The Fine Art Society 1876-2016 | A Celebration

The Fine Art Society 1876 – 2016 · A C E L E B R AT IO N

The Fine Art Society 6 June to 7 July 2016 1 4 8 n ew b on d street · l on d on w 1s 2j t + 44 (0)20 7629 5116 · art@faslondon.com www.faslondon.com

II | the fine art society 1876–2016

The Fine Art Society 1876–2016 · A CE L E B R AT I O N

The Fine Art Society london · 2016

2 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Celebrating 140 years of The Fine Art Society

This year The Fine Art Society marks its 140th anniversary in the same building in Mayfair in which it was founded in 1876. That in itself is cause for celebration but all the more so as it is the only art dealership founded in London in the nineteenth century that remains in business today.

The Fine Art Society is unusual in that it was set up as a limited company, funded by a group of people who were interested in the arts. Our shareholders include a number of descendants of those original investors, as well as others who have since become interested in the gallery as clients. Artists themselves are central to the gallery, and our exhibition programme places the work of living artists close to that of their predecessors.

It is essential to our sense of The Fine Art Society’s role that we combine what is made today with works from the past.

A love of art remains the driving force behind those who visit or work at The Fine Art Society. I believe that our clients share with us the sense that knowledge of a work of art and its context can provide lasting pleasure and satisfaction. I am sure I speak for my colleagues in saying that we consider ourselves fortunate to have had the opportunity in our working lives to develop relationships with collectors, artists, curators and our colleagues in the art trade. Ours is the most sociable of galleries and we have enjoyed contacts with generations of the same families, and encounters with pictures which pass through the gallery more than once.

Our early history is rich with the names of great figures in the art world who showed with or became involved with the gallery. Two artists in particular changed the direction of the company which was set up to sell and publish prints. Whistler and Palmer did not sell us the copyright to their work, so that we could employ an engraver to make a print reproducing their paintings. Instead we published their original etchings. In the case of Whistler, he revolutionised the marketing of prints in the process. He was the

first artist to produce an etching in a signed, limited edition, with the additional feature that he printed and personally approved, with his pencil butterfly signature, each impression.

Whistler was a key figure in the creation of the modern print market and he was involved with our gallery in the same period as Samuel Palmer, whose own etchings have come to be seen among his greatest works. It is difficult to imagine two artists more different than Palmer, the visionary romantic, reclusive, deeply English, his prints dense and dark, and Whistler, the sophisticated expatriate American, sharp, flamboyant and witty, his etchings spare, minimal and deftly drawn.

In Palmer’s The Bellman (1879) and Whistler’s Nocturne (1879–80), The Fine Art Society published in close succession two of the greatest prints in history, both, incidentally, night pieces.

Palmer died in 1881 and the gallery staged his memorial exhibition, a major retrospective which was of great importance in establishing his lasting reputation.

It was also the pattern for many subsequent shows in the gallery, which is credited with the virtual invention of the one-man-show. Whistler was celebrated in an exhibition in April and Palmer is the subject of a special display in this show.

Over one hundred and forty years The Fine Art Society has played a significant part in the history of art and we aim to continue to do so. This exhibition recalls artists who have been part of our history and includes works we have sold and whose owners have graciously agreed to lend them. We are most grateful for their generosity, and to those who have contributed to this exhibition and all those who favour us with their business.

Gordon Cooke

a celebration | 5

Recollections of The Fine Art Society, 1954–2004

Having been host and responsible for FAS 100 and FAS 125, it is a great pleasure to be a guest at Fine Art Society 140. I should say before I begin that I am writing this in Morocco with no access to papers or records!

I suppose I first heard about The Fine Art Society when my father returned from wartime military service in 1946 – I was then 12 years old – and he resumed his arrangement with The Fine Art Society, which had sold all his pictures from about 1930. Later, after I had left school and done national service in the Gordon Highlanders, the then Managing Director of the Fine Art Society, Sydney Francis Grouse, offered me a job to start on the 1st October, 1954. I was to be paid £300 per annum “a sum we will reconsider when and if you prove your usefulness to us.” I well remember my farewell to my family at Taybridge Station, Dundee at the end of September, 1954 and my father’s eldest sister said ‘We are all delighted you are going to London, though we wish you were going to join the Civil Service”. Odd since my father was a successful painter, his father had been a successful architect and his elder brother was also a successful architect. Although I had a fairly strong idea of art history and some idea of contemporary art, I was nevertheless, truly a country hick! Anyway, for the next ten years sitting at the front desk of The Fine Art Society answering the phone, stuffing envelopes, trying to answer enquiries from passers by, I greatly enjoyed being in London. The first picture I sold turned out to be a small oil by my father, and I’m not sure why, but when the purchaser asked me for my name, I gave a false one!

FAS stock and exhibition policy was extremely conservative – the art world was struggling to find its feet after the long war – but I made friends with young artists and other young dealers and I think I learned a lot quite quickly.

Luckily for me, no young people were employed until 1963 when Peyton Skipwith joined and he and I were to work together until 2004 when we both retired.

By 1966 the old guard had gone and Jack Naimaster, a 6 | the fine art society 1876–2016

venerable expert in early English watercolours became Managing Director. Simon Edsor, who retired last year, joined in 1967 and it was more or less left to me, Peyton and Simon to decide the exhibition policy. Considering the illustrious early years of the gallery, the strong connection with Whistler – Gordon Cooke’s recent and magnificent collection of his prints was the great send off for FAS 140, and the string of shows of Ruskin’s, Turners, the Arts of Japan, Lord Leighton’s studio works, Hokusai, etc. we had a challenge.

Our first blockbuster was Sculpture in Britain 1850– 1914 (1968) and this came about after we met Charles and Lavinia Handley-Read who in a way transformed our thinking by emphasising the importance of Decorative Arts. Their enthusiasm led us to our next big show The Aesthetic Movement and the Cult of Japan (1972), which brought us assistance from Michael Whiteway, which led to many further exhibitions. Then there was the Arts and Crafts Movement (1973) exhibition. It was at about this time that Leonard Rosoman, Richard Eurich, Edward Bawden and Gluck came into our lives. The last an amazing moment when she entered the gallery in her usual get-up of Sherlock Holmes cloak, deer stalker hat and carrying a shooting stick. She said she hadn’t shown with us since 1937 and could she have another show now!

It was agreed and it was a huge success. There will be a big show of her work in Brighton later this year and The Fine Art Society hopes to present one here next year.

In 1973, Tony Carrol joined us and it is to his credit that we put together The Re-discovery of Greece (1979) then Travellers beyond the Grand Tour (1980). He was also responsible for Eastern Encounters (1979), the first big exhibition of Orientalist painters, which created huge publicity and brought us many new grand clients including King Hussein of Jordan.

In 1973 Wendy Baron suggested we put on a major Sickert exhibition and she prepared a sensational selection of his major works, which was presented in 1974. The show was also presented in our new Edinburgh

gallery, as its second exhibition. This involved closing it in London on a Friday evening and opening in Edinburgh on Saturday evening, only possible with Simon’s staggering organisational skills. Wendy also gave us a second winner with her re-assembly of the Camden Town Exhibition (1976). Peyton produced two great hits Bank Holiday (1982) and Sculpture Between the Wars (1986) and there were of course dozens of shows in the Scottish Galleries: Edinburgh opened in 1973 and Glasgow in 1979. (They were both, sadly, to close in 1994). Roger Billcliffe ran the Glasgow gallery and we became the main dealers in Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s furniture and watercolours and indeed other Glasgow designers and the work of the Glasgow Boys. Edinburgh also had some fine shows and in 1976 the Bakst exhibition, prepared for our centenary (1976) had its first showing as part of the Edinburgh festival. We charged a shilling to get in! The only time we charged admission in my 50 years and I recall the amazement of the Board at their next meeting when I produced a bag containing more than £10,000 in shilling coins!

FAS 100 (in 1976), was a year of shows with links to our past. Naturally, we wanted to have a Whistler show but as it was the USA’s 200th birthday it became too difficult to assemble a worthwhile group of work.

Instead, we brought over an exhibition of Romaine Brooks borrowed from the Smithsonian in Washington.

Unfortunately, at that time she was little known and the show made little impact.

During the 80’s and 90’s, there were excellent shows in all three galleries. I recall in 1985, as part of the Edinburgh Festival’s Vienna 1900 celebration, the Edinburgh gallery re-assembled the Mackintosh Room shown at the Secessionist exhibition that year, borrowing the original pieces from Glasgow School of Art. Roger Billcliffe and Lawrence Black were responsible. In London there was another winner Pugin to Mackintosh (1981), which offered excellent pieces.

In the 1990’s we were joined by Annemarie Stapleton, now Phelps and Gordon Cooke, both still on board and Max Donnelly, now at the V&A. Annemarie’s excellent knowledge of the Decorative Arts were behind Artist’s Textiles (1999) and Austerity to Affluence (1997).

