museum, 2 May-6 September 2015; ‘The Marvellous Mechanical Museum’, Compton 7erney, June-September 2018; ‘Comedy and Commentary’, Mottisfont, January-April 2020

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249 The Train Set Signed Pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour 9 x 10 ½ inches Illustrated: Punch, 20 November 1950, Page 36; Rowland Emett, The Forgotten Tramcar (and other drawings), London: Faber & Faber, 1952 Exhibited: ‘Rowland Emett. From Punch to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and Beyond’, Chris Beetles Gallery, 1988, No 51

The Train Set The present cartoon emphasises the natural origin of the organic type of abstract sculpture, best known through the work of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. It does so by showing such sculpture in use as a landscape setting for a train set, the gentle pastime of two penniless avant-garde artists.

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251 The Long-Playing Record (above) Signed Pen ink and watercolour 10 x 12 inches Illustrated: Punch, 29 November 1950, Page 514

250 Ordered a new car six years ago, and it’s just arrived.

Not quite the model I speci ed ... (opposite below) Signed and inscribed with title Pen and ink with bodycolour 11 x 12 ¾ inches Illustrated: Punch, 25 October 1950, Page 396; Rowland Emett, The Forgotten Tramcar (and other drawings), London: Faber & Faber, 1952; The Best Cartoons from Punch, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952, [unpaginated]; Alarms & Excursions and other Transports trans"xed by Emett, London: John Murray, 1977 Exhibited: ‘Marvellous Machines: The Wonderful World of Rowland Emett’, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, May-September 2014

The Long-Playing Record (above) The Long-playing record, or LP, was introduced by the American record label, Columbia, in 1948, two years before the publication of the present cartoon. Its speed of 33 1/3 revolutions per minute initially allowed a playing time of 23 minutes per side for a 12-inch disc, 18 minutes greater than the 5 minute playing time of records with the speed of 78 rpm. This was particularly useful for the recording of longer Classical works, such as operas and symphonies, the unity of which was easily spoiled by the constant need to turn or change each disc. However, as this cartoon suggests, it also allowed the listener a greater opportunity to fall asleep while the music was playing.

Ordered a new car six years ago, and it’s just arrived.

Not quite the model I speci ed ... (opposite below) Though forerunners of the forklift truck were developed in the United States before the First World War, forklift trucks were only used regularly within British industry following the Second World War. Coventry Climax produced the Brst British forklift truck in 1946, four years before the publication of the present cartoon, which contrasts a truck’s modernity with the old-fashioned lifestyle of its owner. Such elements of health and safety as overhead guards and backrests were only introduced during the 1950s.

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252 The Palace of Culture III. The Hothouse of British Humour Signed Pen ink and watercolour 17 x 13 inches Illustrated: Punch Festival, 30 April 1951, ‘Part I – The Bouverie Street Exhibition’

The Palace of Culture III. The Hothouse of British Humour The present work was published on 30 April 1951 in ‘The Bouverie Street Exhibition’, the Brst of three issues that Punch devoted to celebrating and satirising the Festival of Britain.

At the time, the o'ces of Punch were based in Bouverie Street, o6 Fleet Street, in the City of London.

The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition that marked the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851. It promoted British achievements in the arts and sciences, and provided an opportunity for relief and recovery from the protracted e6ects of the Second World War. In retrospect, it could also be seen as ushering in the ‘New Elizabethan Age’, for, though King George 7I was well enough to open the festival in May 1951, he died in the following February. London’s South Bank provided the focus for the festival, though events took place elsewhere in London and across the United Kingdom. Rowland Emett himself had designed the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway for the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park.

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The use in Punch of the term ‘The Palace of Culture’ suggests a mocking link between the manifestations of the Festival of Britain and those Palaces of Culture that had been constructed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. In so doing, it picked up on the political division that the festival caused, it being associated

with the governing Labour Party and opposed by the Conservative Party. However, the cartoons that came under the heading of ‘The Palace of Culture’ were essentially benign in their characterisation of aspects of British creativity.

Emett’s Gothic ‘Hothouse of British Humour’ just manages to contain a burgeoning chestnut tree, within the branches of which nest familiar comic tropes, charmingly portrayed. These range from a woman lying down on a psychiatrist’s couch to a man about to walk into a manhole, and are surmounted by an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman hanging on the horns of a dilemma.

More speciBc humorous characters – such as Mr Pickwick, Mr Toad and Three Men in a Boat – appeared in Norman Mansbridge’s ‘The Library of British Literature’, while the satirical paintings of William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson are touched on by Ronald Searle in ‘The Panorama of British Painting’.

Below: A postcard of ‘Wild Goose’, one of the three trains that Rowland Emett created for the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway, Festival Gardens, Battersea Park, London, 1951

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14: PIETR O ANNIGONI: an italian artist in l ondon The Italian artist, Pietro Annigoni, developed a strong bond with Britain over a period of two decades, from 1949 to 1971. It was there that he Brst established an international reputation, and, having done so, maintained a high proBle, especially as a portraitist, of society beauties, of the great and the good, and ultimately of members of the Royal Family, including Queen Elizabeth II herself.

Living in London for six months a year, he kept a studio, gained English friends and pupils, and improved in his ability to speak the English language (though preferring to communicate in French with his educated sitters). While he remained true to his identity as an Italian artist working in the Old Master tradition, he became very much part of the British art scene, and, if dividing critical and public opinion, was praised by a number of Royal Academicians, including Sir Alfred Munnings. In addition, elements of his work may be considered to be almost Neo-Romantic, a signiBcant strain in British art at the time.

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While living in Florence in 1948, Annigoni received a visit from his old friend, Dimitri Kratschko6, a Bulgarian artist who was based in England. Kratschko6 had been trying to persuade Annigoni to try his luck in Britain for about a decade and, on this trip, he Bnally succeeded in doing so. As a result, Annigoni travelled to London in March 1949, taking with him ‘a portfolio of drawings, many photographs of paintings, several art publications containing reviews of [his] work, and three paintings which, on Dimitri’s advice, [he] was to submit to the Royal Academy’ (Pietro Annigoni, An Artist’s Life, London: W H Allen, 1977, page 62).

For the following four weeks, Annigoni stayed with Kratschko6 in Swiss Cottage and, after submitting his paintings to the Royal Academy, he visited the major public galleries and museums. He then began to produce a series of ink drawings of places in the capital [254-255]. Once he had completed 15 drawings to his satisfaction, he and Kratschko6 visited Bond Street in order to interest art dealers in the results, but without success. He then made use of three letters of introduction from the shoe designer, Salvatore Ferragamo, one of which brought him into contact with Louis Israel, Ferragamo’s representative in London. In turn, Israel introduced him to the public relations expert, Mark Neven du Mont, and both Israel and du Mont gave him advice and assistance.

Though Annigoni went back to Italy, Israel and du Mont kept him informed of the positive reception of his exhibits at the Royal Academy, particularly a self-portrait, which was voted Picture of the Year. They urged him to return to London and, when he did so, they organised a party in his honour at du Mont’s house. The guests, including critics and dealers, were invited to look afresh at the drawings of London that had earlier been dismissed. In the light of Annigoni’s triumph at the Royal Academy, they appreciated them more fully, and a representative of Wildenstein & Co even o6ered the artist his Brst solo show outside of Italy, to take place in 1950. Du Mont also introduced him to Betty Howard, and in the autumn Annigoni made his third trip to London in order to paint her and to draw her mother. Until then, his reputation as a portraitist had been based on his images of men. Now he gained the conBdence to paint further portraits of women, as well as men, and these began to be shown at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Annigoni made his fourth visit to London in May to June 1950, mainly to attend his show at Wildenstein. It brought him several

commissions, including one from the sculptor, Faridah Forbes, to paint her daughter, Juanita. Juanita would become one of his most important models, and sit for him for three further paintings.

In the following year, he was back in the city to fulBl a major commission from the Royal College of Physicians to paint its retiring President, Lord Moran, who had been personal physician to Winston Churchill. In 1952, he held a solo show at Thomas Agnew & Sons (a second following there in 1956).

In April 1954, Wildenstein brought to London Annigoni’s Brst French solo show, which had been held at its Paris premises late in 1953. It proved a resounding success with both the critics and the public, and crowds gathered outside the Bond Street gallery to look at whichever painting was placed in the window. Of the commissions that resulted from the exhibition, much the most signiBcant was that from the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers to paint a portrait of the Queen.

Queen Elizabeth II already knew and admired Annigoni’s work, and agreed to sit for him, granting him 15 sittings, which, though fewer than he would have liked, were far greater a number than she had given for any previous portrait. In the event, she granted him a sixteenth. They took place in the Yellow Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace between October 1954 and February 1955, and sitter and artist developed a rapport, Annigoni noting in his diary entry for 1 December 1954 that the Queen was ‘kind, natural and never aloof’. During the progress of the portrait, members of the Royal Household made encouraging comments and, when it was completed, the Queen and others of the Royal Family expressed their great pleasure in it.

The three-quarter length portrait shows the Queen dressed in the robe of the Order of the Garter, standing serenely, high above a distant landscape. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1954, it ensured that the Summer Exhibition received its highest attendance in 50 years. Inevitably, it also brought many more portrait commissions, almost all of which Annigoni chose to refuse. Aside from his subsequent portraits of members of the Royal Family, commissions of English sitters that he did accept included, most notably, the ballerina, Margot Fonteyn (1955), and the actor and singer, Julie Andrews (1958). He portrayed the latter in the costume and character of Eliza Doolittle from Lerner and Loewe’s musical, My Fair Lady, a role that she was then currently performing in its Brst London production at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

In 1956, Annigoni painted a portrait of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, for the Fishmongers’ Company, as a pendant to that of the Queen, and, as before, he was given use of the Yellow Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace as a studio. He also began a portrait of Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, but, though they got on very well, it was more di'cult to accomplish.

The Brst sittings took place in Autumn 1956 at Clarence House, with later ones being held in Spring 1957 at the artist’s studio at 59 South Edwardes Square, Kensington. Both portraits proved somewhat controversial when Brst exhibited, that of the Duke being shown at the Royal Academy in 1957, and that of the Princess at Agnew’s in 1958. The notoriety of the latter was partly due to revelations in the press that Georgina Moore, a nude performer at the Windmill Theatre, had acted as a stand-in for the Princess during the later stages of the portrait’s development.

14: PIETRO ANNIGONI

At about this time, Annigoni also created controversy by attacking the National Gallery for its over-cleaning of works in its collection.

In 1956, he wrote a letter on the subject to The Times, while, Bve years later, he became so enraged that he expressed his opinions more violently. Assisted by a friend, he daubed slogans on both the west door of the gallery and the doorstep of the home of its Director, Sir Philip Hendy.

In the early 1960s, Annigoni painted a second portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh (1962, commissioned by the Automobile Association), and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother (1963, commissioned by the University of London). While developing a good degree of understanding with each member of the Royal Family that he painted, he admitted in his autobiography that he ‘warmed most to her’ (page 141). Also, in 1965, as one of a series of portraits for the cover of the American magazine, Time, he portrayed the British Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson. During a single sitting of only an hour’s duration, he found the politician amiable and helpful.

A second commission for a portrait of the Queen, made in 1967, may be considered to mark the culmination of Annigoni’s years in London. On this occasion it was made on behalf of the National Portrait Gallery by its then Director, Roy Strong, who secured funding for it from the art dealer, Hugh Leggatt. It was mainly produced during two periods of sittings in the Yellow Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, in February and October 1969, though Annigoni also worked on it in Florence in the intervening months. The result was shown at a preview at the National Portrait Gallery on 25 February 1970, and, though it divided critical opinion, the Queen, Leggatt and Strong were all pleased. It is startlingly, hauntingly spare and shows the Queen, dressed in the mantle of the Order of the British Empire, standing against a dark sky and a 0at, featureless landscape or seascape.

It is at once a highly striking o'cial portrait of the British monarch and a memorable example of Annigoni’s Brm artistic vision.

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PI E TRO AN N I GO N I Pietro Annigoni, RP (1910-1988) The Italian artist, Pietro Annigoni, worked with supreme skill in the Old Master tradition, as draughtsman, painter, engraver, and occasional sculptor.

Among a broad range of subjects, including religious themes, he produced many self-portraits, which charted his development and essayed his skills. Having decided, after the Second World War, that the British would be particularly sympathetic to his approach to art, he became world famous, in 1955, when he painted Queen Elizabeth II. For a biography of Pietro Annigoni, please refer to page 170.

253 Crowd Signed and signed with monogram, inscribed ‘London’ and dated ‘XLIX’ Watercolour; 13 ½ x 20 ¾ inches Watercolour of an interior on reverse

Crowd Pietro Annigoni’s earliest exhibits at the Royal Academy of Arts in London include imaginative subjects with such titles as Grief (RA 1949) and The Age of Wrath (RA 1951). Either title would well suit the present watercolour, which is at once dynamic and disturbing. It presents a contrast between a motionless man, who stares down at the body of a woman on the ground, and, opposite him, a crowd writhing in reaction. The remarkable composition, comparable in power to the drawings and etchings of Francisco Goya, suggests a domestic argument that has got out of hand.

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‘[An old friend] Dimitri [Kratschko. ] had little di culty in persuading me that I must produce a series of impressions of London scenes, in ink and colour washes, which, he said, would appeal immediately to the great British public and, it followed, to the art dealers who would soon be vying with each other to show my work in their galleries …

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254 The Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath Signed and signed with monogram, inscribed ‘London’ and dated ‘XLIX’ Watercolour 13 x 19 inches

The Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath This panoramic view of Hampstead Heath looks eastwards from Heath Street, and takes in the 7ale of Health, to the left, and the Old Pound, to the right.

The 7ale of Health only gained that name from 1801. A century earlier it was a stagnant bog known as Gangmoor, and from the 1720s it was known as Hatch’s Bottom, after the harness maker, Samuel Hatch, who built a cottage and workshop there. Once the bog was drained and the pond enlarged by the Hampstead Water Company in 1777, the area supported both light industry and working-class inhabitants. If the change of name to the ‘7ale of Health’ in 1801 was intended to make the area seem more appealing, then it succeeded, as it led to the construction of more substantial dwellings and attracted a greater number of middle-class residents, including the Romantic poet and essayist, James Leigh Hunt, and members of his circle. By the turn of the century, the 7ale of Health contained 53 houses and two unsuccessful hotels, and also hosted tea gardens and fairground

attractions. During the early twentieth century, it became home to a number of writers, while artists, including Stanley Spencer and William Coldstream, made use of the studios in one of the former hotels. About a decade or so after Pietro Annigoni made the present drawing, in 1949, the hotels were demolished and replaced by blocks of 0ats. Little else has changed, and the 7ale retains its village-like atmosphere.

There has been an animal pound in Hampstead since at least the seventeenth century. The latest structure, situated between the 7ale of Health and Whitestone Pond, was built in 1787. During the early nineteenth century, the pound was used to hold pigs, which some local inhabitants illegally took to the heath to root about for food. By the 1880s, it was no longer in use, and the Metropolitan Board of Works, which became responsible for Hampstead Heath in that decade, discussed the idea of demolishing it and replacing it with a chalet and a urinal. However, though empty, it stands to this day.

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Together we tramped from one end of London to the other, from Hampstead Heath to Lambeth, from Chelsea to the Pool of London. I worked like a demon, excited by the fantastic variety – superb parks and squalid slums, magni"cent buildings, and stark dockland derricks.’

(Pietro Annigoni, An Artist’s Life, London: W H Allen, 1977, pages 63-64)

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255 St Paul’s Cathedral Signed twice and signed with monogram, inscribed ‘London’ and ‘A Mrs Theodore 7an Norden ben lieto di essermi meritato la tua ...’, and dated ‘XLIX’ Pen ink and watercolour 14 ¼ x 22 inches

St Paul’s Cathedral This dramatic view of St Paul’s Cathedral was taken from land to the east of it that had been cleared as the result of the German bombing campaign of 1940-41. Before the Second World War, the area had comprised a dense network of buildings that included St Augustine’s Watling Street, designed, like the cathedral, by Sir Christopher Wren. Apart from the cathedral, the structures that remained after the war included o'ces at 21-30 St Paul’s Church Yard, seen at the left of the present watercolour. The ruined appearance captured by Pietro Annigoni also provided a memorable setting for some classic British Blms of the period, most notably Charles Crichton’s Ealing comedy, The Lavender

Hill Mob (1951). Much of the area is now covered by the o'ce and retail development, One New Change, which was designed by the French architect, Jean Nouvel, and opened in 2010.

The dedicatee of this drawing was probably Ethel Maud 7an Norden (1878-1962), the English-born second wife of Theodore Langdon 7an Norden (1869-1946), an American from a distinguished family. They married in Kensington in 1932, and then settled in the South of England, she living latterly at Lake House, 7irginia Water, Surrey.

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The Thames at Millwall The breadth and character of the river in the present watercolour – divided by barges and edged with low buildings and smoking chimneys – suggests the Thames as it 0ows around the Isle of Dogs, with Millwall to the left and Rotherhithe to the right.

Perhaps Pietro Annigoni also had a punning intention in dedicating this particular composition to a patron he addressed as ‘Madame Wall’. Millwall gained its name from a dozen windmills that were constructed between 1670 and 1730. They stood along the top of the embankment, or wall, that protected the farmland of the Isle of Dogs from 0ooding.

256 The Thames at Millwall Signed, inscribed ‘A Madame Wall, Souvenir de Pietro Annigoni’ and ‘London’, and dated ‘LIII’ Pen ink and watercolour 10 ¾ x 20 ¼ inches

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257 London Docks, Looking Towards Tower Bridge Signed with monogram Oil on card 6 ¼ x 10 ½ inches

London Docks, Looking Towards Tower Bridge In this sparkling painting in oil on card, the roofs of Tower Bridge can just be seen above a group of moored barges and behind a crane. It is therefore likely that Pietro Annigoni produced it while sitting on a jetty of one of the wharves that once lined St Katharine’s Way and Wapping High Street.

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68 Venezia Pietro Annigoni produced this drawing of Piazza San Marco, the principal public square of 7enice, in 1970, near the close of what may be considered his ‘London Period’. The viewpoint of the beautifully spare composition is probably that of the terrace of the Ca6è Florian, which was founded in 1720, and is the oldest café in Italy in continuous operation.

Beefeater (opposite) In 1962, Pietro Annigoni received a commission from James Burrough Ltd to produce a new image of a ‘beefeater’, or Yeoman Warder, for the advertisements and labels of Beefeater Gin. This marked an expansion of the distillery company in 1963, a century after James Burrough had founded it in Chelsea, London, and 73 years after he had begun to make gin under the Beefeater name. By 1963, Beefeater accounted for three out of every four bottles of gin imported into the United States. In that year, it was the only gin chosen to be on board for the maiden voyage of the Queen Elizabeth II to New York.

Alan Burrough, the then Chairman of James Burrough Ltd, certainly posed with Annigoni’s drawing for a photograph by

258 Venezia Signed, inscribed with title and dated ‘LXX’ Charcoal and chalk 15 x 22 inches

John Knoote that appeared in Newsweek, among other periodicals, in 1963. However, it seems as if the label and advertising continued to carry the existing image of a beefeater rather than Annigoni’s ‘roguish new portrait’ (as it was described by a Newsweek journalist).

Beefeater is the popular name for the Yeomen Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London.

The Yeomen Warders were formed in 1485 by King Henry 7II, and have guarded the Tower of London since 1509. They are commonly identiBed by their red and gold dress uniforms. The derivation of their popular name has been disputed, but is likely to derive from their diet of beef and of broths made of that meat.

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259 Beefeater Signed with monogram Watercolour, bodycolour, pencil and chalk 29 ½ x 17 ¾ inches

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260 Head Study Signed and signed with monogram Red chalk 10 ¾ x 7 ¼ inches

Head Study The present drawing is one of the characteristic red chalk head studies, or ‘volti’, that Pietro Annigoni would make in preparation for painting a fresco, in order to ensure that he instilled each Bgure with the appropriate individual emotion.

70 261 Head of a Young Woman (opposite) Signed, signed with monogram, inscribed ‘To Martha Hamlen’ and dated ‘Firenze LX7I’ Signed and inscribed ‘Borgo Albizi 8, Firenze’, and ‘To Mr Chauncey Stillman, 820 Fifth Avenue, New York, USA’ on backboard Watercolour, bodycolour and chalk 21 ½ x 14 ¾ inches Provenance: Collection of Chauncey Stillman Exhibited: ‘Pietro Annigoni: drawings, pastels, watercolours, paintings’, Upper Grosvenor Galleries, London, June 1966

Head of a Young Woman Pietro Annigoni produced the present sensitive portrait study in Florence early in 1966, and exhibited it in his solo show held at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries, London, in the June of that year.

Martha Hamlen and Chauncey Stillman, respectively the dedicatee and Brst owner of the drawing, were both friends of the artist and members of a circle of American Roman Catholics.

Mrs Martha Thorndike Hamlen (1896-1973) was the wife of Joseph Rochemont Hamlen, a director of the cooperage and hardwood lumber business, J H Hamlen & Son. Chauncey Devereux Stillman (1907-1989) was a member of one of America’s great banking families, and a collector, conservationist and philanthropist. In 1937, he acquired two abandoned farms near Amenia, Dutchess County, New York, and began to develop WethersBeld Estate and Gardens. The Georgian-style house that he had built there became the setting for a remarkable collection that included masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. His conversion to Catholicism in 1952, while he was in his mid 40s, provided him with a guiding principle for the rest of his life.

Stillman had long wanted Annigoni to paint his teenage daughters, Elizabeth and Theo. The artist resisted doing so until 1961, when he visited Stillman’s Manhattan apartment, at 820 Fifth Avenue, and felt immediately at home, being particularly impressed by the presence of the great Pontormo of a halberdier (now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles). He painted Stillman’s daughters (1962), a fresco in the dining room at WethersBeld (1963) and then a portrait of Stillman himself (1965) – and artist and patron developed a lasting friendship.

The friendship bore particular fruit when Stillman commissioned Annigoni to produce further frescoes at WethersBeld. They were for the ceiling and wall niches of the ‘Gloriette’, a gallery intended to display particularly important paintings and sculptures.

Executed by the artist and his assistants during the course of three visits to the United States in the early 1970s, they are magniBcent examples of his sophisticated art and, with that in WethersBeld’s dining room, the only frescoes by him in the country.

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ENZO PL A Z ZOT TA Enzo Plazzotta (1921-1981) The Italian-born sculptor, Enzo Plazzotta (1921-1981), gained a major international reputation. Though he retained close links to his native country, it was in London that he established his sculptural practice in the 1960s, and was rst celebrated. Then, throughout his career, he exhibited widely in Europe, the United States and Australia. He produced inventive and engaging compositions in marble and bronze,

especially of human and animal gures in movement.

He developed a particular rapport with dancers, and worked with some of the most celebrated performers of his day. His output encompasses both personal expressions of his sensibility and highly accessible, popular works, many of which grace our public spaces.

For a biography of Enzo Plazzotta, please refer to page 171.

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Enzo Plazzotta sculpting Annigoni

Annigoni The Italian artists, Pietro Annigoni and Enzo Plazzotta, both found international success by establishing themselves in England after the Second World War. Annigoni’s ‘London Period’ lasted until 1971, the year in which he sat for Plazzotta. The uncannily realistic portrait bust that resulted is a tribute to the strength of their shared devotion to traditional aesthetic values during a period that they would have considered experimental and iconoclastic.

262 Annigoni Stamped with the foundry stamp From an edition of 9 Bronze 22 ½ inches high x 18 inches wide x 11 inches deep Literature: Carol Plazzotta and Richard O’Conor, Enzo Plazzotta.

A Catalogue Raisonné, London: Trefoil Books, 1986, Pages 180-181 (No 165) Exhibited: ‘Plazzotta’, Acquavella Galleries Inc, New York, December 1973-January 1974; ‘Plazzotta’, Marjorie Parr, London, February 1974; ‘Enzo Plazzotta: Exhibition of Bronzes’, Italian Institute, London, March-April 1976; ‘Enzo Plazzotta’, Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, May-August 1976; ‘Plazzotta: Open Air Exhibition’, Bedford College, London, July-August 1980

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15: THE NATURAL WORLD The strong response of British artists to the natural world has displayed itself most famously through the more dramatic statements of Romanticism and its legacy. However, it has also revealed itself through the quiet power of another native creative tradition, based on detailed observation, and informed by – and informing – scientiBc study. At its most precise, this tradition has provided illustrations to books of natural history but, as so often in British art, illustration has elided with other visual forms, and so has created a wealth of resonant images of recognisable fauna and 0ora. It too has its Romantic antecedents, though they are perhaps better exempliBed by the wood engravings of Thomas Bewick or the verses of John Clare, than by the sublime landscapes of J M W Turner or the re0ective passages of William Wordsworth.

Through the twentieth century, this tradition of informed observation has been perpetuated, even strengthened, by many specialist wildlife and botanical artists. They have established strong individual identities and achieved substantial bodies of work, often in competition with photography and Blm, and contrary to a tide of avant-garde trends. In the post-war period, a number of these specialists have banded together in groups, founding the Society of Wildlife Artists in 1964, and the Society of Botanical Artists two decades later in 1985. Now, in the light of the global climate crisis, their calling seems all the more relevant, even honourable.

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The tradition is represented here by three highly distinctive Bgures, who have been recognised for both their scrutiny of the natural world and their ability to represent it, in two or three dimensions, in terms that are aesthetically satisfying. The success of all three came, in part, from their developing an interest in nature as well as a talent for art at an early age. Charles Tunnicli6e grew up on a farm in Cheshire; David Wynne frequented his father’s livery stable in the New Forest; while Raymond Booth, though living in Leeds, responded to the encouragement of his father and a gamekeeper uncle to engage fully with the countryside when he could.

At the outset of Tunnicli6e’s career, at least one critic, Malcolm Salaman, realised that his ‘art was second nature, not second hand’ (as is explained by Harry Heuser: see the quotation below). That is, however much he absorbed artistic in0uences, he advanced most fully as a printmaker, and more generally as an artist, by recording his own experiences of animals in his native Cheshire [263-264]. Soon a combination of observation, craft and design helped to make his name when, in 1932, he illustrated an edition of Henry Williamson’s classic of Bctional natural history, Tarka the Otter, and then others of his books. During the Second

World War, Tunnicli6e himself began to write about nature, and, after settling in Anglesey, produced his most famous book, Shorelands Summer Diary (1952), a culmination of his skills and interests, and a conBrmation of his reputation as the pre-eminent British bird artist of the mid-twentieth century. It says something that, in 1954, he was elected both a Royal Academician and 7ice-President of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

He also served as 7ice-President of the Society of Wildlife Artists.

The contribution that David Wynne would make to the imagery of nature was forged while he was a student at Cambridge during the 1940s. He chose to read zoology and agriculture, but also began to sculpt, and was encouraged in this talent by his teachers. While becoming a wide-ranging Bgurative sculptor, he developed a particular speciality as an animalier from the early 1950s, when he drew animals at London Zoo and modelled studies of antelopes. He became particularly fascinated by Guy the gorilla, and would spend hours examining him closely, and winning his trust by bringing him food. When commissioned to make a large animal sculpture for a London site, he chose Guy as his subject. Developing his composition through a series of bronze maquettes [267-268], he then produced a striking marble carving that, placed in Crystal Palace Park, made his popular reputation. In order to produce his later, highly vital, sculptures of animals, he spent time in the wild, observing salmon in Ireland, grizzly bears in the Canadian Rockies and elephants in Botswana.

His contribution to natural history was recognised when he was made a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London.

The decision of Raymond Booth to focus on the depiction of the natural world, and especially the depiction of plants, was made for him when, in the mid 1950s, he was su6ering from tuberculosis, and spent six months in a sanatorium. He was already working in a precise, traditional style, and his convalescence allowed him many hours to hone his skills as a botanical artist. The experience also fostered his private, almost reclusive character, his dedication to his art and his power of concentration. He rarely left his home in suburban Leeds, and worked from plant specimens that he cultivated in his garden and greenhouses, and from animal specimens that he received and refrigerated. Nevertheless, he corresponded and collaborated with botanists, curators and other experts across the world, including Don Elick, on the impressive project, ‘Japonica MagniBca’ [272]. The work that resulted from this single-minded approach has a remarkably intense, uncanny, almost hypnotic quality. Like that of Tunnicli6e and Wynne, the work of Booth brings the natural world to life before one’s eyes.

‘“[O]ne realises”, Salaman wrote about The Cheshire Plain, “that this is a true bit of English country, in the etcher’s home-county”, that the cattle were “of the native breed” that Tunnicli.e had seen “with familiar eyes”. He knew them “from intimate personal experience” – “inside out, so to speak” – and “whatever beauty pictorial interpretation may discover in them he recognises instinctively, and with it the traditional dignity and sentiment inherent in the labourers of farm and "eld”. Although one might discern a “pictorial conception of classic distinction”, in other words, Tunnicli.e’s art was second nature, not second hand.’

(Harry Heuser, ‘Second Nature: The Art of Charles F Tunnicli6e RA’, in Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser, Charles Tunnicli.e.

Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2017, page 17, quoting Malcolm Salaman, ‘The Etchings of C F Tunnicli6e’, The Studio, February 1927, page 92)

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C H A R L E S T U N N I CL I FFE One of the foremost wildlife artists of the twentieth century, Charles Tunnicli e displayed his talents in an impressive range of formats and media, including watercolours, oils, etchings and wood engravings.

‘It was a slight thing that in “The Cheshire Plain”, “The Seed Roller,” “Harvesters,” one could trace the inspiration to J F Millet or Paul Potter or Claude, for in each was its own beauty, and that beauty was essentially English. In the second series issued, Mr Tunnicli.e showed in “The White Horse,” with its plastic circumstance, a determination to express his own conception’

For a biography of Charles Tunnicli6e, please refer to page 172.

(‘Tunnicli6e’s Etchings of Farm Life’, Apollo, 1927, page 263)

Charles Frederick Tunnicli6e, OBE RA RE 7PSWLA (1901-1979)

263 The White Horse Signed and inscribed 34/75 Etching and drypoint 8 x 9 ½ inches Literature: Malcolm C Salaman (ed), Fine Prints of the Year, London: Halton & Truscott Smith, 1927; William Gaunt (intro), C Geo6rey Holme (ed), Etchings of Today, London: The Studio, 1929; Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser, Charles Tunnicli.e.

Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2017, No 46 Published by H C Dickins in an edition of 75 in 1927 (5gns)

264 The Cheshire Plain Signed and inscribed 43/75 Etching 8 x 9 ¾ inches Literature: Malcolm C Salaman (ed), Fine Prints of the Year, London: Halton & Truscott Smith, 1926; Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser, Charles Tunnicli.e.

Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2017, No 31 Published by H C Dickins in an edition of 75 in 1926 (4gns)

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265 Barn Owl Signed Watercolour with bodycolour 9 ½ x 6 ¾ inches Illustrated: Sidney Rogerson & Charles Tunnicli6e, Our Bird Book, London: Collins, 1947, Page 70

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266 Red Deer Signed Watercolour 17 ¾ x 22 ¼ inches

Barn Owl (opposite) Barn owls, or Tytonidae, are one of two families of owls, within which there are 20 species, including the western barn owl, or Tyto alba. The present watercolour depicts the subspecies, common barn owl or Tyto alba alba, which is found in the British Isles.

Charles Tunnicli6e probably tackled the barn owl as a subject for the Brst time in illustrating the work of Henry Williamson. Having successfully provided wood engravings for an edition of Williamson’s most famous book, Tarka the Otter, in 1932, he was then commissioned to illustrate three further volumes by Williamson for 1933, two of which featured barn owls. The ‘Celestial Fantasy’, The Star-born, includes a barn owl called Keeorich as a character, and she appears in eight of the wood-engraved illustrations, including that for the front of the dust jacket. The anthology of nature essays, The Lone Swallows, includes two wood-engraved illustrations of barn owls, one ‘over the wheat Beld’ (page 112) and the other ‘at the wharves’ (page 163).

If Williamson was critical of Tunnicli6e’s proposed illustrations for The Star-born, his comments, such as ‘see a barn owl somewhere Mr Tunnicli6e’, encouraged the artist to observe birds more closely and so hone his skills to the degree that he became a master of ornithological portraiture. This mastery is exempliBed

by his subsequent works, including the present watercolour illustration, of 1947, and the famous wood engraving, of 1950, for which the watercolour surely provided a source.

Tunnicli6e produced the present watercolour as an illustration to Our Bird Book, written by Sidney Rogerson (1894-1958) and published by Collins in 1947. Rogerson dedicated the text to his daughter, Jane, and its anecdotes and personal memories are aimed at a juvenile readership, and both informative and entertaining.

They are matched in interest by Tunnicli6e’s striking full-colour plates and black-and-white vignettes. The book was well-received, and the artist and author collaborated again two years later, in 1949, on Both Sides of the Road: A Book About Farming.

In 1950, Tunnicli6e produced a wood engraving of a barn owl, which is very similar in composition to this watercolour illustration, though larger in format. It is one of four wood engravings that he made of di6erent species of owl during the 1940s and 50s. All were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, and Barn Owl and Long-eared Owl were donated to the RA as ‘Diploma Works’ following his election as a Royal Academician in 1954.

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DA7ID W Y N N E David Wynne, OBE (1926-2014) David Wynne was a wide-ranging sculptor, who both carved and modelled in a variety of materials. While producing memorable portraits and gure subjects, he gained particular fame and popularity with his studies of animals and birds, which were noted for their vitality and grace.

For a biography of David Wynne, please refer to pages 172-173.

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267 Gorilla II Indistinctly signed with initials and numbered 7/8 Bronze 9 ¼ inches high x 4 ½ inches wide x 6 inches deep Literature: T S R Boase, The Sculpture of David Wynne, 1949-1967, London: Michael Joseph, 1968, Pages 72 and 154

268 Gorilla IV Numbered 3/8 (under left thigh) Bronze 5 ½ inches high x 5 inches wide x 4 ½ inches deep Literature: T S R Boase, The Sculpture of David Wynne, 1949-1967, London: Michael Joseph, 1968, Pages 72 and 154

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Gorilla, Crystal Palace Park, Southeast London, by David Wynne

Gorillas David Wynne developed as an animalier from the early 1950s by drawing and then modelling inhabitants of London Zoo. Among the animals that particularly fascinated him was the male western lowland gorilla, who was given the name Guy because he had arrived at the zoo as a baby on Guy Fawkes Night, 5 November 1947. During the late 1950s, Wynne regularly visited Guy, bringing him food and studying him closely.

