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ROBERT WALLACE MARTIN (1843-1923)
One hundred and fifty years ago the Martin brothers began making stoneware at Pomona House in Chelsea. They overcame frequent technical crises, and there were endless issues between them of commercial policy and personal temperaments. Nevertheless, the enterprise lasted fifty years, only closing when Wallace, despite being the eldest, was the last of the brothers to die. By that time output had dwindled to almost nothing, but over the years the brothers had produced a large quantity of saltglazed stoneware of superb quality.
Probably the finest and most original body of work which issued from the brothers’ kilns were the grotesque monsters, bird caricatures and facejugs modelled by Wallace. Surprisingly little is known about the sources of his inspiration, but now, with such a good selection of them gathered here in one place, is perhaps an apposite moment to give some account of previously unconsidered factors in the creation of these usually odd, and often disturbing birds and beasts.
Over the years, a number of sources have been suggested by various Martinware commentators. Usually they have been only very loosely attached to the workings of Wallace’s creative mind. Gothic architectural ornament, Lewis Carroll’s literary fantasies, the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear, Ernest Griset’s Punch cartoons, Charles Darwin’s theories of the evolution and mutation of species; all these have been paraded but not inspected. No doubt all of them helped to create the cultural environment in which Wallace worked, but few, if any, instances of direct influence on Wallace have ever been cited.
It is, of course, difficult to be certain about anything which might have affected the young Wallace’s quite undocumented sensibilities, but it is likely that a treatise written by the antiquarian Thomas Wright (18101877), entitled History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art would have attracted his attention, and even more likely that he would have had opportunity to read it when its twentyfour chapters were serialised in the Art Journal through 1863 and 1864; (in 1865 it was published in book form). During those years, Wallace was working intermittently at the studio of the sculptor Alexander Munro (18251871); there, Wright’s treatise would very likely have been a topic of discussion among the young assistants. However, no signs of any influence from the text or illustrations in the book appear in Wallace’s sculpture at the time. Work that he showed at the Royal Academy Summer exhibitions of 1863, and 18671872 were rather vapid terracotta reliefs, in a classical style (with Aesthetic Movement intonations).
In 1869, Wallace joined the Plymouth Brethren, and it has always struck me that there should be some strong connection between his newfound belief and the grotesque birds and monsters that he would go on to create. The Brethren had always maintained a strict anticlericalism, arguing that the omnipotence of the Almighty needed no priestly hierarchy to support it. The Anglican theologian J. S. Teulon in his highly deprecatory History and Teaching of the Plymouth Brethren (1883) wrote:”‘The crowning sin of Christendom’, then, according to them, consists in the existence and operation of an ordained ministry.” This doctrine might have recalled to Wallace an observation made by Thomas Wright in the History of Caricature and Grotesque. When discussing medieval caricature, Wright states:”The popular feeling against the clergy was strong in the middle ages, and no caricarure was received with more favour than those which exposed the immorality or dishonesty of a monk or a priest.”
Within a year or two of the opening of the studio at Pomona House, Wallace started making grotesques. Often adorning a clockcase or a wall bracket, they were not at first too outrageous or horrific, but as Wallace’s religious views hardened, so his grotesques became ever more insidious. Moreover, in 1875 a cheap edition of Wright’s book appeared which cost only 7s.6d.; the first edition had been priced at 21s. Wallace could have gleaned from Wright several motifs which begin to appear in his work; “...dragons”, Wright noted, “were great favourites with the people of Teutonic race....they are found on all their artistic monuments, mingled together in grotesque forms and groups.” Another idea that Wallace could have taken from Wright was the monster which combines bodyparts from different species of animals. “Medieval sculptors,” Wright noted “.... had a great taste for monsters of every description, especially those which were made up of portions of incongruous animals joined together.” Describing ornament in the middle ages, Wright observed: “The entrance to the infernal regions was always represented pictorially as the mouth of a monstrous animal”. So the Martins’ nomenclature of ‘spoonwarmers’ is apt but hardly appetising!