It has been a very happy and stimulating life. I must thank all the people who served with me. I also must

thank the Non-Executive Directors whose wise counsel gave me, and the FAS stalwart support. Thanks also go to the late Martin Bayer, the late Jim Glendenning, Ng Lu Pat and Lady Elizabeth Longman, Lord Macfarlane of Bearsden, Sir Angus Grossart and particularly, the present chairman, Robin Holland-Martin.

Andrew McIntosh Patrick Postscript Back in the UK I have had a chance to think further about The Fine Art Society 140. What I have written above seems inadequate but I will not change it.

I should however add on a few further thoughts.

Firstly about Christopher Dresser, a major hero since the early 1970s. The Fine Art Society put on the first Dresser one-man show (1972) of his designs presenting a major collection formed by Richard Dennis and John Jesse. They were no doubt introduced to Dresser by Charles and Lavinia Handley-Read as were we. I myself put together an important collection of his metalwork, which included the famous square teapot – now in the V&A. This iconic teapot was frequently in demand for exhibitions in New York, Tokyo, Prague, etc., and as its owner I was privileged to be invited to attend these events.

I would also like to mention three other colleagues who certainly made serious contributions to The Fine Art Society in their day. Simon Peers who now lives and works in Madagascar; Richard Ingleby who lives and works in Edinburgh and Johnnie Shand Kydd.

I have always considered that the most acceptable compliment paid to The Fine Art Society was by the illustrious curator Bryan Robertson who said, ‘I always love going in to The Fine Art Society because I never know what I will see there!’

Johnnie Shand Kydd was responsible for one of the most surprising shows in my era. I was in Barbados for Christmas holidays in 1994 and Johnnie phoned to say that Leigh Bowery had died and could he put together a memorial show. Together with Lucian Freud he assembled an extraordinary collection of photographs and ephemera and with Lucian’s monumental portrait at the end of the gallery, a proper tribute to a great artist was paid (1995). I think even Bryan Robertson would have been surprised to see that at The FineArt Society! a celebration | 7

1 Edward Bawden CBE RA 1903–1989 The House at Ironbridge, 1956

Like his close friend Eric Ravilious, as a painter Edward Bawden worked principally in watercolour and the two artists breathed new life into a medium associated with a long tradition stretching back to the 18th century. His style was both inventive and direct and this study of houses clinging to a hillside in Ironbridge, Shropshire delights in the patterns in the retaining wall, the wrought iron railings and the house above. Ironbridge was important in the industrial revolution and is the site of some of the earliest furnaces, factories, workshops and canals in Britain.

Edward Bawden was a student at the Royal College of Art, where he met Ravilious. In the autumn of 1931 they rented part of Brick House, Great Bardfield, Essex and when Bawden married in Charlotte Epton in 1932, his father bought the whole house for them as a wedding present. The Bawdens and Eric and Tirzah Ravilious continued to share the house until the autumn of 1934.

The two artists now worked side by side and in 1933 they both had their first one man show at the same gallery, Zwemmer’s, a month apart. Bawden had a second show of watercolours there in 1937 and a third at the Leicester Galleries in 1938.

In 1939 Bawden was appointed an Official War Artist and was assigned to the War Office. He was at Dunkirk and then sailed for Cairo via Cape Town to join Middle East Command. After two years in Africa he set sail on 1st September 1942 aboard RMS Laconia. The ship was struck by two torpedoes and sank on 12th September.

Bawden spent five days in an open lifeboat before being rescued by a Vichy French ship, taken to Casablanca and interned. The camp was later overrun by American troops and Bawden was shipped to Virginia. He returned to England by way of New York and the North Atlantic, to be told that Ravilious had died. After some assignments in England Bawden returned to Cairo in September 1943 and, after over a year in the Middle East, he was posted to Italy, returning to England in July 1945.

In the post-war years, Bawden became a trustee of the 8 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1968 Edward Bawden exhibited regularly at The Fine Art Society from 1968 until his shortly before his death in 1989: Edward Bawden possesses the remarkable ability of reducing complex forms to a direct shorthand pattern of brush-strokes; from the large shapes down to small details this sprightly calligraphy is sustained.

Michael Rothenstein

Tate Gallery and joined the staff at the Royal College of Art to teach part-time. In 1949 he accepted an invitation to be a Visiting Instructor in Banff, Canada and the landscape of Alberta provided the subjects for a mural in the liner The Empress of France. He also painted murals for SS Orcades and SS Oronsay, and later for BP, Hull University, Queen’s Belfast, Pilkington’s and Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford.

For the remainder of Bawden’s professional life his work was widely considered to be unfashionable.

However his watercolours, linocuts and book illustrations were always admired by a loyal minority.

In his old age and since his death in 1989, interest in his work has grown. His training as a designer enabled him to approach his art with detachment. His independence of mind, skill as a draughtsman and strong feeling for his subjects enabled him to create a body of work which depicts his surroundings and his times vividly, with complete honesty and clarity.

Watercolour, gouache and pen and ink, signed and dated lower right 18 x 22 inches (46 x 56 cm) PROVENANCE: Essex County Council

2 FRANCIS CAMPBELL BOILEAU CADELL RSA RSW 1883–1937 Iona (white sands looking east)

Cadell first visited Iona in 1912 and returned there after the war, often working alongside his friend and fellow Colourist, Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935). It was not until after the war that Cadell started to paint on unprimed board, which gives these pictures their distinctive chalk-like surface, adding to the luminosity of the white sands and aquamarine seas that lie off Iona. It was the dramatic change of light that drew Cadell to the Hebridean island. It heightened the natural colours: flinty dark-grey stones, white sands and brilliant azure seas.

Oil on board, signed, inscribed with title verso, also inscribed Absorbent ground – NEVER varnish, f.c.b.c.

15 x 18 inches (38 x 45.8 cm) Provenance: purchased directly from the artist by Andrew Kain, Giffnock; and by descent

10 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1970 The exhibition Three Scottish Colourists: F.C.B. Cadell, G.L. Hunter and S.J. Peploe was held at The Fine Art Society. In the catalogue introduction William Hardie wrote of the ‘Three Colourists’: This painterliness, this insistence on the quality of paint and the beauties proper to it, is their greatest strength.

It is also the source of their considerable influence on subsequent Scottish painting.

3 GEOFFREY CLARKE 1924–2014 Daedalus

Geoffrey Clarke was a key figure in the renaissance of British sculpture in the post-war era. In 1951 his contribution to the Festival of Britain provided welcome public exposure, kick-starting his career. In 1952, the year this piece was made, he exhibited for the first time at Gimpel Fils, one of London’s leading dealers in avantgarde art in this period. Later that year he contributed to the Venice Biennale in the group of ‘Young British Sculptors’, alongside Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. The importance of Clarke’s contribution to sculpture is marked by his inclusion in British Sculpture in the 1960s at the Tate Gallery, British Sculptors ’72 at the Royal Academy of Arts and British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981.

Moving away from the carving tradition advocated by the previous generation of sculptors, including Moore, Hepworth, Gill, Epstein and Skeaping, Clarke learnt to weld with his contemporaries Chadwick and Butler.

His technique was conveniently low cost – utilising everyday industrial materials and scrap – but also had a powerful directness facilitating experimentation with a new visual language that balanced delicacy and strength, abstraction and figuration, the secular and the ecclesiastical. The symbolic figure of Man was a recurrent theme in both Clarke’s prints and sculpture.

The imagery he used to explore the subject was acutely personal, derived from a mixture of sources such as his Iron on slate 211/2 x 121/2 inches (55 x 32 x 6 cm) Exhibited: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 1994; London, The Fine Art Society, Geoffrey Clarke: Sculpture, Constructions and Works on Paper 1949–2000, 2000 (20), ill. p.28 (as Maquette for Sabena); London, Pangolin Gallery, Conjunction: Lynn Chadwick & Geoffrey Clarke, 2015, ill. p.4

12 | the fine art society 1876–2016

2000 Geoffrey Clarke: Sculpture, Constructions and Works on Paper 1949–2000 was shown at The Fine Art Society: Faith, myth, concept and religion are at the heart of his work. The fragile beauty of the early iron sculptures, paintings and etchings derives from their search for man’s place in nature and his relationship with God. Gordon Cooke

admiration for Klee, the magical tree imagery of Samuel Palmer and Sutherland, and his study of botanical diagrams of seed growth in the Natural History Museum.