In 1959, London County Council took advice from the Arts Council of Great Britain to commission Wynne to make a large animal carving for a public site, as part of its Patronage of the Arts Scheme. Wynne decided that Guy would make an ideal subject, the gorilla having become one of the most popular residents at the zoo. He wanted to produce a sculpture that would do justice to his own deep feelings towards the mighty primate, while also attracting children to climb on it.

The present bronze maquettes are two of a series of four that was produced in 1960-61 as a stage in the process of determining the most suitable form for development. While Gorilla I (not included here), showing the animal walking on all fours, is the closest to the Bnished sculpture, all four are equally lively and characteristic. Wynne drilled, carved and polished that sculpture from a Bve-ton block of dark grey Belgian fossiliferous marble over nine months and with the help of two masons. In 1962, it was installed in Crystal Palace Park, in Southeast London, close to what was then a children’s zoo. It made the artist’s popular reputation, and remains an impressive and appealing memorial to Guy the gorilla, who died in 1978, at about the age of 32.

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R AYM O N D B O OT H Raymond Charles Booth (1929-2015) Intensely private, and possessing an obsessive work ethic and passion for the natural world, Raymond Booth earned a reputation as one of the greatest botanical painters and illustrators, despite rarely leaving his Yorkshire home. Eschewing the more fashionable Modernist principles of the early mid-twentieth century, he instead produced beautiful, intense compositions in oil of British ora and fauna, that rival the very nest Victorian followers of the genre.

For a biography of Raymond Booth, please refer to page 174.

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269 English Hare Signed and dated 1970 Oil on board 20 ¾ x 34 ½ inches ‘The unnoticed or hidden beauties of England’s Nature have rarely been portrayed with such intense observation as by Raymond Booth, a reclusive and focussed genius immersed in his private Other World’ (Chris Beetles, 2020)

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270 Squirrel In Autumn Signed Oil on board 26 ¼ x 21 inches

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271 Anguloa clowesii Signed and dated 1987 Oil on paper 26 ½ x 17 inches Literature: Roy Strong, Country Life, 25 April 1991, Page 88-89, ‘Graphic 7irtuosity’; Peyton Skipwith (text), Raymond Booth, An Artist’s Garden, New York: Callaway, 2000, Page 37, as ‘Cradle Orchid’ Exhibited: ‘Raymond Booth: Painter and Plantsman’, Fine Art Society, London, July 1991, No 24; ‘Raymond Booth: A Memorial Exhibition’, Fine Art Society, London, August- September 2016, No 104; ‘Raymond Booth: In the Wild’, Fine Art Society, London, May-June 2017, No 41

Anguloa clowesii Raymond Booth was not only a formidable wildlife artist, but also an expert plantsman, and he nurtured many rare plants, including orchids, in the garden and greenhouses of his Leeds home. In his later years in particular, these provided ready subjects for his art.

The impressive, fragrant Anguloa clowesii is one of 18 species in the Anguloa or Tulip genus of orchids, all of which are native to Central or South America. The genus in general was Brst described in 1798 and named in honour of Francisco de Angulo,

Director-General of Mines of Peru. However, this particular species was Brst described by the English botanist, John Lindley, in the early nineteenth century, and named after the Rev John Clowes (1743-1831) of Broughton Hall, near Manchester, and incumbent of Manchester Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral). Clowes was a discerning and knowledgeable orchidist and had possessed a mixed collection of orchids from around the world.

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272 Magnolia sieboldii Signed Inscribed with title and ‘Figure No 36’ below mount Oil on paper 8 ½ x 9 ¾ inches

Magnolia sieboldii For 12 years, Raymond Booth maintained a correspondence with the American botanist, Don Elick, who, for four decades, had been living in Japan and collecting its plants. Elick provided the artist with many specimens, which he then grew in his garden in Leeds, so that he could study and draw them. As a result, they embarked on the project, ‘Japonica MagniBca’, a celebration of Japanese plants that developed into both a book and a touring exhibition of some of the 85 works of art illustrated in it. Booth’s paintings in oil on paper were, as always, extremely accurate, portraying as they did each plant at actual size and in its native habitat, and this despite the fact that Booth had never visited Japan.

Japonica Magni"ca was published simultaneously in 1992 in the United Kingdom and the United States. A deluxe edition of the book, which contained two specially commissioned plates signed by the artist, was available from the Fine Art Society, which published the UK edition in collaboration with Alan Sutton Publishing.

Organised by the Fine Art Society, the exhibition was shown in 1992 at Lotherton Hall, Leeds (close to Booth’s home), and in

Illustrated: Don Elick and Raymond Booth, Japonica Magni"ca, Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, with London: Fine Art Society, 1992; Don Elick and Raymond Booth, Japonica Magni"ca, Portland, OR: Timber Press, with Oregon, OR: Saga Press, 1992 Exhibited: ‘Japonica MagniBca’, Fine Art Society, London, 1997, No 36

1994 at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. In the spring of 1995, it was shown at the PaineWebber Art Gallery in New York City. It then toured to the Morris Museum (Morristown, NJ), the Elvehjem Museum of Art (University of WisconsinMadison, WI), the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA), the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT) and Chicago Botanic Garden (Glencoe, IL).

It returned to the Fine Art Society in 1997.

The hardy Magnolia sieboldii is one of about 210 di6erent species of the genus Magnolia. Native to East Asia, it is also known as the Korean mountain magnolia and the Oyama magnolia (Oyama being a city in Japan). Magnolias in general have been called after the French botanist, Pierre Magnol, since Linnaeus adopted the name in the eighteenth century. However, Magnolia sieboldii takes its name from the German doctor and botanist, Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866), who, in the 1820s, introduced western medicine to Japan and made a detailed study of the country’s fauna and 0ora.

16; The Book Jac kets of Eric Fraser Mid twentieth-century British book design is so strong that its versatility can be demonstrated by focussing on the range of a single Bgure. Eric Fraser stands out as particularly suitable for such scrutiny, having had a long career dedicated to illustration, and working in a manner that is at once highly individual and remarkably 0exible. His success at establishing the look of Radio Times, when that magazine was known for its illustrations, is only the most notable of his many achievements.

Despite the old adage, ‘you can’t tell a book by its cover’, Fraser knew that there is much that can be communicated by a book jacket. It may generally identify a publisher, a series and a subject, while also providing many signals, both verbal and visual, about the contents of an individual book. It also appeals to the acquisitive nature of the prospective buyer, through its ability to arrest and delight the eye and mind. To this end, Fraser mastered the skill of giving a fresh appearance to an old text, by creating a modern spin on a pertinent visual style.

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For many years, Fraser was a mainstay of J M Dent and, especially, its Everyman Library. Equipping himself with an impressive mental archive, he could adapt his strong line to almost any historical mode or setting, be it the Medieval Norse world of The Saga of Gisli (1963) [284], the seventeenth-century pietism of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1962) [281] or the sti0ing atmosphere of nineteenth-century Scandinavia conjured up by Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1961) [280].

Detail of The Saga of Gisli [284]

However, Fraser could apply himself equally well to such modern scientiBc titles as those by Robert de Ropp published

by The ScientiBc Book Club. For instance, his dust jacket for Drugs and the Mind (1957) [277] shows that he could be as bold in his use of colour as he was striking in his signature use of black and white – and that he was as attentive to lettering as to imagery.

Fraser also had to help deBne the identity of new or emerging novelists, while Btting the house styles of such publishers as Michael Joseph and Robert Hale. If the former called for a clear division of word and image [273-274], the latter allowed for greater freedom. As a result, the artist could suggest the distinct character of each narrative, from the cool humour of The Pendent Years (1950) [275], Robert Rishworth’s study of the English on the Riviera, to the passion of A Day of Grace (1952) [276], Hebe Elsna’s story of the recovery of ‘six broken and thwarted lives’. His choice of image always intrigues the potential reader as to what to expect in opening the book, and is sometimes more memorable than the book itself.

Detail of Pilgrim’s Progress [281]

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ER I C F R A S E R Eric George Fraser, FSIA (1902-1983) Eric Fraser’s work as an illustrator and designer is at once varied and highly distinctive. Developing an assured technique, he could adapt his style to almost any subject matter, from the whimsical to the tragic.

As a result, he de ned the look of Radio Times for four decades and became a mainstay of J M Dent’s Everyman’s Library – while also creating murals, stained glass and advertisements (including the immortal ‘Mr Therm’).

In 2013, Chris Beetles Gallery held a major retrospective of the work of Eric Fraser. It was accompanied by this 148-page fully-illustrated catalogue, which included an appreciative essay.

For a biography of Eric Fraser, please refer to page 175.

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The House in Clewe Street Mary Lavin (1912-1996) was an Irish American writer best known for her short stories. Her Brst novel, The House in Clewe Street (1945), is a family saga that reveals the poignancies of an Irish Catholic upbringing.

273 The House In Clewe Street Signed with initials and inscribed ‘the letters at bottom could be closer together and may be better in a lavender colour?’ on reverse Watercolour landscape with church on reverse Watercolour with bodycolour 8 x 6 ½ inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Preliminary design for Mary Lavin, The House in Clewe Street, London: Michael Joseph, 1945, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 62

Journey into Spring The novelist and playwright, Winston Clewes (1906-1957), made his name with Violent Friends (1944), a novelised biography of Jonathan Swift and his relationship with Esther Johnson. His third novel, Journey into Spring (1948), was advertised as ‘an original, exquisitely worked-out, richly human story of an English village and its mellowing in0uence on a stranger’, Godfrey Fletton, the last lord of the manor.

274 Journey Into Spring Signed Pen ink and watercolour 7 ½ x 6 inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Preliminary design for Winston Clewes, Journey into Spring, London: Michael Joseph, 1948, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 63

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19 50 275 The Pendent Years [I] Watercolour, bodycolour and pencil with pen and ink Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Preliminary design for Robert Rishworth, The Pendent Years, London: Robert Hale, 1950, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 83

The Pendent Years The now forgotten writer, Robert Rishworth (active 1948-1952), published six novels between the years 1948 and 1952, of which the third was The Pendent Years (1950). Information on the dust jacket of the Brst edition describes it as follows:

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Robert Rishworth’s new novel portrays with understanding and trenchant humour not only those who before the war lived upon the sunlit and often sultry fringe of society, but also the purposeful and hard-working people among whom they picked their way.

Edward Calvert, the compelling pivot around which the story revolves, settles near Cannes and gathers round him a number of friends through whom he enjoys a vicarious vitality.

19 52 276 A Day of Grace Signed Pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour 7 ¾ x 6 ½ inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Preliminary design for Hebe Elsna, A Day of Grace, London: Robert Hale, 1952, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 85; ‘A Book by its Cover’, Nunnington Hall, February-March 2017, No 30; ‘Neo-Romantic Book Illustration in Britain 1943-1955’, Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, 24 February-20 May 2018

A Day of Grace On its appearance, A Day of Grace was advertised in the following terms: ‘Miss Elsna’s enthralling new story tells of the in0uence of a lovely, remote island of the Irish coast on six broken and thwarted lives’. Hebe Elsna was one the pseudonyms used by Dorothy Phoebe Ansle (1890-1983), a proliBc writer, mainly of historical romances.

She also worked under the names of Laura Conway, 7icky Lancaster and Lyndon Snow.

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1957 277 Drugs and the Mind [II] Signed Watercolour with pen ink and bodycolour on paper laid on board 9 ¾ x 7 ¾ inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Robert S De Ropp, Drugs and the Mind, London: The ScientiBc Book Club, 1957, Dust Jacket Literature: Alec Davis, The Graphic Works of Eric Fraser, U6culme: The U6culme Press, 1985 (2nd Edition), Page 63 Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 89; ‘A Book by its Cover’, Nunnington Hall, February-March 2017, No 32

Drugs and the Mind While working at the Lederle Laboratories (near Pearl River, New York), the biochemist, Robert S de Ropp (1913-1987) wrote Drugs and the Mind (1957) on the subject of psychoactive substances.

1960 278 Man Against Aging Signed Pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour 8 x 6 ¼ inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Preliminary design for Robert S de Ropp, Man Against Aging, London: The ScientiBc Book Club, 1960, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 162; ‘A Book by its Cover’, Nunnington Hall, February-March 2017, No 33

Man Against Aging De Ropp was still working at Lederle Laboratories, in the state of New York, when he wrote Man Against Aging (1960). Writing in New Scientist in 1961, A T Welford described the aim of the book as ‘to bring to the general reader the results of the considerable body of experimental biological research which has been done on ageing since the beginning of the century, and especially during the last thirty years’. However, while he thought the result ‘concise and readable’, he criticised it for ‘loose thinking’.

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19 6 1 279 Goodbye Jimmy Goodbye Signed Pen ink and watercolour 8 x 6 inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Unpublished design for Kate Christie, Goodbye Jimmy Goodbye, London: Macmillan, 1961, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 164

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Goodbye Jimmy Goodbye Written by Kate Christie (1917-circa 2009), the novel, Goodbye Jimmy Goodbye (1961), concerns the love of teenager, Clara Winstanley, for doomed alcoholic, Jimmy Lowden, who has returned to live in a crumbling house in the Cumberland valley. The disturbing nature of their relationship is suggested by the surreal motif of Eric Fraser’s jacket design.

280 A Doll’s House Signed with initials Pen ink and bodycolour 9 ¾ x 6 ¼ inches Illustrated: Henrik Ibsen (tr Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Robert Farquharson Sharp, Linda Hannas), A Doll’s House. The Lady from the Sea. The Wild Duck, London: J M Dent (An Everyman Paperback, No 1494), 1961, Front Cover Exhibited: ‘The Artists of the Radio Times’, Chris Beetles Gallery, September 2002, No 89; ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 165

A Doll’s House Eric Fraser’s cover design for a collection of plays by Henrik Ibsen, published by Dent as an Everyman Paperback, illustrates A Doll’s House (1879). That play’s title has suggested the image, in which the heroine, Nora, dwarfs her husband, Torvald, and other characters, as if she were a girl playing with her dolls. Initially controversial for its critique of the norms of marriage, the play is often considered a landmark in the history of feminism, but its purpose is as likely to have been the promotion of the individual fulBlment of all people, male and female.

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1 962 281 Pilgrim’s Progress Signed Pen ink and watercolour with collage 7 ¼ x 9 ¾ inches Illustrated: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, London: J M Dent (An Everyman Paperback, No 204), 1962, Cover Exhibited: ‘The Artists of the Radio Times’, Chris Beetles Gallery, September 2002, No 90; ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 167

The Pilgrim’s Progress Eric Fraser’s striking cover design for an Everyman Paperback edition of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) demonstrates his assured approach: the portrait of the protagonist, Christian, looms large against a shocking pink background, while a raised hand signalling astonishment unites front and back.

89 282 The Twelve Days of Christmas Pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour and pencil 10 ¼ x 7 inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Preliminary design for Miles and John HadBeld, The Twelve Days of Christmas, London: Cassell, 1962, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘A Book by its Cover’, Nunnington Hall, February-March 2017, No 34; ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 166

The Twelve Days of Christmas Writer and publisher, John HadBeld (1907-1999), is perhaps best remembered as the editor of the eccentric and engrossing annual, The Saturday Book. His brother, Miles HadBeld (1903-1982), was a distinguished garden historian. They collaborated together on The Twelve Days of Christmas (1961), a comprehensive book of Christmas lore, and Gardens of Delight (1964), both published

by Cassell.

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283 The Firmament of Time Signed Pen ink, watercolour and bodycolour 8 x 6 inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time, London: Foyle’s Book Club, 1962, Dust Jacket Literature: Sylvia Backemeyer, Eric Fraser. Designer & Illustrator, London: Lund Humphries, 1998, Page 56 Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 168

The Firmament of Time In The Firmament of Time (1960), the distinguished anthropologist, Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), examined what the human species had become in the late twentieth century. A review in The Chicago Tribune stated that the book ‘has a warm feeling for all natural phenomena; it has a rapport with man and his world and his problems; … it has hope and belief. And it has the beauty of prose that characterizes Eiseley’s philosophical moods’.

In designing the cover, Eric Fraser created an image that summarised man’s evolutionary trajectory.

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The Saga of Gisli Eric Fraser designed the dust jacket for a translation of the 13th century Icelandic prose saga, The Saga of Gísli Súrsson, in a translation by the Canadian poet and translator, George Johnston (1913-2004). The saga concerns Gísli, who must kill one brotherin-law in order to avenge another. As a result of his actions, he goes on the run for 13 years until Bnally hunted down and killed.

The published version of Fraser’s design is suitably stark and chill.

284 The Saga of Gisli Signed Pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour 10 ½ x 15 inches Illustrated: George Johnston, The Saga of Gisli, London: Dent, 1963, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘A Book by its Cover’, Nunnington Hall, February-March 2017, No 35; ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 173

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19 6 5 285 The Saga of Grettir the Strong Signed with initials and inscribed with instructions to publisher below mount Pen ink and watercolour 5 x 4 ¼ inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Preliminary drawing for Peter Foote (ed) & G A Hight (tr), The Saga of Grettir the Strong, London: Dent (Everyman’s Library No 699), 1965, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 176

The Saga of Grettir the Strong Eric Fraser designed the dust jacket for a translation of the fourteenth-century Icelandic prose saga. The Saga of Grettir the Strong, in 1913 translation by George Anslie Hight (1851-1937). It concerns the ill-tempered and unlucky outlaw, Grettir.

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19 79 286 Brother Dusty-Feet Signed Pen ink and watercolour with pencil 6 ¼ x 4 ¾ inches Provenance: The artist’s family Illustrated: Unpublished design for Rosemary Sutcli6, Brother Dusty-Feet, Oxford University Press, 1979, Dust Jacket Exhibited: ‘Eric Fraser 1902-1983’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2013, No 283

Brother Dusty-Feet Eric Fraser was commissioned to design a dust jacket for the 1979 edition of Brother Dusty-Feet, a children’s novel by Rosemary Sutcli6 (1920-1992) set in Elizabethan England.

However, the project was eventually given to C Walter Hodges (1909-2004), a specialist in the Elizabethan period, who had illustrated the original edition in 1952.

17: Gener ous Spirits: The Figurative Art of Reginald Brill, Eric Ho lt, Norman Neasom and Betty Swanwic k The four artists represented here demonstrate the survival and success of a strong tradition in British Bgurative art. In the simplest, most purely visual terms, all have, through a basis of conBdent draughtsmanship, evolved strong and solid human forms, that almost literally embody their ideas and, with often outsized hands and feet, embrace life to the full. Their antecedents are, most obviously, William Blake and Stanley Spencer, though the degrees to which they have responded to them, and the things that they have learned from them, di6er from artist to artist.

They are four very individual creators, whose works suggest an appealing family likeness.

The eldest of the four, Reginald Brill, followed most closely in Spencer’s footsteps. Like Spencer, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1920-23), under Henry Tonks, and was primed to produce murals in emulation of the artists of the Italian Renaissance.

At the time that Spencer was working on his major series of murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire (1926-32), Brill was studying at the British School at Rome (1927-29), having been awarded the Rome Prize in decorative painting for The Expulsion of Adam and Eve (1927).

One of Spencer’s signal achievements was to revive the idea of placing religious subjects in a contemporary and local setting.

Brill would later explore the importance of the art of the past on Spencer in his book, Modern Painting and its Roots in the European Tradition (1946). However, Brill’s biographer, Judith Bumpus, has been keen to stress the distinction between Spencer and Brill, stating that Brill ‘was not a religious man’ and that Spencer did not have a direct in0uence on his work (Reginald Brill, Aldershot: Scolar Press in association with Kingston University, 1999, page 21). Brill’s mature drawings and paintings, of the 1950s and 60s, would often show Spencer-like Bgures, frequently engaged in manual tasks, but free of any Biblical allusion [288].

Early in her career, and mainly in the 1950s, Betty Swanwick (who was 13 years Brill’s junior) also worked as a muralist.

However, while a vein of gentle humour runs through the work of all the artists here, her murals were more patently fun-Blled

and fanciful, and were often intended to appeal to children or the child-like in all of us [290]. Both she and Brill contributed to the Festival of Britain, which took place on London’s South Bank in 1951, she producing a mural for The Rocket restaurant, and Brill producing a 15-foot miniature replica of a seaside promenade, which stood close to the Regatta restaurant. They worked on these in collaboration with their students, both being inspiring teachers, Swanwick at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art and Brill as Headmaster of Kingston School of Art. As Swanwick matured, she turned, in the 1960s, to producing watercolours and drawings of a visionary nature, and often based on Biblical stories and themes [296-297]. Like Spencer, she tended to set these in her own time and place. However, despite critical comparisons between her work and that of Spencer, she was more directly a6ected by William Blake and his circle, especially Samuel Palmer. Indeed, in her later years at Goldsmiths, when she felt alienated by changes to the educational regime, she would carry, as a talisman, a facsimile of one of Palmer’s sketchbooks.

Swanwick’s exact contemporary, Norman Neasom, drew on a similar range of inspirations – Blake, Spencer and their own in0uences – to inform both his work and his teaching. Many of his most characteristic watercolours create an almost earthly paradise, based on his memories of childhood, spent on a Worcestershire farm. However, his teaching at Redditch School of Art – as stimulating as that of Brill and Swanwick – called for him to rehearse a much wider range of styles and subjects, including Biblical parables [300] and recent history [298], in order to encourage his students, especially in their projects.

Though almost 30 years younger than Swanwick and Neasom, Eric Holt became their contemporary; for he produced work of equivalent strength and individuality during a short career of two to three decades, before dying in 1997, 13 years before Neasom.

Again considered ‘a gifted follower of Stanley Spencer’ (by a reviewer writing in Art and Artists in 1977), he ensured that his Bgures Blled the space of his pictures with energy and interest, and found new ways to tell stories of humanity.

Detail of Betty Swanwick, Design for Children’s Nursery School [290]

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REGINALD B RILL Reginald Charles Brill (1902-1974) Reginald Brill was best known for his large-scale gure subjects of men engaged in manual labour. Their combination of monumentality and homeliness, even humour, bear witness to the artist’s central place within our native gurative tradition.

For a biography of Reginald Brill, please refer to page 176.

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287 Onlookers Signed Signed and inscribed with title on reverse Pen ink, watercolour and pencil on paper laid down on board 27 ½ x 32 inches Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1972, No 190

Onlookers From 1962, Reginald Brill was the resident married warden of Little Hall, Lavenham, Su6olk, which he had helped establish as a hostel for students from Kingston College of Art, in Surrey.

The fourteenth-century Little Hall (which is now a museum) overlooks the market square of the village, at the centre of which stands a market cross. In the present drawing, Brill has depicted a crowd of onlookers sitting and standing on the steps of the

cross so that it gain a good view of an event. However, while he has shown the cross and crowd in some detail, he has omitted to show the event that has drawn the crowd. As a result, he has introduced into the composition a somewhat characteristic air of mystery. The omitted event was possibly a carnival, which was introduced to Lavenham as an annual event early in the 1970s.

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288 Lawn Bowls Signed Pen and ink 12 ½ x 9 ¼ inches

‘In his working methods Brill demonstrated great consistency, patience and control. Self-critical and modest, despite his nonchalant and sometimes arrogant air, it seems that Brill himself, although holding the practice of drawing to be of great importance and constantly pushing himself (and his students) in its improvement, did not really value his own e.orts as a draughtsman at their true worth. There is no doubt, however, that he was a great craftsman when working with pen and pencil.’

(Leo Du6, ‘Foreword’ to Judith Bumpus, Reginald Brill, Aldershot: Scolar Press in association with Kingston University, 1999, page 7)

289 Head of a Woman Signed and dated 1931 Pen ink and watercolour 14 x 11 inches Provenance: The artist’s family Exhibited: Kingston Heritage Centre, May 1985; 'Chris Beetles Summer Show 2017', No 134

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B E T T Y SWANWICK Ada Elizabeth Edith Swanwick, RA RWS (1915-1989) Very early in her career, Betty Swanwick established herself as an illustrator and designer of great wit and invention, so complementing her friend and teacher, Edward Bawden. Later, she produced an extraordinary series of visionary watercolours and drawings in the

tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, which led to her election as a Draughtsman Member of the Royal Academy.

For a biography of Betty Swanwick, please refer to page 177.

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290 Design for Children’s Nursery School Signed Watercolour with bodycolour and pencil; 17 x 20 ½ inches

Design for Children’s Nursery School During the 1950s and early 1960s, Betty Swanwick produced a number of designs for murals. Three were intended for speciBc sites in London, and executed in collaboration with friends and students. These were The Rocket, for The Rocket Restaurant at the Festival of Britain, on the South Bank (1951); The Wedding Feast, for the sta6 refectory at Goldsmiths’ College (1959); and Pearly King and Queen, for the Evelina Children’s Hospital, Guy’s Hospital (1961-62). Others were speculative, and shown with the Society of Mural Painters or at ‘Mural Art Today’, an exhibition held at the 7ictoria and Albert Museum during the winter of 1960-61. These include Ride-a-Cock-Horse, which was intended as a ‘design for a children’s nursery school’, and shown at ‘The Second Exhibition by the Society of Mural Painters’, at the Royal Institute of British Architects in April-May 1953.

The present work is in the same delightful style as Ride-a-Cock-Horse, and it may also have been exhibited with the Society of Mural Painters in 1953. Its teeming composition fuses a variety of elements likely to engage and entertain young children. In the left foreground, a crowing cockerel stands on top of a house of cards that shelters bags of money. In the right foreground, a periwigged aristocrat steps from the pages of a picture book. As he is met by soldiers presenting arms, he is possibly the Grand Old Duke of York. Among the other characters nestling between the pages is Humpty Dumpty, who tempts a spaniel with a treat. Between the house of cards and the picture book, a trio of Siamese cats emerge from a magician’s hat. The background elements include a monkey puzzle tree (complete with monkeys) and a cowboy 0eeing from ‘Red Indians’.

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In 2008, Chris Beetles Ltd published Paddy Rossmore’s deBnitive monograph, Betty Swanwick: Artist & Visionary, which rectiBes the neglect of this visionary twentieth-century British artist. A chronology and catalogue raisonné (by Barry 7iney and David Wootton) record documentary detail, while articles and contemporary reviews help to bring her alive.

This handsome 176-page hardback also contains a wealth of illustrations.

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291 The Waiting Room Watercolour and bodycolour 5 ½ x 11 ¾ inches

Designs for an Entertainment Betty Swanwick is likely to have produced this delightful series of Bgures as a contribution to an entertainment at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art, and possibly a toy theatre production.

Having studied at Goldsmiths from 1930, she taught there from 1936, and supervised annual toy theatre productions from 1943.

As Paddy Rossmore records in his monograph of Swanwick, ‘These were to become a prominent annual event in which each of the illustration students was made responsible for a particular scene’ (Betty Swanwick: Artist & Visionary, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2008, page 29). Rossmore then quotes the unpublished notes on the toy theatre written by one of those students, Ian Mackenzie-Kerr: Each performance lasted about an hour, the longest time [in the opinion of the Head, Clive Gardiner] that one could hope to hold an audience’s attention, and everyone agreed that the results were magical … We did, of

course, often have children among our audiences but it was remarkable how many adults, both students and sta6, found themselves fascinated and entertained by the performances. What could in less skilful hands have been either embarrassing or twee was transformed by Clive’s and Betty’s imagination (and occasionally Betty’s innate sense of mischief, which enjoyed turning things on their heads) into something approaching an art form. (quoted on pages 29-30) The Bgures were discovered by another of Swanwick’s students in 1969 in an untidy cupboard at Goldsmiths that was full of student work.

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Designs for an Entertainment

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292 Screens Please Nurse Watercolour and bodycolour 7 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches

293 Waiting for the Doctor Watercolour and bodycolour 5 ½ x 6 ¼ inches

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99 294 Time for Tea (above) Watercolour and bodycolour 7 ¾ x 9 ½ inches

295 The Medical Trolley (below) Watercolour and bodycolour 7 ½ x 14 ½ inches

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296 The River (above) Pencil 18 ½ x 19 ¼ inches Provenance: Mary Edmonds Literature: Paddy Rossmore, Betty Swanwick, Artist & Visionary, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2008, Catalogue Raisonné D43a

The River The present drawing is a study for the watercolour of the same title, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1970 as No 518. The composition was inspired by Gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus Christ by St John the Baptist in the River Jordan.

297 The Approach (opposite) Watercolour with pencil 23 ¼ x 19 ½ inches Provenance: Mrs Joan Gibson Literature: Country Bazaar, Summer 1985, front cover; Paddy Rossmore, Betty Swanwick, Artist & Visionary, London: Chris Beetles Gallery, 2008, Page 116, Catalogue Raisonné D48a Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1973, No 657; ‘British Painting 1952-1977’, Royal Academy, 1977, No 350

The Approach The present watercolour was inspired by Christ’s Parable of the Ten 7irgins, recorded in the Gospel of St Matthew. The parable concerns Bve wise virgins who have prepared themselves in their wait for a bridegroom by carrying su'cient oil for their lamps, in contrast to Bve foolish virgins who have not. Its theme is readiness for the Day of Judgement, the bridegroom being Christ himself. The beautiful cluster of Madonna Lilies in the foreground symbolises the chastity of the wise virgins depicted.

For another watercolour on the same subject, please see Norman Neasom’s The Wise Virgins [300].

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NO R M A N N E A S O M Norman Neasom, RWS RBSA SAS (1915-2010) Having grown up on a farm in Worcestershire, Norman Neasom developed into a master of the gure in the landscape. However, he did so in a variety of ways, creating work that ranged from the purely

naturalistic through the caricatural to the poetic and surreal, and that seemed to straddle the pagan and the pious.

For a biography of Norman Neasom, please refer to page 178.

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298 Foundry Workers Signed and dated ’48 Pencil drawing of an ironing board on reverse Bodycolour 12 x 10 ½ inches

Foundry Workers This striking early work by Norman Neasom was produced in 1948, two years after he began to teach at Birmingham School of Art. It suggests the degree to which Birmingham’s reputation as one Britain’s most signiBcant industrial centres survived into the post-war period.

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299 Cleaning the Guns Signed and dated 75 Inscribed with title below mount Pencil 9 x 9 ¾ inches

Cleaning the Guns During the time that he taught at Redditch School of Art, between 1953 and 1979, Norman Neasom particularly enjoyed setting his students thematic projects that would fully engage the range of their talents. He often contributed his own ideas and drawings to these projects, and the present drawing is likely to exemplify such work.

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300 The Wise Virgins Pen ink and watercolour 13 ½ x 13 inches For another watercolour and a note on the same subject, please see Betty Swanwick’s The Approach [297].

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ER IC H O LT Eric Stace Holt (1944-1997) Eric Holt was a draughtsman and painter, who worked mainly in tempera. A slow, meticulous and self-critical artist, he became best known for his highly-wrought gure compositions, including Biblical scenes in modern dress, which led some critics to describe him as a talented follower of Stanley Spencer. Having a strong interest in the countryside, and its crafts and pursuits,

he also produced scenes of country and suburban life, and some pure landscapes. His work invariably displays a strong sense of design, vivid characterisation and elements of the surreal.

For a biography of Eric Holt, please refer to page 179.

PIJ 82 The present drawing is a study for the tempera painting of the same title that was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1983 as No 355.

This highly condensed composition displays Eric Holt’s great abilities as a designer and draughtsman.

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301 PIJ 82 Signed with initials and dated ‘82 Pencil 15 x 11 inches

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302 The Cricketers Tempera on board 19 ¼ x 14 ¼ inches Provenance: The Piccadilly Gallery, London; Purchased by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, 1988

The Cricketers Eric Holt enjoyed depicting Bgures in action, including Bgures at play. The present work shows a batsman at a village cricket match about to be caught out, and typiBes the artist’s approach, with the solid bodies of its protagonists Blling, and almost breaking, the picture plane, in order to engage the viewer’s attention.

SOME VERSIONS of L andscape This Bnal chapter showcases the strength and variety of landscapes produced by artists during the period since the Second World War, and suggests the degree to which landscape painting remains a vital force. Its title alludes to Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), that signiBcant study of the literature of rural life, in the hope that it may draw on the perceptiveness of its author, William Empson, in attempting to articulate some of the meanings and purposes of the works included. In any event, the chapter provides a rich ‘Landscape Anthology’, the term used to head the ultimate section of the 1983 Tate retrospective of the work of John Piper, a Bgure so central to the remaking and reinterpreting of this quintessentially British genre [211-214].

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With the outbreak of the Second World War, Laura Knight, and her painter husband, Harold, made a home for themselves in the Malverns, a beautiful rural corner of England, steeped in ancient history. As an o'cial war artist, she would be responsible for some of the most emblematic Bgure paintings to result from the con0ict, including her portrait of a woman working on the Home Front, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring (1943), and The Nuremberg Trial (1946, both Imperial War Museums). At the same time, she was producing such landscapes as Sun Rays on the Malvern Hills [308], which seems to epitomise all that Britain was Bghting for.

In its impression of lush, diminutive hills, caught in ever-changing light and shade, it may remain a symbol of a nation, and a standard of British landscape and landscape painting. However, through the subsequent decades, artists have conveyed many alternative, even competing, visions of what constitutes a British landscape – in their choice and experience of topography and feature, and in their style of representation.

The conscious project of ‘Recording Britain’ at a time when its heritage was threatened by both enemies and developers was explored in Chapter 7 of the Brst volume of A Century of British Art. It surveyed a wide-range of natural and man-made sites that were considered worth preserving. Following the Second World War, survival and change became increasingly pressing as themes for landscape painting, and the interaction of the natural and man-made more frequently depicted. On the other hand, some artists chose to engage more fully with nature at its most raw or impressive, or to revive the idea of its possessing spiritual energy or power.

In 1949, the Italian artist, Pietro Annigoni, arrived in Britain for the Brst time, and stayed in London. Almost immediately, he began to make drawings of the city, in order to engage with it, and to create what may be considered visual ‘calling cards’ for the art dealers of Bond Street. He gravitated towards the green spaces within it [254], but also recorded its major landmarks that had survived the Nazi bombing [255]. In subsequent years, he would be drawn again and again to the Thames [256-257], as would such native artists as David Tindle [349-353]. Both Annigoni and Tindle convey surprising degrees of stillness and silence in presenting the expanse of the slow, grey river. At the same time, they almost normalise, even naturalise, the elements of industry that line its banks.