In 1878 a storm blew up within the ranks of the Plymouth Brethren, which directly affected Wallace Martin. Let William Blair Neatby, the author of A History of the Plymouth Brethren (1901) take up what is a very complicated story: “In the autumn of 1878 a young clergyman by the name of Finch, resident in Ryde, left the communion of the Church of England, and was received into the fellowship of [the Plymouth Brethren] in London”. On his return to Ryde “he began the observance of the Lord’s Supper in his own house with some that had followed him out of the Established Church [of England]. In February Dr. Cronin visited Ryde, and took communion with Mr. Finch at this private meeting. He repeated the act a few weeks later.”Cronin, a homoeopathic doctor, had first met Wallace in 1868 when he sat for a portrait medallion in terracotta at his home in Brixton; the young sculptor had been impressed by the bible quotations that Cronin made in the course of their conversation. Shortly afterwards (but quite coincidentally) Wallace had joined the Plymouth
Brethren and had started to attend regularly the Kennington Meeting in Mountford Street, where Cronin was a wellknown and wellloved member. To resume Neatby’s account of the affair: “A clamour was raised for the excision of the venerable offender, and the Kennington Brethren were given to understand that if they screened Dr. Cronin they would only share his ruin.” Under intense pressure from the other London meetings, on August 19th, 1879, the Kennington meeting gave in. “We are sorrowfully compelled to declare Dr. Edward Cronin out of fellowship, until he judges and owns the wrongness of his act at Ryde,” affirmed their resolution; appended to the document was a statement that “Colonel Langford and five others objected to the resolution. One hopes and believes that Wallace was one of those five.
It is possible to detect in Wallace’s work at this time an intensification in the malignity of his more monstrous creations, reflecting, perhaps, the tension he felt as a result of the wrangling and rancour which must have pervaded the Kennington meetings during those weeks. Further to that, he seems to have eased his frustration at the unhappy turn of events by taking his own tacit revenge on the Anglican clergyman who had effectually started the whole sorry affair, and whose name happened to be ‘Finch’. From about 1880, Wallace’s bird jars cease to be of the rather idiotic, webfooted variety that Wallace had previously favoured and sometimes assume an almost finchlike appearance, and more knowing facial expressions. Many of them have been given a noticeably clerical air, with their folded back wings often looking like the university gowns worn by clergymen in those days when taking services. The birds now tend to wear facial expressions which reveal what Wallace might have been feeling about the Anglican clergy: sly, selfsatisfied, jugemental, perhaps even pecuniary like their medieval forerunners.
In 1907, Wallace created one of the masterpieces of Martinware, the Bird Man. Here again Wallace finds in the pages of Wright’s History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art an image to help him through an emotional crisis. For about ten years, Wallace’s younger brothers, Walter and Edwin, had been persistently demanding a more equitable share of the firm’s assets; they were afraid that Wallace would die leaving everything to his wife and son. Wallace acknowledged their right but did nothing. Rancour pervaded the Southall pottery and the Holborn Street shop, just as it had poisoned the atmosphere at the Kennington meetings during the Cronin affair. Wallace recalled an illustration in Wright’s book, a woodcut from an early blockbook, the Ars Moriendi (The Art of Dying). It shows a dying man on his deathbed attended by his relatives and three grotesque demons, each urging the cause of the respective parties. One, who is whispering in the dying man’s ear, has the head of a viciouslooking bird of prey on a wellmuscled human torso. He warns his client to guard his fortune.
For four decades Wallace used Wright’s treatise as a sort of inspirational vademecum. It may also have provided him with some compensation for the social isolation that his religion demanded of him.
Malcolm Haslam, 2023.
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Robert Wallace Martin (18431923)
Self-portrait, 1883 terracotta plaque, unframed incised R W Martin, 1883 XL to the front, R W Martin Sc 40 1883 to reverse, 19cm. diam.
Provenance
Private collection.