Clarke was unusual amongst his contemporaries for the sheer number of public art commissions he received, contributing to more than 70 projects. The most notable of these was Coventry Cathedral, the largest British post-war commissioning projects, where he contributed more pieces than any other artist. Working on the project for a decade his stained glass windows and sculptures there are one of his greatest achievements. This piece was a maquette for a public work commissioned by the Belgian airline, Sabena. The tragic crash of an aircraft in February 1952 spelled the end of the project. In retrospect the subject chosen for the commission is hauntingly pertinent: the human ambition to defy nature in flight led to the death of Daedalus’s son, Icarus.

4 Harry Clarke 1889–1931 Madonna and Child, 1915

Madonna and Child was a gift to The Right Honourable Laurence Ambrose Waldron PC, Clarke’s first major patron. Waldron went on to commission Clarke to make a series of miniature stained glass panels to illustrate J.M. Synge’s poem Queens, which were installed as a frieze in his library and completed in September 1917.

Clarke’s miniature panels are unprecedented in the history of stained glass. This piece showcases the technique Clarke evolved for miniature panels over a number of years: using a single piece of relatively thick flashed glass, which is acid etched, stained and then painted over in minute detail. It is believed to be the first of his miniatures and, although Clarke incorporated similar small panels into his Honan Chapel windows (1915–1917), this appears to be the first panel intended as an independent piece.

The head of the Madonna is very likely inspired by Donatello’s gilt terracotta relief Virgin and Child in the Victoria & Albert Museum, which the artist would have been familiar with from his frequent visits to the museum during his formative years in London.

Single piece of turquoise flashed glass, acid etched, stained and hand painted; inscribed on the glass H. Clarke to Laurence Waldron – Dec 1915 51/2 inches (14 cm) diameter Provenance: The Rt Hon Laurence Ambrose Waldron PC; and then by descent Literature: Studio, Irish Arts & Crafts, vol. 72, Jan 1918, pp.15–22, ill. p.19; Harry Clarke, exh. cat., Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1979, ill. p.98; N. Gordon Bowe, The Life & Work of Harry Clarke, 1989, ill. p.59 Exhibited: Dublin, 5th Exhibition of the Arts & Crafts Society of Ireland, 1917 (257), the exhibition travelled to Belfast and Cork

14 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1988 A pioneering exhibition of the stained glass of Harry Clarke was shown at The Fine Art Society in 1988: Harry Clarke would bring into the world a comforting picture of the glories of salvation. Much of religion, in which he did not believe, he found aesthetically pleasing.

The peripheral rules he found an irritation. The deeper mysteries filled him with awe.

Michael Clarke

5 PRUNELLA CLOUGH 1919–1999 Fisherman with Trawlnet, 1947

Clough was unusual in her attraction to the stuff of ordinary life: housing estates, factories, docks, and borderlands between urban and rural areas. Her affinity for bleak and ugly subjects could be read, in part, as a reaction against her privileged upbringing in London’s Belgravia, the daughter of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic mother. Though seemingly banal, her subject matter was in fact ‘exotic’ to her. She was also influenced by her close relationship with John Berger, who in his capacity as critic was promoting a new realism in art and new values associated with that reality.

In the 1940s she began painting in Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, where her mother had a holiday home.

Initially she was drawn to the ramshackle fishermen’s huts and docking boats of Blackshore, where this work was probably painted. As demonstrated in this work, Clough was both compelled by the industrious labour of the fisherman and surfaces and textures of their environment.

She removes all unnecessary prettiness or elegance by refining her subject into abstract elements, flattening the pictorial space and using a close-toned colour palette.

Later, the grittier scenery of Lowestoft’s busy fishing port captured her attention – as seen in her contribution to the Festival of Britain’s 60 Paintings for ’51 exhibition – which in turn lead to her interest in industrial landscapes.

Clough’s first solo exhibition was in 1947 and in 1999, the year of her death, she won the prestigious Jerwood Painting Prize. In the years between she exhibited at The Leicester Galleries, The Grosvenor Gallery, New Art Centre and Annely Juda Fine Art, as well as internationally. In 1960 a retrospective exhibition was held at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1976 an Arts Council exhibition was held at the Serpentine Gallery and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge staged an exhibition of her work in 1999.

Oil on canvas, signed indistinctly, lower left 12 x 10 inches (30.5 x 25.5cm) Provenance: The New Art Centre, London 16 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1949 In an interview with the magazine Picture Post Prunella Clough explained that in her work she aimed at: Saying a small thing edgily.

6 PRUNELLA CLOUGH 1919–1999 Bonfire, 1967

Although Clough’s work of the 60s and 70s became increasingly abstract, they were always inspired by the concrete/physical world around her: the overlooked components of what she called the ‘urbscape’ or the experience of viewing objects in space. In this work she directly references the visual source in the title – on one hand the piece is representational but on the other it is abstract and expressive. In her abstract works Clough was continually inventive. Stylistically and in terms of subject the abstracts are very diverse and might be seen more as experiments in the field rather than a continuous and relational body of work.

The painting was owned by Sir Frederick Gibberd a prolific British architect, town planner and landscape designer whose works include Liverpool Catholic Cathedral, the first three Heathrow terminals, and The Central Mosque in Regents Park. His private collection of art included works by John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, part of which was donated to the Harlow Council, now exhibited in the Civic Centre.

Oil on canvas 313/4 inches (81.5 x 81 cm) Provenance: Sir Frederick Gibberd CBE RA

18 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1951 Prunella Clough was included in the Festival of Britain exhibition 60 Paintings for ’51.

Looking back at the recent history of British art, there are a few artists who stand out for the depth and constancy of their contribution over the last 50 years – artists who arrived on the scene in the immediate post-war years and who still seem to be making work that has a place in the modern world. Lucian Freud is one, Eduardo Paolozzi another – and so is Prunella Clough.

RICHARD INGLEBY

7 JOHN CRAXTON RA 1922–2009 Seated Figure, 1954

The Second World War brought a new sense of urgency to the archaic British art scene. In 1940 the Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts, now the Arts Council, was set up and a group of very young artists were gaining recognition including Michael Ayrton, Lucian Freud, John Minton and Keith Vaughan. The patronage of Peter Watson, ICA founder and co-founder of the magazine Horizon helped support Craxton’s career. Watson paid for the studio the artist shared with his friend Lucian Freud. Through Watson, Craxton made many invaluable connections as well as being invited to Greece for the first time in 1946, where he spent much time until eventually moving there permanently.

Craxton’s post-war work was a departure from the earlier neo-romanticism (a term hated by the artist) inspired by Sutherland, Palmer and Blake. His time in Greece brought a new clarity and reality to his pastoral scenes. His work became more inspired by Picasso and Miró – whose work was still considered exotic in this period – as well as the colour and flatness of Byzantine art. All these influences can be felt in the present work.

What is most remarkable is Craxton’s resounding use of line; as he explained in the catalogue for his Whitechapel retrospective in 1967: ‘Line is used to make volume expressive rather than to express volume… And line is also used to explain the play of light on contours.’ In this work his lines sing, emphasised by the luminous colour he employs.

His favourite subjects at the time were the sailors, shepherds and fishermen who he presented in a very informal and unpretentious way. The posture of the figure in this piece is very relaxed and HE was obviously encountered by the artist in a casual setting. Craxton repeated the motif of the slouched, seated figure several times, making it a sign of the simpler life THAT the artist encountered in Greece at the same time being ambiguously introspective.

20 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1946 Craxton first visited Crete which was to become his home and where he eventually became one of the Britain’s honorary consuls. He wrote: I can work best in an atmosphere where life is considered more important than art – where life is itself an art. Then I find it possible to feel a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all.

Oil on canvas 131/2 x 61/8 inches (34 x 15.5 cm) Provenance: Nancy Wynne-Jones Exhibited: London, The Leicester Galleries, John Craxton, 1954 (9)

8 JOHN DUNCAN FERGUSSON 1874–1961 Cassis from the West, c.1930

Born in Edinburgh, he studied at the Edinburgh School of Art before moving to Paris in 1885 to study at the Académie Colarossi. Fergusson returned to Paris every year for the next 10 years and moved there permanently in 1907, where he taught at the Académie de la Palette.

He liked to spend time in cafés, observing life and conversing with Parisian avant-garde artists. Living in Paris gave him new impetus, and the years 1909 and 1910 where a transitional moment in his career.

He became the leader of a group of Anglo-American painters (later to be called ‘Rhythm’) that belonged to one of the most progressive circles of artists in Paris, and in recognition of his contribution to the modern movement he was elected one of the sociétaires of the Salon d’Automne.

This is a larger version of an oil on panel painted in 1913, when Fergusson and Peploe spent their last sketching holiday together. However, stylistically this later version appears to date from the 1930s, when Fergusson was living again in Paris and making regular summer visits to the South of France.