Though the industrial mode of landscape painting had been memorably present in British art since the Industrial Revolution itself, it became much more frequently employed in the second half of the twentieth century, as artists and their audiences came

to accept signs of engineering and manufacturing in their everyday surroundings. Cecil Arthur Hunt had long recognised the sublime grandeur that was potent in industrial sites [305], and could also see the dramatic appeal of the destruction of such sites, making much of the demolition of the Watney Stag Brewery, in 7ictoria, in 1959 [304 & 306]. Meanwhile, Terence Cuneo celebrated the energy and activity involved in making and operating the modern world, not only in his famous depictions of trains, but also in those of men at work, such as those constructing the shaft collar of a gold mine in South Africa in 1951 [317]. Here the artist is not on the ground, but deep within it, revealing the degree to which humanity is immersed in its surroundings, while expanding the deBnition of landscape. In contrast, Edward Bawden represented the marks of industry more gently, even decoratively, as in a former Cornish granite quarry, 0ooded and gradually returning to nature [309].

Some artists have been much keener to insist on the continuing power of nature, and to concentrate on features that best express it. Charles Knight showed that it was still to be found in the British Isles, by depicting the Cuillins looming high on the horizon of the Isle of Skye [207] and the waters of Glen Moriston surging beneath a ruined bridge [205]. Peter Coker focussed even more closely on the forceful 0ow of a Pyrenean mountain stream, excluding from view anything beyond its waters [324].

While Keith Grant has maintained a devotion to the idea of the North, and the many places that embody it, he has travelled far and wide, and has adapted his style in sensitive response to the precise qualities of particular natural phenomena. So he has been able to communicate his experiences of the volcanic activity of both Etna, on Sicily [339-340], and Surtsey, o6 Iceland [341-343], and contrast the rhythmic smoking of the former and spectacular erupting of the latter. In so doing, he has remained true to the Neo-Romantic impulse – to express the spirit of nature – that inspired him from so early in his career. On the contrary, Alan Reynolds soon stripped away the Neo-Romantic elements from his pictorial language [231-233] in order to emphasise underlying pattern and structure [234]. Such others as James Stroudley [311] and Donald Hamilton Fraser [326-332] followed similar paths towards abstraction.

Like Edward Seago before him [318-322], Ken Howard has demonstrated that, unsurprisingly, an appreciative audience remains for comprehensible, celebratory landscapes painted with conBdence and skill [344-348]. This is the legacy of Edwardian Impressionism, and its promotion by the New English Art Club (as explored in Chapter 1 of the Brst volume of A Century of British Art). What is more striking, and telling, is that it is Howard himself who has spoken of ‘two very deBnite sides of the coin’ in life, and, having accompanied and painted the British Army over a period of 10 years, has been able to represent the obverse of celebration in a large-scale humanitarian statement, Raw War [348]. If Laura Knight should Bnd solace in the Malvern Hills after attending the Nuremberg war trials, it seems only right that Ken Howard should remind the many lovers of his light-Blled beach scenes of their dark counterpart. Painters in Britain throughout the twentieth century have extended deBnitions of landscape and, in so doing, have enriched our life experience.

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C E C I L ART HU R HU N T Cecil Arthur Hunt, 7PRWS RBA (1873-1965) Once elected a full member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1925, Cecil Arthur Hunt retired from his career as a barrister and turned his serious pastime of painting into a profession. While he had rst established himself as a painter of mountains, especially the Alps and the Dolomites, he soon proved himself a master of a great variety of topographies.

The impressive, often stark, e ects that he achieved rival those associated with his friend and mentor, Frank Brangwyn.

For a biography of Cecil Arthur Hunt, please refer to page 179.

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303 On the Medway Signed Inscribed with title and artist’s address on original backboard Watercolour and bodycolour 11 ¼ x 15 inches Exhibited: ‘Coronation Exhibition’, Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1952, No 29

On the Medway Hunt’s sketchbook for 1949 (No 33) shows drawings of this view in Kent from the north bank of the River Medway across to Rochester.

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304 Demolition (below) Signed Pen ink and watercolour with bodycolour 11 x 15 inches Exhibited: Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours On reverse: Misty Valley (left) Signed Watercolour with bodycolour 11 ¼ x 15 ¼ inches

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The Demolition of the Watney Stag Brewery (above and opposite below) Hunt was attracted to the dramatic and theatrical qualities of sites of industry and demolition. He therefore found much to inspire him when, in November 1959, the large Watney Stag Brewery in central London, between 7ictoria Street and Bressenden Place, was razed to the ground. He made drawings of the subject in two of his sketchbooks for 1959 (Nos 41 and 43), and then watercolours that were exhibited at Royal Academy of Arts between 1960 and 1962, and at the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1960 and 1963.

305 Silver and Black (opposite above) Signed Watercolour with bodycolour 15 ¼ x 22 ½ inches Exhibited: ‘Cecil Arthur Hunt 7PRWS RBA’, Chris Beetles Gallery, October 1996, No 11 306 Demolition in the West End (opposite below) Signed Watercolour and bodycolour 11 ¼ x 15 inches Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1962, No 598

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L AU R A K N IG HT Dame Laura Knight, RA RWS RE RWA PSWA (1877-1970) Laura Knight exploited her versatility, verve and clarity of vision to her utmost, so proving how a woman could be as successful and serious an artist as any man in twentieth-century Britain.

She was the rst woman artist to be made a Dame of the British Empire, and the rst in 150 years to be elected a full Royal Academician.

She was also the only woman artist to work as an oScial war artist in both world wars.

For a biography of Laura Knight, please refer to page 180.

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Sun Rays on the Malvern Hills Though Laura Knight is perhaps best remembered as a Bgure painter, she had proved herself to be a consummate landscapist from early in her career, while working in Staithes, in Yorkshire, and Newlyn, in Cornwall. Her later landscape style is well represented by her images of the Malvern Hills, which straddle Worcestershire and Herefordshire, including the present outstanding example.

Laura Knight took great advantage of the elevation a6orded by the Malverns to paint views that are both panoramic and dizzying. She particularly enjoyed emphasising the height by including rays of sunshine breaking through the scudding clouds, as here or in Harvest (1939, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide).

Between 1929 and 1937, Laura Knight and her painter husband, Harold, regularly attended the annual Malvern Festival, which was founded by their friend, Sir Barry Jackson, primarily as a showcase for the work of George Bernard Shaw. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, they returned to the area, staying initially at the British Camp Hotel, Colwall, and then moving to the nearby Park Hotel. In the post-war period, they would spend most of their summers at this hotel, and in their Bnal years together spend almost all their time there.

Following Harold’s death at the hotel on 3 October 1961, Laura spent her Bnal years in London.

307 Sun Rays on the Malvern Hills Signed Oil on canvas 19 ¼ x 23 ¼ inches

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EDWA R D B AW D E N Edward Bawden, CBE RA (1903-1989) One of the most signi cant graphic designers of the twentieth century, Edward Bawden worked with ease between the ne and applied arts. Even before his appointment as an oScial war artist in 1940, he had established a reputation as a designer, illustrator and painter, and the output of his long career included ceramics, lithographic prints, murals, wallpaper designs and watercolours.

For a biography of Edward Bawden, please refer to page 181.

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308 The Foundry Signed Watercolour and ink 14 ½ x 19 ½ inches Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 1

The Foundry Though it is unidentiBed, the foundry in the present watercolour calls to mind Edward Bawden’s interest in traditional industrial buildings and processes. In 1956, for instance, he made a painting trip with John Nash and Carel Weight to Ironbridge, Shropshire, known as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. A year or two earlier, he may have had Brst-hand experience of a working foundry, as the result of designing cast iron garden furniture that was produced at Bilston Foundries in Wolverhampton. As with the watercolour of Gold Diggings Quarry [309], the present work is beautifully designed while conveying a strong sense of atmosphere, indeed so much so that one can almost feel the heat of furnaces.

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Gold Diggings Quarry, Minions, Liskeard The Bawden family was originally Cornish. Edward Bawden’s grandfather was a copper miner at Caradon, near Liskeard, in southeast Cornwall, and his father founded an ironmongery business in Liskeard itself, before moving to Bury St Edmunds, Su6olk. So, though Edward Bawden was born in Braintree, Essex, he would often return to his family’s roots in taking painting holidays in Cornwall. In April 1958, he painted several watercolours in the area around Liskeard, including some of the mines and quarries. The present example shows Gold Diggings Quarry, an abandoned, 0ooded granite quarry situated about six miles north of Liskeard. It displays the artist’s ability to combine his acknowledged skill at design with strong sense of atmosphere, the water both re0ecting the lowering clouds and creating a great degree of unity.

309 Gold Diggings Quarry, Minions, Liskeard Signed and dated 1958 Watercolour 18 x 22 ¼ inches Provenance: Leicester Galleries; West Riding Education Department, on loan to Ripon Grammar School Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 2

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JAM E S STRO U D L E Y Leonard James Stroudley, RBA (1906-1985) James Stroudley worked through a series of in uences – from early Italian artists to Cubists – in order to achieve the incisive draughtsmanship that underpins his artistry. He then produced gure subjects, landscapes, still life compositions and, ultimately, abstracts with equal con dence and success.

For a biography of James Stroudley, please refer to page 182.

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310 Nude, Rottingdean Chalk 16 x 30 inches

Nude, Rottingdean The present drawing is one a series of works that James Stroudley produced during the 1950s, on the theme of nudes reclining in landscapes, and speciBcally on the beaches of Sussex. Stroudley’s explorations of the relationship between the human body and its environment can be compared to those of Bill Brandt, who took photographs of nudes on similar Sussex beaches during the same decade. However, while Brandt produced abstracted close-ups of bodily parts in order to emphasise their organic qualities, Stroudley outlined the contours of the whole Bgure as a suggestion of the wider terrain.

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115

Abstract Red Yellow and Green The trajectory of James Stroudley’s career was similar to that of Thomas Monnington (whose work is represented in volume one of A Century of British Art). Driven by a classicising impulse, underpinned by a strong sense of design, both artists began by producing major murals of Bgures in landscapes and ended by concentrating on geometric abstractions.

311 Abstract Red, Yellow and Green Oil on board 29 ½ x 23 ½ inches

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SH ELL COUNTY GUIDES : S r Ba dm i n a nd ke i t h g r ant The petroleum company, Shell-Mex and BP, proved a major patron of artists between the early 1930s and the mid 1960s, and employed them to represent the wealth and variety of British landscape and heritage.

published by the Ebury Press in association with George Rainbird in 1964. The appearance of the latter may be said to have marked the end of the sustained enlightened patronage of the oil companies.

The involvement of S R Badmin and Keith Grant came relatively late to Shell’s project, but both certainly enhanced the look and the message that the company was trying to promote during the post-war period.

They both contributed to the ‘Shell County Guides’, a series issued as poster and magazine advertisements. The artwork for many of these was then used to provide the covers for the small paperback volumes known as ‘The Shilling Guides’, and for the chapter openers of the comprehensive and popular book, The Shell and BP Guide to Britain,

Having already illustrated The Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs (collected in book form, with a text by Geo6rey Grigson, in 1958), Badmin was commissioned to contribute to Bve of the Shell County Guides: Middlesex and Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Shropshire, Surrey and Yorkshire. Though a generation younger, Grant contributed to three of the guides: Wiltshire [312], Cardiganshire [313] and Shetland [314].

K EITH G R A N T Keith Frederick Grant (born 1930) One of the greatest living British landscape painters, Keith Grant has travelled extensively, and has confronted the elements in order to produce extraordinary, resonant images of nature, especially in the north. Recently, he has preferred to recollect his experiences in the tranquility of his studio in Norway, and work imaginatively to produce an exciting series of what he calls ‘autobiographical’ paintings.

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For a biography of Keith Grant, please refer to pages 166-167.

312 Wiltshire Watercolour and bodycolour with ink 12 ¾ x 16 ½ inches Provenance: ‘The Shell Collection of Modern British Paintings’, Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 2002 Illustrated: ‘Shell County Guides’ Poster (Printed by Henry Stone), 1960; Edward Young and Yorke Crompton (eds), Wiltshire (The Shilling Guides), London: Shell-Mex and BP/George Rainbird, 1963, Cover; Geo6rey Boumphrey (ed), The Shell and BP Guide to Britain, London: Ebury Press/George Rainbird, 1964, between pages 64 & 65 (detail) Exhibited: ‘Keith Grant: Metamorphosis’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2016, No 1; ‘A Book by Its Cover’, Nunnington Hall, February-March 2017, No 25 Painted by 1959

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313 Cardiganshire (above) Bodycolour and ink; 12 x 14 ½ inches Provenance: ‘The Shell Collection of Modern British Paintings’, Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 2002 Illustrated: ‘Shell County Guides’ Poster (Printed by C Nicholls), 1961; Edward Young and Yorke Crompton (eds), Cardiganshire and Breconshire (The Shilling Guides), London: Shell-Mex and BP/George Rainbird, 1963, Cover; Geo6rey Boumphrey (ed), The Shell and BP Guide to Britain, London: Ebury Press/George Rainbird, 1964, between pages 225 (detail) Exhibited: ‘Keith Grant: Metamorphosis’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2016, No 2 Painted by 1961

314 Shetland (below) Watercolour and bodycolour 14 ¾ x 18 ¾ inches Provenance: ‘The Shell Collection of Modern British Paintings’, Sotheby’s, London, 4 July 2002 Illustrated: ‘Shell County Guides’ Poster (Printed by C Nicholls), 1962 Exhibited: ‘Keith Grant: Metamorphosis’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2016, No 3 Painted by 1962

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S R B ADM I N Stanley Roy Badmin, RWS RE AIA FSIA (1906-1989) Throughout his career, S R Badmin used his great talents – as etcher, illustrator and watercolourist – to promote a vision of the English countryside and thus of England itself. By underpinning his idealism with almost documentary precision and detail, he was able to produce images that appealed to all, and could be used for a great variety of purposes, from education through to advertising. The wellbeing suggested by each rural panorama is all the more potent, and pleasing, for the accuracy of each tree and leaf, and the plausibility of the slightest anecdotal episode.

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For a biography of S R Badmin, please refer to pages 182-183.

Chris Beetles has done much to promote the work of S R Badmin, notably through the monograph, S R Badmin and the English Landscape (Collins, 1985), which includes a catalogue raisonné of etchings, and a series of exhibitions. The most recent of those exhibitions, held in 2015, was accompanied by a 48-page fully-illustrated catalogue containing an updated catalogue raisonné of etchings.

315 Yorkshire Signed Inscribed with title below mount Watercolour and pencil 13 x 17 ½ inches Illustrated: Preliminary Drawing for: ‘Shell County Guides’ Poster (Printed by C Nicholls), 1964; Edward Young and Yorke Crompton (eds), Yorkshire (The Shilling Guides), London: Shell-Mex and BP/George Rainbird, 1964, Covers to the two parts, ‘The West Riding’ and ‘The East and North Ridings’;

Geo6rey Boumphrey (ed), The Shell and BP Guide to Britain, London: Ebury Press/George Rainbird, 1964, between pages 560 & 561 and 576 & 577 (details) Exhibited: ‘S R Badmin RWS’, Chris Beetles Gallery, June 1985, No 116; ‘S R Badmin RWS, Paintings, Drawings & Prints’, Chris Beetles Gallery, March-April 2015, No 154

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‘The working drawing for Northamptonshire … has the key to his compositional process scribbled in the margins. The proposed content is divided into the industrial side and the traditional side. The industrial side is away to the distant left – “Corby with its sulphurous smoke and giant bunsen burner; overhead bucket cables converging on Corby; open-cast iron ore quarrying; special iron ore tip lorries; corn crops growing to the edge of quarries”. Over to the right is the traditional side – Queen Eleanor’s Cross; the spire of a typical church, and Middleton Cheney. Between them are “"ne stonework and carving on church towers, great country houses, and beautiful thatch and stone-roofed stone houses with careless patches of red brick and slate horrors.” The foreground shows ancient and modern boots, a Roman stone co n, Roman castor ware and Northamptonshire’s favourite sons, George Washington and John Dryden. The powerful mass of Henry Moore’s “Mother and Child” statue in St Matthew’s Church, Northampton, is in the centre, but before the "nal illustration was completed the claims of Yorkshire took Henry Moore and his Madonna on a free transfer to the county guide of his birthplace.’

(Chris Beetles, S R Badmin and the English Landscape, London: Collins, 1985, pages 34-35)

316 Northamptonshire Signed Signed and inscribed with title and artist’s annotations Pen ink and watercolour with pencil 13 x 16 ¾ inches Illustrated: Preliminary drawing for: ‘Shell County Guides’ Poster; Edward Young and Yorke Crompton (eds), Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire (The Shilling Guides), London: Shell-Mex and BP/George Rainbird, 1964, Cover Literature: Chris Beetles, S R Badmin and the English Landscape, London: Collins, 1985, Page 36 Exhibited: ‘S R Badmin RWS’, Chris Beetles Gallery, June 1985, No 118; ‘S R Badmin RWS, Paintings, Drawings & Prints’, Chris Beetles Gallery, March-April 2015, No 153

The published version of S R Badmin’s Northamptonshire Pen ink and watercolour (Private Collection)

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TER E N C E C U N E O Terence Tenison Cuneo, C7O OBE RGI FRGA (1907-1996) Considered by many to be the greatest railway artist of the twentieth century, Terence Cuneo was a painter and illustrator of highly atmospheric realistic gure scenes – encompassing ceremonial, industrial, military, sporting and wildlife subjects – and also portraits.

For a biography of Terence Cuneo, please refer to page 184.

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‘I oundered about the shaft trying to "nd a composition for my picture. Water from rock “seepage” poured o. my helmet, the shriek of compressed air deafened me, and barged as I was by natives, I only just missed getting caught up in the grab. After twenty minutes of this I had enough data and was more than ready to come up.

I found the shift-boss and gave him the prearranged signal – a tug on his coat. He nodded, looked round the shaft and shrugged. There was no bucket! It was then that I really became aware of those 4,400 feet of rock overhead. When a bucket appeared I made a bee-line for it, but as we waited to move upwards three small rocks hit me on the helmet in quick succession. I thought, “This is it”, and waited for the next one to atten me.

However, after a vicious jerk, we were soon soaring up …’

(Terence Cuneo, ‘Behind the Canvas’, The Artist, 1952, page 56)

Shaft Collar during Construction at a Gold Mine in the Orange Free State As explained in introductions to his series of articles, ‘Behind the Canvas’, published in the magazine, The Artist, in 1952, Terence Cuneo made two trips to Africa in 1951 in response to commissions. During the second, he worked on seven paintings for the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa, including the highly dramatic one included here, which depicts the construction of a shaft at Jeanette Gold Mine in the northern Orange Free State. A caption in The Artist describes the situation as follows: The scene 4 400 ft below the surface of a gold mine in the Orange Tree State. Native boys are ‘lashing’ the rocks to the centre of the shaft to allow the grabs to pick it up and discharge it into the buckets where it is disposed of on the surface. (page 54)

Development of Jeanette Gold Mine began in 1951, but was suspended in 1955 prior to production, as a result of unfavourable market conditions, technical di'culties associated with Khaki Shale and the prospect of signiBcantly better mining opportunities elsewhere in the Welkom GoldBeld. In 2001, it became the collaborative property of African Rainbow Minerals Gold and Harmony Gold Mining Company Ltd, which merged two years later, in 2003. Then, in 2008, it was sold, untouched, to Taung Gold International Ltd. It is currently the subject of a feasibility study.

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317 Shaft Collar during Construction at a Gold Mine in the Orange Free State Signed and dated ‘May 1951’ Oil on canvas 25 x 30 inches Provenance: Commissioned from the artist by the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa; John Laing & Son Ltd Literature: Terence Cuneo, ‘Behind the Canvas’, The Artist, 1952, Pages 53-56

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EDWA R D SE AG O Edward Brian Seago, RWS RBA (1910-1974) One of Britain’s best loved and most widely collected twentieth-century artists, Edward Seago painted fresh and vigorous oils and watercolours of a variety of subjects, including portraits and, especially, landscapes.

For a biography of Edward Seago, please refer to page 185.

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318 North East Wind, Waxham Beach Signed Oil on canvas on board 26 x 36 inches Provenance: P & D Colnaghi & Co Ltd, London

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319 Sunlit Street, Italy Signed Inscribed with title on reverse Watercolour with pencil 10 ¾ x 14 ¼ inches Exhibited: Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, No 2, as ‘Sunlit Street, Italy’

320 December Morning, Norwich Signed Oil on board 16 x 24 inches Provenance: Mr and Mrs Edward L Bateman of Johannesburg Exhibited: ‘Edward Seago Memorial Exhibition’, Pieter Wenning Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, July 1975, No 8

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321 The Squall, Hong Kong Harbour Signed Inscribed with title on reverse Oil on board 20 x 30 inches

The Squall, Hong Kong Harbour In 1962, Edward Seago accepted an invitation from the Far Eastern trading house, John Swire and Sons Ltd, to go out to Hong Kong to produce Bve paintings for its new boardroom, in exchange for transport and accommodation. He painted the Bve paintings, each measuring 24 x 36 inches, in less than three weeks, and they were very well received by John Kidstone Swire and his fellow Directors, and by their families and friends. As a result,

he stayed on in Hong Kong for three months to paint about 90 oils and watercolours, about three-quarters of which he sold to this appreciative audience, and many of which still remain in collections in Hong Kong. Contrary to his usual practice of painting en plein air, Seago found that the inquisitive nature of the native population necessitated that he make sketchbook drawings on site, and then work them up into paintings in the studio.

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322 The Colleoni Statue – Venice Signed Inscribed with title on reverse Oil on board 19 ½ x 29 inches Provenance: Kennedy Galleries, New York

The Colleoni Statue – Venice Campo San Zanipolo, in 7enice, is of such interest, both topographically and historically, that it o6ers much to an artist in search of a subject. Edward Seago painted it on several occasions, in both oil and watercolour, and, depending on his perspective, either excluded or, as here, included Andrea del 7errocchio’s impressive equestrian statue of the mercenary captain, Bartolomeo Colleoni (1480-88). Behind it stands the Scuola Grande Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the charitable foundation

(now a hospital) attached to the great Dominican church of the same name (both of which were built in the Bfteenth century).

They are dedicated to two early Christian martyrs, John and Paul, and their Italian names, Giovanni and Paolo, are shortened in the 7enetian dialect to Zanipolo. The façade of the church is represented in the present work by the dark vertical stripe down its right-hand edge.

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PE T E R CO K E R

For a biography of Peter Coker, please refer to page 186.

323 Apple Tree Signed Inscribed with title and ‘The Red House, Mistley, Manningtree, Essex’, and dated ‘Oct 1965’ on reverse Oil on canvas 50 x 60 inches Provenance: Given to the Bishop of Coventry by his parishioners; The Stanley Seeger Collection Literature: David Wootton, Peter Coker RA, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2002, Catalogue Raisonné No 119 Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1966, No 864; ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 39

Apple Tree A single tree, sometimes a single apple tree, was an important motif for Peter Coker, in both his drawings and paintings, from the mid 1950s. The two versions of Tree and Hedge painted in 1956 (the second of which is in the collection of the Alfred East Art Gallery, Kettering) provided an especially signiBcant precedent for the present work. They introduced a new 0uidity into Coker’s work, of which this oil, produced about a decade later,

was one of the ultimate expressions. After a long concentration on trees en masse – in his representations of the forests of Epping, Rendlesham and Tunstall – he returned in Apple Tree to a single specimen and presented it heroically and on an epic scale. Its expressionist handling and powerful palette suggest a tension between the tree itself – surviving, growing – and the elements with which it interacts.

Peter Godfrey Coker, RA (1926-2004) ‘One of the foremost realist painters in England … Coker will be remembered for the refreshing nature of his astringent vision, for his consummate mastery as a draughtsman, painter and etcher, and as a proud and vigorous inheritor of a great artistic tradition.’

(Frances Spalding, Independent, 20 December 2004)

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In 2002, Chris Beetles published Peter Coker RA, a comprehensive companion to the work of this artist. In addition to an authorised biography (by David Wootton) and two additional essays (by John Russell Taylor and Richard Humphreys), it includes a catalogue raisonné, a list of exhibitions and sketchbooks, an inventory of public collections containing his works and a select bibliography. This beautifully-produced 180-page hardback is extensively illustrated.

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324 Mountain Stream, Pyrenees No 2 Signed Signed, inscribed with title and artist’s address, and dated ‘19th Sept 1965’ on reverse Oil on board; 48 x 48 inches Provenance: Provost Family Literature: David Wootton, Peter Coker RA, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2002, Catalogue Raisonne No 122

Mountain Stream, Pyrenees No 2 In the mid 1960s, Peter Coker employed a square format to create a number of monumental compositions from aqueous motifs. When he combined the format with a high viewpoint, taking in little or no sky, the result was often simultaneously economical, forceful and intriguing. This was equally true whether the subject was drawn locally from East Anglia or, as here, from places in France.

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PETE R COK ER

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325 Veules-les-Roses Signed with initials Inscribed with title and artist’s address on a label on the reverse Oil on board 13 ¼ x 19 ¾ inches Literature: David Wootton, Peter Coker RA, London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2002, Catalogue Raisonné No 585 Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1993, No 835

Veules-les-Roses During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Peter Coker was preoccupied in painting the north coast of France and also that of Belgium. He made frequent visits to numerous sites, from Etretat in the west to Ostend in the east, and favoured especially a cluster of communities along the coastline of Haute-Normandie.

These included 7eules-les-Roses, the beach of which provides a magniBcent view of the cli6s stretching westwards towards the headland at St-7alery-en-Caux. The present work captures in dynamic fashion the experience of standing on that beach and absorbing all that it o6ers, including the sound of the waves and the sensation of the spray, as well as the sights.

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D O N AL D HA M I LTO N FR A S ER Donald Hamilton Fraser, RA (1929-2009) His boldly-handled and richly-coloured semi-abstracts, in uenced by the School of Paris, established Donald Hamilton Fraser as one of the most distinctive British Modernist painters of the immediate post-war generation.

For a biography of Donald Hamilton Fraser, please refer to page 187.

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326 Night Flight Signed with initials Inscribed with title on reverse Oil on canvas 23 ½ x 27 ½ inches Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 54

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130 327 Re ected Waterfront (above) Signed with initials Oil on canvas 20 x 30 inches Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 57

328 Landscape (below) Signed with initials Oil on paper 12 x 17 ¾ inches Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 55

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329 Re ected Moon Signed on label on reverse Oil on board 27 x 35 inches Provenance: Gimpel Fils, London Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 56

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330 Horizontal Composition (Blue) 1961 (above) Signed with initials Oil on paper 16 ½ x 21 ½ inches Exhibited: Gimpel Fils, London

331 City Landscape at Night, September 1957 (opposite) Signed with initials Signed on reverse Oil on board 21 x 12 inches Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 53

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D ONA L D HAM I LTO N F R A S ER

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332 Blue Landscape Signed and dated 57 Oil on canvas 28 x 36 inches Exhibited: Gimpel Fils, London, November 1958, No 23, Purchased by Godfrey Winn; ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 60

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K EI TH G R A N T Keith Frederick Grant (born 1930)

Chris Beetles Gallery has represented Keith Grant since 2008, and has mounted Bve major solo shows devoted to his work, all of which were accompanied by substantial, fully-illustrated catalogues. These were Elements of the Earth (2010), Metamorphosis (2016), North by New English (2017), Antarctica (2018) and Invention and Variation (2020), the last of which presented a series of paintings celebrating the transBguration of nature in the music of Frederick Delius.

19 6 1-6 2: No r way ‘I was itching to go up north to start work, so I left Oslo and went to Andenes … the landscapes started to work on me in the north, so that the forms became more abstract really, though sometimes more hard edged, but textural too and certainly big.

They gave me an opportunity to see vast horizons and seascapes and distant mountains – all of the things that a.ected me as a child and which I responded to were there again, but with a much and ever in"nitely deeper mystery about them, which for me con"rmed this notion of the North holding the key to what I wanted to do.’

(Keith in conversation, 9 December 2010, reminiscing about his seven-month visit to Norway in 1960-61, as the result of a Norwegian Government Scholarship)

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333 Coastal Rocks Signed Watercolour, bodycolour, ink and varnish on card 11 x 6 inches

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334 Snow-Capped Rocks Signed Watercolour, bodycolour, ink and varnish on card 8 ¾ x 14 ¾ inches

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335 Landscape of a Landscape, Harstad Signed, inscribed with title and dated 61/62 on reverse Oil on board 36 x 48 inches Provenance: Paintings in Hospitals Exhibited: New Art Centre, London, April 1962; ‘Keith Grant: Elements of the Earth’, Chris Beetles Gallery, March-April 2010, No 1; ‘Keith Grant: Metamorphosis’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2016, No 4

‘I stayed with a Dutch doctor and his wife up in Harstad [on the island of Hinnøya, in northern Norway]. You could look across the strait to a particular line of cli.s, and these impressed me enormously, and I made many drawings and sketches of them.

I must have spent some time in Harstad, and I later used a view of those cli.s in one of the Benjamin Britten memorial pictures [in 1976-77].’

(Keith Grant in conversation, 9 December 2010)

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137 336 The Pool of the Drowned Man (above) Signed and dated 61/62 Oil on board 23 ¾ x 32 inches Provenance: Patrick and Caroline Neill

337 The Gull in the North III (below) Signed and dated 61/62 Signed, inscribed with title and details of provenance and exhibition, and dated 61/62 on reverse Oil on board 29 ½ x 47 ½ inches Provenance: Patrick and Caroline Neill

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1961-6 2: No r way

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338 An Abstract Landscape Signed and dated 61/62 Oil on board 29 ½ x 39 ½ inches Provenance: Patrick and Caroline Neill

196 4 : S i c i ly Keith Grant has made two trips to Sicily. The Brst took place in 1964, when he, his new wife, Gisèle, and her sister, Monique, ‘drove all the way down Italy from France – right the way down to the south’ (as he has explained in conversation). A decade later, in September 1977, he took a group of his students from Hornsey College of Art, and they pitched tents in the grounds of a hotel on the slopes of Mount Etna.

While working up sketches that he had made on the Brst trip to Sicily, Keith recollected in his journal the experience of viewing Mount Etna: I remember watching the smoke issuing from the crater (I was at Taormina), interested and moved by the slow rhythmic beauty of the white smoke column against the sky. I bridged the distance between it and myself until I had separated all else from it. I felt myself a part of the blue atmosphere and the swaying trunk of steam, peaceful like a lullaby, and yet an uneasy peace, charged with the ever present menace of sudden explosion. It was something compelling, fascinating, like a snake which is charmed. (in his journal, 3 March 1965) On the second trip, his head was full of Stéphane Mallarmé’s sensual poem, L’après-midi d’un faune, which is set on Sicily, and Claude Debussy’s symphonic Prélude, which it inspired. He remembers: I was very interested in L’après-midi d’un faune and the evocative music of Mount Etna, and the mood of it, and the Roman connection, and all sorts of echoes … from the Classical side of my interests … I was fascinated by the places there they had developed, made, and Sicily was an amazing place for that. (in conversation, 9 September 2010)

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339 Etna, Sicily (right) Signed, inscribed with title and ‘To David + Geraldine with a6ection, Keith + Gisele’, and dated 1965 and 20.6.66 Watercolour and bodycolour with oil pastel, ink and pencil on board 15 ½ x 16 ½ inches Exhibited: ‘Keith Grant: Metamorphosis’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2016, No 5

340 Study for Mount Etna No 4 (below) Watercolour and bodycolour 16 ¾ x 21 ½ inches Exhibited: New Art Centre, London

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1965 -6 7: I c e l a nd

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341 Midnight Sun, Surtsey Bodycolour and polymer on board 21 ½ x 44 inches Provenance: Sir Frederick Gibberd Exhibited: Keith Grant – The North Lands – Paintings’, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London, 1967; ‘The Way to Cold Mountain. An Exhibition of Paintings by Keith Grant’, Rochdale Art Gallery, 11 September-31 October 1976, No 9; ‘Keith Grant Metamorphosis’, Chris Beetles Gallery, April-May 2016, No 6

In the years 1956-57, while studying at the Royal College of Art, Keith Grant received encouragement from his teacher, Colin Hayes, to visit Iceland. It would be almost a decade before he did so, by which time he had developed his idea of the North through extensive experiences of Norway. Nevertheless, Keith remembers the Brst trip to Iceland – with his friend, Tony Buckingham, in 1965 – as amazing … We went right the way round. We went to the very far north to Lake Mývatn. I made many, many drawings, and it cemented a love for Iceland, which I was able to develop … The volcanoes were extinct, of course, Helgafell and others of the volcanoes around Mývatn. And it was a strange new landscape, but that was also in0uential, because it was very dark and abstract, the contorted shapes of the lava, and the action of the lava and the sea … Another volcano called Snæfellsjökull: the snow mountains glacier, I think that means. But that was the mountain chosen by Jules 7erne for where Journey to the Centre of the Earth begins’ (in conversation, 9 December 2010) He returned to Iceland one year later in order to experience some signiBcant volcanic eruptions of the south coast, on the 7estmannæyjar islands: I was teaching at Hornsey College of Art then, I remember, because I took their photographic assistant with me to take the photographs. We were given a small aeroplane, and so we 0ew around an island that had come out of the sea next to Surtsey.

It’s been washed away now. It was called Syrtlingur [Little Surtsey], and I’ve got some very dramatic pictures of that – movie pictures as well. (in conversation, 9 December 2010) Recording these 0ights in his journal, he made the following observation: An hour ago we 0ew again over the volcanic eruption near Surtsey. The billowing steam was rubbed with dirt, its whiteness burst by great black and brown protusions of ascending lava and ash. Like Bngertips of giant hands rising out of the sea, black and stretching upwards, as if clawing for the top of the mushrooming clouds, and then relaxing and falling outwards in arcs and returning in graceful arcs into the sea. (in his journal, in the air, 20 May 1966)

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342 Iceland’s Atlantic (above) Signed Inscribed with title and dated 1967 on reverse of original frame Bodycolour and charcoal 12 x 23 ½ inches

343 Surtsey (below) Signed with initials, inscribed with title and dated 5/66 Inscribed with title and medium, and dated 5/66 on original backboard Acrylic, bodycolour and ink with pencil on paper laid on board 15 x 21 inches

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K EN H OWA R D James Kenneth Howard, OBE RA HonRWS HonRBA ROI RWA PPNEAC HonSGFA (born 1932) Ken Howard is one of Britain’s best-loved artists, his light- lled landscapes and studio scenes being always greatly anticipated by visitors to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

For a biography of Ken Howard, please refer to page 188.

