Communist Murals at a Country House

Last year, Ella Nowicki participated in “British Art in Motion”, a new programme at the PMC that provided specialist training in filmmaking to ten undergraduate students who each produced a short film about a work of British art or architecture. This article is adapted from Ella’s film, which can be watched on our website. In 2022, Ella graduated with a BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge.

In 1937, Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon, commissioned a lavish and unusual fresco cycle for the pool house at his estate Buscot Park in Oxfordshire. The painter was Viscount Jack Hastings, who had trained with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and would become the 16th Earl of Huntingdon in 1939. Faringdon and Hastings were lifelong friends and Labour peers active in socialist causes. Balancing private humour and political content, Hastings’ Buscot Park frescos complicate the categories of both country house decoration and 1930s leftist muralism. They illuminate surprising encounters between North American mural movements and British art, and between radical politics and elite spaces.

Painted in 1937–39, the frescos playfully illustrate life at a country house. Five sections depict recreation, showing tennis, golf, bathers by the pool, a dinner party, and a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the gardens. Two further lunettes celebrate the farmers and gardeners whose labour sustained Buscot Park.

Buscot Park, Oxfordshire.

Photograph by Simon Q, 2011, Flickr.com (CC BY-NC 2.0).

In the only overtly political panel, Lord Faringdon is shown speaking at a local Labour Party rally. His speech agitates the police horses in the background and energises a parade of Labour supporters, who carry the banner “Workers of the World Unite”. Faringdon had joined the House of Lords as a Labour member in 1934, defying his family’s Conservative legacy. The diverse marchers allude to international leftist causes: the inclusion of a Sikh man affirms Faringdon’s support for Indian independence. Two whitehaired women represent the Quaker activists Poppy and Chloe Vulliamy, who arranged for Buscot Park to host child refugees from the Spanish Civil War in 1938. Faringdon was an early advocate for intervention on behalf of Spanish Republicans fighting against Franco’s fascist troops.

Viscount Jack Hastings (16th Earl of Huntingdon), Untitled Fresco Cycle (detail), circa 1937–39, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire.

Courtesy of the Estate of the 16th Earl of Huntingdon and the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park (all rights reserved).

Hastings had first come to leftist politics while working as an assistant to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in San Francisco and Detroit in 1930–33. After studying with Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Hastings sought out Rivera to pursue his passion for muralism. Rivera viewed muralism as a “weapon” – as he wrote in 1932 – for communism. In the 1920s, Rivera had been instrumental in the rise of state-sponsored murals in Mexico following the revolution. In the 1930s, he helped to catalyse a mural movement in the United States, which culminated in unprecedented funding for public art via the New Deal, a set of Depression-era relief programmes under Franklin D. Roosevelt. These North American murals often deployed a social realist style, featuring gritty depictions of economic inequality and heroic representations of labour.

Diego Rivera, Wall Street Banquet, 1923–28, fresco, Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City.

Photograph by Adam Jones, 2011, Flickr.com (CC BY 2.0).

Immersion in a robust community of leftist artists in the USA – including Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo, and the growing ranks of American muralists – led Hastings to embrace communist values. When he and his wife Cristina returned to England in 1934, Cristina joined the Communist Party and Hastings joined the Artists’ International Association (AIA), a group of communist artists and fellow travellers who organised exhibitions, fundraised to aid Spanish Republicans, and held seminars at the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School in London. At the Marx Library in 1935, Hastings painted the fresco Worker of the Future Upsetting the Economic Chaos of the Present, in which a shirtless worker rips apart parliament and the church under the approving gazes of Marx, Lenin, and British socialists Robert Owen and William Morris.

While the Marx Library mural instructed students, artists, and workers about the coming revolution, the Buscot Park frescos entertained Faringdon’s guests with scenes of luxury. Mindful of their context, Hastings took a more subtle and self-conscious approach to politics, exploring the complexities and absurdities of his and Faringdon’s positions as leftist aristocrats. The frescos embrace the irony of Faringdon as a “red peer” who, according to a Daily Mail article from 1936, would “arrive at Westminster in a green chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce… and then, after railing against the government, would return to his country mansion recently renovated at great cost”.

Such juxtapositions of aristocratic privilege and revolutionary politics endow the frescos with humour. Roger Vlitos, curator of the Faringdon Collection, notes that the moustachioed golfer in one lunette has been read as Stalin holding the world in his hands like a golf ball. While the likeness is inexact, Faringdon was given a lock of Stalin’s hair on a state visit to Moscow. This ambiguous portrait brings politics into view while resisting serious, fixed political meanings. The nearby figure wearing Robin Hood’s feathered cap is a selfaware joke, as Hastings claimed to be Robin Hood’s descendant. The Robin Hood outfit conveys a sincere belief that Hastings and Faringdon could take from their class and give to the poor, yet also hints that their leftist identities could come across as a kind of masquerade.

Even Hastings’s Labour rally panel is underpinned by irony, making light of the fact that the Faringdon Labour Party was in reality too small to organise such a parade. Exaggerated social realist tropes – Faringdon’s power pose and the rearing police horses – contrast with the lack of actual Labour support in the towns of Faringdon and Abingdon, where the campaign Lord Faringdon sponsored for his secretary, Frank Bourne, to run as MP had been unsuccessful. Faringdon had himself photographed with this panel for Life in 1943, using it to broadcast both his sense of humour and sincere socialist commitments.

Another lunette depicts Faringdon and friends dining on gold plates in a composition that recalls Rivera’s caricature of American capitalists feasting on gold tickertape in Wall Street Banquet (1928). Hastings turned Rivera’s satirical eye inward and diffused his harshness, resulting in a panel that celebrates Faringdon’s friendships as much as it ironically contemplates aristocratic excess.

This mixture of sincerity and humour, and revolutionary and aristocratic imagery, sheds light on the condition of muralism in Britain in the 1930s. Murals in the USA and Mexico were often state funded and public. By contrast, lacking largescale state patronage, many British muralists painted for elite spaces like restaurants, hotels, and cocktail bars. While American muralism has been discussed in terms of labour, propaganda, and leftist politics, interwar British muralism has instead been understood in terms of recreation, entertainment, and luxury. In 1939, a review in The Times of the Tate exhibition Mural Painting in Great Britain – which featured Hastings’ frescos for the Marx Library and Buscot Park – concluded that “lighthearted” British muralism would “take the fear and mystery out of ‘mural’”.

Hastings’s Buscot Park frescos both confirm and complicate the narrative that British muralism was less proletarian and propagandistic than its counterpart in North America. They subvert the conventions of country house decoration by expressing Faringdon’s leftist politics. At the same time, Hastings’ jokes, irony, and leisure scenes demand that we revise our expectations of social realism to make room for humour.

The frescos’ ambiguities suggest that Hastings could only partially adapt social realism to the walls of a country house – that the elite setting limited Hastings’ ability to make a political mural. However, this partial translation also reminds us that political art is not necessarily solemn, didactic, or uncontradictory. Hastings’ conflicting identities as a “red peer” allowed him to avoid taking too seriously either the leftist art world or the aristocracy, viewing both spheres with a simultaneously sympathetic and critical eye.

Diego Rivera, Wall Street Banquet, 1923–28, fresco, Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City.

Photograph by Adam Jones, 2011, Flickr.com (CC BY 2.0).

Viscount Jack Hastings (16th Earl of Huntingdon), Untitled Fresco Cycle (detail), circa 1937–39, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire.

Courtesy of the Estate of the 16th Earl of Huntingdon (all rights reserved).