Oil on canvas, signed verso 21 x 251/2 inches (53 x 64.7 cm) Exhibited: London, Alex Reid & Lefevre, J.D. Fergusson Painting and Sculpture, 1939

22 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1974 The Fine Art Society mounted a solo show of Fergusson’s work, in the introduction to the catalogue Roger Billcliffe wrote: His work of the twenties and thirties has a freshness and vitality which many young painters must have envied.

His sculpture, too, showed the inventiveness of his mind.

9 Stanhope Alexander Forbes 1857–1947 The Old Courtyard, Cahors, 1925

Painting en plein air was Stanhope Forbes’s guiding principle, an enthusiasm he acquired in France. He studied in Bonnat’s studio in Paris in 1880 and the following year travelled to Brittany with La Thangue. The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool bought his early painting A Street in Brittany in 1882. Forbes continued to paint in France, at Concarneau and Quimperlé near Pont-Aven.

By 1884 he had joined Walter Langley and Thomas Cooper Gotch at Newlyn, which he described as ‘a sort of English Concarneau.’ His painting A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach was shown at the Royal Academy in 1885, and its success encouraged other artists, such as Frank Bramley, to settle in Newlyn. The following year Forbes was a founder member of the New English Art Club.

His initial antipathy towards the Royal Academy did not prevent him from exhibiting there, and in 1892 he was elected an Associate and a full Academician in 1910.

In 1885 he met the Canadian artist Elizabeth Armstrong, who had settled with her mother in Newlyn, and they married in 1889. She also joined the New English Art Club, and took up etching, which led her to meet Whistler and Sickert.

Oil on canvas, signed, inscribed and dated Stanhope A Forbes / Cahors / 1925, lower right 20 x 15 inches (50.8 x 38.1 cm) EXHIBITED: London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1926 (6)

24 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1886 The New English Art Club was founded in London by a group of artists including Stanhope Forbes, Sir George Clausen, Philip Wilson Steer, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. A reviewer for Pall Mall Gazette wrote of their first exhibition: The three score works in the exhibition reveal a quite unexpected variety of subject and treatment, and undoubtedly a very much higher level of excellence than is to be found in the average Academy or Grosvenor Gallery.

10 EDWARD ONSLOW FORD RA 1852–1901 Folly, 1886

Ford occupied a neighbouring studio to Alfred Gilbert in The Avenue, Fulham Road. Together they worked in experiments with lost-wax casting, a technique on which both artists established their reputations. In their casts the artists of the New Sculpture movement favoured realism over ideal beauty. In the case of Folly, Ford pressed strands of animal hair into the wax model to effectively imitate the texture of hair. His attention to surface detail led to concerns amongst critics that the piece was too life-like to be considered sculpture – a criticism also levelled at Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).

Devoid of any contextual narrative, religious or legend, Folly is the ultimate expression of an abstract idea in a realist manner. Although seemingly an allegory, it is neither moralising nor instructive, it is strictly evocative. In this way the piece exists in the tradition of the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly the ‘subjectless’ paintings of Albert Moore (see cat.22), which Ford has taken to its logic conclusion. Another cast of this sculpture is in the Tate collection.

Bronze, edition 2 of 2 345/8 x 163/8 x 13 inches (88 x 41.5 x 33 cm) Provenance: Presented by the Artist to Clinton Dent; and then by descent Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1886 (1925, another cast) Literature: M. Hepworth Dixon, Onslow Ford ARA in Magazine of Art, 1892, p.238, ill. p.329; E. Gosse, The New Sculpture, 1879–1894 in Art Journal, 1894, p.282, ill. p.306; E.T. Cook, A Popular Handbook to the Tate Gallery, 1898, p.279; M.H. Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day, 1901, p.55; S.Beattie, The New Sculpture, 1983, pp.153–55, no.144

26 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1886 Seeing Folly when the sculpture was first shown at the Royal Academy, Marion Hepworth Dixon wrote: It made the fortunes of its creator for here in a seductively direct and simple realisation the sculptor both found and made known his special gifts.

11 SIR GEORGE JAMES FRAMPTON RA 1860–1928 Peter Pan, conceived in, 1911, this cast 2006

The original cast of this piece was commissioned by the author J.M Barrie in 1910 and depicts his famous literary character, Peter Pan, first published in 1902. It was secretly placed in Kensington Gardens during the night of 30 April, and announced in The Times on May Day 1912. With no prior publicity or formal unveiling – Barrie had even failed to secure permission to erect the piece in Kensington Gardens – the illusion was as if it had appeared by magic. ‘There is a surprise in store for the children who go to Kensington Gardens to feed the ducks in the Serpentine this morning. Down by the little bay on the south-western side of the tail of the Serpentine they will find a May-day gift by Mr J.M. Barrie, a figure of Peter Pan blowing his pipe on the stump of a tree, with fairies and mice and squirrels all around’. (The Times, 1 May 1912) The edition of eight marked and numbered casts was taken, by exclusive agreement, with Liverpool City Council, from the bronze in Sefton Park. The first four casts from this edition are all in private collections in Britain. There were five full-sized casts made in Frampton’s lifetime, or very shortly afterwards: Sefton Park, Liverpool, cast at the behest of George Audley and donated to the children of Liverpool; in Perth, Western Australia presented in 1929 to the Perth City Council by The Rotary Club of Perth to mark the centenary of the State; in the Parc d’Egmont, Brussels, Belgium, gifted

by Frampton in memory of the children who perished in the First World War; in Bowring Park in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, erected in memory of Sir Edgar Bowring’s grandchild, Betty Munn who had drowned along with her father at the sinking of the Florizel at Cappahayden; Camden, New Jersey, USA, Eldridge Johnson presented the statue to the children of Camden.

Sir George Frampton was born in London, the son of a stone carver, he trained as an architect before studying sculpture at Lambeth School of Art and later at the Royal Academy Schools, where he won a Gold Medal and a Travelling Scholarship to Paris to the studio of Antonin 28 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1902 M.H.Spielmann, the prolific Victorian art critic and scholar who was the editor of The Connoisseur and Magazine of Art wrote about Frampton’s 1902 exhibition at The Fine Art Society: ... there is nothing more inspiring, more refreshing, for those who have eyes to see, than a beautiful figure in the round … It may appeal to your fancy and to your sense of grace and elegance; it may prove a daily tonic to the sight by its dignity ... There is no more convincing sign of a new taste than a love and appreciation of sculpture.

Mercie, 1887. Frampton was a central figure of the New Sculpture movement, who rejected classical prototypes in favour of new allegorical subjects, expressing abstract ideas about the human condition. In this context, Barrie’s enchanting and unsettling character was an ideal subject. Audiences of public sculpture would have been used to the portrayal of grand, ideal masculine figures; Frampton’s Pan is strange for elevating eternal youth and celebrating magic. Frampton received numerous honours and produced many public monuments, including a number of statues of Queen Victoria, Queen Mary, and the Edith Cavell Memorial 1920.

Bronze, edition 6 of 8, Inscribed GEO FRAMPTON RA / MORRIS SINGER FOUNDERS / FAS 6 / 8 Height 118½ inches (300 cm) Exhibited: London, The Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition 1911 (number 1960, the plaster); London, The Fine Art Society Public and Private Sculpture in Britain 1880–1940, 2002 (10)2/8 from this edition); London, The Fine Art Society, Spring 2003 (30) (3 / 8 from this edition) Literature: B. Read Victorian Sculpture, 1983, pp.315–7 & 365; S. Beattie The New Sculpture, 1985, p.218

12 SIR GEORGE FRAMPTON RA 1860–1928 Peter Pan, conceived, 1909, this cast, 1918

This reduced version of the monumental sculpture (cat 11) was first published in 1913 and subsequently sold to benefit the Red Cross during the First World War. Casts of Peter Pan were shown in the Venice Biennale in 1909, 1910, and 1922. Further casts are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Sydney, and the Museum of the University of St Andrews.

Bronze, 187/8 inches (48 cm) Inscribed GF, dated: 1918 and with an encircled P.P. Literature: B. Read, Victorian Sculpture, 1982, pp.315–7, 365; S. Beattie, The New Sculpture, 1983, p.218

30 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1904 Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up premiered in London on 27 December 1904. The play was highly popular, running to 1913.

‘Pan, who and what art thou?’ he cried huskily.

‘I’m youth, I’m joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.’

J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

13 LOUIS RICHARD GARBE RA FRBS 1876–1957 The Red Shawl

Louis Richard Garbe was the second son of Prussian immigrant Gustave Garbe (1850–1919), an ivory and tortoiseshell carver, to whom he was apprenticed. Garbe was a key contributor to the resurgence in the use of exotic materials in sculpture, including ivory. Although he both practiced and taught modeling techniques, Garbe’s real affinity was for carving. His influences in this field included Chinese carvers in jade and crystal, Japanese ‘netsuke’ and Gothic craftsmen.

The Red Shawl is evocative of antique precedents, indicated by the pose, drapery and hairstyle of the figure.