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344 Newlyn, May 1990 Signed Oil on canvas 19 ¼ x 23 ¼ inches

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345 Late Afternoon Light, 1993 Signed Signed, inscribed with title, medium and artist’s address, and dated 93 on Royal Academy label on reverse of frame Oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1994, No 1017; ‘The Figurative Tradition, A Celebration of Contemporary British Art’, Chris Beetles Gallery, 6 October-7 November 2020, No 47

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346 Lido di Venezia Signed Inscribed with title and dated 2008 Oil on canvas board 9 ½ x 11 ½ inches

347 Bell Tower, Santorini, Morning (below) Signed Oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

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‘In this exhibition [Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2010], I’ve got a wide range of work … There’s Raw War, which, in fact, is a tough picture … People won’t believe that I’ve done that one. I suppose it was the years that I spent with the British Army between ’73 and ’83, and I worked at that time in places like Beirut, when they bombed the American base there, and I worked in Cyprus just after the Turks invaded. It did have quite an e.ect on me, in terms of … what I was doing, was about. On one hand, that side of life exaggerated, if you like, the celebratory side of what I was doing. It made me want to do that more. And yet, on the other hand, the celebratory side – my beaches and my studio interiors etcetera – seem to stress the importance of this sort of thing …

I had this idea of man’s inhumanity to man, if you like, the terrible things that men do to each other, and yet I didn’t have a concept to begin with about how I could make it visually come over rather than verbally … And the theme for the Summer Exhibition this year is ‘Raw’. But I suddenly realised that ‘Raw’ was ‘War’ spelled backwards. And it was at that time that I was beginning to be able to see how I could get this idea down …

I found that Northern Ireland and all my 10 years’ experience with the army, on the one hand made my natural inclinations stronger, and on the other hand made me question them very much. At one stage I was going to put, I had cut out of the paper the head shots of the "rst hundred men that were killed in Afghanistan, and I was going to have that on this central part, But then I began to think … I don’t want this to be o.ensive to any individuals. But every one of those 130,000,000 million deaths must have caused families to grieve and su.er …

That expresses to me the contrast to the things that I delight in, because I’m not incredibly depressive about life in general, but there are two very de"nite sides of the coin, aren’t there?’

(Ken Howard speaking during David Austin and Neale Worley’s The Way I See It. A documentary about the life and work of Professor Ken Howard, OBE RA, 2011)

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For a detail of the artwork, please refer to the back endpapers of the catalogue

348 Raw War: We Are Building a Better World Signed Oil on canvas 49 ½ x 89 ¾ inches Literature: Royal Academy Illustrated, London, Royal Academy, 2010, Pages 152-53 (illus); David Austin and Neale Worley, The Way I See It. A documentary about the life and work of Professor Ken Howard, OBE RA, 2011 Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, June-August 2010, No 792, as ‘Raw War: We Are Making a Better World’

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DA7 ID TIND L E David Tindle, RA HRBSA RE (born 1932) David Tindle is best known for the technical accomplishment of his work in egg tempera, emphasising the stillness and emptiness of interior spaces. However, he is a versatile artist and has made use of various media of painting and printmaking to depict a wide range of subjects.

For a biography of David Tindle, please refer to page 189.

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349 Harbour, Low Tide Signed and dated 1957 Pen ink and watercolour 13 x 19 inches

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350 Thames (above) Signed and dated 1956 Oil on canvas 24 x 40 inches

351 Waterloo Bridge (below) Signed and dated 1957 Oil on canvas 26 ¾ x 38 ¾ inches Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 75

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352 Yellow Crane Oil on canvas 17 ¼ x 17 ¼ inches Provenance: Piccadilly Gallery, London, April 1959; Purchased by the Blm director, producer and writer, Sidney Gilliat (1908-1994)

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353 Brighton Beach and Front Signed, inscribed with title and dated 1961 on stretcher Oil on canvas 24 x 24 inches Exhibited: ‘Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends’, Chris Beetles Gallery, May-August 2018, No 76

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F R A N K CO L L I N S Frank Collins (born 1938) Though Frank Collins initially trained in the Euston Road tradition of realism, he would make his reputation as a painter and printmaker of re ned abstracts.

For a biography of Frank Collins, please refer to page 190.

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354 A View from Camberwell School of Art Signed and dated 1955 Bodycolour 14 ½ x 21 ¾ inches Literature: Geo6 Hassell, Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1995, Page 55 Exhibited: Belgrave Gallery, London

A View from Camberwell Art School The present work demonstrates how the Euston Road tradition of realism was not only encouraged at Camberwell School of Art, but survived well into the 1950s, after its leading exponents – William Coldstream, Lawrence Gowing, 7ictor Pasmore and Claude Rogers – had stopped teaching at the school.

Frank Collins was a student at Camberwell School of Art between 1954 and 1958. The view from the school has changed very little since he captured it in this highly mimetic painting of 1955.

Though the tree on the corner of Bushey Hill Road has been cut

down and the tra'c on Peckham Road has increased, the 7ictorian houses and the Art Nouveau school railings remain in place.

At the time that Collins painted the view, the house on the right, at 58 Peckham Road, was occupied by the Stelena Guest House.

It advertised itself on the board above its front door and in the ‘Socialist digest’, Fact, as catering ‘for coach parties, clubs etc.

All nations, large families bring the kiddies’.

Bio g ra ph i e s

BIOGRAPHIES

POW YS E 7A N S

Powys Arthur Lewthall Evans (1899-1982), also known as ‘Quiz’

The artistic talent of Powys Evans was nurtured in the circle of George Sheringham and by a number of teachers that included Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art. He became best known for his portrait drawings and caricatures, the latter of which he signed with the pseudonym, ‘Quiz’. They were suSciently successful in both exhibition and publication for Max Beerbohm to claim Evans as his heir.

Powys Evans was born at Cornwall Lodge, Allsop Place, Marylebone, London on 2 February 1899, the younger of the two children of a Welsh-born county court judge, William Evans, and his wife Frances (née Cheatle). Both he and sister, Gwendolyn, were encouraged to develop their artistic talents, and she also became an artist.

Evans’s father patronised George Sheringham, buying his silk fans (1911) and commissioning a set of panels of The Mabinogion for his country house, Ilmington Hall (1912). In turn, Evans himself became part of the Sheringham circle and, a decade later, caricatured Sheringham and himself walking arm-in-arm. With precocity and rapidity, he gained an enviable training, despite time taken out to serve in the Welsh Guards on the Western Front during the First World War. He received private tuition from Robert Bevan and Spencer Gore, studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and worked with F E Jackson, Walter Sickert and Sylvia Gosse; of the last, he said, ‘to whose splendid teaching owe what knowledge of sound drawing I possess’.

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Abandoning a career as an oil painter in favour of portrait illustration, Evans made his name with a set of caricatures of Lovat Fraser’s designs to The Beggar’s Opera (1922). Exhibited at the Little Rooms and published as a portfolio, these caricatures attracted the attention of Filson Young, Assistant Editor of the Saturday Review, who then employed Evans as the house caricaturist under the name of ‘Quiz’; a selection of these caricatures were later published as Eighty-Eight Cartoons (1926). In writing the preface to Evans’s solo show, at the Leicester Galleries in 1924, Beerbohm claimed him as an heir, and later paid him the compliment of producing a self-caricature in Quiz’s style. (That drawing, which also depicts the stage designer, Gordon Craig, later entered the collection of Ronald Searle.)

Evans had a further show at the Leicester Galleries in the following year, and regularly included work in the exhibitions of the Goupil Gallery. Contributing to a wide variety of periodicals, Evans produced a notable series of portraits in pen and ink for the London Mercury (some of which reappeared in Fifty Heads, 1928) and a number of caricatures for G K’s Weekly; as H R Westwood noted in his study of Modern Caricaturists (1932), ‘he is personally very much interested in Mr Chesterton, political philosophy and general outlook’. Though he exhibited a large range of works at the Cooling Gallery (1930) and had two further solo shows, at Colnaghi and Bumpus’ Bookshop (both 1932), he soon ceased to exhibit or publish, retiring to Dolgellau, in Merionethshire in the late 1930s. He lived on Anglesey during the Second World War, and later in Bala, in Snowdonia, before returning to Dolgellau. It was only in 1975, when the Langton Gallery, London, mounted a retrospective, that he was Bred to paint again.

Powys Evans died at The Bay Nursing Home, Tywyn, Gwynedd, on 1 December 1981.

His work is represented in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery.

Further reading: John Jensen, ‘Evans, Powys Arthur Lenthall [pseud. Quiz] (1899-1981)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.109184

G LY N PHILPOT Glyn Warren Philpot, RA ROI RP IS NPS (1884-1937) Glyn Philpot was one of the most interesting and ambitious artists working in Britain between the wars. In establishing himself as a painter, he emulated the Old Masters in style and technique, and gained international success, especially as a portraitist.

However, he believed that experimentation was essential to artistic development, and essayed a variety of subjects, approaches and materials. This resulted in a small but impressive body of sculptures, and then, more radically, a signi cant change in his painting towards a decorative modernity.

Glyn Philpot was born in Clapham, London, on 5 October 1884, the youngest of the four surviving children of John Philpot, a surveyor turned commercial traveller, and his Brst wife, Jessie (née Carpenter). His elder brother, Leonard, would become an architect, interior designer and painter. Their mother died when Glyn was seven years old, and in 1897 their father married her sister, Julia Carpenter, who had already been a member of the household.

By 1901, the family was living at 108 Upper Tulse Hill, Streatham.

Philpot revealed a talent for drawing from early childhood and, at the age 13, he began to produce printed booklets with woodcut illustrations in0uenced by Charles Ricketts, who would later become a mentor. He left his school in Streatham at the age of 16 as the result of ill health, and was sent to study at the South London Technical Art School, Lambeth, in the belief that the lessons would not tire him. He made rapid progress under Thomas McKeggie and, especially, Philip Connard, and was awarded a scholarship for two years. In 1903, he won Brst prize for book illustration in the National Competition for Schools of Art; and in 1904, when still only 19, he exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts for the Brst time (giving as his address, The Studio, 2A Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea). He spent 1906 studying under Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian in Paris, and in that year converted to Roman Catholicism, which ‘shocked his Baptist family’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). In a mixed exhibition at the Ballie Gallery, London, in June 1906, he showed his Brst sculptures.

On his return from Paris, Philpot based himself in Chelsea, and began to establish himself as a painter of portraits and historical subjects in a style and technique that were in0uenced by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon and also the Old Masters who had inspired them. As the result of the success of a number of small exhibitions that he organised, he was able to make trips to Spain in the years 1908-10, and so engage with the work of 7elasquez and Goya, among others. It is the example of those artists and of Manet that informed the painting of Le Manuelito (The Circus Boy) (1909, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and La Zarzarrosa (The Dog Rose) (1910-11, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Along with his Brst solo show, held at the Baillie Gallery in 1910, these made his reputation when they were exhibited at the Modern Society of Portrait Painters in 1910 and 1911 respectively.

Particularly sought after as a portrait painter, Philpot was elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (1909), helped found the National Portrait Society (1911) and joined the International Society of Painters and Sculptors (1913). He travelled frequently to Paris and in Italy, and visited the United States in 1913 to

BIOGRAPHIES

paint some portraits, including that of Robert Allerton, known as The Man in Black (Tate). While there, he produced a statue for the garden of Allerton’s estate, ‘The Farms’, near Monticello, Illinois. He was also awarded a gold medal at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh for The Marble Worker (1912, Hackley Gallery of Fine Art, Muskegon, MI).

Living in 7enice in 1914, Philpot returned to England when war was declared, and attempted to enlist in the army. Rejected several times on medical grounds, he was Bnally accepted into the Royal Fusiliers in 1915. While attending a training course at Aldershot, he met 7ivian Forbes, a fellow soldier and aspiring painter, who would become a close friend and eventually his partner. It was also in 1915 that he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. However, it was only from 1917, when he was invalided out of the army, that he began to exhibit regularly at its Summer Exhibitions. In 1918, he painted four portraits of admirals for the Imperial War Museum.

Philpot visited Tunisia in 1920, and returned to the United States in 1921, taking 7ivian Forbes with him. They stayed in Chicago, where Philpot painted several society ladies, and also with Allerton, on his Illinois estate. Soon after their return to London, Philpot and Forbes began to live together, in the apartment at Lansdowne House, Lansdowne Road, Holland Park, that had been the former home of Ricketts and Shannon (Ricketts seeing them as their artistic successors).

Around this time, Philpot embarked on the most successful period of his career. In the spring of 1923, the Grosvenor Galleries mounted the Brst retrospective of his work. During its run, he was elected a full Royal Academician, becoming the youngest artist of the day to be so honoured. Late in the year, he travelled to Cairo to paint the portrait of King Fuad I of Egypt, for which he received the generous fee of £3000. Subsequent signiBcant commissions included a portrait of the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin (1926), and a mural of Richard I embarking for the Crusades, for St Stephen’s Hall, Westminster (1927). In 1927, he was able to buy a country house, Baynards Manor, near Horsham, in Sussex.

Through the 1920s, Philpot took on a number of o'cial positions.

He sat on the jury of the Carnegie International Exhibition, in Pittsburgh, in both 1924 and 1930, and in 1925 became a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and an honorary member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. In 1927-34, and again in 1935-37, he was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery. In 1929, he became the Brst President of the newly formed Guild of Catholic Artists. He was also one of three painters to represent Britain at the 7enice Biennale in 1930.

In 1929, Philpot met Henry Thomas, a young Jamaican who was visiting London. He became Philpot’s servant, companion and frequent model for both paintings and sculpture. In so doing, he joined a household that already included 7ivian Forbes and Daisy Philpot, one of the artist’s two elder sisters, who acted as his housekeeper and secretary.

Despite his great success, Philpot became dissatisBed with his need to produce work that satisBed the traditional tastes of the artistic establishment. In search of a way to express himself more freely, he travelled to Paris, and engaged with artistic developments happening there. In 1931, he took a studio (previously inhabited

by Helena Rubenstein) in the chic Modernist block at 216 Boulevard

Raspail, Montparnasse. Initially, he devoted himself to sculpture, while exploring new approaches to painting. The style that emerged was lighter and brighter, and the handling simpler, more direct and more graphic. It was informed by aspects of the art of Pablo Picasso, but also by the more decorative modernity of such as Jean Cocteau and Marie Laurencin. While he was based in Paris, he visited Berlin and was a6ected by the signs of its Depression. The paintings that resulted from the experience – Lokal, Berlin; Weight-lifting, Berlin; and The Entrance to the Tagada – invite comparison with the satirical qualities of the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit, Otto Dix and George Grosz. Either in Paris or Berlin, he began a relationship with a young German, Karl Heinz Müller.

Philpot’s new style of painting bewildered both critics and the public, and lost him most of his existing clientele. Nevertheless, he was determined to present his latest work properly, including innovative forays into still life, so, in 1932, he mounted a solo show at the Leicester Galleries. Then, when reviews of it focussed on the in0uence of Picasso, he reacted by producing some ambitious mythological and religious compositions.

Unfortunately, this led to the greatest indignity of his career, when the Council of the Royal Academy asked him to withdraw a major canvas, The Great Pan, from his submissions to the 1933 Summer Exhibition, as a result of its disturbing erotic power. It was given a full-page reproduction in the magazine, Apollo, in June 1933, and the art critic of The Times was positive about it; but, though he featured it in a second solo show at the Leicester Galleries in 1934, he eventually destroyed it. In 1935, he decided to reduce his costs by selling Baynards Manor and moving into a smaller London apartment, at 1 Marlborough Gate House, Lancaster Gate.

In the years 1935-37, Philpot worked frequently in the South of France and North Africa, painting in watercolour. The results were exhibited at two solo shows, at the Syrie Maugham Gallery in 1935 and the Redfern Gallery in 1937, and also helped reinvigorate his oils, ensuring that he produced strong pictures until the end of the career. The strain of four major exhibitions in six years began to a6ect his health and, on 16 December 1937, he died at home in London of a fatal stroke. Two days after his funeral – at Westminster Cathedral on 22 December – 7ivian Forbes committed suicide. A memorial exhibition was held at the Tate Gallery in 1938.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Courtauld Art Gallery, the Imperial War Museums and Tate; the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery and the 7ictoria Art Gallery (Bath).

Further reading: J G P Delaney, Glyn Philpot: His Life and Art, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999; Robin Gibson, Glyn Philpot, 1884-1937: Edwardian Aesthete to Thirties Modernist, London: National Portrait Gallery, 1984; Robin Gibson, Glyn Philpot, 1884–1937: The Bronzes, London: Leighton House, 1986; Thomas Lowinsky, revised by J G P Delaney, ‘Philpot, Glyn Warren (1884-1937)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35519; A C Sewter, Glyn Philpot 1884-1937, London: B T Batsford, 1951

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BIOGRAPHIES

F R AN K DO B S O N Frank Owen Dobson, RA ARBS PLG (1886-1963) Frank Dobson was the most pioneering British-born sculptor of his generation, who contributed much to the development and promotion of modern sculpture.

He rst made his name in the early 1920s with a number of striking angular carvings. Then, through the 1920s and 30s, he absorbed the in uence of, especially, Aristide Maillol, to evolve his mature style, which is characterised by serene, simpli ed female nudes, but also exempli ed by many commissioned portrait busts. Bridging Modernist and Classical approaches, he worked equally well in stone, bronze and terracotta, and was increasingly considered alongside Jacob Epstein as a ‘keeper of tradition’.

Frank Dobson was born at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London, on 18 November 1886, the elder son of the artist, Frank Dobson, and his wife, Alice (née Owen). At the time that he was born, the family was living at 7 Acton Street, Clerkenwell, though, by 1891, it had moved to 8 Pevensey Terrace, Pevensey Road, Wanstead, West Ham. He was educated locally, at schools in Forest Gate and Harrow Green.

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Dobson learned the rudiments of painting from his father, who specialised in bird and 0ower studies, which were often published as greetings cards. At the age of 11, he won a scholarship to study part-time at Leyton Technical School. Through his studies and his visits to museums, he developed a distinction in his mind between his father’s work and serious art. At the age of 14, he left school and took a number of short-term jobs. However, on the sudden death of his father, he broke away from the family home, and went to live with an aunt in Hastings, Sussex. While there, he drew during the day and attended classes at the local school of art in the evenings. When his aunt insisted that he Bnd work, he gained a position in London as a ‘studio boy’ to William Reynolds-Stephens, President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, and worked with him for about a year and a half. From 1902, he managed to earn his living painting watercolours, Brst in Salcombe, Devon, and then in Newquay, Cornwall. In 1906, he won a scholarship to the recently opened Allan-Fraser School of Art, HospitalBeld, Arbroath, Forfarshire, Scotland, and studied there for four years.

In 1910, Dobson returned to London, and studied part-time for two further years, at the City and Guilds School of Art, Kennington.

In the winter of 1910-11, he was greatly a6ected by his visit to the exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, mounted by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries. Then, in 1912, he travelled again to Devon and Cornwall, and settled in Newlyn, where he shared a studio with Cedric Morris. He studied brie0y with Stanhope Forbes, and then struck out on his own, making a living by producing potboilers and experimenting with his Brst sculptures.

While there, he made the acquaintance of Augustus John, who o6ered him his Brst solo show, of ‘Paintings and Drawings’, at the Chenil Gallery, in Chelsea, in 1914. When in London for the exhibition, he looked properly at modern sculpture, and then determined to produce his own carvings.

During the First World War, Dobson enlisted in the Artists’ Ri0es, and was sent to France, where he served as a Lieutenant in the 5th Border regiment. As the result of a duodenal ulcer, he

was invalided out in January 1917, and during the following year, while still convalescing in London, he married Cordelia Tregurtha, the daughter of a Newlyn Btter, in Marylebone. In August 1918, the Ministry of Information commissioned him to paint the large oil, The Balloon Apron (Imperial War Museums). In order to do so, he took on a studio at Trafalgar Studios, Manresa Road, Chelsea, which would remain his home until 1939.

In March-April 1920, Dobson exhibited with Percy Wyndham Lewis’s short-lived Modernist ‘Group X’ at Heal & Son’s Mansard Gallery in Tottenham Court Road. He was the only sculptor among nine painters. In 1921, he took on Stephen Tomlin as his Brst student, and became a member of Tomlin’s dining club, ‘The Cranium’, which also included Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Raymond Mortimer, among others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group.

In the November of that year, he held his Brst solo show to focus on his sculptures, at the Leicester Galleries. The angularity of the carvings that he contributed to both exhibitions demonstrated his alignment to the 7orticism of Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Quite di6erent, though equally experimental, was one of his earliest portrait commissions, that of the writer, Osbert Sitwell, which he made in polished bronze in 1922 (Tate).

In the same year, he also produced the backdrop for the earliest performances of Façade, the unconventional entertainment devised by Osbert’s sister, the poet, Edith Sitwell, and the composer, William Walton. From 1922, he made many visits to Paris, the Brst in the company of Tomlin.

Through the early 1920s, Dobson gained national and international recognition. In 1922, he joined the avant-garde London Group, and soon served as its President (1924-27). In both 1924 and 1926 (and again in 1932), he helped represent Britain at the 7enice Biennale, while contributing to other major international exhibitions, including the Tri-National Exhibition, held in Paris, London and New York in 1925, and a show of European artists that toured Canada and the United States in 1926. In the winter of 1925, he also travelled abroad, visiting Ceylon in the company of the novelist, L H Myers (who had commissioned Dobson to sculpt his daughters in 1921 and would sit for him himself in 1927). In 1926, he became the subject of a monograph by Raymond Mortimer.

Dobson separated from Cordelia in 1924, and would divorce her in 1929. In 1926, he began a relationship with Caroline Mary Bussell (known as Mary), the daughter of an art dealer. They had a daughter, Ann, in 1928, but married only in 1931.

From the mid 1920s, Dobson’s style began to change and, in0uenced by the work of Aristide Maillol and the recent, classical phase of Picasso, he concentrated on the female nude, which he treated with cool curvilinear monumentality. This change was marked by Cornucopia (1927, University of Hull), which was included in his Brst major solo show, held at the Leicester Galleries in March 1927. Roger Fry, had already been alert to this change when he published the a'rmative article, ‘Mr Dobson’s Sculpture’, in The Burlington Magazine in 1925. Now Clive Bell wrote a positive review of the exhibition in Vogue. Dobson was an early member of the London Artists’ Association, which had been instigated by Fry in 1925, and he exhibited with it in November 1927. He was also a founding member of the Society

BIOGRAPHIES

of Industrial Artists in 1930, the year in which he was featured in Stanley Casson’s book, XXth Century Sculptors. Another solo show was held at the Leicester Galleries in 1931.

Dobson never held a dogmatic position on the relative values of carving and modelling and, during the early 1930s, worked on a range of projects that included a larger than life bronze entitled Truth (1930, Tate) and a series of gilded faience panels for the new headquarters of the Hay’s Wharf Company at London Bridge (1930). However, a fracture to his arm in 1933 restricted his ability to carve on a large scale and, though he had studio assistants, he gave up doing so after he produced Pax (1934, private collection), which he not only exhibited with the London Group, in 1935, but also internationally. In 1937, he fulBlled a commission to design a sliver-gilt cup in honour of the coronation of George 7I (Royal Collection). In 1938, he was elected an associate member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

In addition to sculpture, he designed advertisements (for Shell and BP) and textiles (for Allan Walton Textiles, among others) during the decade.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Dobson closed his Chelsea studio and moved with his family to Bristol.

While there, he sold the Brst of several drawings to the War Artists Advisory Committee, which also commissioned him to produce two portrait busts. By 1941, the bombing of the city had become so severe that he and his family joined his wife’s sister and brother-in-law in the village of Kingsley, in Hampshire.

However, he retained his proBle in London. Having exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts since 1933, he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1942. Then, in 1944, a further solo show at the Leicester Galleries again proved a critical success.

In 1945, he was the subject of a monograph by T W Earp.

In 1945, Dobson returned to London, and by the winter had settled with his family at 14 Harley Gardens, Kensington, which included a spacious studio. In the following year, he was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, at the suggestion of Henry Moore, and, instigating a liberal regime, became a much-loved teacher. He was created CBE in 1947, and in 1951 contributed the plaster sculpture, London Pride, to the Festival of Britain. (Cast posthumously, it was placed outside the National Theatre, close to the site of that festival, in 1987.)

Though Dobson retired from the RCA in 1953, at the age of 67, he remained active through the decade. In that year, he was elected a full Royal Academician, and made his Brst visit to the United States, for the presentation of his bust of Sir Thomas Lipton to the New York Yacht Club. While in New York, he was invited to design a piece of artists’ glass for the Steuben Collection.

His last major commission was the design for the Zodiac Clock for the façade of Sir Albert Richardson’s Bracken House in Cannon Street (1959).

In 1961, Frank Dobson and his wife moved into 4 Stamford Bridge Studios. He died in the Princess Beatrice Hospital, Kensington, on 22 July 1963. A memorial show was mounted by the Arts Council in 1966.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Art Council Collection (Southbank Centre), the Imperial

War Museums, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate; Leeds Art Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery; and National Museum Wales (Cardi6). His archive is held at the Henry Moore Institute, Centre for the Study of Sculpture (Leeds).

Further reading: John Glaves-Smith, ‘Dobson, Frank (Owen) (b London, Nov 18, 1886; d London, July 22, 1963)’, Grove Art Online, 2003, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T023040; Neville Jason, Dobson, ‘Frank Owen (1886-1963)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32844; Neville Jason and L Thompson-Pharoah, The Sculpture of Frank Dobson, Leeds: Henry Moore Foundation/London: Lund Humphries, 1994

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BIOGRAPHIES

DOR A G O R D I N E Dora Gordine, FRBS (1895-1991)

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The Russian-born sculptor and painter, Dora Gordine, matched her extraordinary life with a body of work that spanned sensitive portrait busts and impressive public commissions. Inspired by the peoples and culture of Southeast Asia from early in her career, she spent ve years living and working in what was then known as British Malaya. Settling in Britain before the Second World War, she soon gained a critical reputation as ‘very possibly becoming the nest woman sculptor in the world’ (Jan Gordon, Observer, 6 November 1938).

In 2005, the leading modern sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro, paid tribute to her art, by describing it as ‘withheld, slowed down, as is the art of Maillol’, and adding that ‘when we place her work against that of the much more successful academic Sculptors of the time it is a million miles better’ (in Sara MacDougall and Rachel Dickson (eds), 2006, page 17).

By the autumn of 1924, Dora had left Tallinn, and had travelled, via Berlin, to Paris. There she settled in a room with a studio at the Maison des Etudiantes, 214 Boulevard Raspail, in Montparnasse.

She studied a course in French civilisation at the Sorbonne, and began to make the acquaintance of signiBcant cultural Bgures, including the sculptors, Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol.

Dora Gordine was probably born in the Latvian port of Liepâja, in the Russian Empire, on 8 June 1895, the youngest of the four children of the middle-class Jewish couple, the Latvian, Morduch Gordin and his Lithuanian wife, Emma Ester (nèe Schepshelewitch).

However, during her lifetime, she claimed to have been born in St Petersburg in 1906, and encouraged the mystery that surrounded her origins.

During the late 1920s, Dora Gordine travelled freely between Tallinn, Paris, London and Berlin. In 1926, she began to work for David Gourlay, of the Wayfarers’ Travel Agency, by bringing parties of school children from Paris to London. (Her brother, Leopold, had married an Englishwoman, and was already living in the British capital.) Through Gourlay, she met his future wife, the physiologist, Janet 7aughan, and through her entered Bloomsbury circles. As a result, she also met the Hon Richard Hare (1907-1966), the second son of the Earl of Listowel, who was then studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, and would develop a career in the diplomatic service. He proposed to her, but she refused to marry him until she had established herself professionally.

(He would eventually become her third husband.) With the help of Gourlay and 7aughan, she persuaded the Leicester Galleries to mount a solo show of her work, which took place, with great success, in October 1928. Among those to see the show was the industrialist and collector, Samuel Courtauld, who was a friend of 7aughan’s father. He bought Mongolian Head and then donated it to the Tate Gallery.

In 1912, the Gordin family moved to Tallinn (then known as Reval), in Estonia, and settled in an apartment at 21B Tatari Street.

Dora is likely to have been in0uenced by members of the Art Nouveau artistic movement, Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia). These included the painter, Ants Laikmaa, who ran an art school from his rooms on the top 0oor of 21B Tatari Street, and the sculptors, Jaan Koort and Anton Starkopf. While she may have studied with these artists, it has also been suggested (by Jonathan Black, May 2016) that she trained alongside her friend, the Leipâjan sculptor, Natalie Mei, in Petrograd and Helsinki, in the years 1915-17. In April 1917, she contributed two works to an exhibition organised by the Estonian Art Society.

Dora’s father, Morduch, probably died in 1915. Between 1916 and 1918, she was married to 7ladimir Rolov, a Russian-Jewish businessman based in the Latvian port of 7entspils (then known as 7indava). (See Jonathan Black, May 2016.)

Later in 1917, the Russian Bolsheviks seized control in Tallinn.

Early in 1918, the Bolsheviks were overthrown by Estonian Nationalists, but their control of the city was very short lived, as it was soon occupied by the German Army. Following the Armistice of 11 November 1918, the Germans withdrew and the Nationalists returned to power. However, the Estonians then had to Bght the Soviet Western Front in order to gain their country’s independence. Dora’s brother, Leopold, was actively involved in the war, and for a while she worked as a nurse.

Early in October 1919, the Gordin family moved into an apartment at 4 Narva Road, and Dora used an adjacent one as a sculpture studio. In 1920 and 1921, she took part in exhibitions held by the ‘ARS’ Group. She also taught at an art school founded by Jaan Koort in 1921, numbering the Jewish sculptor, Jeguda Leiba, among her students. By 1922, Dora, her mother and elder sister, Anna, had successfully applied to become Estonian citizens.

In the spring of 1925, Dora worked part-time as a painter on a mural for the British Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which was held in Paris.

Then in the May of that year, she exhibited for the Brst time in the French capital, showing a bronze at the Salon des Tuileries, under the name ‘Gordine’. It is said that she thought that the addition of an ‘e’ at the end of her surname would make her sound more Russian, though she gave her nationality as Estonian. When she exhibited again at the Salon in 1926, her submission of Chinese Head (Dorich House Museum) received enthusiastic reviews.

On her return to Paris, Dora Gordine commissioned the Modernist architect, Auguste Perret, to design a ‘maison-atelier’ for her at 21 Rue du Belvedere, in the fashionable suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. While it was being built, she went to Berlin to participate in ‘Junge Künstler’, a joint exhibition with two other artists, held at the prestigious Galerie Alfred Flechtheim in September and October 1929.

Dora Gordine then left for the British colony of Singapore, arriving in January 1930, and settling in a studio on land belonging to the Sultan of Johor. She told a journalist that she was fascinated by ‘the naturally graceful movements of the Eastern peoples’ and her experience of Southeast Asia would have a strong e6ect on her work. She soon met Dr George Garlick (1886-1958), Deputy-Chief Medical O'cer for the State of Johor and a friend of the Sultan, and in the September she married him in a civil ceremony. As a result, she renounced her Estonian nationality and became a British citizen. In 1931, she accepted a commission to decorate the interior of Singapore’s new town hall with Bve bronze portrait heads representing the peoples of British Malaya.

During the year, she travelled through the region, also to Cambodia, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Thailand and Burma (now

BIOGRAPHIES

Myanmar). Later, she accompanied her husband to China, visiting Shanghai and then Peking, where he participated in a medical conference. While living in Johor Bahru, she and her husband received a visit from Richard Hare. In July 1933, the Leicester Galleries, in London, held a second solo show of her work. It demonstrated the in0uence of Asia on her work and consolidated her reputation as a sculpture of signiBcance.

In June 1935, Dora left the State of Johor for England. On arriving in London, she renewed her contact with Richard Hare, and began to divorce herself from Dr Garlick. Richard bought her a plot of land in Kingston 7ale on which was built a highly individual house to her design. Completed in October 1936, it was named ‘Dorich House’ as a con0ation of their given names. They married at Chelsea Registry O'ce during the following month, and settled at the house, making it the centre of a circle of distinguished artists and sitters.

From 1937, Dora Gordine exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts, and was involved in a number of commissions and other signiBcant projects. These included the commission of portrait heads for the new premises of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in Portland Place; the purchase of a cast of Seated Baby for the new Maternity and Child Welfare Centre, in Bessborough Street, Pimlico; and the purchase of a cast of Walking Male Torso for the new Senate House of the University of London. In April 1938, she was elected an associate the Royal Society of British Sculptors, at the same time as Frank Dobson and Maurice Lambert. Then, in the November, she held a third successful solo show at the Leicester Galleries. Reviewing the exhibition in the Observer, Jan Gordon described her as ‘very possibly becoming the Bnest woman sculptor in the world’ (6 November 1938).

The outbreak of the Second World War slowed the development of Gordine’s artistic career. She lost access to her favourite foundry – 7alsuani in Paris – and found bronze scarce to come by, as the result of rationing. Only in 1944 did she begin to work with the leading London foundry, Morris Singer Company, and then exhibit her latest work in bronze at the Royal Academy.

Between 1942 and 1956, she was nominated on three occasions as an associate of the Royal Academy. Those nominating her included the etcher, Malcolm Osborne, and the sculptors, Alfred Hardiman, Gilbert Ledward and Charles Wheeler (the last of whom was President of the RBS 1944-49, and President of the RA 1956-66). By the end of the war, her husband, Richard, a 0uent Russian speaker, had become Director of the Ministry of Information’s division for Anglo-Russian relations.

