Eardley Knollys 2016

Eardley Knollys

Eardley Knollys 1902 – 1991

Works from the Studio Estate

2016

www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

Eardley Knollys “Despite all my interest in other peoples’ pictures, I never knew I could paint. It was after the war, when I was going abroad with Edward Le Bas…“Of course, you’re going to paint too”, he said... although I said I couldn’t. Ten days later, when he left me to go to Lucca to meet Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, I was unable even to sleep for thinking about painting pictures. [But] I never looked back.”

It was perhaps inevitable that Eardley Knollys become an artist, albeit rather late in life. A scion of minor aristocracy, after studying at Christ Church, Oxford, he inherited estates whose income freed him to pursue a love of watercolour. His early love of prints and drawings possibly compelled him towards a brief career in advertising at Lever Bros. and J. Walter Thompson. Hoping to break into the film business, he then left for Hollywood, where he spent a year and a half, followed by the obligatory pre-war travels in Europe. Eventually, he became private secretary to Viscount Hambledon, owner of W. H. Smith, but was so skilled at managing both Lord Hambledon’s finances and his properties, that a few years later Knollys took up a second career. He became an art dealer.

Around 1936, he became partners in the Storran Gallery, a small space near Harrod’s established

by Ala Story, an Austrian dealer who showed works by Pavel Tchelitchew, Ivon Hitchens, Frances Hodgkins, Christopher Wood and Victor Pasmore. Story’s assistant was Frank Coombs, a young member of the London Group, who later became the great love of Knollys’ life. When Ala Story moved to California, Knollys bought her half of the business. Knollys and Coombs organised themed and monograph shows of works by Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso, Vlaminck, Derain, Picasso and Modigliani, dealing on a sale-or-return basis, unimpeded by either overhead costs or their modest premises. Lady Ottoline Morell was a regular client, and in addition to Duncan Grant and Graham Sutherland, they befriended many of the artists they showed. In 1937, they moved to Albany Court Yard off Piccadilly, a small, but brilliantly configured space, thanks to Coombs’s sophisticated mix of artificial and natural lighting. The gallery continued after the outbreak of WWII, despite Coombs joining the Royal Navy. (Knollys worked on a farm in Dorchester.) However, in the spring of 1941, Coombs was killed in a Belfast air raid. Knollys was devastated and while he continued to buy and sell pictures, eventually he closed the gallery.

He began to work as an assistant to Donald MacLeod, secretary of the National Trust. James LeesMilne soon joined them and became one of Knollys’ closest friends, despite their different tastes and politics. The two men shared a common passion in the growing plight of English heritage. (LeesMilne had previously helped to set up the Country Houses Committee.) As more and more owners of country houses faced losing their properties in the wake of dwindling funds, servants and heirs, they looked to the National Trust for support. Knollys became responsible for advising properties in Wales and Wessex, including Avebury Manor, whose Neolithic stone circle he championed to the Trust and which is now considered second only to Stonehenge in archaeological importance.

After the War, Knollys moved to Dorset, where he joined Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond ShaweTaylor and later Raymond Mortimer in forming a salon at Crichel House, near Wimborne. This small, Georgian rectory became a cultural haven, where guests included Sybil Colefax, Anthony Asquith, Graham Sutherland, Lord Berners, Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Henry Reed, Rose Macaulay, Laurie Lee, Ben Nicolson, Cecil Day-Lewis and Graham Greene.

By 1958, Knollys resigned from the National Trust to devote himself to painting. He moved from Long Crichel to Slade Hill House, near Petersfield in Hampshire. He shared this modest former hunting lodge with Mattei Radev, a Bulgarian picture framer, with whom he shared a close, platonic friendship. Painting from the studio he built there, his sense of composition nevertheless remained framed by London windowpanes, and he later said: “I tend to see things framed in a rectangle, and once struck by a composition I have to make a drawing of it and take it to the studio. I do like a ‘workshop’. [But] I can’t paint in my flat, there are too many memories.”

Knollys spent his later life in Hampshire painting, cooking and giving dinner parties – that were as likely to include one of the Sitwells as his cleaning lady – in rooms hung with paintings by Grant, Hitchens, Sutherland, Alfred Wallis, Winifred Nicholson, Lucien Pissarro and Sir Matthew Smith, whose works strongly influenced Knollys’ decorative Fauvism. When Knollys died in 1991, Radev sold the house and moved his collection to London, where he effectively preserved it intact until his own death in 2008. That year, the collection was exhibited for the first time in a dedicated exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester.

Earlier Duncan Grant had written: “It has been about twenty years since I first saw a canvas by Eardley Knollys. What I felt then was the integrity of his courageous enthusiasm – courageous because it seemed to me relatively late in life, like Gauguin, he was burning all the boats in his dedication to painting.”

Knollys said of his own work: “I have always loved bright strong colours – muddy ones seem to me symbols of gloom. This led me to the Pont Aven and Fauve painters, and they remain my favourites.

But I soon discovered – as they did – that youth and exceptional genius are needed to apply blazing colours so recklessly... I try to drive along the splendid roads they opened – in my own car of course and with some personal diversions.”