However the title, rather than suggesting a legendary or pagan context, refers only to the garment depicted.

The piece was intended to be decorative and seductive, and therefore relates to the earlier movement of ‘Art for art’s sake’ advocated by Whistler and Moore (see cat 22). Garbe’s use of lacquer on the surface of the piece punctuated by the deep red heightens the eroticism.

Further to his father’s training he studied at Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal Academy Schools, becoming an instructor in sculpture at the Central School, 1901–29, then Professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, 1929–46. During the 1930s he worked with Doulton on the making of a number of pieces of ceramic sculpture. Garbe was a fellow of the RBS, he began exhibiting at the RA from 1908 and was elected RA in 1936. His monumental work includes examples at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

Japanese ash, lacquered Height: 54¼ inches (137.7 cm) Base: 17½ x 87/8 inches (44.5 x 22.7 cm) Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1925 (1336); London, The Fine Art Society, Sculpture in Britain Between the Wars, 1986 (38)

32 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1986 The Red Shawl featured in the exhibition Sculpture in Britain between the Wars at The Fine Art Society.

Now we can take the understanding of direct carving as fait accompli ... This is well and it is this very largely that has created the revolution in sculpture at the Royal Academy. kineton parkes, 1929

14 HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA 1891–1915 Crouching Fawn, 1913

Henri Gaudier moved to London from France in early 1911 with his partner Sophie Brzeska, whose name he added to his own. Friendships with Jacob Epstein, Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme introduced him to the avant-garde and his work developed in experimental directions. He was an important figure in the group of artists and writers who brought modernity to the pre-First World War London art world and invented Vorticism. Gaudier-Brzeska was primarily a sculptor and his dynamic use of abstract forms in his carvings as well as his brilliant draughtsmanship signalled his great talent. Gaudier-Brzeska joined the French Army in August 1914 but was killed in action in the following summer.

This is the only recorded cast of Gaudier-Brzeska’s Bath stone carving Crouching Fawn of 1913. It was cast

by The Leicester Galleries and bought in 1925 by the American Mina Kirstein Curtiss on her honeymoon for 40 guineas. The patinated plaster cast that is now in the Tate collection (T03729), presented to the national collection by The Leicester Galleries in 1939, is believed to have been the ‘shop sample’ from which clients would commission casts. The Leicester Gallery account books indicate that this was the only bronze to be cast, making it exceptionally rare. In 1913 Gaudier-Brzeska’s artistic focus was largely on stone carving, consequently this bronze has the precision and sharp forms of a carving as opposed to modelled clay.

This cast has been inspected and approved by Dr Evelyn Silber.

1914 In the Vorticist journal Blast Henri Gaudier-Brzeska wrote his definition of modern sculpture: Sculptural energy is the mountain.

Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation.

Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes.

Bronze 12 x 10 x 5 inches (30.5 x 25.4 x 12.7 cm) Provenance: bt 1925 at The Leicester Galleries (for 40 gns) by Mina Kirstein Curtiss (1896–1985), Bethel, Connecticut; Private Collection, UK. Literature: E. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, a Memoir, 1916, p.161 (stone version pl. ix); H.S. Ede, A Life of Gaudier-Brzeska, 1930, pp.170, 198 (stone version pl. xxvi as ‘Seated Fawn’); R. Cole, Burning to Speak: the Life and Work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, 1978, p.91; J. Collins, The Omega Workshop, 1983, p.70; Evelyn Silber, Gaudier-Brzeska: Life and Art, with a Catalogue Raisonne, 1996 no.62 Provenance: Mina Kirstein Curtiss, Bethel, Connecticut, bought The Leicester Galleries; private collection.

34 | the fine art society 1876–2016

15 SIR ALFRED GILBERT MVO RA 1854–1934 Eros, 1893

Standing in the centre of London’s Piccadilly Circus, Gilbert’s Eros stands alongside Michelangelo’s David, 1504, and the Statue of Liberty, 1886, as one of the most famous sculptures in the world and a symbol of the city in which it stands. The original cast of this sculpture adorns the top of Alfred Gilbert’s memorial for the great Victorian philanthropist Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, and was the first public sculpture to be cast in aluminium. The commission was firstly offered to Gilbert’s old master Joseph Edgar Boehm, who generously rejected it and recommended his former pupil. Boehm readily promoted Gilbert’s work at every opportunity, saying ‘England will yet be proud of so talented a sculptor better than we have yet had.’ Gilbert, unlike Boehm, could not be pinned down to the traditional ‘coat and trousers style’ monument.

Instead he explained to the committee that he would not produce a portrait at all, but ‘something that will symbolise [Shaftesbury’s] life’s work.’

Lord Shaftesbury died in October 1885, work began on the sculpture in 1887 but the piece was not unveiled until 1893. Gilbert earliest concept for the memorial was a gothic-style covered font heavily inspired by Donatello’s baptismal font in Siena Cathedral. The piece was also to include bas-reliefs of scenes from the life of Lord Shaftesbury, as insisted upon by the Committee.

However, in the intervening years both Gilbert’s style and conception changed, as well as the final selection of the Piccadilly Circus site in 1890. The idea for Eros came very late in the day and was conceived separately to the design for the base. The result being a bolder and more ambitious sculpture, liberated from the strict gothic linearity of his earlier style and inspired by Rococo forms. Other sources for the figure include Giambologna’s Flying Mercury in the Bargello in Florence with the force and bounce of Bacchus in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. For contemporary audiences this joyous portrayal of youth and love was too far removed from the statues of statesmen and 36 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1985 The great thing about Eros is his marvellous balance: he’s got that backwards swing as if he’s really moving, but with nothing hard or strained about him. Sculpture should be alive, ready to move at any moment.

George Mancini

generals they were used to, causing some controversy.

This new edition of Eros was launched in 1985 under licence from the The Victoria and Albert Museum, who hold the original plasters, in return for the restoration of the plasters to be included in the exhibition Alfred Gilbert: Sculptor and Goldsmith at the Royal Academy in 1986. The edition was produced by the Morris Singer Foundry and overseen by George Mancini (1904–1989) who assisted with the cast now in Sefton Park, Liverpool, under the direct guidance of Gilbert.

Aluminium, raised on a bronze scroll, resting on a bronze fountain base; edition 5 of 10 Overall height 190 inches (485 cm), base diameter 57 inches (145 cm) Exhibited: (Other casts) London, The Fine Art Society, Sir Alfred Gilbert OM ARA 1854–1934 Eros, May 1987; Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art, Aluminium by Design: Jewelery to Jets, 2000–2001, exhibition travelled to New York, CooperHewitt Museum, Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Miami, The Wolfsonian, London, The Design Museum; London, Victoria & Albert Museum, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900, 2012; Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Beauté, morale et volupté dans l’Angleterre d’Oscar Wilde, 2011–2012; San Francisco, The Legion of Honour, Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900, 2012 Selected Literature: I. McAllister, Alfred Gilbert, 1929, pp.103–113; S. Beattie, The New Sculpture, 1983, pp.162, 214, & 217–8, pl.218–9; R. Dorment, Alfred Gilbert: Sculptor and Goldsmith, 1983, pp.9, 15–6, 25, 36–8, 43, 104, 115, 135–43, 184, 196, 199, 202, pl.37, 136–7

16 ERIC GILL ARA 1882–1940 Standing Female Nude, c.1912

Eric Gill was a prolific sculptor, stonemason, draughtsman, engraver and author. He also designed some of the most famous typefaces of the twentieth century for the Monotype Corporation. Converting to Catholicism in 1913 and five years later becoming a tertiary of the order of St Dominic, religion was central to his life and work. Gill rejected the luxuries and conveniences of modern life for a more ascetic and unconventional life on the fringes of society. Medieval ecclesiastical statuary was a profound influence on him and he relished its flatness, linearity and primitivism.

Equally Egyptian, Greek and Indian sculpture informed his style.

Gill often used tracing paper for preparatory sketches both for his wood engravings and carvings. However, this piece is clearly a finished work in its own right.

Gill has treated this work in the same way as many of his wood engravings, where the negative space represents a solid form, given shape by the densely inked background. The untreated surface of the tracing paper represents flesh, whilst colour is sparingly applied to the hair, nipples, lips, eyes and cheeks, breathing life into the figure.

Pen and ink and bodycolour on tracing paper 65/8 x 25/8 inches (16.8 x 6.7 cm) Provenance: Victor Arwas; and by descent

38 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1934 Originally published in 1934, Art was a series of essays written by Eric Gill. In his chapter on ‘Art and Holiness’ the artist writes: It is impossible to put the thing too strongly or strongly enough. What is the mark which distinguishes the good from the bad, in works as in men? Holiness is the only word for it.