In October 1945, Gordine held a fourth solo show at the Leicester Galleries. A review in The Times described her as ‘having much ability’ while being ‘eclectic in her inspiration’ (6 November 1945).

Soon after, she produced one of her best-known public works, a low-relief plaque portraying Sun Yat Sen, the Brst President of the Chinese Republic, for display on a wall in Warwick Court, Gray’s Inn, on the site of a house in which he had once lived. By contrast, she was then commissioned to produce The Crowning Glory as a trade symbol for Eugène Ltd, ‘perfecters of the permanent wave’, and it was launched at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia in March 1947. During 1947,

she produced Happy Baby, a cast of which would be installed at Holloway Prison’s new maternity ward in 1949.

In October 1947, Dora went to the United States for the Brst time, in the company of Richard. He had turned to the study and translation of Russian literature, and was taking up a research fellowship at Stanford University, in California, in preparation for a book on the subject. Following its publication, in 1949, he would become a lecturer in Russian literature at the University of London.

While in California, Dora continued to work, producing portrait busts and lecturing on art. In 1949, following her return to London, she would be elected a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and hold a Bfth solo show at the Leicester Galleries. In 1953, she was a founder member of the Society of Portrait Sculptors and, in 1957, elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Dora remained highly active and worked on some major projects.

In July 1956, a cast of her bronze, Mother and Child (1956), was installed in the entrance of the International Committee of Mothers for Disarmament and Against War in West Berlin, and remained there until the committee broke up in 1958. In 1961, she was commissioned to produce the bronze relief, Power, for the interior of the administration block of Esso’s new reBnery at Milford Haven, in Pembrokeshire. Her last major commission, also called Mother and Child, was intended for the entrance of the new Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital, Sutton, Surrey, and was unveiled by the Queen on 20 May 1963.

Dora’s husband, Richard Hare, died in September 1966, at the age of only 59. Already in her early seventies, she then lived a somewhat reclusive life, and in 1972 stopped producing original work altogether. She died at home, at Dorich House, on 29 December 1991. The house and its contents were left in trust to Kingston University. Some of the Russian art objects that Dora and Richard had collected were sold at auction by Phillips in 1994 to help Bnance the transformation of the house into a museum to display both Dora’s work and the remaining items of the collection.

Her work is represented in the collections of Dorich House Museum (Kingston University) and Tate.

Further Reading: Jonathan Black, ‘Dora Gordine’, Paper given to the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, May 2016, https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/36577/3/Black-J-36577.pdf; Jonathan Black and Brenda Martin, Dora Gordine: Sculptor, Artist, Designer, London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2008; Michael R Gibson, ‘Gordine [Gordin], Dora (1895-1991)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/64479; Sara MacDougall and Rachel Dickson (eds), Embracing the Exotic: Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine, London: Papadakis Publisher in association with the Ben Uri Gallery, 2006

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BIOGRAPHIES

C H AR L E S K N I GHT Charles Knight, ROI 7PRWS (1901-1990) The Sussex landscape painter, Charles Knight, channelled the tradition of English watercolour painting in order to produce his own original contribution.

As a result, he became a pillar of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours and received acclaim, from William Russell Flint, as the 'star turn' of the Recording Britain scheme.

Charles Knight was born in Hove, Sussex, on 27 August 1901, the second of three children of Charles Knight, an accountant to a publishing company, and his wife, Evelyn (née Nash). His father came from a family that had long farmed in Sussex, and remained a keen naturalist and artist, taking the young Charles on walking and sketching trips, and so initiating his love of the county. He grew up in central Brighton, Brst at 78 Ditchling Road and later at 61 Stanford Road, and was educated at Stanford Road Junior and 7ardean School. He was also an active member of the Anglican church of St Bartholomew’s, Ann Street, and sang in its choir. Its vicar, Gilbert Elliott, encouraged his gift for drawing by taking him on four trips to France, in the years 1922-25.

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Studying Brst at Brighton School of Art (1919-23), Knight won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools in 1923 and, though he commuted from the South Coast, he became exposed to many new in0uences. His discovery of the work of John Sell Cotman was particularly seminal, for it determined his concentration on watercolour, and directed his travels, as well as a6ecting his early style. As a student of the RA Schools, he won the Landseer Scholarship, and the Turner Medal for his oil of the Cotmanesque subject, Llangollen. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1926, it was soon bought for the Tate Gallery by Sir Joseph Duveen. The publicity led to the membership of both the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils (1933) and the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (ARWS 1933, RWS 1936, 7PRWS 1961).

From 1925, Knight taught at Brighton School of Art, Brst as a full-time lecturer, and later as a visitor. Following his marriage in 1934, to Leonora 7asey, he and his wife settled at Chettles, 34 Beacon Road, in Ditchling, in the heart of the Sussex countryside.

Their son, Richard, was born in 1938. The forty drawings of Sussex that he produced for Recording Britain were dubbed the ‘star turn’ of the project by William Russell Flint.

During the Second World War, Knight was reserved by the teaching profession, and returned to full-time teaching at the college, but also worked as a night telephone operator for the Civil Defence and a member of the Home Guard. In 1944, he was asked by the Queen Mother to give Princess Margaret lessons in watercolour painting; his appointment lasted for three years.

He continued to teach at Brighton School of Art, and in 1959 became both 7ice-Principal and Head of the Drawing and Painting Department. Though he retired from teaching in 1967, he continued to paint and exhibit a wide variety of conBdent watercolours until the end of his life. He died on 15 May 1990, his wife having died 20 years earlier.

In 1997, the Chris Beetles Gallery hosted ‘… More Than a Touch of Poetry’, an important retrospective exhibition of the work of Charles Knight, organised in conjunction with the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne and Hove Museum and Art Gallery. It was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.

His work is represented in the collections of the Royal Watercolour Society, and numerous public collections, including the British Museum and the 7&A; and the University of Brighton.

Further reading: Michael Brockway, Charles Knight RWS, ROI, Leigh-on-Sea: F Lewis, 1952 Detail of Charles Knight, Lavardin [203]

BIOGRAPHIES

JO H N PIPE R John Egerton Christmas Piper, CH LG (1903-1992) From the outset of his career, John Piper proved to be multi-talented, for he earned his living as an art and theatre critic while establishing himself as a painter and stained-glass designer. Though central to the Modern Movement in Britain during the 1930s, he soon moved away from pure abstraction to a personal form of Neo-Romanticism inspired by many aspects of landscape, both native and foreign. Instrumental in reviewing notions of Englishness, he wrote British Romantic Artists (1942) and was an ideal choice for involvement in Recording Britain (1940) and as an oScial war artist (1944). Sustaining a radical versatility, his later achievements included a notable series of settings for the operas of Benjamin Britten, as well as impressive bodies of oils, watercolours, murals, prints and illustrations.

John Piper was born at ‘Alresford’, Ashley Road, Epsom, Surrey, on 13 December 1903, the youngest of the three sons of the solicitor, Charles Alfred Piper, and his wife, Mary (née Mathews).

He spent three years as a day boy at Epsom College (1919-22), and while there won a drawing prize. A talented writer and artist from an early age, he kept topographical and architectural notebooks, and illustrated his own privately printed books of poetry. Reluctantly, he became an articled clerk in his father’s o'ce (1921-26), leaving to pursue an artistic career on his father’s death. While studying under Raymond Coxon at Richmond College of Art (1927-28), he held his Brst exhibition (of wood engravings) at the Arlington Galleries (1927). He then attended the Royal College of Art, where he studied painting under Morris Kestelman and lithography and stained glass under Francis Spear (1928-29). He left the Royal College early, in order to marry Eileen Holding, who had been a fellow student at Richmond.

They settled in a 0at at 29 St Peter’s Square, Hammersmith, and he earned his living writing art and theatre criticism for The Listener and the New Statesman, while spending time painting and making stained glass. However, he soon met Myfanwy Evans at the Su6olk home of his friend, Ivon Hitchens, and, following his divorce from Eileen, married her in 1937. By then, they had already settled at Fawley Bottom, a farmhouse near Henley-on-Thames.

They would have two sons and two daughters, the eldest of whom, Edward, would also become an artist.

Elected to the London Group (1933) and 7 & 5 Society (1934), Piper began to take an active interest in Modernism. He made constructions and collages that show the in0uence of Ben Nicholson and, with Myfanwy Evans, co-edited Axis, the pioneering journal of abstract art (1935-37). However, his increasingly direct knowledge of Picasso and European Modernism and, conversely, his continued topographical preoccupations, encouraged Piper to distance himself from Nicholson's approach. Instead, he tended to assimilate these disparate in0uences, as in the Landscape Collages (1936-8), which made use of watercolour and gouache, and which were inspired by Paul Nash. His interest in a sense of place was encouraged by John Betjeman, who in 1937 commissioned the Shell Guide to Oxfordshire. It was also Betjeman who, in 1944, produced the early monograph of Piper for the series, ‘Penguin Modern Painters’.

Piper spent much time working over the established categories of British landscape. Instrumental in reviewing notions of Englishness, he wrote British Romantic Artists (1942), and was an ideal choice for involvement in Recording Britain (1940) and as an o'cial war artist (1944). His solo show at the Leicester Galleries in 1940 was a sell-out, demonstrating how well his work chimed with the spirit of the age. Painting bombed churches during the Second Word War, he would later revitalise many buildings with his stained glass (from 1954) and tapestries (from 1966). From before the war he was already an important muralist and stage designer, producing the curtain for the Brst deBnitive performance of Sitwell & Walton’s Façade (29 May 1942) and a notable series of settings for the operas of Benjamin Britten (from The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne in 1946 to Death in Venice at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1973). These many and varied projects Bnd their roots in his work as a watercolourist. His Bnest work as a painter was produced in the 1940s, and includes a commission from Queen Elizabeth (now the Queen Mother) to make watercolours of Windsor Castle, and one from Osbert Sitwell to paint oils and watercolours of the Sitwell family homes at Renishaw, in Derbyshire and Montegufoni, near Florence. The Sitwell pieces were exhibited at a major solo show at the Leicester Galleries (1945) and used to illustrate Osbert’s autobiography. At the end of the decade, Piper became preoccupied with the motif of Snowdonia, and made many highly acclaimed watercolours and oils. From 1948, his work also began to Bnd popularity across the Atlantic, through solo shows held at the Buchholz Gallery, New York. A major monograph by S John Woods, entitled John Piper: Paintings, Drawings and Theatre Designs, 1932-1954, was published by Faber & Faber in 1955.

In later years, Piper took a number of o'cial roles, serving as a Trustee for both the National and Tate galleries and sitting on the Oxford Diocesan Advisory Committee, the Royal Fine Art Commission and the Arts Council panel. As a reward for such work, and for a lifetime’s achievement as an artist, he was made a Companion of Honour (1972). Major retrospectives were held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1979), and the Tate Gallery (1983). He died at home at Fawley Bottom on the 28 June 1992.

His work is represented in the Royal Collection and the Government Art Collection, and in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, the Imperial War Museums, Tate and the 7&A; The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), Manchester Art Gallery, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and The Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester); National Museum Wales (Cardi6); and Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge MA).

Further reading: David Fraser Jenkins, ‘Piper, John Egerton Christmas (1903-1992)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 44, pages 396-399; Orde Levinson, Quality and Experiment: The Prints of John Piper – A Catalogue Raisonné 1932-91, London: Lund Humphries, 1996; June Osborne, John Piper and Stained Glass, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997; Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper. Lives in Art, Oxford University Press, 2009; Stephen Stuart-Smith, ‘Piper, John (b Epsom, Surrey, 13 Dec 1903; d Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, 27 June 1992), Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 24, page 839

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BIOGRAPHIES

JOHN M I N TO N Francis John Minton, RBA LG (1917-1957) John Minton was one of the most signi cant British painters, illustrators and designers of the Post-War period, working in many formats and on a range of scales, from delicate vignettes to monumental canvases.

Central to the development of Neo-Romanticism, he was inspired by Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland, and befriended Michael Ayrton, Keith Vaughan and the ‘Two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde. Indeed, his charisma and generosity brought him celebrity in bohemian London and made him a highly popular and in uential teacher.

John Minton was born in Great Shelford, near Cambridge, on 25 December 1917, the second of three sons of the solicitor, Francis Minton, and his wife, Kate (née Webb). He was educated at Northcli6e House, Bognor Regis, Sussex (1925-32), and then at Reading School, Berkshire (1932-35), during which time he dropped the use of his Brst name, Francis.

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Minton studied art under Patrick Millard and Kenneth Martin at St John’s Wood Art School (1935-38). In 1936, he received prizes from 7anessa Bell at the St John’s Wood Sketch Club, and later visited her at Charleston Farmhouse in Firle, Sussex. In the same year, his art school awarded him a scholarship. While on an organised trip to Paris in 1938, he befriended his fellow students, Michael Ayrton and Michael Middleton, and the three of them soon became known as the ‘Three Musketeers’. Ayrton greatly a6ected his development by introducing him to After Picasso (1935), James Thrall Soby’s survey of the contemporary School of Paris. In 1939, he spent eight months in Paris, sharing a studio with Ayrton, meeting Eugène Berman and occasionally attending classes at the Académie Colarossi. Minton and Ayrton were joined by Middleton, and the three of them together visited Les Baux-de-Provence.

Minton returned to London in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940, his application to register as a conscientious objector was rejected. He spent much of the time painting the war-torn city in a style that showed the in0uence of Giorgio de Chirico and such French Neo-Romantics as Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew. He also collaborated with Ayrton on the designs for John Gielgud’s production of Macbeth (the results of which were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1942, one of several shows to which he contributed during his formative years).

In 1941, Minton withdrew his conscientious objection and entered the Pioneer Corps, being sent to Ifracombe, in Devon, for training. Late in the following year, he was stationed at Wrotham, in Kent, and then Barmouth, in North Wales. In 1943, he was commissioned in the army and transferred to the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry at Little Missenden, in Berkshire. However, in the June of that year, he was invalided out of the army on medical grounds.

On returning to London in the summer of 1943, Minton began to share a studio with the Scots painters, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, at 77 Bedford Gardens, Kensington. In the autumn of that year, he began to teach illustration at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Spending the Christmas of 1944 in Glasgow with Colquhoun and MacBryde, he returned to that city

in the following year to paint the children of the Gorbals.

In October 1945, he exhibited with them at the Lefevre Gallery, in London, and also held his Brst solo show, of drawings of Cornwall and Kent, at Roland, Browse and Delbanco. These showed how the e6ect on his work of a lyrical strain of Romanticism and Neo-Romanticism (exempliBed by Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland), was being tempered by the tougher Bguration of the ‘Two Roberts’ and of Jankel Adler, the Polish émigré artist, who occupied another of the studios at 77 Bedford Gardens.

A further change in his work occurred following his visit to the exhibition, ‘Picasso and Matisse’, at the 7ictoria and Albert Museum in the winter of 1945, Picasso’s stylisation proving particularly in0uential.

In 1946, Minton began to share 37 Hamilton Terrace with the artist, Keith 7aughan. In the same year, he moved from Camberwell School to the Central School of Arts and Crafts to teach drawing and illustration. Having already contributed to books and magazines, and having designed a number of book covers, he established himself more thoroughly as an illustrator with three books; these were Odo Cross’s The Snail that Climbed the Ei.el Tower and Other Stories, an edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and Françoise Delisle’s translation of Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes (as The Wanderer) (all 1947). The Brst of these was published by John Lehmann, with whom he had a particularly close working relationship. His output as an illustrator and designer would encompass posters and other advertisements and also wallpaper patterns.

In August 1947, Minton travelled to Corsica with the writer, Alan Ross, in order to collaborate on the classic travel book, Time was Away (1948). This trip, and subsequent ones to Spain in 1948 and 1949, encouraged him to employ a brighter palette in his paintings. In 1948, he moved from the Central School to the Royal College of Art in order to teach painting. In October 1948, he exhibited at Durlacher Bros, New York, and, in the following February, held the Brst of four solo shows at the Lefevre Gallery, London. He also began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts (from 1949), and was elected to the London Group (1949) and the Royal Society of British Artists (1950).

Already an habitué of Soho drinking establishments, Minton became even more sociable and generous from 1949, following his receipt of an inheritance. It was in the Black Horse, Soho, that he met the wrestler and former sailor, Ricky Stride, and they soon began a relationship, Stride moving into 37 Hamilton Terrace.

Increasingly open about his homosexuality, Minton wrote to The Listener in January 1950, to complain about a homophobic article by Dr Marie Stopes. After a trip to Israel to prepare illustrations for an article for the magazine, Tribune, he was joined

by Stride on travels to the South of France, during the summer, and Jamaica, in the autumn. The sense of plenty and promise that he experienced on such travels contrasted with the strained conditions of post-war England, and informed his illustrations to Elizabeth David’s ground-breaking Brst cookbooks: A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) and French Country Cooking (1951).

Jamaica became the subject of several of Minton’s paintings, most notably the large-scale Jamaican Village, which was exhibited in 1951, at both the Royal Academy and ‘60 Paintings for ’51’,

BIOGRAPHIES

the Art Council’s contribution to the Festival of Britain. He also painted a mural on the theme of exploration for the festival’s Dome of Discovery. These works ushered in a late phase, in which he painted historical and religious subjects on a monumental scale, the most famous of which was The Death of Nelson; after Daniel Maclise (1952, Royal College of Art). Alongside these he made a number of a sensitive portraits, mostly of young men, including the artist, David Tindle.

In the summer of 1952, Minton bought 5 Shaftesbury 7illas, Allen Street, Kensington, which he shared with Stride (while the law student, Paul Danquah, who would gain fame as both a barrister and an actor, lived in a 0at in the building). During the next few years, he travelled widely in Europe and to North Africa, often in the company of his friend and model, Norman Bowler.

Destinations included Morocco (December 1952), Spain (1953 and subsequently), Norway and Sweden (Summer 1953) and Italy and France (1954).

In April 1956, Minton came to an agreement with Robin Darwin, the Rector of the RCA, to take a year’s unpaid leave, as the result of his increasing alcoholism. He still managed to work and, among other projects, he designed the sets for a double bill of plays by Ronald Duncan at the Royal Court. His last painting was Composition: Death of James Dean (1957, Tate), an attempt to create a modern history painting.

On 22 January 1957, Minton took an overdose of drugs at his last home, 9 Apollo Place, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and died while being taken to St Stephen’s Hospital. The Arts Council mounted a memorial exhibition, which was shown in London and on tour during 1958-59.

His work is represented in The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art and the Royal College of Art; and numerous public collections, including Tate; and the Yale Center of British Art (New Haven, CT).

Further reading: 7irginia Button, Minton, ‘(Francis) John (b Cambridge, Dec 25, 1917; d London, Jan 20, 1957)’ Grove Art Online, 2003, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T058523; Simon Martin and Frances Spalding, John Minton, Chichester: Pallant House Gallery, 2017; Michael Middleton, ‘Minton, (Francis) John (1917–1957)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35041; Martin Salisbury, The Snail that Climbed the Ei.el Tower and other work by John Minton, Norwich: The Mainstone Press, 2017; Frances Spalding, Dance Till the Stars Come Down: A Biography of John Minton, London: John Curtis, 1991

Detail of John Minton, The Railway Arms [216]

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BIOGRAPHIES

MICH A E L AYRTO N Michael Ayrton, RBA (1921-1975) Michael Ayrton was a veritable twentieth-century Renaissance man, whose relatively short career encompassed a wide range of creative achievements.

He was a painter, illustrator, sculptor and stage designer, and also a novelist, poet, critic and broadcaster. His varied output reveals a fascination with mythological subjects, and especially those concerning ight, mazes and mirrors.

Michael Ayrton was born at 8 Hamilton Terrace, St John’s Wood, London, on 20 February 1921, the only child of the poet and journalist, Gerald Gould, and his wife, the Labour politician, Barbara (née Ayrton). Extremely ambitious, Michael would adopt his mother’s maiden name in 1941 (Bve years after his father’s death) in order to appear high in the alphabetical lists of mixed exhibitions.

Ayrton was educated at Hall School, Hampstead (1926-27), and as a boarder at Abinger Hill School, Dorking, Surrey (1928-30), and The Beeches, Greater Felcourt, Sussex (1930-35). His school career came to an abrupt end at the age of 14, when he seduced the French mistress. However, he was intellectually, as well as sexually, precocious, and had already established a pattern of private study and travel.

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Having expressed a desire to train as an artist, Ayrton studied initially at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, London (1935-37), while taking additional evening classes at Westminster Technical College (1937), and making signiBcant visits to Paris (1936), Barcelona (1936, in an abortive attempt to Bght in the Spanish Civil War) and 7ienna (1937). Then, in autumn 1937, he and his fellow Heatherley’s student, Michael Middleton, enrolled at St John’s Wood Art School. During a trip to Paris arranged by its Principal, Patrick Millard, he and Middleton made the acquaintance of another student, John Minton, and they soon became known as the ‘Three Musketeers’. In 1939, Ayrton and Minton shared a studio in Paris, and were joined for a period by Middleton. Both Ayrton and Minton studied under Eugène Berman, with Ayrton occasionally working in the studio of de Chirico, while Pavel Tchelitchew also proved an important in0uence.

In the early years of the Second World War, Ayrton concentrated on painting and, in 1941, began to collaborate with John Minton on designs for the sets and costumes for John Gielgud’s production of Macbeth. In October of that year, he was called up to the Royal Air Force, and reported to the RAF Recruit Centre at Padgate, Lancashire. However, he was soon discharged on health grounds, and in the December returned to London to complete work on Macbeth, initially with Minton, and then, once he was called up, alone. The designs were shown at the Leicester Galleries in October 1942, by which time Ayrton had found a part-time position as a teacher of life drawing and design at Camberwell School of Art (1942-44).

Ayrton soon began a relationship with Joan Walsh, who was estranged from her husband, the theatre designer, Henry Locke.

In 1943, they set up home in at 4 All Souls’ Place, which was close to the BBC’s Broadcasting House, where Ayrton was beginning to work as a radio critic and a member of the Home Service’s ‘Brains Trust’. In the following year, they were joined by the composer, Constant Lambert, who had become a close

friend of Ayrton, Ayrton having had a strong love of music from an early age. In 1944, he designed the sets and costumes for Le Festin de l’araignée, a new ballet to the music of Albert Roussel, which Lambert conducted for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company at the New Theatre.

During the 1940s, Ayrton assimilated the in0uences of John Piper and Graham Sutherland in a number of Neo-Romantic landscapes.

He made contact with Sutherland in Pembrokeshire (1945-46) and succeeded Piper as the art critic on The Spectator (1944-46).

Having contributed eight paintings to an exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1941, he held his Brst solo show there in July 1943, and it became his main dealer, mounting another seven solo shows between 1945 and 1959.

Endlessly stretching his talents as an artist and writer, Ayrton began to work as an illustrator, Brst in pen and ink, later employing lithography. The Brst books that he illustrated included the play, Gilles de Rais, by his friend, Cecil Gray; an edition of John Webster’s The Duchess of Mal"; and the anthology, Poems of Death (all 1945).

During the late 1940s, he also contributed illustrations to Radio Times.

Ayrton’s Brst major work as a writer was British Drawings (1946), in Collins’ series, ‘Britain in Pictures’. In this, and in four articles in the magazine, The Studio, he emphasised the distinctive qualities of British art, while, around the same time, he made an infamous and untimely broadcast, ‘Picasso as Black Magician’, attacking the modern master as a pasticheur. This was a view that he shared with the 7orticist, Percy Wyndham Lewis, a work of whose he reproduced in British Drawings. This led to a meeting between these two strong personalities and, to the surprise of both of them, the development of a close friendship.

Ayrton’s Brst visit to Italy, in 1947, resulted in paintings in0uenced by painters of the Quattrocento, while his second, in 1949, coincided with his Brst retrospective, which was mounted by WakeBeld Art Gallery and then toured. His latest, Italian-inspired work was also exhibited in Milan and Rome in 1950.

In 1948, Ayrton met the novelist and psychologist, Nigel Balchin, at the Savile Club, and then Balchin’s wife, Elizabeth (née Walshe).

Soon Ayrton, his partner, Joan Walsh, and the Balchins were establishing ‘a complex four-way relationship’ (Justine Hopkins, 1994, page 145). This eventually led to a divorce between the Balchins in 1951, and the marriage of Elizabeth to Ayrton in 1952. Following their marriage, she developed a career as a novelist, poet and writer on cookery.

In 1951, Michael Ayrton moved with Elizabeth to BradBeld, in the village of ToppesBeld, near Halstead, Essex. This rambling house with its large Tudor barn enabled him to begin to work as a sculptor. Taking technical advice from Henry Moore, he soon became as proBcient in three as in two dimensions, and found himself able to work through his ideas with great success in almost any medium. In 1953, for instance, he also published an illustrated novel, Tittivulus, and made his Brst documentary Blm, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. His artistic achievement to date was surveyed in a retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1955, during which year he also illustrated Wyndham Lewis’s epic trilogy of novels, The Human Age. In turn, Lewis would provide the

BIOGRAPHIES

introduction, as his last written work, to Ayrton’s signiBcant collection of essays, Golden Sections (1957).

Further travels in Italy (1956-57) and Greece (from 1957) inspired in Ayrton a passionate interest in Classical culture, and in the related myths of Icarus, Daedalus and the Minotaur. Beyond his evolving paintings and sculptures, his Classical preoccupations revealed themselves at an early stage in his Blm, Greek Sculpture (1960), his collection of poetry, The Testament of Daedalus (1962), and his illustrations to translations of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (1960) and Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (1961).

International exhibitions of his work in the early and mid 1960s included one at the Athens-Hilton Gallery, in the Greek capital (1964), as well as his Brst solo show in the United States, at the Main Street Gallery, Chicago (1960). Major manifestations of the Daedalean theme in the late 1960s were the book, The Maze Maker (winner of the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1968), and the garden construction, The Arkville Maze (1968), which was commissioned by Armand Erpf for his estate in the Catskill Mountains, New York, and, built of brick and masonry, contains two life-size bronze sculptures. A retrospective at Reading Museum and Art Gallery in 1969 explored his achievement to date, and in that year the Hamet Gallery took over from the Grosvenor Gallery as his London dealer.

While the Daedalean maze would continue to preoccupy Ayrton until his death, he also focussed on other Bgures and ideas in his later years. These included the Italian Gothic sculptor, Giovanni Pisano, and the French Romantic composer, Hector Berlioz.

Berlioz became the subject of a book, Berlioz, A Singular Obsession; a television programme for BBC2; and an exhibition of paintings and sculptures at the Hamet Gallery entitled ‘A Debt to Hector Berlioz’ (all 1969). Pisano became the subject of a well-received monograph, which had an introduction by Henry Moore (1970).

Other major writings of the period included the volume of essays, The Rudiments of Paradise (1971), in which he tempered his earlier critique of Picasso; the short stories, Fabrications (1972); and the novel, The Midas Consequence (1974). His later illustrations included the suite of etchings based on Paul 7erlaine’s erotic poems, Femmes/Hombres (1972), one of several projects in that medium.

Among the many exhibitions that evidenced Ayrton’s continuing energy and invention, his friend, the art historian, Tom Rosenthal, singled out ‘Word and Image’, which was held at the National Book League in 1971. Rosenthal, who wrote its catalogue, has described it as ‘a remarkably inventive show devoted to a comparison of the work of Ayrton and Wyndham Lewis, showing the interrelationship not only of the two artists and their styles but also of their writings as well as their visual work’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Though Ayrton had su6ered ill-health since the early 1940s, he was still in the midst of creative activity when he died suddenly of a heart attack in London on 17 November 1975. He was survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and three step-daughters. A major retrospective at Birmingham Art Gallery, that had already been in the planning, became a memorial show when it took place in 1977.

His work is represented in the Government Art Collection, The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art and the Jerwood Collection, and numerous public collections, including the Arts Council Collection (Southbank Centre), the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Air Force Museum (Hendon) and Tate; and the Fry Art Gallery (Sa6ron Walden), Keele University Art Collection, Southampton City Art Gallery, the University of Essex and the 7ictoria Art Gallery (Bath).

Further reading: Peter Cannon-Brookes, Michael Ayrton: an illustrated commentary, Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery, 1978; Justine Hopkins, ‘Ayrton, Michael (b London, Feb 20, 1921; d London, Nov 16, 1975)’, Grove Art Online, 2003, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T005416; Justine Hopkins, Michael Ayrton: a biography, London: André Deutsch, 1994; T G Rosenthal, ‘Ayrton [formerly Ayrton Gould], Michael (1921–1975)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 3, pages 43-46

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AL A N R E Y N O L D S Alan Munro Reynolds (1926-2014) For ten years, from 1948 to 1958, Alan Reynolds was supremely successful as a Neo-Romantic landscape painter. He then turned to abstraction and, in 1967, abandoned painting in favour of constructions. For the last 30 years, he made only white reliefs, tonal drawings and woodcuts.

Alan Reynolds was born at 11 Stanley Road, Newmarket, Su6olk, on 27 April 1926, the third of four children of George Reynolds, a Scottish groom in racing stables, and his wife, Margaret (née Holloway). His father encouraged his early interest in art.

Leaving school at the age of 14, Reynolds worked in various jobs while teaching himself to paint. Then, in 1944, he was called up, and served in both the Su6olk Regiment and the Highland Light Infantry, in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. His time in the army provided a grounding for his subsequent career, for he took teachers’ training courses at the Forces Study Centre in Hanover, in order to become an education sergeant, and spent his leave absorbing the paintings and theories of Paul Klee and the artists of Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke.

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Following demobilisation in 1947, Reynolds studied at Woolwich Polytechnic School of Art (1948-52), and, inspired by Romantic and Neo-Romantic artists, developed as a landscape painter.

Successfully refusing to a summons to return to the army during the Korean War, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art (1952-53), where he received a medal for painting. While still a student, he began exhibiting with the London Group (1950) and held the Brst of 11 solo shows at the Redfern Gallery (1952-74). He taught drawing at the Central School of Art (1954-61) and then painting at St Martin’s School of Art (from 1961). Becoming Senior Lecturer in Painting in 1985, he retired a decade later.

Initially, Reynolds worked as a landscape painter in oil and watercolour in a Neo-Romantic manner, evolving recognisable, often small-scale, natural forms into expressive patterns. In addition to the Redfern Gallery, he held solo shows at the Durlacher Gallery, New York (1954, 1959), and the Leicester Galleries, London (1958), and gained great success, with international museums acquiring his work.

In 1957, Reynolds married the art teacher, 7ona Darby, and they settled initially in Sevenoaks, Kent, before moving to Briar Cottage, High Street, Cranbrook, in 1962. In 1959, he stopped drawing from nature, and turned unequivocally towards abstraction, by emphasising the geometric, rather than organic, qualities of networks of horizontal and vertical lines. He applied his skill at abstraction to design as well as painting and, in 1965, won a Design Centre Award for ‘Legend’, his 1962 fabric pattern for Edinburgh Weavers.

Inspired by the work of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Reynolds began to produce painted wooden reliefs in the late 1960s, and in the mid 1970s established a new geometric style based on white forms.

In 1978, he held the Brst of several solo shows at Annely Juda Fine Art (1978-2006). His work was gradually reBned to ‘sequenced and squared drawings, woodblock prints and reliefs: white paint, black ink, graphite’ (Gill Hedley, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Reynolds’ constructivist art was perhaps more greatly appreciated on the Continent than in Britain, and he held solo shows at Galerie Wack, Kaiserslautern (1986-2008), Galerie Lahumière, Paris (1990), Galerie Art In, Nürnberg (1992), Galerie Konstruktiv Tendens, Stockholm (2002) and Galerie Gimpel & Müller, Paris (2009, 2012). Retrospectives were devoted to him at the Städtische Galerie, Wolfsburg, and the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen-am-Rhein (1996), and the Musée des Ursulines, Macon, and Museum Liner, Appenzell (2009).

In Britain, Reynolds developed a close working relationship with Michael Harrison, the director of Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.

Kettle’s Yard mounted a retrospective in 2003, and Harrison published a monograph in 2010.

Living at Briar Cottage, Cranbrook, until the end of his life, Reynolds died in Tunbridge Wells Hospital on 22 August 2014.

His work is represented in many public collections, including the Arts Council Collection (Southbank Centre), Tate and the 7&A; and Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge) and Leicestershire County Council Artworks Collection (County Hall, Leicester).

Further reading: Charles Darwent, ‘Alan Reynolds’ [obituary], Guardian, 3 September 2014; Michael Harrison, Alan Reynolds. The Making of a Concretist Artist, Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2011; Gill Hedley, ‘Reynolds, Alan Munro (1926-2014)’, Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.108473

BIOGRAPHIES

ER NE ST GR E E N WO O D Ernest Greenwood, PRWS (1913-2009) Though the painter and printmaker, Ernest Greenwood, rst established himself with portraits and gure subjects, including murals, he became better known for his gentle Neo-Romantic landscapes, which ‘often have a Palmeresque atmosphere of mystery’ (Alan Windsor (ed), Handbook of Modern British Painting 1900-1980, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992, page 123).

A successful teacher and administrator, he also helped revive the fortunes of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, while he was its President.

Ernest Greenwood was born in Welling, Kent, on 12 February 1913, the sixth of seven children of the shipping engineer, Owen Charles Greenwood, and his wife, Annie (née Bradshaw).

His father died when he was very young and the family then lived in poverty.

Greenwood was educated at Gravesend Grammar School and, from 1927, studied at Gravesend School of Art. In 1931, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, in London, where he studied painting under William Rothenstein, John Nash, Alan Sorrell and Gilbert Spencer. When it was agreed that Sorrell should produce a series of murals for the public library in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, Greenwood was taken on as his assistant. A travelling scholarship, in 1934, enabled Greenwood to spend time at the British School at Rome, and in Paris and Copenhagen. A year later, he returned to the RCA, in order to study etching and engraving under Malcolm Osborne and Robert Sargent Austin.

While at the RCA, Greenwood met his future wife, Eileen Messenger, who was a student in the design school. Their Brst joint exhibition was held at her lodgings in Redcli6e Road, Chelsea, and they both became art teachers. They married in 1939, and lived initially with her family at ‘Glen Gairn’, Norrys Road, Cockfosters, East Barnet. They would have one daughter, Dorelia (who would exhibit a lithograph at the Royal Academy in 1964).