The mixture of salon culture, country-house parties, old school and Charvet ties that colour Knollys’ life might have been lifted straight out of P. G. Wodehouse (although it’s doubtful he would have found this comparison flattering). Nevertheless, the enduring point of Knollys’ life was pleasure: the joy he took in painting, and the joy he took in sharing it with such a supportive, stimulating circle of friends.

Andrea Gates Director

Landscape

1. The Younger Trees oil on canvas 63 x 76 cms 243⁄4 x 297⁄8 ins

2. Reflections at Mottisfont oil on canvas 91 x 64 cms 357⁄8 x 251⁄4 ins

3. Clumps of Trees oil on canvas 51 x 76 cms 201⁄8 x 297⁄8 ins

4. Cityscape oil on canvas 76 x 61 cms 29 7⁄8 x 24 ins

5. Reflections oil on canvas 71 x 91 cms 28 x 36 ins

6. Blue Poplars oil on canvas 71 x 91 cms 28 x 35 7⁄8 ins

7. In the Drome oil on canvas 66 x 46 cms 26 x 181⁄8 ins

8. The Chalk Heap oil on canvas 61 x 46 cms 24 x 181⁄8 ins

9. Olive Grove oil on canvas 51 x 41 cms 20 x 16 ins

10. Summer, Renishaw oil on canvas 76 x 41 cms 30 x 161⁄8 ins

11. Pink Blossom oil on canvas 91 x 122 cms 36 x 48 ins

12. Thames Warehouse oil on canvas 51 x 66 cms 20 x 26 ins

13. Hampshire View oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 201⁄8 x 24 ins

14. View from Window, Le Touquet gouache on paper 55 x 43 cms 211⁄2 x 16 7⁄8 ins

15. Earthworks oil on canvas 51 x 76 cms 20 x 30 ins

16. May Tree oil on canvas 76 x 64 cms 30 x 25 ins

17. Landscape in the Var, Provence oil on canvas 64 x 77 cms 25 x 301⁄4 ins

18. View from the Studio, The Slade oil on canvas 60 x 117 cms 231⁄2 x 46 ins

19. The Valley oil on canvas 51 x 66 cms 20 x 26 ins

20. Crofton Hall Lake oil on canvas 53 x 69 cms 21 x 27 ins

21. Spring Blossom oil on canvas 51 x 66 cms 20 x 26 ins

22. Hampshire Fields oil on paper 45 x 65 cms 17 1⁄2 x 251⁄2 ins

23. River Valley, Hampshire lithograph 46 x 56 cms 18 x 22 ins

24. Hampshire Landscape lithograph 76 x 56 cms 30 x 22 ins

Still life

25. Still Life with Chrysanthemum pastel 28 x 53 cms 11 x 21 ins

26. Dahlias oil on canvas 61 x 51 cms 24 x 201⁄8 ins

27. Omega Roses oil on canvas 56 x 46 cms 22 x 18 ins

28. Chianti Bottle Still Life oil on canvas 64 x 76 cms 25 x 30 ins

29. The Pink Bowl oil on canvas 25 x 36 cms 10 x 14 ins

30. Poppies in Purple Vase oil on canvas 61 x 51 cms 24 x 20 ins

31. Black Vase Yellow Flowers pastel 61 x 47 cms 24 x 181⁄2 ins

32. Still Life with Pears oil on canvas 76 x 64 cms 30 x 25 ins

33. Still Life: Lemons Peaches and Cucumber oil on canvas 61 x 64 cms 24 x 25 ins

34. Tulips oil on canvas 66 x 51 cms 26 x 201⁄8 ins

Photo courtesy of the Radev Collection

Biography

1902

Born Arlesford, Hampshire on November 21

1920s Oxford University, founder member of Antony Eden’s Uffizi Society.

Working in Hollywood in various studio roles aiming to be a film director

1930–40

Secretary to Lord Hambleden, owner of W. H. Smith

1935 Moves to Belgravia, where he will have his London base for the rest of his life

1935–40

Proprieter Storran Gallery, Brompton Road, London

1942–57

National Trust, agent and representative for South West England

1945 Shares Long Crichel House, near Wimborne, Dorset, with the music critics Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor (later joined by a third critic, Raymond Mortimer)

1949

1949–64

Contemporary Art Society committee member

1957–72

National Trust committee member

1960

First one-man exhibition, at the Minories, Colchester

1965

Exhibition Hambledon Gallery, Blandford

1966 Leaves Long Crichel House and recreates a smaller version of this rural idyll at The Slade, near Alton, Hampshire, with Mattei Radev

Takes up painting on the urging of his artist friend Edward Le Bas

1970–1984 London exhibitions at the Wilton, Mansard, Green & Abbott, Marjorie Parr, Alwin, and Achim Moeller galleries

1985

Exhibition Achim Moeller Gallery, New York

1986

Exhibition Southampton City Art Gallery

1987, 1989, 1991

Exhibitions Michael Parkin Fine Art, London

1991

Died London on September 6

1999, 2001

2002

Exhibition Messum’s Cork Street, London

2011

Exhibition Messum’s Cork Street, London

2014

Exhibition Messum’s Cork Street, London

2016

Exhibition Messum’s Cork Street, London

Memorial exhibitions, Bloomsbury Workshop, London

CDIX

ISBN 978-1-910993-01-9 Publication No: CDIX Published by David Messum Fine Art Š David Messum Fine Art

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ISBN 978-1-910993-01-9

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