17 THOMAS COOPER GOTCH 1854–1931 Paddling, Whitsand Bay

Thomas Cooper Gotch’s work went through several phases during his career. In 1878 he studied at the Slade under Alphonse Legros, where he met and became close friends with Henry Scott Tuke and Caroline Yates, who he later married. He first adopted the plein air approach to painting whilst studying in Paris in the early 1880s and later settled in Newlyn, where a group of artists lead

by Stanhope Forbes followed realist rural style. However, a visit to Florence 1891 marked a turning point in his oeuvre. Many of his later works employ a bolder use of colour and are influenced by the medieval revival in PreRaphaelite paintings.

Watercolour, 41/4 x 71/2 inches (10.8 x 19 cm) signed T. C. Gotch, lower right Provenance: Christopher R Cone, bought at Maas Gallery Exhibited: Bristol, Royal West of England Academy, Gotch Exhibition, 30th May 1923 (82)

40 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1888 Alfred East RI, T. C. Gotch RBA and W. Ayerst Ingham RBA – Illustrating the Duchy of Cornwall was held at The Fine Art Society. In the catalogue introduction R.A.M. Stevenson wrote: They have by no means forgotten the more homely and popular details of the shore: the fishing boats, the slateroofed homesteads, the hedges, the long flats, the far-away church towers, the coloured evenings, the grey rain, the rare gleams of azure weather.

18 KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI (1760–1849) Fujiwara no Yoshitaka, from the series ‘Hyakunin Isshu Uba Ga Etoki’ (‘The Hundred Poems as told by the Nurse’), c.1839

The exhibition A collection of drawings and etchings by Hokusai at The Fine Art Society in November 1890 was not only the first solo exhibition of an Eastern artist in the gallery, but the first time that Hokusai had ever been exhibited in the West. Little was known about the life of this printmaker, who is now considered one of the most compelling artists whose ‘discovery’ stimulated a shift in the Western identification and signification of Japanese culture.

Born in Yedo in 1760 to a family attached to the Shogunate, he began painting at the age of six. As a prolific illustrator he took to woodblock printing with ease, and adopted the popular style of Ukiyo-yé, or ‘pictures of the floating world’ a genre that he became synonymous with, and with which he enjoyed fame throughout Japan for his development of the art form.

In the West however, much like many great Japanese artists, he was effectively unknown. Although Japanese prints had been filtering through to Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was not until 1889 when the École des Beaux Arts in Paris held an exhibition of Japanese Art, that he and several other printmakers began to receive notice. It was at this exhibition that Marcus B. Huish, the Managing Director of the Fine Art Society at the time, noticed Hokusai’s works which appeared to him as likely to be the most popular to exhibit in an upcoming show at the Mayfair gallery.

A champion of East Asian art, he had tried before to engage the London public in Japonism but found they were as unreasonable as they were apathetic. The public, as he wrote in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “demands of Japanese Art a standard equal to that of the finest Western art at its highest pitch of perfection, and if it sees the least failing either in, for instance, the draughtsmanship of the human body or the laws of perspective, it will examine the subject no further, and refuses to allow it any place in the world’s Academy of Art.” 42 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1890 A Collection of Drawings and Etchings by Hokusai at The Fine Art Society, the artist’s first exhibition in the West.

The story of the beautiful is already complete – hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon – and broidered with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai – at the foot of Fusiyama.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER

This print takes its name from a poem by Fujiwara no Yoshitaka, and is part of an iconic series entitled One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse, which, along with his series One hundred views of Fuji, are most characteristic of the artist and considered to be the pinnacle of Hokusai’s work as a woodblock print designer.

Fujiwara no Yoshitake (954–974), was a handsome nobleman who died tragically young leaving behind him a love poem full of pathos: For thy precious sake Once my eager life itself Was not dear to me.

But ’tis now my heart’s desire It may long, long years endure Colour woodblock print Technique: Nishiki-e (woodblock print with colour blocks) signed Zen Hokusai Manji, from the series The Hundred Poems as Told by the Nurse, published by Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudo) oban yoko-e: 10 x 15 inches (25.4 x 38 cm) LITERATURE: G.C. Calza, Hokusai, 2003, pl.v.12.7, p.390; M. Forrer, Hokusai, Prints and Drawings, 1991, pl.433; P. Morse, Hokusai One Hundred Poets, 1989, no.50; A. Yonemura, Hokusai, 2006, no.69

19 HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE 1859–1929 The Orange Grove c.1920

Following the First World War, Henry Herbert La Thangue returned to Liguria, where he had first travelled with his friend and fellow artist Stanhope Forbes.

During the decade that followed he painted scenes of orange groves and gardens. In this and his other works of the period he demonstrates his dedication to social realist, en plein air painting by finding the beauty in the rustic and everyday. His obsession with the sun-filled beauty of the Italian landscape with its abundant orange trees was likely sparked by his increasing lament for the decline of English rural life. In Liguria he had hoped to find an area still relatively untouched by industrialisation or tourism, but writing in 1929, shortly before his death, La Thangue noted ‘all of these regions have been spoilt by the war and still more perhaps by peace’. (See K. McConkey, A Painter’s Harvest: H.H. La Thangue, 1859–1929, 1978, p. 44.)

Early in his career La Thangue worked in the studio of Jean Léon Gérome (1824–1904), a Neo-Classical painter and advocate of the academic tradition. Later he studied at the Royal Academy Schools, winning a gold medal in 1879, and afterwards at the École des BeauxArts, Paris. However, on returning to London in 1886 La Thangue became increasingly dissatisfied with the Royal Academy and eventually exhibited with the New English Art Club. He was a follower of Jules Bastien-Lepage and was profoundly influenced by the French Impressionist movement.

Oil on canvas, signed lower left, H.H La Thangue 34 x 38 inches (86.3 x 96.5 cm)

44 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1931 In the catalogue of An Exhibition of Pictures by the late H.H. La Thangue RA exhibited at The Fine Art Society, George Clausen wrote: No painter can get everything of what is before him; he can only, as far as he is able, get the things that move him: he must let the others go. And so, for La Thangue, it was, primarily, the beauty of things in sunlight that excited him.

20 EDWARD LEAR 1812–1888 View from the Benitza Road, near Gastouri, Corfu, 1855–8

Lear first visited Corfu in the summer of 1848 and was immediately struck by its beauty, describing it as ‘Paradise’. He returned in November 1855 to set up a winter retreat there. The landscape in Corfu satisfied his fascination with trees as well as his skill in capturing wildlife, developed in his early work as an illustrator, and his ability to handle the sculptural quality of the mountain ranges. He took pleasure in painting the variations in the landscape from densely vegetated foregrounds through to the wide view of distant mountains via several overlapping layers.

As far as we know, Lear produced three major oil paintings of this view, which he thought one of the loveliest in the island. In a letter to his sister Ann he described the Albanian mountains as ‘like long ranges of opal, with pearls or cream on their summits’, adding, ‘this is a long wonderous beauty’. Although the work was painted in his studio he revisited the site often.

Oil on canvas 131/2 x 211/2 inches (34 x 54.5 cm) Provenance: Major General Mackintosh (name inscribed on stretcher); Christie’s London 20 November 1984 lot 17; Robertson Collection, Orkney Exhibited: London, Peter Nahum at the Leceister Galleries, A Celebration of British and European Paintings of the 19th and 20th Centuries, 1985, where purchased Literature: Lady Strachey (ed.), The Letters of Edward Lear, 1907, p.315; for a lithograph of the same view see E. Lear, Views in the Seven Ionian Islands, 1863, pl.4 and V. Noakes, Edward Lear, p.58, pl.39b

46 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1938 Edward Lear was first shown at The Fine Art Society in July 1938 in the show Landscapes in watercolours.

There was an Old Man of Corfu, Who never knew what he should do; So he rushed up and down, till the sun made him brown, That bewildered Old Man of Corfu. edward lear

21 PAUL MAITLAND 1863–1909 Battersea Mills

Paul Maitland was a reclusive landscape painter, who largely confined himself to scenes in and around where he lived in Chelsea, including Kensington Gardens, the Chelsea Embankment and views across the river to Battersea. He studied at the Royal College of Art and later sought the tuition of Theodore Roussel (1847– 1926). Through Roussel, Maitland became associated with Whistler and his circle. Whistler’s influence is evident here in Maitland’s interest in the industrial landscapes along the Thames and in his murky, impressionistic handling of the paint.

Oil on canvas, signed P. Maitland lower left 10 x 177/8 inches (25.4 x 45.5 cm)

48 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1994 The exhibition Paul Fordyce Maitland 1863–1909 was held at The Fine Art Society. Walter Sickert was quoted in the catalogue introduction: Maitland was born a painter, and acquired by practice considerable physical strength and endurance. He may be said to have lived in Kensington Gardens by day, and on Chelsea Embankment by night. My last meeting with Maitland was thus. I was on an omnibus going east and, by Kensington High Street Station, I saw Maitland walking home loaded with apparatus of the painter from nature. I got down and caught him up, and we walked back to his house down Wrights Lane. He took me into a large studio that was piled around like an arena from the tiny pit of clear floor in the centre to the ceiling, with his paintings, the whole work of his short life.