In 1941, Greenwood was conscripted into the Royal Artillery.

A few months later, he was transferred to the Army Education Corps School. By the end of the war, he was working at the Army Rehabilitation School in Berlin. His experiences of that city in ruins inspired him to produce a series of paintings on the theme of resurrection.

Following demobilisation in 1946, Greenwood was appointed art master at the Technical High School for Girls in Chislehurst, Kent. In that year, he painted a set of 8 mural panels on Biblical subjects for Coopers, a Georgian mansion in Chislehurst Park (now in Bromley Central Library). Soon after, his school invited him to paint a set of 15 mural panels on the themes of Christmas and Easter. (Completed in 1951, the panels were dismantled when the school was later modiBed.) From 1947, Greenwood held solo shows, and joint shows with his wife, at Kensington Art Gallery. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and the New English Art Club. By 1950, he and his family were living at Bridge Cottage, Otford, near Sevenoaks, Kent. In 1953, he was appointed an inspector of art education for the London County Council.

In 1960, Greenwood and his wife bought Brushings Farm House,

a listed sixteenth-century house in the village of Broad Street, northeast of Maidstone. While they would spend the next few years restoring it with care, they did not neglect their work as artists. Focussing increasingly on landscape watercolours, Greenwood became an active member of a number of artists’ societies, being elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (1962) and taking the position of President of both the Hesketh Hubbard Art Society (1960-65) and the Guild of Kent Artists (1966). He also held solo shows in London, including one at Walker’s Galleries (1960) and another, of ‘French and English Landscapes’, at the galleries of the Federation of British Artists (1965).

In 1966, Greenwood became an inspector of art education for the Kent Education Committee, a position he retained until 1973. Over that period, he held signiBcant exhibitions in Kent, including a joint show with Hugh Casson in Canterbury (1970) and a retrospective at the New Metropole Arts Centre, Folkestone (1972). During the run of the latter, he met the new owner of the New Metropole, the property developer, Sir Gerald Glover, and established a good relationship with him.

Elected a full member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1973, Greenwood became its President in 1976, and remained in the position for the following eight years.

According to Simon Fenwick, the former RWS archivist, it was Greenwood who secured a new home for the society, and more generally its future, by alerting Sir Gerald Glover of its need for a new premises. Then involved in the development of the South Bank, Glover was able to incorporate such premises in the project. As a result, the Bankside Gallery was opened in 1980.

While President of the RWS, Greenwood still found time to travel, often in his role as a lecturer in art appreciation on Swan Hellenic cruises.

In later years, Greenwood continued to paint and exhibit, both in England and in Arizona, in the United States, where he had friends. In 1994, he accepted an invitation to paint decorations for the Judges’ Chambers at Canterbury Crown Court. Three years later, he held a retrospective at County Hall, Maidstone.

In about 2003, Greenwood became conBned to a wheelchair, so he and his wife, Eileen, moved to sheltered accommodation at Lakeside in HothBeld, near Ashford. While there, he wrote his memoir, The Last of Seven: Re ections of a Life in Art (2006). He died in Ashford on 17 May 2009, a year after his wife.

His work is represented in the collections of the Royal Watercolour Society and numerous public collections, including the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum and Bromley Central Library.

Further reading: Simon Fenwick, ‘Ernest Greenwood’ [obituary], Independent, 3 September 2009

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BIOGRAPHIES

K EITH G R A N T Keith Frederick Grant (born 1930) One of the greatest living British landscape painters, Keith Grant has travelled extensively, and has confronted the elements in order to produce extraordinary, resonant images of nature, especially in the north. Recently, he has preferred to recollect his experiences in the tranquility of his studio in Norway, and work imaginatively to produce an exciting series of what he calls ‘autobiographical’ paintings.

Keith Grant was born Frederick Nall at Walton Hospital, Liverpool, on 10 August 1930, with his twin brother, Roy. He was fostered and later adopted by Charles and Gladys Grant, and grew up at 21 Patrick Avenue, Orrell, Liverpool. He was educated at Roberts County Primary School, Orrell (1935-40), and, following a brief period as an evacuee in Peak Dale, Derbyshire, at Bootle Grammar School for Boys, as the result of a scholarship. He left school at the age of 13 to work at the Co-operative store, Stanley Road, Bootle. While there, he attended evening classes at Bootle School of Art, and contributed drawings to the Liverpool Co-op’s magazine. He also attended weekly classes in watercolour with the Misses Isaacs in Litherland. Through them, he made his Brst visits to Wales, staying at their cottage in Glyn Ceiriog, Denbighshire.

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Between 1948 and 1950, Keith Grant undertook National Service in the Royal Air Force as Aircraftsman 1st Class, Brst at RAF Bridgnorth, Shropshire, and then at RAF Sta6ord. While there, he received his Brst opportunity to practise as a painter, producing murals for the canteen. On moving to London with his brother, Roy, in 1950, he worked as a window dresser at the Co-op store in Wood Green. While there, he took classes at the Working Men’s College, St Pancras, and designed productions for Mountview Theatre Club, Crouch Hill, including its famous production of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra.

In 1952, Grant enrolled at Willesden School of Art, and spent three years studying under William Brooker, Ivor Fox, Edward Middleditch and Cli6ord Wilkinson, among others. While there, he chaired the Young Contemporaries exhibition, held at the Royal Society of British Artists (1954), and had his Brst ever solo show, in Bootle (1955). In 1956, he married 7alerie Owen, a fellow student at Willesden School of Art; the marriage lasted Bve years.

Going on to the Royal College of Art (1955-58), Grant studied under Colin Hayes, John Minton, Kenneth Rowntree and Carel Weight, among others. While there, he produced murals for the 7erulamium Museum, St Albans (1956-57, later destroyed), and Rhodesia House, London (1957-59, later destroyed). As a result of this work, he gained a silver medal for mural painting during his Bnal year at the RCA. He also won the David Murray Landscape Award, in 1958, and used part of it to travel to Paris.

Having encountered the work of J M W Turner and Samuel Palmer early in his development, Grant fell under the in0uence of such Neo-Romantic painters as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland while at the RCA. Yet, in his devotion to landscape, he has explored many places not previously painted by British artists.

Supported by Colin Hayes, he developed a particular enthusiasm for northern terrains, visiting Scotland, Iceland (on at least four occasions from 1965) and – most signiBcantly – Norway. He Brst visited Norway in 1957 and, feeling an immediate a'nity with

the land and its people, began to incorporate motifs inspired by the country into his work. He would return there again and again.

Between 1958 and 1960, Grant taught at Kingston School of Art. In 1959, he appeared on BBC television’s Monitor with Reginald Brill and Malcolm Kador, fellow teachers at Kingston. In the same year, he began to exhibit at the New Art Centre, and in the following one held the Brst of his solo shows there.

In 1960-61, Grant visited Norway as the result of a Norwegian Government Scholarship, spending one month in Oslo, but staying mainly in the north of the country. On his return, he taught at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art (by 1962) and then Hornsey College of Art (1963-68). In 1964, he married Gisèle Barka Djouadi, and they would have a daughter, Dominique, and a son, Paul. He and Gisèle lived Brst at the Abbey Centre, New Barnet, before moving to Camden Studios, by 1967. In 1967, he held his Brst solo show at Roland, Browse & Delbanco. In the following year, he became Head of Painting at Maidstone College of Art (1969-71).

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Grant experimented with kinetic and other sculpture. In 1969, his construction, Earth Time and Space – The North, was installed at Snape Maltings, Su6olk. Its genesis, construction and installation was charted in Grant North, a 15-minute documentary Blm by Jack Hazan. In 1971, his steel and concrete sculpture, St Joan, was installed outside the Shaw Theatre, London. As a result, he became the subject of ‘Together They Made it on the Euston Road’, a programme in the BBC television series, Look, Stranger. Other projects in the early 1970s intended for public display included murals for Middlesex Hospital (1972, later destroyed when the building was demolished) and the mosaic, The Magic Mountain, for Charing Cross Hospital (1975). He and his family moved to Lewes, East Sussex, in the mid 1970s. He was Head of the Painting Department of Newcastle Polytechnic during the years 1979-81.

From the early 1980s, Grant seized opportunities to explore contrasting climes. In 1982, he accepted an invitation to French Guiana to paint the launch of the Ariane rocket, and exhibited the resulting works in the following year at the Paris International Air Show. This led to visits to Sarawak (1984 & 1985), Cameroon (1986), the Negev Desert in Israel (1988), the Co-operative Republic of Guyana (1991) and 7enezuela (1992). Still devoted to the cold north, he worked in Arctic Greenland during 1989.

At the end of the decade, Grant began to exhibit his paintings in a series of signiBcant solo shows. 7enues included London dealers: Cadogan Contemporary (from 1989), the Crane Kalman Gallery (1989), the Gillian Jason Gallery (1990) and Cassian de 7ere-Cole (1994). He also showed at Roehampton Institute (1992), where he was Head of Art (1981-90), and The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (1994), which entitled its retrospective ‘Fire and Ice’, so encapsulating his landscape art.

In addition to his work as a landscapist, Grant has received commissions to paint the portraits of Sir Geo6rey Wilkinson, the Nobel prizewinning chemist (1988), and HRH Prince Andrew (1994). More recently, he has painted the poet, Sir Geo6rey Hill, while he was Oxford Professor of Poetry (2015).

BIOGRAPHIES

Grant settled in Norway in 1996, and now lives in the village of Gvarv, in Telemark, with his Norwegian wife, Hilde; together, they have a daughter, Thea. Nevertheless, he has exhibited internationally, and continues to travel widely. For instance, in 2001, he accepted an invitation from the British Antarctic Survey to co-inaugurate its Artists and Writers’ Programme (with fellow painter Philip Hughes). This resulted in an appearance on BBC television news in an item on Antarctica. He returned to Antarctica in 2017.

Representing Keith Grant since 2008, the Chris Beetles Gallery has held Bve highly successful solo shows of his work: ‘Elements of the Earth’ (2010), ‘Metamorphosis’ (2016), ‘North by New English’ (2017), ‘Antarctica’ (2018) and ‘Invention and 7ariation’ (2020), the last of which presented a series of paintings celebrating the transBguration of nature in the music of Frederick Delius.

His work is represented in the Government Art Collection and numerous public collections, notably the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge).

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Detail of Keith Grant, Wiltshire [313]

BIOGRAPHIES

SHAN D H U TCHI S O N Shand Campbell Hutchison, SSA (1920-2015) Shand Hutchison was a leading Scottish artist and art educator of the second half of the twentieth century.

His paintings combined his intimate experience of the landscapes of the Lothians and Berwickshire with the in uence of such signi cant English Neo-Romantics as Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash.

Shand Hutchison was born on 17 August 1920 in his grandmother’s house on the Buccleuch estate on the River Esk, near Dalkeith, in Midlothian, Scotland. He was the son of Thomas Shand Hutchison, an accomplished amateur painter, and his wife Jane (née Small).

At the age of six, he moved with his family to North Berwick, on the Firth of Forth, and was educated at North Berwick High School.

In 1939, Hutchison went to Edinburgh College of Art. However, his studies were soon interrupted by the Second World War, and he joined the RAF, being assigned to the RAF Signals. According to his obituary in The Scotsman, ‘one of his more unusual tasks involved painting shark’s teeth onto the fronts of American Tomahawk aircraft’ (Elliott, 2015). Between 1942 and 1944, he worked in Lagos as a radio o'cer seconded to the British Overseas Airways Corporation.

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In 1946, Hutchison returned to Edinburgh College of Art, and studied under Andrew Dods, William Gillies, William MacTaggart, John Maxwell, Donald Moodie and Leonard Rosoman. He became a close friend of fellow student, Alan Davie, and, in the year 1947-48, they rented a 0at together in Frederick Street; they would remain Brm friends until Davie’s death in 2014. Following travel abroad, as the result of scholarships, Hutchison graduated in 1949.

Hutchison then trained to teach at Edinburgh Provincial Training Centre, based at Moray House, coming top of his year. He gained his Brst teaching post at Carrickvale Secondary School, in the west of Edinburgh. At the same time, he took a studio at 37 Cockburn Street, and there produced some of his best work, including the present work, Secret of the High Cliff (1958) [240], and Fish Fence (which was bought by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1953 and subsequently donated to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art). He exhibited with the Scottish Arts Club and the Society of Scottish Artists (from 1951) and at the Royal Scottish Academy (from 1953). From 1953, his work was also included in exhibitions organised by the Arts Council, notably ‘Four Scottish Painters’, which was mounted during the Edinburgh Festival of 1963.

In 1954, Hutchison married Ruth Wilson, a fellow student at Edinburgh College of Art. His obituary in The Scotsman records that ‘around this time they took a holiday to Figueres in Spain’ during which they ‘plucked up the courage to call on Salvador Dalí, who lived in nearby Port Lligat’.

Between 1954 and 1959, Hutchison taught at the Royal High School in Edinburgh. He then moved to the newly-built Gracemount Secondary School, to the south of the city, to become head of a large art department. The department’s programme proved so successful that its students won a number of national and international prizes.

In 1965, Hutchison resigned from his position at Gracemount to become Advisor in Educational Technology for the Lothian Regions, based at the Dean Centre. In this position, he had responsibility for audio-visual requirements and training for art departments across Edinburgh and the Lothians. He also began to lecture at the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University, and to teach life drawing at Edinburgh College of Art. At this time, he was living at The Anchorage, 6 The Quadrant, North Berwick, while maintaining his Edinburgh studio. Late in the decade, in the years 1968-70, he was President of the Scottish Arts Club (a position that he took up again in the years 1992-94). Becoming increasingly involved in audio-visuals, he edited the Bulletin of NECCTA (the National Educational Closed-Circuit Television Association) during the early 1970s.

By the early 1990s, Hutchison had retired to a bungalow in Portobello, a coastal suburb of Edinburgh, where he became an active member of its Community Council. Between 2006 and 2014, he was also a director of the Edinburgh Society of Musicians.

Hutchison died peacefully, at his home in Portobello, on 25 April 2015, aged 94. He was survived by his wife Ruth and two children, Jane and Christopher.

Further reading: Patrick Elliott, ‘Shand Hutchison’ [obituary], The Scotsman, 22 May 2015

BIOGRAPHIES

ROWL A N D E M E T T Frederick Rowland Emett, OBE (1906-1990) Rowland Emett began to establish himself as the creator of elegant and whimsical cartoons in the late 1930s, while working as an advertising draughtsman.

In 1951, he reached a wider public with his designs for the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway, which was sited at Battersea Park during the Festival of Britain. Gradually, he converted more of his illustrations into increasingly complex three-dimensional machines.

Both drawings and inventions did much to cheer a nation fed up with years of austerity.

Rowland Emett was born at ‘Eskdale’, Natal Road, New Southgate, London, on 22 October 1906, the elder son of Arthur Emett, the proprietor of a small advertising business, and his wife, Alice (née 7eale). Around the beginning of the First World War, he moved with his family to Birmingham, and settled at 24 Tennyson Road, Small Heath. He was educated at Waverley Grammar School, Birmingham, and showing his father’s enthusiasm for invention, registering his Brst patent at the age of fourteen.

However, he had ambitions to become a landscape painter, and studied brie0y, but with great success, at Birmingham Central School of Arts and Crafts. In 1931, he contributed a painting entitled Cornish Harbour to the Royal Academy of Arts. By that date, he was living at 60 Sandbourne Road, Washwood Heath, Birmingham, and working as an advertising draughtsman for the process engravers, Siviter Smith. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1939, he moved to Turner Brothers, and for six months led a team of draughtsmen in designing elements of Frank Whittle’s jet engine for its use in the Gloster Meteor.

Emett published his Brst cartoon in Punch on 10 December 1939, and his work soon began to appear regularly both in its pages and those of other magazines, including Lilliput. In 1941, he was chosen to illustrate Bells and Grass, a series of humorous rhymes that Walter de la Mare had originally written for Punch.

The poet was so impressed by the result that he immediately encouraged Emett to illustrate an edition of his more famous book, Peacock Pie. In the same year, he married Elsie May Evans (known as Mary), and he and his wife set about producing the delightful children’s book, Anthony and Antimacassar (1943), she also becoming his business manager.

About the same time, Emett’s cartoons began to be collected

by Faber in a series of volumes: Engines, Aunties & Others (1943), Sidings, & suchlike (1946), Home Rails Preferred (1947), Saturday Slow (1948), Bu.ers End (1949), Far Twittering (1949), High Tea (1950) and The Forgotten Tramcar (1952).

By 1950, Emett had returned to London, with his wife and daughter, Claire, and they were living on the Embankment, with a view of Battersea Power Station. He soon received a commission from the organisers of the Festival of Britain to transform the trains that appeared in his cartoons into a full-size, working railway.

The result was the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Railway, and its three featured engines, Nellie, Neptune and Wild Goose, which operated at Battersea Park during the course of the festival, in 1951. It brought Emett increased popularity and other o6ers of work. In the early months of 1954, he and Mary travelled across the United States so that he could produce a ‘A Witty British Artist’s Friendly Portrait of the US’, which appeared as a

portfolio in Life magazine on 5 July 1954. Soon after the trip, they settled at Wild Goose Cottage, in Ditchling, in Sussex.

As his eyesight faltered, Emett converted more of his illustrations into increasingly complex three-dimensional machines that, from 1956, he constructed himself at a blacksmith’s forge near his Sussex home. He received international success, through his work on the Blm, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), when he gave substance to the adventures of the inventor, Caractacus Potts.

He achieved this by employing a team of assistants to help him make eight of his machines for the Blming and a further 37 for international promotional purposes. In 1974, he built his Brst permanent, site-speciBc construction, The Rhythmical Time Fountain, for the 7ictoria Centre, Nottingham.

A parodist of the real world of functional engineering, Emett had long proved to be the Genius of British Eccentricity, a fact acknowledged by his being awarded an OBE in 1978. This was conBrmed by the overwhelming response to the most important exhibition of his career, ‘Rowland Emett: From “Punch” to “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” and beyond’. Mounted by Chris Beetles Gallery in 1988, the exhibition travelled to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where it was augmented by a number of the machines. He died on 13 November 1990 in a nursing home in Hassocks, Sussex, close to his home in Ditchling. Chris Beetles Gallery has continued to do much to promote his work.

Emett’s Bnal machine, A Quiet Afternoon in the Cloud Cuckoo Valley, constructed in 1984, was last year saved for the nation by the Science Museum Group. It is currently on display at Locomotion, Shildon, County Durham, which shows highlights of the national collection of railway vehicles in the world’s Brst railway town.

Emett’s work is represented in the collections of The Cartoon Museum, Tate and the 7&A. His open air sculptures can be seen at the 7ictoria Centre, Nottingham and Eastgate Shopping Centre, Basildon; and at the Mid America Science Museum (Hot Springs, Arkansas) and the Ontario Science Center (Toronto).

Further reading: John Jensen, ‘Emett, (Frederick) Rowland (1906-1990)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 18, pages 404-406

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BIOGRAPHIES

PIE TRO AN N I GO N I Pietro Annigoni, RP (1910-1988) The Italian artist, Pietro Annigoni, worked with supreme skill in the Old Master tradition, as draughtsman, painter, engraver, and occasional sculptor.

Among a broad range of subjects, including religious themes, he produced many self-portraits, which charted his development and essayed his skills. Having decided, after the Second World War, that the British would be particularly sympathetic to his approach to art, he became world famous, in 1955, when he painted Queen Elizabeth II.

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Pietro Annigoni was born in Milan on 7 June 1910, the second son of Ricciardo Annigoni, a mechanical engineer, and his wife, Teresa (née Botti), who was born in San Francisco, California, of Italian parents. He was educated at a local primary school, the Ginnasio Giuseppe Parini and the Collegio Calchi-Taeggi. When he moved with his family to Florence, in 1925, he attended the Collegio Padri Scolopi. At the same time, he attended classes in life drawing at the Circolo degli Artisti and at the Accademia di Belle Arti. In 1927, he entered the Accademia as a full-time student, and took courses in painting (under Felice Carena), sculpture (under Giuseppe Graziosi) and engraving (under Celestino Celestini). He based his style on Italian old masters, and learned from their techniques, while also receiving advice on oil tempera from the Russian artist, Nikolai Loko6.

Annigoni exhibited for the Brst time with two other artists, in Florence in 1930, at the Galleria Cavalensi e Botti. In the following year, he won the Domenico Trentacoste award. Then, in 1932, he held his Brst solo show at the Bellini Gallery in the Palazzo Ferroni, which attracted the attention of the artist, Giorgio de Chirico, and the art critic, Ugo Ojetti, who featured him in the arts section of Corriere della Sera. In 1935, he was given international exposure when selected to participate in the ‘Exposition d’Art Italien Moderne’ at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

A further exhibition at the Casa d’Artisti, in Milan, in 1936, brought him particular acclaim, and led to the important commission to produce frescoes in the Convent of San Marco, Florence. At the same time, he travelled widely, Bnding inspiration in the paintings that he studied, and producing a series of landscape watercolours. In 1937, he married Anna Giuseppa Maggini; they would have a son and a daughter.

The open opposition of Annigoni to the fascism of Mussolini led to his ostracism from the cultural establishment within Italy until the end of the Second World War. But conditions so changed from 1945 that he was able to produce some of his greatest and most characteristic works. In 1947, he founded the Gruppo dei Pittori Moderni della Realtà, with six other painters, including Gregorio Sciltian and the brothers, Antonio and Xavier Bueno, and together they signed a manifesto.

However, the group folded in 1949, and Annigoni was alone among its members to remain true both aesthetically and ethically to its opposition to abstraction.

Late in the 1940s, Annigoni decided that the British public would be particularly sympathetic to his approach to art; and indeed, to an extent, he paralleled such Neo-Romantic contemporaries as Michael Ayrton. From 1949, he began to exhibit at the Royal

Academy of Arts (showing a self-portrait) and, in the following year, held the Brst of several successful solo shows in London (at Wildenstein), which led to international fame. Living in London for six months a year, he received many commissions, particularly for portraits, including several of members of the royal family, and was the subject of solo shows in Paris, New York, San Francisco and, of course, Italy. In 1954, the Fishmongers Company requested a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, and the result proved phenomenally popular when it was exhibited in 1955 at the Royal Academy. While a second version, painted for the National Portrait Gallery in 1969, was less well received, Annigoni remained a prominent artistic personality through his later years.

His Brst wife dying in 1969, he married Rosella Segreto, one of his favourite models, in 1976. During the late 1960s, he returned to religious works for various Italian churches, the most signiBcant being those for the Abbey of Montecassino (1978- 80) and the Basilica del Sant’Antonio in Padua (1985). He died in Florence of kidney failure on 28 October 1988, having failed to recover from a perforated ulcer earlier in the year.

A major retrospective took place in Florence, at the Palazzo Strozzi, in 2000.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery; the Museo Pietro Annigoni (Florence); and Indianapolis Museum of Art (IN).

Further reading: Pietro Annigoni, An Artist’s Life (as told to Robert Wraight), London: W H Allen, 1977; Charles Richard Cammell, Pietro Annigoni, London: B T Batsford, 1954; Charles Richard Cammell, Memoirs of Annigoni, London: Allan Wingate, 1956; Philip Core, ‘Annigoni, Piero (b Milan, 7 June 1910; d Florence, 29 Oct 1988)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 2, page 123

BIOGRAPHIES

ENZO PL A Z ZOT TA Enzo Plazzotta (1921-1981) The Italian-born sculptor, Enzo Plazzotta, gained a major international reputation. Though he retained close links to his native country, it was in London that he established his sculptural practice in the 1960s, and was rst celebrated. Then, throughout his career, he exhibited widely in Europe, the United States and Australia. He produced inventive and engaging compositions in marble and bronze, especially of human and animal gures in movement. He developed a particular rapport with dancers, and worked with some of the most celebrated performers of his day.

His output encompasses both personal expressions of his sensibility and highly accessible, popular works, many of which grace our public spaces.

Enzo Plazzotta was born in Mestre, near 7enice, on 29 May 1921, and grew up on the shores of Lake Maggiore. Developing a particular aptitude for sculpture, he began to study under Messina at the Accademia di Brera, in Milan, at the age of seventeen.

However, he had to terminate his studies abruptly when Italy entered the Second World War. A volunteer in the Bersaglieri, he was sent to North Africa, where he was awarded the Silver Medal for valour. Following the fall of Benito Mussolini in 1943, he broke with the Fascist regiment and helped to found a partisan group in the Italian mountains. Betrayed by an inBltrator, he was captured and placed in solitary conBnement, escaping six months later while in transit to Mauthausen concentration camp. In Switzerland, he helped to improve relations between the partisans and the Allies. In the closing months of the war, he returned to Italy to participate in the Bnal struggle for national liberation.

Plazzotta was Bnally able to return to the Brera, Milan, to complete his studies, under Giacomo Manzù, who exerted a considerable in0uence over his work. On graduating, he received a commission from the Italian Committee of Liberation to make a bronze statuette for presentation to the British Special Forces Club.

He travelled to London himself to present the statuette and was so drawn to the British way of life that he decided to stay.

Plazzotta found work as a portrait artist but later, with a family to support, he was obliged to turn to more lucrative pursuits.

Rather than practise his art merely as a hobby, he set up a commercial art agency in London, which specialised in importing Milanese art and design. It was not until the early 1960s that he found himself in a position to take up sculpting again. Engaging himself fully in his work, he produced both accessible pieces and more personal projects in which he overcame conceptual and technical problems. Favourite preoccupations included dancing Bgures, horses and adaptations of classical and Christian themes.

Retaining close links with his native Italy, he kept a small studio in Pietrasanta, near Carrara; it was the base for much casting of his work, and for experiments in carving marble and onyx. In 1976 he received the title of Cavaliere from the Italian government for services to art. In the same year he moved into the Garden Studio in Cathcart Road, built and formerly owned by Sir Charles Wheeler. He died on 12 October 1981.

The estate of Enzo Plazzotta is now jointly owned by Chris Beetles Gallery and Bowman Sculpture.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University; College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, Mass); and Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane).

Further reading: Carol Plazzotta and Richard O’Conor, Enzo Plazzotta. A Catalogue Raisonné, London: Trefoil Books, 1986

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BIOGRAPHIES

C H AR L E S TU N N I CL I FFE

DA7ID W Y N N E

Charles Frederick Tunnicli6e, OBE RA RE 7PSWLA (1901-1979)

David Wynne, OBE (1926-2014)

One of the foremost wildlife artists of the twentieth century, Charles Tunnicli e displayed his talents in an impressive range of formats and media, including watercolours, oils, etchings and wood engravings.

Charles Tunnicli6e was born in Langley, Cheshire, on 1 December 1901, the only son of the Bve children of the shoemaker turned tenant farmer, William Tunnicli6e, and his wife, Margaret (née Mitchell), a farmer’s daughter. He grew up on Lane Ends Farm in nearby Sutton, and was educated at St James’s Church of England School, where teachers fostered his talent for art. He studied brie0y at MacclesBeld School of Art, in 1915, at the age of 14, before moving to Manchester School of Art, in the same year. In 1921, he won a Royal Exhibition Scholarship to the Royal College of Art (1921-25); there he met Malcolm Salaman, who helped him launch his career as a printmaker. He would be elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1929, and full member in 1934. For four years, from 1925 to 1928, he taught design and poster work as a part-time member of sta6 at Woolwich Polytechnic, while living at Waltham Green.

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In 1928, Tunnicli6e returned to Cheshire and settled at 34 Nicholson Avenue, MacclesBeld. In the following year, he married Belfast-born Winifred Wonnacott, a fellow student at the Royal College of Art, in Whalley Range Methodist Church, Manchester. Becoming a freelance artist, he produced commercial work for Brms involved in farming, while also painting and printmaking. From this time, he began to make a highly accurate record of birds of Britain, and to keep meticulous sketchbooks.

In 1932, Tunnicli6e made his name with wood engravings to an edition Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, and so ensured that he would receive many, and regular, commissions for illustrations. In fact he became so popular that he made an increasing use of scraperboard as a convenient substitute for wood. Through the 1930s, he fully established himself as an artist, exhibiting engravings at the Royal Academy of Arts (annually from 1928 to 1970), and holding his Brst solo show, at the Greatorex Galleries in London (1938). During the Second World War, he also began to write his own books, publishing My Country Book (1942) and Bird Portraiture (1945), while teaching art at Manchester Grammar School. In 1944, he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy.

Following the war, the Tunnicli6es settled at Shorelands, a house on the Caefni Estuary at Malltraeth, near Bodorgan, Anglesey, and remained there for the rest of their lives. The great inspiration that Tunnicli6e received from that particular environment was expressed, in 1952, in his most famous book, Shorelands Summer Diary. In his later years, he received a number of honours: he was elected a Royal Academician and a 7ice-President of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (both 1954); he was made 7ice-President of the Society of Wildlife Artists (1968); he was awarded the gold medal of the RSPB (1975); and he received an OBE (1978). He died at his home on 7 February 1979, Winifred having died a decade before.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Manchester Art Gallery and West Park Museum (MacclesBeld); and The National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) and Oriel Ynys Môn (Llangefni, Anglesey).

Further reading Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser, Charles Tunnicli.e. Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2017; Ian Niall, Portrait of a Country Artist: Charles Tunnicli.e, RA, 1901-1979, London: Gollancz, 1983; Ky'n Williams, rev, ‘Tunnicli6e, Charles Frederick (1901-1979)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 55, pages 550-551

David Wynne was a wide-ranging sculptor, who both carved and modelled in a variety of materials. While producing memorable portraits and gure subjects, he gained particular fame and popularity with his studies of animals and birds, which were noted for their vitality and grace.

David Wynne was born in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, on 25 May 1926, the son of the Naval Commander, Charles Edward Wynne, who ran a livery stable in the New Forest, and his wife, Millicent (née Beyts).

He was educated at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he initially read zoology. His studies were interrupted by the Second World War, and between 1944 and 1947 he served as a Sub-Lieutenant with the Royal Naval 7olunteer Reserve, working on minesweepers and aircraft carriers.

On returning to Cambridge, Wynne ostensibly studied zoology and agriculture. However, he soon showed a talent for art, by modelling busts of his friends and, in his last year, Trinity allowed him to spend time both sculpting and studying the history of art under the classical scholar, Dr Andrew Gow, who was known as a collector and connoisseur.

While at Cambridge, he also rowed for his college.

On leaving university in 1949, Wynne decided to become a sculptor.

It was Jacob Epstein, above all others, who encouraged his father to provide him with a studio at Campden Hill Gardens, and pay for his lessons from the Austrian sculptor, Georg Ehrlich, who had settled in London. That summer, he spent time in Europe, including Paris, where he befriended the elderly American architect, Welles Bosworth, who had ended his career restoring French monuments, including the Palace of 7ersailles and the Château de Fontainebleau. Two years later, in 1951, he would return to Paris to study under Bosworth and work as a stonemason for the sculptor, Paul Landowski. By then, he had launched his career, in 1950, by contributing to ‘Artists of Fame and Promise’ at the Leicester Galleries, and, in 1951, by producing a life-size bronze of St John the Baptist for the Church of St John, Rudmore, Hampshire (now in Portsmouth Cathedral).

In 1952, Wynne started to lay the foundations for his work as an animalier. He spent days drawing animals at London Zoo, and then modelled three studies of antelopes, which he exhibited in the same year at the Royal Academy of Arts, alongside a human head. In 1953, after a summer spent travelling in Greece and Israel, he began to teach art for one day a week at Langford Grove, a private school for girls in Barcombe Mills, Sussex, and continued to do so for the next Bve years.

In 1955, he held his Brst solo show, at the Leicester Galleries, to exhibit the achievements of Bve years’ work, central to which was the large-scale Entry into Jerusalem.

Having converted some stables at Ebernoe in Sussex for use as a country studio in 1956, Wynne moved his London studio to Queensgate in 1957. Major works of the period include Archer in Portland Stone (1956, Longbow House, London) and Teamwork in granite (1958, Taylor Woodrow, London). A second solo show, of recent work, was held at the Leicester Galleries in 1959. In the same year, he married Gillian Bennett, the daughter of the novelist, Joan Grant (having met her some years earlier while she was working as an artist’s model for Georg Ehrlich).

Through his marriage, he gained a stepson and a stepdaughter, and he and Gillian would go on to have two sons together.

In 1960, Wynne was commissioned by London County Council to create a work on a plinth for Crystal Palace Park. Having been fascinated

by Guy the gorilla since his Brst visits to London Zoo, he chose him as a subject that would suit an elevated position and engage children. The resulting black marble sculpture, completed in 1961, made his popular reputation. During the 1960s, the artist divided his time between

BIOGRAPHIES

large-scale commissions, some featuring birds, and more intimate portrait busts, including those of the contrasting musicians, Yehudi Menuhin (1963) and The Beatles (1964). He held a solo show of drawings and watercolours at the Temple Gallery, London, in 1964, and solo shows of sculpture at Arthur Tooth and Sons, London, in 1964 and 1966, and at the Findlay Galleries, New York, in 1969. In 1968, the art historian, T S R Boase, published The Sculpture of David Wynne, 1949-1967, the Brst monograph on the artist.

Further reading: David Elliott, Boy with a Dolphin: The Life and Work of David Wynne, London: Quartet, 2010; Christopher Masters, ‘David Wynne’ [obituary], Guardian, 23 September 2014; Jonathan Stone (ed), The Sculpture of David Wynne: 1974-1992, Lund Humphries, 1993

Wynne held further successful solo shows in the early 1970s at the Covent Garden Gallery, London (1970, 1971), and the Findlay Galleries, New York (1970, 1973). Perhaps even more important, in helping to raise his proBle and attract future commissions, was the exhibition, ‘David Wynne: Portraits’, held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 1972. Subsequent bronze portraits included those of Queen Elizabeth II (1972), King Hassan of Morocco (1972), The Begum Aga Khan (1975), the great Brazilian footballer, Pelé (1976) and Prince Michael of Kent (1977). During the decade, he also designed the 50 pence piece to mark Britain’s entry into the Common Market (1973) and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal (1977), and was himself awarded the latter.

A second monograph – The Sculpture of David Wynne, 1968-1974 by Graham Hughes – was published in 1974, and covers much of this period.