22 ALBERT MOORE 1841–1893 Anemones, c.1880

Anemones is typical of Moore’s work from the 1870s and 1880s – an upright, narrow format of about this height, depicting a single female figure. The titles of these works peculiarly ignore any reference to narrative or even the figures depicted. Instead he titled them after the flowers or accessories that appear within, which often inform the colour harmony of each work. Moore believed that the purpose of art was primarily to be decorative and that subject matter was inconsequential. Despite his work being figurative, Moore conceived them in abstract terms, where form, line and colour speak for themselves. Moore often used fabrics to create pattern in his work, both as a backdrop and also in the tight rhythmic folds of the costume. The rug on which the anemones are scattered in this work had also been used in Moore’s earlier painting of Pansies, 1875. The piece aptly demonstrates Moore’s interest in both Japanese art and antique friezes.

Anemones was described by Moore’s pupil and biographer, A. J. Baldry, as: ‘an especially excellent example of mellow colour and deft brushwork... It is a white and yellow study, a female figure standing in the thinnest white gauze, through which the tints of the flesh tell strongly, partly wrapped round with thicker drapery of buttercup yellow, and relieved against a background of pale yellow-brown...’

Moore’s artistic theories made him one of the leading artists of the Aesthetic Movement, along with Whistler, Leighton, Watts and Burne-Jones.

Oil on canvas, signed with anthemion device, lower right 17½ x 6 inches (44.5 x 15.2cm) Provenance: Peter Nahum, London, 1989; Private Collection Exhibited: London, McLean’s Gallery, 1880; Tokyo, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Shigeru Aoki and Late Victorian Art, 1982 (78); London, Peter Nahum at the Leicester Galleries, Burne-Jones, The Pre Raphaelites and Their Century, 1989 (123) Literature: A. J. Baldry, Albert Moore, His Life and Works, 1894, p.50; Studio, no.44, 1904, ill. p.278 50 | the fine art society 1876–2016

2011 In the catalogue for the exhibition The Cult of Beauty The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 at the Victoria & Albert Museum Margaret D. Stetz wrote: For Moore, the tension between the evanescent beauty of his models and the timelessness of their classical settings and draperies created a meditation on temporality, as did the contrast between the implied dynamism of their bodies.

23 Henry Nelson O’Neil 1817–1880 No Tears Lassie

O’Neil was one of Victorian England’s most celebrated genre painters. Many of his most successful works revolved around the theme of separation of men from their wives and children, painted without saccharine or sentiment but with an instinctive human sympathy that confronted the human consequences of their subject.

O’Neil’s most famous painting was Eastward Ho! (1857), which depicted the departure of British soldiers to suppress the Indian Mutiny. The central focus is the farewell of a young woman to her husband, reaching up to him on board the troop ship. The Illustrated London News commented on it: ‘Henry Nelson O’Neil’s Eastward Ho!… presents nothing beyond what has over and over again been witnessed … and not a week, or scarcely a day, has passed … but the silent Thames has been witness to many a sad parting such as that depicted in this canvas.’ The picture caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858 and O’Neil became one of the most celebrated painters with an estimated half a million visitors seeing his painting.

The following year he exhibited Home Again to similar acclaim, which showed the same troops returned, wounded and exhausted.

O’Neil followed up this great success with a series of connected pictures. In No Tears Lassie he depicts a Highland regiment soldier, bidding farewell to his sweetheart. Her tearful sadness and his reassuring brave resolve are poignant and affecting. With great simplicity, their embrace and impending separation acknowledges the human demands of Empire and the necessity of duty. The account of their emotions feels truthful. O’Neil was also a greatly gifted technician and the picture is beautifully crafted, the soft rosiness of the woman’s cheek and the glistening tear in her eye expressed in paint quite brilliantly.

Oil on board 14 x 12 inches (35.5 x 30.5 cm)

52 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1857 The Times review of O’Neil’s Eastward Ho! described: In Mr O’Neil’s picture the element of pain is more delicately blended. Hope and aspiration are busy among these departing soldiers, and if mothers and wives, and sisters and sweethearts, go down the side sorrowing, it is a sorrow in which there is no despair, and no stain of sin and frailty.

Samuel Palmer and The Fine Art Society

Two men who figured in The Fine Art Society’s early years, John Ruskin and F.G. Stephens, had a high opinion of Palmer’s work. Ruskin praised him in Modern Painters and Stephens, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, made the first critical assessment of Palmer’s early work in the catalogue of the memorial exhibition held at the gallery in 1881. In his essay Stephens compared the young Palmer to Keats and the later one to Tennyson.

The comparison with two poets is significant, as in his art Palmer responded to the landscape like a poet, and indeed poetry was often his inspiration, Milton especially.

It was not his intention to record the appearance of the landscape but to convey the experience of it, and a sense of how it affected him. Thus his paintings and etchings were highly original, a departure from the landscape tradition.

For a man who was a devoted member of the Church of England and conservative in many of his views, it is interesting that he so admired the radical William Blake, who held many contrary opinions. It seems equally contradictory that Palmer should have founded The Ancients in 1824, pursuing an ‘alternative’ lifestyle in the rural village of Shoreham in Kent. It was one of the earliest of the artistic groups which grew up in the nineteenth century: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood followed in 1848.

The contradictions in Palmer’s views and actions may explain, as well as his works themselves, his continued relevance. He was both modern and traditional, innovative and inspired by the past. He in turn has inspired many artists who followed him, including Paul Nash, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, who described him as ‘a sort of English Van Gogh.’ In fact in 1949 Kenneth Clark was moved to say that Palmer had been ‘almost too influential.’

The exhibition of Samuel Palmer’s work which was staged at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005–06, was a reminder of Palmer’s central position in British landscape art. It demonstrated that, after Shoreham, his art was always highly individual 54 | the fine art society 1876–2016

and shows an artist constantly absorbed in his subjects.

In later life, particularly in his etchings, the intensity of his earlier vision returned.

The entire etched output of Samuel Palmer consists of twelve finished plates, a probationary plate for membership of The Etching Club, and four works unfinished when he died. Perhaps no artist with so small an oeuvre has shown such originality and had such influence. Although Palmer loved etching he struggled to find a way to make it financially rewarding.

The Fine Art Society published two of his prints, The Bellman and Opening the Fold, and staged the first major exhibition of his work, his memorial show in 1881. This was the occasion when the paintings in the Milton cycle, commissioned by Ruskin’s lawyer, Leonard Rowe Valpy, were exhibited for the first time.

Valpy wrote an extensive commentary on them and showed his satisfaction in the completion of a project he had proposed in 1863. Palmer considered them to be his ultimate achievement in watercolour.

Both as a painter and as a printmaker Samuel Palmer rekindled interest in pastoral art, a genre which had become largely unfashionable in his time. At the end of his life he translated and illustrated Virgil’s Eclogues, a fundamental text. William Vaughan in his definitive study of the artist, published last year, points to a recent assessment by Mark Abley: ‘Something new had entered English Painting: the willingness to make pastoral landscape a vehicle for intense turbulent emotion.’

A contemporary critic, P.G. Hamerton, who had published an article on the artist and one of his etchings in the 1872 edition of The Portfolio, also wrote in the 1880 edition of Etchers and Etching: ‘There is more feeling, and insight, and knowledge in one twig drawn by his hand, than in the life’s production of many a wellknown artist. Words cannot express the quality of such work as his … the work of his old age is like a great fine fruit which has been in the sun for many days.’

GORDON COOKE a celebration | 55

24 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 Landscape with Windmill c.1851

Three watercolours of landscapes showing a windmill are listed in Raymond Lister’s Catalogue Raisonné.

A.H. Palmer thought these were ‘possibly made at Margate, where in the Early Fifties, there were several [windmills]’. This work seems closer to the watercolour in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, which depicts a landscape near Pulborough, Sussex.

Watercolour, signed S. Palmer, lower right, on paper mounted on board 71/4 x 161/4 inches (18.5 x 41.2 cm) Exhibited: London, Thos. Agnew & Sons, no.3074

56 | the fine art society 1876–2016

25 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 In Vintage Time, 1861

Following his marriage in 1837, and a two year ­honeymoon in Italy, his work became distinguished by a brightness and clarity inspired by the light of the Mediterranean. The landscapes that he produced over the next three decades, executed in watercolour, gouache, chalk, pencil and gum Arabic, are among his most appealing works. In 1843 Palmer was elected an Associate of the Old Watercolour Society.