SigniBcant to Wynne’s work from the early 1970s were those sculptures that combined human and animal Bgures. These included Girl with the Doves (1971, Cadogan Place) and Boy with a Dolphin (1974, Cheyne Walk, among other locations), and Dancer with a Bird and Girl with a Dolphin, both of which were produced in 1974, and marked the beginning of an important relationship with the American company, PepsiCo. The company mounted a solo show of Wynne’s work at its headquarters in Purchase, New York, in 1976, and commissioned him to produce a sculpture of a grizzly bear, which led him to study the animals in the wild in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada. He made similar studies of salmon in Galway, in the Republic of Ireland, in order to produce Leaping Salmon (1981, Kingston House, Kingston-upon-Thames).

Wynne held his Brst retrospective at Cannizaro Park, Wimbledon, in 1980, and a solo show at Agnew’s in 1983. During the 1980s, he would continue to produce both large-scale commissions and intimate portraits.

He made a particular focus on sporting stars, both human and equine, including Shergar (1981), Jackie Stewart (1982), Arnold Palmer (1983), Björn Borg (1984), Fred Perry (1984), Shareef Dancer with his groom (1984) and a cresta rider (1985).

Wynne’s wife, Gillian, died in 1990. In the following year he produced Elephant Charging, the result of his studying elephants in Botswana. It was one of the last works included in the third of the monographs to be published in his lifetime: The Sculpture of David Wynne: 1974-1992, edited by Jonathan Stone. Later major commissions include the Queen Elizabeth Gates, Hyde Park Corner, London (1993), and a statue of the 7irgin Mary for the Lady Chapel in Ely Cathedral (2001).

A retrospective of his work was held at the Mall Galleries in 1997, while David Elliott’s biography, Boy with a Dolphin, was published in 2010. Having lived in London for many years, he died on 4 September 2014.

His work is represented in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery; Aberdeen Art Gallery; and the Donald M Kendall Sculpture Gardens, PepsiCo, Purchase, NY.

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BIOGRAPHIES

R AYM O N D B O OT H Raymond Charles Booth (1929-2015) Intensely private, and possessing an obsessive work ethic and passion for the natural world, Raymond Booth earned a reputation as one of the greatest botanical painters and illustrators, despite rarely leaving his Yorkshire home. Eschewing the more fashionable Modernist principles of the mid-twentieth century, he instead produced beautiful, intense compositions in oil of British ora and fauna, that rival the very nest Victorian followers of the genre.

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Raymond Booth was born in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, on 8 August 1929, to John Booth, a member of the local police force, and his wife Margaret Edna. When Raymond was still a young child, the family moved from their Brst home in the crowded streets of central Leeds, to Fearnville Place, in the leafy suburb of Roundhay. His father was a keen rambler and impressed upon Booth from an early age a respect and understanding for the British countryside. Just a short walk from his childhood home was Roundhay Park, the second largest urban park in Europe, comprised of over 700 acres of parkland, lakes and woodland. It is likely that growing up so close to such an environment had a profound in0uence on him, helping to develop what would become a lifelong obsession with natural world.

Booth’s early passion for nature was surely heightened by the number of summer holidays he spent on an estate near Winterslow, Wiltshire, where an uncle worked as a gamekeeper.

In 1946, at the age of 17, Booth won a scholarship to study at Leeds College of Art. However, his studies were put on hold during two years of National Service, which he spent largely with the RAF in Egypt, guarding the Suez Canal. He returned to Leeds College in 1949, graduating in 1953. While at Leeds College, he had frustrated his teachers and fellow students by insisting on working in a more traditional, precise style, and rejecting the more Modernist principles that were being promoted. As a result, his teachers convinced him that he was unlikely to earn a living as an artist, and encouraged him instead to study for a teaching diploma. Shortly after graduation however, he was diagnosed as su6ering from tuberculosis, a consequence of his time in Egypt, and was admitted to a sanatorium, where he would stay for the next six months. Years later, Booth would joke ‘I am one of the few people who can say, “Thank God for TB”’ (The Times obituary, 9 September 2015), as his months of recuperation gave him countless hours to develop his skills as a botanical artist. This enforced focus on his work gave him the conBdence to submit a number of his drawings to a botanical art exhibition in London organised by the Royal Horticultural Society. These works attracted the attention of a number of prominent horticulturalists, including Dr Harold Fletcher, the director of the RHS’s gardens at Wisley, Sir George Taylor, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the second Lord Fairhaven, all of whom would become patrons of Booth. His drawings at the Royal Horticultural Society also earned him a commission to illustrate a large two-volume work devoted to camellias, entitled The Camellia (1956), by Beryl Leslie Urquhart. When the actor Ernest Thesiger viewed the works at the RHS, he recommended them to the director of Walker’s Galleries on New Bond Street. As a result, Booth would exhibit there until its closure in 1961.

Following the closure of Walker’s Galleries, Booth began exhibiting, from 1962, at the Fine Art Society. He held his Brst solo show there in 1975, and would go on to have a further seven dedicated exhibitions, including a large, 50-year retrospective in 2011.

Though he lent several owl studies to an exhibition on birds of prey at Leeds City Museum during the early 1970s, he remained virtually unknown in his native Yorkshire until a retrospective exhibition of his work toured his home county, going on display at HuddersBeld Art Gallery, Crescent Art Gallery, Scarborough, and Cooper Gallery, Barnsley.

In 1992, Booth completed one of his most ambitious undertakings, a collection of 85 drawings of Japanese 0ora for Don Elick’s Japonica Magni"ca. This impressive publication was born out of 12 years of correspondence between Booth and Elick, an American plant collector who had lived in Japan for over 40 years. During this time, Elick would send rare and exotic Japanese plants to Booth, who would grow them in his garden. As arranged by the Fine Art Society, many of his drawings for Japonica Magni"ca were exhibited at Lotherton Hall, Leeds, in 1992, and the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (1994) The exhibition then toured the USA for two years, going on display at the PaineWebber Art Gallery (New York, NY), the Morris Museum (Morristown, NJ), the Elvehjem Museum of Art (University of Wiconsin-Madison, WI), the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation (Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, Pittsburgh, PA), the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT) and Chicago Botanic Garden (Glencoe, IL).

It returned to the Fine Art Society in 1997.

Booth was an intensely private, almost reclusive artist who spent his career obsessively dedicated to his craft, rarely venturing from his home in Alwoodley, a suburb of Leeds. His exquisitely detailed and scientiBcally accurate oils were produced in a home studio from plant specimens that he personally cultivated in his garden and greenhouses, or from animal specimens that had been sent to him, such as foxes, badgers and birds, which he kept in a special refrigerator. Indeed, his Brst contact with Leeds City Museum was through the natural science collections, where the curators would lend him owls and rabbits for his studies. Despite an association of over Bfty years, he visited the Fine Art Society only once. He did not personally appear at an opening of any of his shows until the major retrospective of his work held at Leeds Art Gallery in 2002.

Raymond Booth met his wife, Jean (née Wilson), the widow of the artist Ronald Pawson, at Gadsby’s artists’ materials shop, where she worked, close to his home. They were friends for many years before marrying in 1991. They lived together at 22 Far Moss, Alwoodley, Leeds, until Booth died from cancer on 26 June 2015. They had no children. The following year, a major memorial exhibition was held at the Fine Art Society.

His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew; The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) and Leeds Art Gallery; The Ulster Museum (Belfast) and the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation (Pittsburgh, PA) Further Reading: Peyton Skipwith, An Artist’s Garden, New York: Callaway, 2000 The biography of Raymond Booth is written by Alexander Beetles.

BIOGRAPHIES

ER I C F R A S E R Eric George Fraser, FSIA (1902-1983) Eric Fraser’s work as an illustrator and designer is at once varied and highly distinctive. Developing an assured technique, he could adapt his style to almost any subject matter, from the whimsical to the tragic.

As a result, he de ned the look of Radio Times for four decades and became a mainstay of J M Dent’s Everyman’s Library – while also creating murals, stained glass and advertisements (including the immortal ‘Mr Therm’).

Eric Fraser was born at 39 7incent Street, Westminster, London, on 11 June 1902, the only child of the solicitor’s clerk, George Fraser, and his wife, Matilda (née Peartree), the headmistress of the primary department of St Mary’s Church of England elementary school, Hide Place. From 1913 to 1919, he was educated at Westminster City School and, while still a pupil, attended Walter Sickert’s evening classes at Westminster School of Art. Then, in 1919, he won a scholarship to Goldsmiths’ College School of Art. There he studied under the Headmaster, Francis Marriott (etching, aquatint and mezzotint), and also Clive Gardiner (drawing and painting), Harold Speed (painting), E J Sullivan (book illustration and lithography) and Alfred Taylor (commercial art).

The absence of Sullivan from Goldsmiths in 1923 gave Fraser the chance to teach lithography, and in the same year he assisted Gardiner in producing murals for the Malaya Rubber Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley. Other opportunities arose in 1924, when he exhibited an etching at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and received his Brst commission from R P Gossop, his agent for almost 60 years. In 1925, he married Irene Lovett at St John’s, Smith Square, Westminster; they would have three sons and a daughter. Soon after their marriage, he and his wife moved to Tennyson Avenue, Twickenham, though he travelled daily to his studio in town. (The studio was Brst in Essex Street, Strand; then in Paternoster Row, in the City; Bnally in Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster.)

In 1926, Fraser began to draw for The Radio Times, a collaboration that would last until his death, for it was he more than any other artist that gave the magazine its visual identity. Fraser’s style was founded upon a thorough knowledge of the history of printing methods, which he mainly reproduced in pen and ink; traditional images were combined with mechanistic and scientiBc motifs to create a Modernist view of the past. He produced drawings for a number of other magazines, including fashion plates for the British version of Harper’s Bazaar, from its inception in 1929. His wide- ranging work for advertising is epitomised by his invention, in 1931, of ‘Mr Therm’ for the Gas, Light and Coke Company.

Before the Second World War, Fraser supplemented his income by teaching Bgure composition, book illustration and commercial design at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1926-40) and fashion drawing at the Reimann School, Regency Street, Westminster (1938-39).

In 1935, Fraser and his family settled at Penn’s Place, Church Street, Hampton, next to the Parish Church of St Mary the 7irgin.

Three years later, it also became his place of work. He continued to respond to commissions throughout the Second World War, while also serving as a full-time ARP Warden in the Civil Defence

Force. At the end of the war, he was elected one of the Brst ten Fellows of the Society of Industrial Artists. From 1948, he worked from an asbestos ex-army hut at the end of the garden.

In the post-war period, some signiBcant large-scale commissions conBrmed Fraser’s reputation as an artist, notably a mural for the People of Britain pavilion at the Festival of Britain (1951) and stained glass windows for the sanctuary of his own church of St Mary the 7irgin (1960-63). However, he continued mainly as an illustrator and increasingly of books, working on such classics as the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Collins, 1951), Manzoni’s The Betrothed (The Folio Society, 1969) and Ovid’s The Art of Love (Limited Editions Club, 1971). His talent for representing traditional imagery as something novel, even progressive, was as pertinent in his dust jacket designs for the Everyman’s Library (1953-72) as it was in Radio Times, for it made manifest the link between cultural wealth and the identity of the contemporary nation. In 1978, he was elected an Honorary Member of the Association of Illustrators.

Fraser died at home on 15 November 1983 and was buried next door at St Mary the 7irgin.

The Chris Beetles Gallery held a major retrospective of the work of Eric Fraser in 2013.

His work is represented in the collections of the 7&A. Further reading: Sylvia Backemeyer (with an essay by Wendy Coates-Smith), Eric Fraser. Designer & Illustrator, London: Lund Humphries, 1988; Mark Bryant, ‘Fraser, Eric George (1902-1983)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.110221; Alec Davis (with a postscript by Geo6rey Fraser), The Graphic Work of Eric Fraser, U6culme: The U6culme Press, 1985 (2nd edition); Pat Hodgson, Eric Fraser. An Illustrator of Our Time, London: British Gas plc, 1991

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BIOGRAPHIES

R EG I N AL D B R I L L Reginald Charles Brill (1902-1974) Reginald Brill was best known for his large-scale gure subjects of men engaged in manual labour. Their combination of monumentality and homeliness, even humour, bear witness to the artist’s central place within our native gurative tradition.

Reginald Brill was born Reginald Brüll in Hither Green, London, on 6 May 1902, the youngest of three children of the Polish tailor, Edward Brüll, and his English wife, Jane (née Norvall).

During his childhood, he moved with his family to Bath and then Harrogate, though domestic harmony was disrupted on the outbreak of the First World War, when his father was interned as an alien. Nevertheless, his artistic studies developed considerably during his father’s absence; winning a scholarship to Harrogate School of Art at the age of 13, he managed to gain a certiBcate in art teaching only two years later. Moving to London, in 1917, he took clerical jobs – in the City and Fleet Street – so as to a6ord evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art. Then, in 1920, he received a scholarship which enabled him to attend the Slade School of Art as a full-time student under Henry Tonks. While there, he produced murals for Christopher Hatton Turnor at Stoke Rochford Hall, meeting his future wife, Rosalie Clarke, in the process. They married in Fulham in 1925.

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Brill began his career, in 1925, by contributing illustrations to Lansbury’s Labour Weekly. Yet, in 1927, he substantially widened his horizon by winning the Rome Prize in Decorative Painting; for he spent two years at the British School at Rome and – among other achievements – painted its Director, Bernard Ashmole.

And, though he began to teach at Blackheath School of Art on his return to England in 1929, he went abroad again in the following year, painting in Egypt for six months at the invitation of the government. While there, he met Major Robert Gayer-Anderson, who would prove a friend of great signiBcance. He also held his Brst solo show, in Cairo in March 1930, which was successful enough to allow him to take a long route back to England, via Greece and Italy. His Brst solo show in Britain was held at the Leicester Galleries, London, in April 1933, by which time he was teaching in several art schools. Though he used it to demonstrate his equal skill as a painter of portraits, still lifes and landscapes, he would subsequently become best known for his large-scale Bgure subjects.

Brill set the pattern for much of his later career in 1934, when he took an appointment as Head Master of Kingston School of Art and, in the same year, embarked on a programme of substantial paintings on the theme of ‘the Martyrdom of Man’. He would do much for the development of Kingston as an institution. In 1939, he oversaw its move to new purpose-built premises while, three years later, he began discussions with Robert Gayer-Anderson and his brother, Thomas, over the possibility of them bequeathing their family home of Little Hall, Lavenham, Su6olk, to Surrey County Council for use by the school. His own status and achievements as an artist, writer and broadcaster also helped the promotion of the school, and sealed its relationship with the surrounding community. So he involved sta6 and students in his design for a model seaside promenade for the Festival of Britain (1951), took on the role of o'cial painter to the Borough of Kingston (1952), and encouraged the Borough Council to commission artists to paint local views (1955).

Following the death of Colonel T G Gayer-Anderson in 1960, Brill successfully negotiated the transfer of Little Hall, Lavenham, from his sons to Surrey Council. Two years later, he retired from Kingston and became Little Hall’s resident married warden when it opened as a hostel for art students. Though the hostel closed in 1969, Brill remained at Little Hall until his death on 14 June 1974. A retrospective of his work had opened at the Phoenix Gallery, Lavenham, three weeks before.

Further reading: Judith Bumpus, Reginald Brill, Aldershot: Scolar Press in association with Kingston University, 1999

BIOGRAPHIES

B E T T Y SWANWICK Ada Elizabeth Edith Swanwick, RA RWS (1915-1989) Very early in her career, Betty Swanwick established herself as an illustrator and designer of great wit and invention, so complementing her friend and teacher, Edward Bawden. Later, she produced an extraordinary series of visionary watercolours and drawings in the tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, which led to her election as a Draughtsman Member of the Royal Academy.

Betty Swanwick was born on 22 May 1915, the elder daughter of Harry Swanwick, who developed as a marine watercolourist while serving as a Paymaster in the Royal Naval Reserves, and his wife, Ethel (née Bacon). She was baptised at St Peter’s Church, Aldborough Hatch, near Ilford, Essex.

Swanwick was educated at a local LCC elementary school, and later at the Prendergast Grammar School, Lewisham, South London.

She received her Brst lessons in art from her father, and was encouraged by her art mistress at the Prendergast. Her father died when she was 10 years old, a loss that threw her upon her own determination to develop as an artist.

During her formative years and into early adulthood, Swanwick would continue to live in South London, Brst at Forest Hill and then at Sydenham. At the age of 15, she entered Goldsmiths’ College School of Art, where she was encouraged by Clive Gardiner, the Headmaster, and Edward Bawden, her tutor. Four years later, she received scholarships to both the Central School of Arts and the Royal College of Art, and attended them at the same time as Goldsmiths.

Swanwick received commissions even before such friends and contemporaries as Carel Weight and Denton Welch. As a result of seeing her work at a student exhibition at Goldsmiths in 1936, Frank Pick commissioned her to design her Brst posters for London Transport, and other projects soon followed.

In the same year, Swanwick returned on a part-time basis, to teach Illustration at Goldsmiths, as a successor to Bawden. Highly talented – and highly respected by her students – she taught at Goldsmiths through the Second World War, and became a full-time Senior Assistant in the Illustration School in 1948. During this post-war period, she developed her range as an artist, painting watercolours and murals, providing illustrations for books and periodicals, and designing further posters.

Having begun to illustrate books from 1939, Swanwick produced her own texts, for both children and adults, from 1945. Describing her idiosyncratic social comedies for adults as ‘novelettes’, she populated them with large-headed wide-eyed Bgures with tiny feet. Though they hardly hinted at her later, more spiritual preoccupations, the images amply demonstrated her instinctive wit, her innate sense of design and her skilful draughtsmanship.

As a whole, the publication of these books marked an important step towards the recognition of her originality, John Betjeman calling Hoodwinked (1957), ‘strange, startling, funny with a weird beauty’.

In 1950, a rare solo exhibition at The Little Gallery provided a showcase for Swanwick’s anthropomorphic watercolours, which combined her love of animals and sense of fun in the most

delightful way. Her mural designs, for venues such as the Festival of Britain (1951) and the Evelina Children’s Hospital (1955), were equally successful manifestations of her jaunty early style.

Soon after the retirement of Clive Gardiner from Goldsmiths in 1958, Swanwick became aware that the new Principal, Patrick Millard, was introducing changes in methodology that favoured the avant-garde. Most damaging for Swanwick was that drawing in general, and illustration in particular, was marginalised. Increasingly ostracised by those who represented the new order, she would seek solace in artistic certainties, and so carried with her a facsimile of one of Samuel Palmer’s sketchbooks. She eventually resigned as Senior Lecturer in 1970, and left her home in Greenwich for Downgate, Tidebrook, Sussex.

By this time, Swanwick was working increasingly on large-scale Bgurative watercolours and drawings, and exhibiting them regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Gradually receiving some recognition, she was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1972, and a Royal Academician seven years later.

She was also elected a member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1976.

In the poetry and intensity of the late narrative pictures, there is a level of achievement that suggests that Swanwick had overcome earlier anxieties. Yet there was something in her character that stopped her being as well known as she might have been. She preferred to spend her time working – and, as a perfectionist, completing work with di'culty – at home, and in the company of her dogs, her cats and Jobo, her African Grey parrot.

On returning to Greenwich in 1973, Swanwick taught again at Goldsmiths for one day a week and continued to do so for Bve years, by which time she had settled in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Swanwick died in hospital, in Tunbridge Wells, on her birthday, 22 May 1989. She left her money to four charities: the Celia Hammond Animal Trust, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.

In 2008, Chris Beetles Ltd published Paddy Rossmore’s deBnitive monograph, Betty Swanwick: Artist & Visionary.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Royal College of Art and Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery.

Further reading: Judith Collins, ‘Swanwick, Ada Elizabeth Edith [Betty] (1915–1989)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/64536

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NO R M A N N E A S O M Norman Neasom, RWS RBSA SAS (1915-2010) Having grown up on a farm in Worcestershire, Norman Neasom developed into a master of the gure in the landscape. However, he did so in a variety of ways, creating work that ranged from the purely naturalistic through the caricatural to the poetic and surreal, and that seemed to straddle the pagan and the pious.

Norman Neasom was born on the family farm of Birchensale, near Redditch in Worcestershire, on 7 November 1915, and lived there for his Brst 34 years. The farm itself, and the general environment in which Neasom grew up, obviously had an enormous e6ect upon him, and he retained an intuitive sense of time and place. He was steeped in the history of both Redditch and the counties to the west of his home town, which he tended to make the special province of his painting.

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A pupil of Brst a local kindergarten, and later Redditch County High School, Neasom once said that he never had much of an education and ‘staggered through school on the strength of [his] art’. He became a member of the High School’s semi-autonomous art school, which was run by Ernest Lupton Allan. Allan encouraged him to enter Birmingham School of Art, which he did in 1931, studying most notably under Bernard Fleetwood-Walker. He had an ‘old-fashioned formal training’, with drawing from the antique and life drawing, and also lessons in illustration and design. On completing his studies, he returned to work on the farm, but continued to experiment with style, subject and technique.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, Neasom joined the Rescue Service. In 1946, he returned to Birmingham School of Art as a member of sta6, becoming a colleague of many of his former teachers. He married in 1948, and would have two daughters.

Together with William Colley, he initiated the idea of regular themes at the Birmingham School, often of a historical nature, which would focus the attention and energy of the students and give them a context for their work. This contextual and experiential approach epitomises his own art, and was developed against both the pedantry of an academic classicism and an equally dry system based on abstraction.

Neasom confronted this newer system in 1953 when he moved to Redditch School of Art. Whatever his doubts as to its validity, he turned it to his advantage, using the example of Eric Fraser in order to integrate elements of Modernism into a more traditional approach. He experimented with printmaking (1960s) and the medium of scraperboard, varnished and then engraved (early 1970s).

However, he continued to work most reguarly in watercolour and bodycolour, and began to exhibit landscapes at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours and the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. In 1977, Neasom wrote a series of articles on ‘Sketch-Book Drawing’ for Leisure Painter.

This series sets out his own methods and preoccupations as an artist, and indicates something of his success as a teacher.

Following his retirement from teaching, Neasom gained in reputation, and was elected to the membership of Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (ARWS 1978, RWS 1989), the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (1981), and Stratford Art Society, of which he became patron. Through the 1970s and 80s,

and into the 90s, he regularly exhibited works of a consistently high quality at these venues.

Norman Neasom died on 22 February 2010.

His work is represented in the collections of Her Majesty the Queen; the Royal Watercolour Society; and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and the West Midlands Arts Council.

BIOGRAPHIES

ER I C H O LT

C EC IL ART HU R HU N T

Eric Stace Holt (1944-1997)

Cecil Arthur Hunt, 7PRWS RBA (1873-1965)

Eric Holt was a draughtsman and painter, who worked mainly in tempera. A slow, meticulous and self-critical artist, he became best known for his highly-wrought gure compositions, including Biblical scenes in modern dress, which led some critics to describe him as a talented follower of Stanley Spencer. Having a strong interest in the countryside, and its crafts and pursuits, he also produced scenes of country and suburban life, and some pure landscapes. His work invariably displays a strong sense of design, vivid characterisation and elements of the surreal.

Once elected a full member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1925, Cecil Arthur Hunt retired from his career as a barrister and turned his serious pastime of painting into a profession. While he had rst established himself as a painter of mountains, especially the Alps and the Dolomites, he soon proved himself a master of a great variety of topographies.

The impressive, often stark, e ects that he achieved rival those associated with his friend and mentor, Frank Brangwyn.

Born in Sutton, Surrey, on 12 May 1944, Eric Holt was half-brother to the painter, Ronnie Copas (1936-2017). From as early as the age of 13, he was focussing on art by taking a special course at Sutton East School. In 1959, at the age of 15, he went to Epsom and Ewell School of Art, and studied for three years under Eric Rodway and Leslie Worth. However, his move to Wimbledon School of Art in 1962 proved less of a success, and he left at the end of the Brst term. As a result, he took the Brst of a series of jobs to help him make ends meet and – following his marriage to Sandra Wrightson in 1964, with whom he had two children – to help support his family. These jobs included a groundsman on a caravan site, a van driver, a factory worker and a labourer, digging tunnels for a Brm of civil engineers. On being made redundant, he took work making furniture at Portobello Studios, Portobello Road, London. From there he moved on to glass painting and antique restoration. Through the 1960s, he had managed to complete only two pictures a year, but his work as a restorer revived his interest in painting.

Cecil Arthur Hunt was born in Torquay, Devon, on 8 March 1873, the second of three children of the highly regarded writer and geologist, Arthur Roope Hunt, and his wife, Sarah (née Gumbleton), who was born in Waterford, Ireland. He was educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge, studying Classics and Law, and being called to the Bar in 1899 (as had his father before him). He treated painting and writing as serious pastimes until 1925, when he was elected to the full membership of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours.

He then relinquished his legal career to become a professional painter.

Hunt had Brst exhibited in London in 1900, at the Alpine Club Galleries, and had held his Brst major show a year later, alongside E Home Bruce at the Ryder Gallery. From the Brst, he established himself as an atmospheric painter of mountains, especially of the Alps and Dolomites. However, he was soon accepted as a master of a great variety of topographies, for he exhibited the products of his wide travels frequently and extensively. Favourite destinations included the West Country, the West Coast of Scotland, the Rhône 7alley, Northern Italy, Rome and Taormina.

In 1903, Hunt married Phyllis Lucas, and they would have two sons.

From 1911, they lived at Mallord House, on the corner of Mallord Street and Old Church Street, Chelsea, which was especially designed

by Ralph Knott to include a large studio on the ground 0oor. During the summer months, he and his family retreated to the farm estate of Foxworthy, on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon.

In 1969, Holt and his family moved to 17 High Street, Purley, Surrey. Two years later, he began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts, and his work there met with a highly positive response from both the public and dealers. In 1972, he held his Brst solo show at the Maltzahn Gallery in Cork Street, London, and another at the same venue in 1974. Following the closure of the Maltzahn Gallery, he moved to the Piccadilly Gallery, and held Bve solo shows there between 1977 and 1993.

During the First World War, Hunt was employed at the Home O'ce, Brst in connection with Irish prisoners interned in England following the Sinn Fein’s Rebellion in 1916, and later assisting the Committee for Employment of Conscientious Objectors.

In 1978, Holt and his family left Surrey for Norfolk and bought a cottage near Sandringham. There he developed his passion for organic gardening, which informed his depiction of trees and 0owers in his paintings. In addition to his solo shows at the Piccadilly Gallery and his contributions to the RA and the RBA, he showed work at the Tolly Cobbold-Eastern Arts National Exhibition in 1980 and 1985. He also won a prize at ‘The World of Newspaper’, held at Sotheby’s, London, in 1982, and was prizewinner of the Royal Academy Annual Christmas Card Competition in 1985.

Hunt showed work regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts (from 1912), the Royal Society of British Artists (from 1914) and the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (from 1918). He was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1914, an associate of the RWS in 1919, and a full member six years later. He acted as the 7ice-President of the RWS for a three-year period from 1930.

His many substantial solo shows included six at the Fine Art Society (1919-34) and one at Colnaghi’s (1945). Following his death on 5 August 1965, he was the subject of a large memorial show at the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours.

Though Holt contracted cancer of the brain, he continued to work until his death early in 1997.

Chris Beetles has done much to revive interest in the work of Cecil Arthur Hunt. He mounted a large scale retrospective exhibition in 1996 at his London gallery, on the exact site of the artist’s Brst substantial show in 1901. The retrospective was accompanied by a deBnitive catalogue.

His work is represented in the collection of the Royal Watercolour Society and numerous public collections, including the 7&A.

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BIOGRAPHIES

L AU R A K N IG HT Dame Laura Knight, RA RWS RE RWA PSWA (1877-1970) Laura Knight exploited her versatility, verve and clarity of vision to her utmost, so proving how a woman could be as successful and serious an artist as any man in twentieth-century Britain. She was the rst woman artist to be made a Dame of the British Empire, and the rst in 150 years to be elected a full Royal Academician. She was also the only woman artist to work as an oScial war artist in both world wars.

Laura Knight was born Laura Johnson in Long Eaton, Derbyshire on 4 August 1877, the youngest of the three daughters of Charles Johnson and his wife, Charlotte (née Bates), and grew up in the house of her grandmother. Her father abandoned the family at the time of her birth, and her mother had to support the children by teaching drawing in Nottingham. Laura was educated at Brincli6e, in Nottinghamshire, and received lessons in art from her mother and under Wilson Foster at the Nottingham School of Art (1890). When her mother became too ill to work, the fourteen-year-old Laura took over her work as an art teacher in the Castle Rooms, Nottingham.

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In 1894, Laura moved to Staithes in Yorkshire with Harold Knight, a fellow student of the Nottingham School of Art, and in 1903 became his wife. In that year, her Brst painting to be accepted by the Royal Academy was bought by the artist, Edward Stott.

During this period, she and Harold made frequent visits to Holland, where she was impressed by the work of the Hague School.

Retaining contact with the area in which she had grown up, she was elected to the Nottingham Society of Artists in 1908.

In 1907, the Knights moved to Newlyn, Cornwall, where they Brst shared a house with Alfred Munnings before moving to Lamorna. And though they settled in St John’s Wood, London in 1918, they continued to summer in Lamorna each year. The Cornish landscape had an enormous e6ect on the work of Laura Knight, as displayed in her plein-air coastal scenes and Bgure subjects.

Between the wars, Laura Knight greatly expanded her range of subject and media, including pastels and various kinds of printmaking. An enthusiasm for theatrical entertainments resulted in many paintings of life backstage, including series relating to Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes (1919) and Bertram Mills’s Circus (1925).

The period was rehearsed in the book Oil Paint and Grease Paint (1936). Developing an international reputation, she was elected to the membership of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (ARWS 1919, RWS 1928) and the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (ARE 1924, RE 1932). She twice visited America to serve on the jury of the International Competition at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (1927 and 1929).

The honour of becoming a Dame of the British Empire (1929) was capped by her singular election as a full academician, the Brst woman to be so honoured in a hundred and Bfty years (ARA 1927, RA 1936). However, she also acted as President to the exclusively female organisation, the Society of Women Artists.

Though she and Harold lived in Malvern during the Second World War, Laura Knight continued to play an active role in public life and, as an o'cial war artist, painted munitions factories, airBelds and, latterly, the Nuremberg Trials. In 1965 she

rehearsed many of these events in her autobiography, The Magic of a Line, published to coincide with a retrospective at the Royal Academy. Again, she was the Brst woman to be so honoured. She died at St John’s Wood on 7 July 1970. An important retrospective was held in that year as part of the Nottingham Festival.

Further reading: Janet Dunbar (rev), ‘Knight [née Johnson], Dame Laura (1877–1970)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34349; Janet Dunbar, Laura Knight, London: Collins, 1975; Caroline Fox, Dame Laura Knight, Oxford: Phaidon, 1988; ‘Knight [née Johnson], Dame Laura (b Long Eaton, Derbys, Aug 4, 1877; d London, July 7, 1970)’, Grove Art Online, 2006, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T046963

BIOGRAPHIES

EDWA R D B AW D E N Edward Bawden, CBE RA (1903-1989) One of the most signi cant graphic designers of the twentieth century, Edward Bawden worked with ease between the ne and applied arts. Even before his appointment as an oScial war artist in 1940, he had established a reputation as a designer, illustrator and painter, and the output of his long career included ceramics, lithographic prints, murals, wallpaper designs and watercolours.

Edward Bawden was born in Braintree, Essex, on 10 March 1903, the only child of the ironmonger, Edward Bawden, and his wife, Eleanor (née Game). He was educated at Braintree High School and the Quaker High School, Sa6ron Walden, before studying at Cambridge School of Art (1919-21). At the Royal College of Art (1922-26) he worked under Paul Nash, who in0uenced his watercolour technique, and Ernest Tristram, the Professor of Design and mediaevalist, who inspired him more than any other teacher. Starting on the same day at college were Eric Ravilious and Douglas Percy Bliss who became close and life-long friends, and with whom he edited and hand-coloured the students’ magazine, Gallimaufry. He was soon recognised for his talents as an illustrator and designer, particularly in his use of woodblocks, and won a travel scholarship to Italy in 1925. In the same year, he was commissioned by the Curwen Press to illustrate a booklet, Pottery Making in Poole. This successfully designed circular, with its drawings and pictorial map, was the start of a long and active association with the Curwen Press, and the relationship with the founder, Harold Curwen, was to be one of the most signiBcant of Bawden’s life. He had his Brst West End exhibition with Ravilious and Bliss at the St George’s Gallery in SeptemberOctober 1927 showing 27 works, mainly watercolours.

In conjunction with Ravilious and Charles Mahoney, Bawden executed decorations in wax tempera for Morley College (1928-29), and later replaced them by himself, in 1958, following their destruction in the Second World War. Throughout the 1930s he taught at Goldsmiths’ College and the RCA while working as a commercial artist. In 1925, he and Ravilious rented Brick House at Great BardBeld, Essex, which gradually became the centre of a small group of artists geographically deBned as the Great BardBeld School. On his marriage in 1932 to Charlotte Epton, another of his contemporaries at the RCA, they received Brick House as a wedding present from his parents. They had a son and a daughter, both of whom became artists. Beyond his artistic interests, he shared his love of gardening, swapping tips and plants with John Aldridge, Cedric Morris and John Nash, brother to Paul. Before the Second World War he held solo shows at the Zwemmer Gallery (October 1933 and again in 1937) and at the Leicester Galleries (1938).

In March 1940, Bawden was made an O'cial War Artist and was sent with Edward Ardizzone across to Belgium returning with the Dunkirk evacuation two months later. From July 1941, by sea around the Cape, he was in Egypt then Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Western Desert and, in February 1943, back to Cairo, from where he sketched and travelled with Anthony Gross. On his recall to England his ship SS Laconia was torpedoed 600 miles from Lagos. After Bve days in a lifeboat he was picked up by a 7ichy French warship and interned at Mediouna near

Casablanca for two months until released by the invading Americans.

By the end of the year, he was back in the Middle East, meeting Feliks Topolski in Cairo, and being sent on arduous tours from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. Late in 1944 he was posted to Rome where he met up with Ardizzone and William Coldstream.

He spent the rest of the war touring Italy with the allied troops, returning in August 1945 to his family in Cheltenham, as Brick House had su6ered bomb damage. (His great friend, Ravilious, had been lost in action in Iceland in 1942.)

Bawden was awarded CBE in 1946, and was elected a Royal Designer for Industry in 1949, an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1947 and a full Royal Academician in 1956. A tutor again at the RCA between 1948-53, he also acted as a guest instructor at the Ban6 School of Art, Canada (1949-50). Following the death of his wife in 1970, he moved from Great BarBeld to 2 Park Lane, Sa6ron Walden. Continuing to work successfully until the end of his life, he received the Francis Williams Book Illustration Award for both 1977 and 1982. He exhibited at the Fine Art Society (especially in 1987), and died on 21 November 1989, at the time of a retrospective exhibition at the 7ictoria and Albert Museum.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Imperial War Museums, Tate and the 7&A; and The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art (The Lightbox, Woking), Fry Art Gallery (Sa6ron Walden) and The Higgins Bedford.

Further reading Douglas Percy Bliss, Edward Bawden, Loxhill: Pendomer Press, 1979; David Gentleman, rev, ‘Bawden, Edward (1903-1989)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 4, pages 396-397; Robert Harling, Edward Bawden, London: Art and Technics, 1950; Justin Howes, Edward Bawden. A Retrospective Survey, Bath: Combined Arts, 1988; J M Richards, Edward Bawden (Penguin Modern Painters), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946; Stephen Stuart-Smith, ‘Bawden, Edward (b Braintree, Essex, 10 March 1903; d Sa6ron Walden, Essex, 21 Nov 1989)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 3, page 240; Tribute to Edward Bawden, London: The Fine Art Society, 1992; The World of Edward Bawden, Colchester: The Minories, 1973; Dr Malcolm Yorke, The Inward Laugh, Edward Bawden and his circle, HuddersBeld: Fleece Press, 2005

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BIOGRAPHIES

JAM E S STRO U D L E Y

S R B AD M IN

Leonard James Stroudley, RBA (1906-1985)

Stanley Roy Badmin, RWS RE AIA FSIA (1906-1989)

James Stroudley worked through a series of in uences – from early Italian artists to Cubists – in order to achieve the incisive draughtsmanship that underpins his artistry. He then produced gure subjects, landscapes, still life compositions and, ultimately, abstracts with equal con dence and success.

Throughout his career, S R Badmin used his great talents – as etcher, illustrator and watercolourist – to promote a vision of the English countryside and thus of England itself. By underpinning his idealism with almost documentary precision and detail, he was able to produce images that appealed to all, and could be used for a great variety of purposes, from education through to advertising. The wellbeing suggested by each rural panorama is all the more potent, and pleasing, for the accuracy of each tree and leaf, and the plausibility of the slightest anecdotal episode.

James Stroudley was born in London on 17 June 1906, the son of James Stroudley, showcard and ticket writer. He studied at Clapham School of Art (1923-27) and then at the Royal College of Art (1927-30), where his teachers included Alan Gwynne-Jones and William Rothenstein. As a recipient of the Brst Abbey Scholarship he was able to spend three years in Italy from 1930, where he absorbed the in0uences of Giotto and Piero della Francesca, and produced one of the last wholly satisfying decorative cycles by a Rome Scholar of the period. From 1934, he exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists, and was elected to its membership in the following year.

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From the Second World War – in which he worked with the Camou0age Unit – Stroudley taught at St Martin’s School of Art and was a visiting lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools. Though he continued to live in London, his later work, exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1955, indicated regular painting trips to Kent and Sussex coasts. However, much of his later work was abstract. In 1971, his former student, Peter Coker, paid homage to Stroudley by including his work in the exhibition ‘Pupil & Masters’, held at Westgate House, Long Melford, Su6olk.

Stroudley married three times, and his wives included the fashion artist to the Sun newspaper, designer and writer, Phyllis Neuland, with whom he had one son; and the painter and printmaker, Gillian Thain, with whom he had two sons and one daughter.

Stroudley died in Wandsworth, London, in May 1985.

Stanley Roy Badmin was born at 8a Niederwald Road, Sydenham, London, on 18 April 1906, the second of three sons of Charles James Badman, a teacher, and his second wife, Margaret (née Raine). He was educated at Sydenham School, where he adopted the surname ‘Badmin’ on the insistence of his father in the vain hope that it would divert ‘jeers & insults’.

Badmin studied at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts (1922-24), before winning a studentship to the Royal College of Art, initially to study painting, though he later transferred to the design school (1924-27). In 1925, he married Margaret Colbourn, known as ‘Peggy’, and soon settled with her at ‘Aleroy’, 45 Thorpewood Avenue, Sydenham, a house built for them by his father. Together they would have two children: Patrick (born 1936) and Joanna (born 1939).

Badmin began his career by contributing illustrations to The Graphic (1927) and The Tatler (1928), and holding his Brst solo show, at the Twenty-One Gallery (1930). Further solo shows would take place at the Fine Art Society (1933 & 1937).

Having taken further courses at the RCA and Camberwell, he qualiBed as a teacher in 1928, and supplemented his income by teaching part-time at Richmond School of Art (1934) and St John’s Wood School of Art (1936). However, he worked increasingly as an etcher and watercolourist, and was soon elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (ARE 1931, RE 1935) and the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (ARWS 1932, RWS 1939). He was also a member of the Artists International Association (from 1936).

In 1935, Badmin received a major commission – from the American magazine, Fortune – to depict various towns in the United States; the results were exhibited at M A McDonald in New York, in spring 1936. An important development in Badmin’s illustrative style was marked soon after his return to England by Highways and Byways in Essex, a collaboration with F L M Griggs (published in 1939). Even before the Second World War, he made a mark as an educational illustrator and was particularly admired for his accurate depiction of trees. Before working in the war, for the Ministry of Information and the Royal Air Force, he made a major contribution, in 1940, to Sir Kenneth Clark’s Recording Britain – a term that might well be applied to his work as a whole.

From 1945, Badmin worked increasingly as a commercial artist, designing advertisements and posters, and producing illustrations for greeting cards and calendars. Equally in demand as an illustrator of books and periodicals, he published Trees for Town and Country (1947) and contributed to Radio Times. Divorcing his Brst wife in

BIOGRAPHIES

1948, he would marry the widow, Rosaline Flew (née Downey), in 1950, and bring up her daughter, Elizabeth, with his children.

In 1951, Rosaline gave birth to their daughter, Galea Rosaline.

Only from the mid 1950s was Badmin able to paint two or three major pieces for each RWS exhibition, and hold a show at the Leicester Galleries (1955). Even then, he found time to embark on projects for Shell: Geo6rey Grigson’s The Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs (1958) and four volumes of the series of ‘Shell Guides to the Counties’. In 1959, he and his family moved to Bignor, near Pulborough, West Sussex, from where he continued to paint and exhibit. He held a further solo show, at Worthing Art Gallery in 1967. His achievement was honoured by the RWS in devoting a part of its Autumn Exhibition to his work in 1984, and by the Chris Beetles Gallery, in mounting a major retrospective in 1985 and subsequent exhibitions. He died at St Richard’s Hospital, Chichester, West Sussex, on 28 April 1989.

Further reading: Chris Beetles, S R Badmin and the English Landscape, London: Collins, 1985; Christopher Beetles, ‘Badmin, Stanley Roy (1906-1989)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/64261

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Detail of S R Badmin, Northamptonshire [314]

BIOGRAPHIES

TER E N C E C U N E O Terence Tenison Cuneo, C7O OBE RGI FRGA (1907-1996) Considered by many to be the greatest railway artist of the twentieth century, Terence Cuneo was a painter and illustrator of highly atmospheric realistic gure scenes – encompassing ceremonial, industrial, military, sporting and wildlife subjects – and also portraits.

Terence Cuneo was born at 215 Uxbridge Road, Shepherd’s Bush, London, on 1 November 1907, the younger son of the painters and illustrators, Cyrus Cuneo and Nell Cuneo (née Tenison).

His uncles, Rinaldo Cuneo and Egisto Cuneo, were also painters.

Following the death of his father in 1916, the nine-year-old Cuneo moved with his mother and brother to Holland Park.

He was educated at various preparatory schools and then at Sutton 7alence School, near Maidstone, Kent. In the early 1920s, his mother settled in St Ives, Cornwall, and bought Down-Along House, which she restored as a home for her and her sons, as a studio for herself, and as a café known as the Copper Kettle.

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Inspired by the example of his father, and initially tutored by his mother, Cuneo studied under Percy Hague Jowett at Chelsea Polytechnic, and then at the Slade School of Fine Art. Establishing himself as an illustrator in the late 1920s, he contributed to a range of books and periodicals, and, in 1931, joined the London Sketch Club. Three years later, he married Catherine MayBeld Monro, the younger daughter of Major Edwin George Monro, a company director; they would have two daughters. In 1940, they moved from 2 Gainsborough Road, Hounslow, to Ember Lane, East Molesey, Surrey.

In 1936, Cuneo started to paint in oils, while continuing to work as an illustrator. In 1939, he illustrated the Brst of his own books, Sheer Nerve. During the Second World War, he served brie0y as a sapper with the Royal Engineers, but spent most of the time as a war artist, for The Illustrated London News (in France in 1940), and then for the Ministry of Information and the War Artists Advisory Committee. His tasks included producing propaganda paintings, anti-Nazi drawings and cartoons, and illustrations of tanks and aircraft factories. He wrote and illustrated, Tanks and How to Draw Them (1943), and held exhibitions of his war work.

Soon after the end of the war, Cuneo began to produce posters for railway companies, and continued to do so for the next 50 years, gaining a great popular reputation for his railway imagery.

In 1985, he designed a set of stamps commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Great Western Railway, while his last, unBnished painting was of the Channel Tunnel.

Cuneo painted a number of portraits of the members of the Royal Family engaged in their o'cial duties, beginning in 1950 with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the Middle Temple Banquet, depicting the parents of the present Queen. In 1953, he was appointed one of the o'cial artists for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, an honour that brought him to the attention of an even wider public. He completed the resulting painting in 1955, and it was presented to the Queen by her lords lieutenant.

While executing this work, he also produced A Mouse Painting a Still-Life of Cheese, the Brst of his ‘mouse’ paintings, which led to his practice of including a small and inconspicuous mouse in his

more formal works, as a kind of signature. When he published his autobiography in 1977, he titled it The Mouse and His Master.

Cuneo painted a number of other o'cial portraits, including those of the Prime Minister, Edward Heath (1971) and Field Marshal 7iscount Montgomery of Alamein (1972).

His activities as a painter took him across the world, and he spent much time in countries in Africa, while also living and riding with cowboys in the United States.

Cuneo held solo shows in London at the galleries of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (1954 & 1958), at the Sladmore Gallery (1971, 1972 & 1974) and at the Mall Galleries (1988), and also in New York at the Grand Central Gallery (1956).

Cuneo was, at various times, President of the Industrial Painters Group, the Society of Equestrian Artists, the Molesey Arts Society and the Thames 7alley Art Society; 7ice-President of the Guild of Aviation Artists; Fellow of the Guild of Railway Artists, and a member of the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts.

He was appointed OBE in 1987 and C7O in 1994, and given the Freedom of the City of London in 1992.

Cuneo painted almost to the end of his life and died a millionaire at Arbrook House, a nursing home in Esher, Surrey, close to his home, on 3 January 1996. He was survived by one of his two daughters, his wife having died in 1979. A retrospective, ‘Railway Paintings by Cuneo’, was held at the National Railway Museum, Peterborough, in 1997.

A bronze memorial statue of Cuneo by Philip Jackson, was erected on the main concourse of Waterloo Station, London, in 2004.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Guildhall Art Gallery, The Postal Museum, the Royal Air Force Museum and the Science Museum; the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom (Swindon) and the Royal Cornwall Museum (Truro).

Further reading: Narisa Chakra, Terence Cuneo: Railway Painter of the Century, London: New Cavendish Books, 1990; Beverley Cole, ‘Cuneo, Terence Tenison (1907-1996)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/60751; Gerald Landy, The Military Paintings of Terence Cuneo, London: New Cavendish Books, 1993

BIOGRAPHIES

EDWA R D S E AG O Edward Brian Seago, RWS RBA (1910-1974) One of Britain’s best loved and most widely collected twentieth-century artists, Edward Seago painted fresh and vigorous oils and watercolours of a variety of subjects, including portraits and, especially, landscapes.

The son of a coal merchant, Edward Seago was born at 13 Christchurch Road, Norwich, Norfolk, on 31 January 1910, the second child of the coal merchant, Francis Seago, and his wife, Mabel (née Woodro6e). He was educated at Norwich Grammar School and South Lodge Preparatory School in Lowestoft, but childhood illness meant that his schooling was frequently broken. As a result, he spent much time painting scenes from his bedroom window. Though given little encouragement by his parents, he received advice on art from Alfred Munnings and some instruction from Bernard Priestman. At the age of 14, he won a special prize from the Royal Drawing Society.

About the age of 18, Seago joined Bevin’s Travelling Show, and subsequently spent much time touring with circuses across Europe.

He recorded these experiences in books and included a number of the illustrations in his Brst London solo show at the Sporting Gallery. In 1936, some 42 of his paintings were used to accompany John MaseBeld’s poems in The Country Scene, and he later worked with MaseBeld on Tribute to the Ballet (1937) and A Generation Risen (1942).

During the Second World War, Seago served with the Royal Engineers (1939-44) and spent much of his time in Italy painting with Field-Marshal Lord Alexander. An exhibition of his war paintings at Colnaghi’s, in 1946, instigated a series of solo shows with that dealer. He enjoyed unprecedented success, with queues forming outside the gallery long before the doors opened: every exhibition sold out within an hour of opening. In addition, he submitted work regularly to exhibiting societies and was elected to the membership of the Royal Society of British Artists (1946) and the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (ARWS 1957, RWS 1959). His autobiography, A Canvas to Cover, was published in 1947. In 1953, Seago was appointed one of the O'cial Artists of the Coronation, and three years later was invited by the Duke of Edinburgh to join the Royal Yacht, Britannia, on a round-the-world tour. The results of that trip were displayed at St James’s Palace in 1957. While a keen traveller and sailor, he remained attached to East Anglia and lived at Ludham in Norfolk for many years. Following his death in London of a brain tumour on 19 January 1974, a memorial show was held at Marlborough Fine Art. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Government Art Collection; and Anglesey Abbey (National Trust) and Norfolk Museums Service.

Detail of Edward Seago, The Colleoni Statue – Venice [320]

Further reading: Jean Goodman, Seago – A Wider Canvas: The Life of Edward Seago with Writings by his Brother, John, Banham: Erskine Press, 2002; Jean Goodman, ‘Seago, Edward Brian [Ted] (1910–1974)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31667; Ron Ranson, Edward Seago, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1987; Ron Ranson, Edward Seago: The Vintage Years, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1992; James W Reid, Edward Seago: The Landscape Art, London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1991; James Russell, Edward Seago, London: Portland Gallery/ Lund Humphries, 2014

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BIOGRAPHIES

PE T E R CO K E R Peter Godfrey Coker, RA (1926-2004) ‘One of the foremost realist painters in England …

Coker will be remembered for the refreshing nature of his astringent vision, for his consummate mastery as a draughtsman, painter and etcher, and as a proud and vigorous inheritor of a great artistic tradition.’

(Frances Spalding, Independent, 20 December 2004) Peter Coker was born in the Royal Free Hospital, London, on 27 July 1926, the only child of Edwin Coker, the manager of a wholesale confectioner, and his wife, Elsie (née Goode). He grew up in Leytonstone, where he attended Canterbury Road School, and then Havering-atte-Bower, where he attended Pettits Lane School.

Coker Brst studied at St Martin’s School of Art (1941-43; 1947-50), and began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy from 1950. Though he was a contemporary of John Bratby and Edward Middleditch at the Royal College of Art (1950-54), his work related only brie0y to the raw Bguration of the Kitchen Sink School. This was signalled by his paintings of a Leytonstone butcher’s shop which were included in his highly successful Brst solo show (Zwemmer Gallery 1956). His development as a landscape painter originated in his Brst encounter with the canvases of Gustave Courbet on a trip to Paris (1950).

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In 1951, Coker married 7era Crook, and they settled at 1 Moyers Road, Leytonstone, which had been his childhood home (and which his father had retained and let). They would have one child, Nicholas.

By the mid 1950s, Coker was an established landscapist in the French manner, working from the motif on the coasts of Normandy (1955) and Brittany (1957), and drawing inspiration from such contemporaries as Nicholas de Stäel. Later in the decade, he revived the spirit of Barbizon in his paintings of Epping.

Coker moved with his family to Manningtree in Essex (1962), and added occasional appearances at Colchester School of Art to teaching at St Martin’s. Nevertheless, he concentrated on his work, and made time for painting trips to France, the North of England and Scotland. He held solo shows at the Zwemmer Gallery (1960s), the Thackeray Gallery (1970s) and Gallery 10 (1980s), and continued to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy.

He was elected an Academician (ARA 1965, RA 1972), and had his early images of the butcher’s shop presented at the RA in one of an increasing number of public retrospectives (1979).

From 1972, Coker made several visits to Bargemon, Provence, during which he gradually accepted the character of the South of France, and integrated its startling light and colour into his established palette and handling. Late in the decade, he applied this approach to an ideal motif, in beginning a series of paintings of the garden of the Clos du Peyronnet, Menton. Following the death of his son Nicholas in 1985, he stayed at Badenscallie, Ross-shire, Scotland. There he began an impassioned series of landscapes, extended on subsequent visits, which focussed on salmon nets drying at Achiltibuie. These rea'rmed his essential identity as ‘a northern painter’, which had actually become more strongly emphasised by his contrasting achievement of painting the south. The many studies and paintings inspired by both Mediterranean France and the West of Scotland comprised

important elements of such recent retrospectives as that of drawings and sketchbooks at the Fitzwilliam Museum (1989) and that of paintings and drawings at Abbot Hall Art Gallery (1992).

In October 2002, Chris Beetles Gallery mounted a major retrospective of the work of Peter Coker and, at the same time, launched the artist’s authorised biography. While the monograph and retrospective were being planned, it seemed that the artist’s career might have been drawing to a close. However, the joint project revived his energies signiBcantly. This was manifested by a range of new work, which was shown at Chris Beetles Gallery during spring 2004. The motifs are mostly familiar, being drawn from existing sketchbooks, and range across France and encompass Britain. Yet the handling was freer than ever, and the palette more vibrant – accomplishments of which Peter was justiBably proud. This display was complemented by an exhibition of recent Parisian subjects, touring to Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Graves Art Gallery, She'eld.

Peter Coker died in Colchester, Essex, on 16 December 2004.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Tate; and Museums She'eld.

Further reading: Frances Spalding, ‘Coker, Peter Godfrey (1926-2004)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/94481

BIOGRAPHIES

D O N AL D HA M I LTO N FR A S ER Donald Hamilton Fraser, RA (1929-2009) His boldly-handled and richly-coloured semi-abstracts, in uenced by the School of Paris, established Donald Hamilton Fraser as one of the most distinctive British Modernist painters of the immediate post-war generation.

Though he was of Scottish descent, Donald Hamilton Fraser was born in London on 30 July 1929, the son of the antiques dealer, Donald Fraser, and his wife, Dorothy (née Lang). During the Second World War, his family moved constantly and, while he spent some time at Maidenhead Grammar School, he often had to change school. Nevertheless, he developed an interest in literature, reading voraciously and writing poetry, and he began to train as a journalist with Kemsley Newspapers.

During a period of national service in the Royal Air Force (1947-49), Fraser became increasingly interested in the visual arts, and studied at St Martin’s School of Art, Brst in evening classes and, on his release, as a full-time student (1949-52).

His precocious ability to gain external commissions provoked the envy of some of teachers, but soon led to his Brst solo show at the prestigious London gallery, Gimpel Fils, in 1953. Gaining a French government scholarship to Paris, he lived in the city in the years 1953-54, a brief but formative period that had a signiBcant in0uence on the development of his work. It was also in Paris, at the British Embassy in 1954, that he married the graphic designer, Judith Wentworth-Sheilds, whom he had met at St Martin’s. (Together they would have one daughter.)

On returning to London in 1954, Fraser supported himself by writing for Arts Review, while establishing himself as a painter.

His ability to devote himself fully to his art was marked, in 1956, by a solo show at Galerie Craven, in Paris. Then, in 1957, he took up an invitation from Carel Weight to teach at the Royal College of Art for one day a week; he continued to do so for 25 years, becoming a Fellow of the RCA in 1970, and an Honorary Fellow in 1984. He became one of the most proliBc and widely exhibited of British artists, with his work being shown nationally as well as throughout America and Japan. In addition to Gimpel Fils, he frequently held solo shows at Paul Rosenberg & Co, in New York (the American dealer of Nicolas de Staël, whom he admired).

In 1969, Fraser and his family moved to Henley-on-Thames, and settled into a pair of converted cottages that would remain his home until his death. From 1977, he would hold solo shows locally at the Bohun Galleries. Exhibiting increasingly at the Royal Academy, he was elected an Associate in 1975, and a full Royal Academician a decade later, becoming Honorary Curator in 1992. He held a number of o'cial roles: Honorary Secretary (1975-81) and then Chairman (1981-87) of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution; a member of the Royal Fine Art Commission (1986-99); and 7ice-President of the Royal Overseas League (1986-2009).

A highly civilised man with interests in literature and music, Fraser was particularly knowledgeable about ballet, writing a book on the subject, entitled Dancers (1989), and producing many drawings and paintings of dancers in a naturalistic style, which contrasted with the semi-abstraction of his landscapes.

Two retrospectives of his work were held in London in the summer of 2009 – at Arthur Ackerman and the CCA Galleries – not long before his death on 2 September.

Further reading: ‘Donald Hamilton Fraser’ [obituary], Daily Telegraph, 4 September 2009; ‘Donald Hamilton Fraser: Painter’ [obituary], The Times, 19 September 2009; Clare Hinton, Donald Hamilton Fraser. A retrospective: metamorphosis not metaphor, Tilford: CCA Galleries/Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2009; William Packer, ‘Donald Hamilton Fraser’ [obituary], Guardian, 7 September 2009

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BIOGRAPHIES

K EN H OWA R D James Kenneth Howard, OBE RA HonRWS HonRBA ROI RWA PPNEAC HonSGFA (born 1932) Ken Howard is one of Britain’s best-loved artists, his light- lled landscapes and studio scenes being always greatly anticipated by visitors to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

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Ken Howard was born in London on 26 December 1932, the younger of two children of Frank Howard, a Lancashire-born mechanical Btter, and his Scottish wife, Elizabeth (née Meikle), who took in lodgers and worked as a domestic cleaner. He and his family spent his earliest years in a 0at in Alder Grove, Cricklewood, moving to a house in Review Road, Neasden, when he was about six years old. While still a child, he determined to become a painter, and received inspiration and support from Robert Whitmore, his art master at Kilburn Grammar School, during the years 1944-49. It was Whitmore who encouraged him to study at Hornsey College of Art, where, between 1949 and 1953, he applied himself and made excellent progress, arguably becoming the star of his year. As a result, he gained the conBdence to apply early for the Royal College of Art, and received a place.

However, he could take it up only after he had undertaken two years of National Service, in which he served with the Royal Marines at Plymouth, in Devon. During this time, he regularly attended life classes at Plymouth Arts Centre, and its organisers, recognising his talents, o6ered him his Brst solo show. Consisting mainly of portraits of Royal Marines, his exhibition sold well and received some national press coverage. Consequently, he received a number of commissions, including one by the Royal Marine barracks for a portrait of the wife of General Cornwall. More negatively, he arrived at the Royal College of Art, in 1955, with too much of a reputation, so that he was initially singled out for criticism by some members of sta6. He also felt that his social realist approach to painting was greatly in contrast to the interest shown by many fellow students in Abstract Expressionism. The situation improved in the second year, when the more supportive Carel Weight took over as Professor of Painting, and he was better able to respond to the teaching, including that of his tutor in drawing, Rodney Burn. In his third year, he succeeded in gaining an Italian government scholarship, which allowed him, on Bnishing at the RCA in 1958, to study in Florence for up to a year. This would be his third trip abroad, he having twice visited Spain while a student. During his time in Tuscany, sharing a studio in the village of 7iuzzo di Monteripaldi, he met the German student, Christa Köhler. She was his Brst love and, much later, his second wife (by which time she was an established artist known as Christa Gaa).

On his return to London, in 1959, Ken Howard taught almost full-time for a year across four art schools: Ealing, Berkhamsted, Harrow and Walthamstow. He then kept on his days at Harrow and Walthamstow, particularly enjoying the calibre of students at the latter, which included Ian Drury, Peter Greenaway and Bill Jacklin. The head of Walthamstow, Stuart Ray, encouraged him to exhibit at the New English Art Club, and he became a member in 1962 (serving as President from 1998 to 2003).

In 1962, Ken Howard also married Annie Popham, a dress design student at Harrow, and they took a 0at in the King’s Road, Chelsea. When she Bnished her studies at the RCA, they settled

in Hampton Hill, Richmond, Brst buying a small cottage, and later moving to a large house. During this period, he produced illustrative work for a range of clients, and showed work with exhibiting societies, including the Royal Academy, and dealers, including Wildenstein and the John Whibley Gallery (holding solo shows at the latter in 1966 and 1968). As a result of his winning Brst prize in the Lord Mayor’s Art Award, in 1966, he was invited to join the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. Beyond London, Plymouth Art Gallery held a retrospective in 1972. Two years later, in 1974, his marriage to Annie was dissolved. She went on to become the director of a large fashion company, and married another designer. He regained contact with Christa.

From 1971, Ken Howard was represented by the New Grafton Gallery, and held 15 solo shows there over a period of two decades, as well as others internationally. In 1973, he was asked by the Imperial War Museum to work in Northern Ireland, the Brst such commission made by the museum since the Second World War. For about a decade, he would work on and o6 with the British Army in the province and internationally. Among his many major paintings of the period, Ulster Cruci"xion won a prize in 1978 at the John Moores exhibition, Liverpool. He also worked independently on landscapes. While retaining his London studio, in South Bolton Gardens, he spent more time at his other studios in south-west England: in Sampford Spiney, on Dartmoor, and Mousehole, in Cornwall. In 1981, he was elected to the Royal West of England Academy.

In the early 1980s, Christa Gaa joined Ken Howard in London.

When he won Brst prize in the Hunting Group Award, in 1982, she suggested that they spend the prize money on a painting trip to India. The results included a solo show in Delhi in 1983. In the same year, he was elected to the membership of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours and – of particular importance to him – as an Associate of the Royal Academy. He became a full Royal Academician in 1991. While exhibiting regularly at the societies of which he was a member through the 80s and 90s, he also held numerous solo shows, including several at the St Helier Gallery, Jersey, Lowndes Lodge Gallery, London, and the Brian SinBeld Gallery, Burford. He was Bnally able to marry Christa in 1990, though sadly she died in 1992. Almost a decade later, in the year 2000, he married Dora Bertolutti.

Between 2002 and 2017, Ken Howard was represented by Richard Green, and held solo shows at his gallery almost annually.

Remaining as active an exhibitor as ever, he has also garnered a number of honours, including election to the Royal Academy Professor of Perspective (2004), appointment as Freeman of the City of London and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers (2007), election as Senior Royal Academician (2008) and the award of an OBE for his services to Art (2010).

The author of several books, Ken Howard published his autobiography, Light and Dark in 2011.

Ken Howard held an exhibition of Swiss landscapes at the Royal Academy in 2016.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the City of London Corporation and the Imperial War Museums; and Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery.

BIOGRAPHIES

DA7 I D TIN D L E David Tindle, RA HRBSA RE (born 1932) David Tindle is best known for the technical accomplishment of his work in egg tempera, emphasising the stillness and emptiness of interior spaces. However, he is a versatile artist and has made use of various media of painting and printmaking to depict a wide range of subjects.

David Tindle was born in HuddersBeld, Yorkshire, on 29 April 1932.

He grew up largely in Coventry and, while still in his early teens, studied art for six months at the Lanchester College of Technology (1945-46). He then took a job at a local commercial art studio.

Two years later, at the age of 16, he began to work with the theatrical scene painter, Edward Delaney, initially for a two-week stint at a theatre in Birmingham.

In August 1951, David Tindle moved to London, Bnding work with a commercial artist in Wardour Street, Soho, and then again with Edward Delaney, at his scenic studio in Princes Place, Holland Park. He engaged with many aspects of the art world, reading books and attending exhibitions, and began to admire the work of John Minton, in particular. When he held his Brst solo show, close to his home, at the Archer Gallery, Westbourne Grove, in 1952, he telephoned Minton to invite him to see it.

Minton visited the show, and bought a self-portrait, so instigating a friendship. Tindle soon came to know a number of other signiBcant painters working in London at the time, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Craxton. Following a second exhibition at the Archer Gallery in 1953, he joined The Piccadilly Gallery, in Cork Street, and showed there for three decades. He also began to contribute work to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. His Brst retrospective was held at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, in 1957.

If the post-war aspect of London was the focus of his earliest paintings, Tindle expanded his repertoire during the mid 1950s.

He worked in Wantage, Oxfordshire, producing murals for John Betjeman’s tearoom, King Alfred’s Kitchen, and also in the Bshing ports of Hastings, in Sussex, and Arbroath, in Scotland. At the end of the decade, he began to teach at Hornsey College of Art and the Byam Shaw School of Art. By this time, he had moved close to abstraction, in spare, low-toned but thickly painted landscape oils, such as those of Brighton. When he lived in Su6olk in the mid 1960s, he continued this approach, but heightened the palette. In 1962, re0ecting the increasing recognition of his talents, he was awarded the Critic’s Prize by the British section of the International Association of Art Critics.

Even before his move to a converted chapel in East Haddon, Northamptonshire, in 1969, David Tindle had begun to alter his method, by moving ‘gradually towards a crisper articulation of form’, which he achieved with ‘a more restrained handling’ (Ian Massey, 2016, page 8). About the time that Northampton Museum and Art Gallery mounted a retrospective, in 1972, he reBned this further by turning to the medium of egg tempera. The resulting images epitomised stillness, whether they were portraits or a unique combination of landscape, interior and still life.

From 1972, David Tindle began to teach at the Royal College of Art (and was elected an Associate in 1973, a Fellow in 1981 and an Honorary Fellow in 1984). In 1973, he was elected an

Associate of the Royal Academy (becoming a full Royal Academician in 1979). While continuing to exhibit at The Piccadilly Gallery and the RA (winning the Johnson Wax Award for the Best Painting in 1983), he also showed internationally, and especially with Galerie XX, Hamburg (in the years 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1985).

Commissions in this period included a set of three mural decorations for the Open University, Milton Keynes (1977-78).

During the 1980s, David Tindle lived in Clipston, Leicestershire, and then, from 1986, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. As with the converted chapel at East Haddon, his homes, and especially their windows, were his regular subjects. In 1985, he became Ruskin Master and a Professional Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford; and also began to be represented by Fischer Fine Art, London. Commissions included a portrait of Sir Dirk Bogarde for the National Portrait Gallery (1986), and the stage design for a production of Tchaikovsky’s opera, Iolanta, for the Aldeburgh Festival (1988). He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1988 (though resigned in 1991), and an Honorary Member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1989.

Since 1990, David Tindle has lived mainly abroad, Brst for eight years in Brittany, and then subsequently in Tuscany. Since 1994, he has been represented by the Redfern Gallery. The latest retrospective of his work was held at HuddersBeld Art Gallery from November 2016 to February 2017.

David Tindle has been married three times and has nine children.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Government Art Collection, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate; and Herbert Art Gallery & Museum and the Lakeland Arts Trust.

Further reading: Ian Massey, David Tindle, HuddersBeld Art Gallery, 2016

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BIOGRAPHIES & INDE X

F R A N K CO L L I N S Frank Collins (born 1938) Though Frank Collins initially trained in the Euston Road tradition of realism, he would make his reputation as a painter and printmaker of re ned abstracts.

Frank Collins was born into a Jewish family in London. He studied initially at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, between 1954 and 1958, and then received two government scholarships that enabled him to work with the etcher, S W Hayter, at Atelier 17 in Paris. On his return to London, he studied in the School of Graphic Design at the Royal College of Art, in the years 1960-63, while he was living at 3 Fletching Road, Clapton. During this time, he produced a number of lithographs.

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On completing his studies, Collins travelled round the world, and then taught at various London art schools. In May 1971, he exhibited pointillist abstract paintings and prints in a joint show with Sheila Yale at the Artists International Association Gallery.

Three years later, in August 1974, he held a solo show of ‘Colour Paintings’ at Whitechapel Art Gallery, and further solo shows followed. He also contributed to group exhibitions, including the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition and those of the London Group and the Young Contemporaries. By 1981, he had become Head of the Foundation Art Course at the Sir John Cass School of Art, City of London Polytechnic. In that year, he contributed an article to The Artist in its series on ‘Master Classes in Acrylics’.

He was still teaching at the Sir John Cass School in 1991.

I NDE X O F ART I S T S Numbers in bold indicate the artist’s biography page

Annigoni, Pietro

63, 170

Ayrton, Michael

34, 162

Badmin, S R

118, 182

Bawden, Edward

112, 181

Booth, Raymond

80, 174

Brill, Reginald

94, 176

Coker, Peter

126, 186

Collins, Frank

150, 190

Cuneo, Terence

120, 184

Dobson, Frank

8, 154

Emett, Rowland

50, 169

Evans, Powys Fraser, Donald Hamilton

6, 152 129, 187

Fraser, Eric

85, 175

Gordine, Dora

12, 156

Grant, Keith Greenwood, Ernest

46, 116, 135, 166 43, 165

Holt, Eric

104, 179

Howard, Ken

142, 188

Hunt, Cecil Arthur

107, 179

Hutchison, Shand

49, 168

Knight, Charles

15, 158

Knight, Laura Minton, Circle of John Minton, John Neasom, Norman Philpot, Glyn

110, 180 32 30, 160 102, 178 7, 152

Piper, John

25, 159

Plazzotta, Enzo

72, 171

Reynolds, Alan

39, 164

Seago, Edward

122, 185

Stroudley, James

114, 182

Swanwick, Betty

96, 177

Tindle, David

146, 189

Tunnicli6e, Charles

75, 172

Wynne, David

78, 172

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