This fine watercolour, depicting a peasant family returning home at sunset with a cart laden with grapes, was exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society in 1861.

It may have been intended to be as a pair with the following sheet of the same size, In the Chequered Shade, which was also exhibited at the OWCS that year.

The format of these watercolours is what Palmer called the ‘little long’, which was his preferred size for the works of his middle and later years, as it allowed the artist to portray a panoramic landscape.

The romantic Italianate landscape and strong colours, as well as the stippled effect and the extensive pencil underdrawing, are all typical of Palmer’s later work, as is the rich technique. As William Vaughan has noted of Palmer’s work of this period, ‘He seems to have ­considered new ways of extending the power and range of watercolour… He regularly added body colour and chalk to give his paints density… By these methods he was able to retain a remarkable amount of purity of tone and delicacy of detail. His concern to use the best possible materials, the most reliable of pigments, was probably necessary in order for these effects to work.

All in all, Palmer’s later watercolours are remarkable for their complexity.’

58 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Watercolour, heightened with gouache and gum Arabic, over an underdrawing in pencil; signed and dated S. PALMER 1861 in brown ink lower left 7¾ x 16¾ in (19.6 x 42.9 cm) Provenance: Walker’s Galleries, London, 1952; acquired from them by a private collector; then by descent Literature: ‘Society of Painters in Water Colours [Second and Concluding Notice]’, The Illustrated London News, 8 June 1861, p.540; A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher, 1892, [1972 ed.], p.411, no.107; R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, p.188, no.582 (as ‘Untraced since 1861’) Exhibited: London, Society of Painters in Water Colours, 1861, no.216; London, Walker’s Galleries, 48th Annual Exhibition of Early English Water-Colours, 1952, no.86 (as The End of Day)

26 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 In the Chequered Shade, 1861

The title of this watercolour is taken from the 17th century English poet John Milton’s pastoral ode to L’Allegro, published in 1645. Milton’s work was a constant influence on Samuel Palmer throughout his life, and his work is filled with references to images found in his poetry.

The high viewpoint, looking down on an Italianate landscape, and the interest in effects of light and shade are typical features of Palmer’s work of the period.

One review of the 1861 exhibition noted that ‘one of the most original and remarkable landscapists in the room is Mr. Samuel Palmer, who, besides throwing an air of poetry over the scenes he represents, peoples them with figures perfectly well drawn, and with a classic style about them which reminds one of an earlier and more learned school of landscape-art. Like the generality of the artists of our day, he is too much devoted to one peculiar aspect of atmosphere – glowing sunsets, which, however, he manages so as to produce a considerable amount of variety. After the Storm (183), In Vintage Time (216) and Sunset in the Mountains (226) are all examples eminently deserving the high character we have specified.’

Another anonymous review said: ‘Mr Samuel Palmer contributes his usual number of drawings, which still present his well-known merits; but we are happy to say on a more modified style of art… The Chequered Shade is a more pleasing and successful production, in which the light is brilliant, broad and well distributed, fading in its vividness, and increasing in its fitfulness on the figures in the foreground.’

Such watercolours as these not only evoke Palmer’s experiences of Italy, but also often combine elements and motifs from his travels in Shoreham, the West Country and Wales.

60 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Watercolour, heightened with gouache and gum Arabic, over an underdrawing in pencil; indistinctly signed and dated S. PALMER / 1861 in brown ink lower right 8 x 17 in (20.2 x 43.2 cm) Provenance: Walker’s Galleries, London, 1952; acquired from them by a private collector; then by descent Literature: ‘Society of Painters in Water’, Building News, 10 May 1861, p.388; A. H. Palmer, Samuel Palmer: A Memoir, 1882, p.87; A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher, 1892, [1972 ed.], p.411, no.105; R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, p.189, no.586 (as ‘Untraced since 1861’) Exhibited: London, Society of Painters in Water Colours, 1861, no.133; London, Walker’s Galleries, 48th Annual Exhibition of Early English Water-Colours, 1952, no.85 (as Noon – Resting Time)

27 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 Going to Evening Church, 1874

Across a field of ripe corn, worshippers walk to church on a late summer evening. As a staunch Christian, Palmer would have been profoundly inspired by this idea and, in his mind’s eye, he saw a vision made up of remembered landscapes: Shoreham, Devon, Wales and Italy. In his imagination these places merged and this scene took shape. The subject recalls his earlier Shoreham painting, Coming from Evening Church 1830, bought by the Tate Gallery in 1922, shortly before the revival of interest in Palmer’s work led to an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum which so affected the rising generation of artists, such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper.

Palmer wrote of churches “which are, to the Christian’s eye, the most charming points of an English landscape – gems of sentiment for which our woods and green slopes, and hedgerow elms, are the lovely and appropriate setting.” He used watercolour as others used oil paint, and his technical virtuosity resulted in paintings which are luminous, intense and dense. They invite the viewer to follow the artist into its centre.

This work belonged to Joseph Overbury, a stockbroker, who bought it from the Old Watercolour Society exhibition in 1874. Overbury was also the owner of the extraordinary group of six sepia drawings painted in 1825, bought by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 1941 from his son Giles. He also loaned two early paintings to the memorial exhibition held at The Fine Art Society in 1881, The Sleeping Shepherd (Lister 179) and Scene at Underriver or The Hop Garden (Lister 170), then titled A Kentish Hop-Garden.

The last period of Palmer’s career was marked by growing critical appreciation for the poetry of his idyllic landscapes. This followed the commission from Leonard Rowe Valpy, John Ruskin’s lawyer, to paint a series of watercolours based on Milton’s early poems, L’Allegro and Il Peneroso. Palmer had been planning this landscape cycle for some time, and needed only the impetus of a patron to start. A succession of watercolours and etchings resulted.

62 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Watercolour over pencil, bodycolour, scratching out and gum arabic, signed Samuel Palmer, lower left 12 x 27½ inches (30 x 70 cm) Provenance: J.W. Overbury, bought from the artist 1874; Mrs O.M. Pilcher; J.G. Pilcher; A.A. Schumann Exhibited: London, Society of Painters in Water Colour, 1874 (91) titled Old England’s Sunday Evening; London, Grosvenor Gallery, Winter Exhibition; Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Samuel Palmer … An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, 1961 (72) Literature: Raymond Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the works of Samuel Palmer, 1988 p.208, no.669

28 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 The Skylark, 1850

This was Palmer’s first real etching and he selected a motif which he had already painted in a sepia of the 1830s (Lister 140), exhibited at The Fine Art Society in the 1881 Memorial Exhibition [5], and an oil of circa 143 (Lister 375, now in the collection of the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff). There is a preparatory study for the etching in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr and Mrs Lewis B. Williams Collection (Lister 497); the subject was inspired by Milton’s poem L’Allegro (II, lines 41–44): To hear the Lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, From his watch-towre in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise …

Palmer referred to this work as ‘Dawn’ until it was published in 1857, and it is this time of day, as the sun rises to illuminate the landscape and the skylark above, in which his sense of a re-awakened vision may be felt.

It is a work both small in scale but intense in detail, showing great technical skill.

In The Portfolio, 1872, F.G. Stephens wrote: ‘The refined spirit of this little gem of art and poetry baffle words of description. Ineffable is the way in which the rays of the sun interpose between us and the ribbed clouds of fugitive night, giving an idea of palpitation in perfect accord with the outpouring of the voice of the bird, and the awakening landscape’.

64 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Etching, printed in black ink on chine appliqué, on a backing sheet of wove paper, as published in Etchings for the Art Union of London by the Etching Club, 1857 plate 17: in the seventh state (of eight) 43/4 x 37/8 inches (12.1 x 9.9 cm) sheet 143/8 x 101/4 inches (36.4 x 26.1 cm) Reference: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, p.239, no.E2 vii/viii

29 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 Christmas, 1850

This proof was probably printed on Palmer’s own press, set up in 1873. It was with Christmas that his son, A.H. Palmer, made his first attempts at retroussage, under instruction from Frederick Goulding, the finest printer of his time. There was no edition until it was included as the frontispiece in Samuel Palmer, A Memoir

by A.H. Palmer, 1882, published by The Fine Art Society.

Developing the theme expressed in The Skylark and The Herdsman’s Cottage, in Christmas Palmer has the challenge of combining the lamplight shining in the cottage and the moonlight from above, in a single image.

As with many of the etchings by members of the Etching Club, which the artist had recently joined, it illustrates a poem, in this case a sonnet by John Codrington Bampfylde (1754–1796): Old Christmas comes, to close the waned year, And ay the Shepherd’s heart to make right glad; Who when his teeming flocks are homeward had, To blazing hearth repairs, and nut-brown beer, And views, well-pleas’d, the ruddy prattlers dear Hug the grey mongrel; meanwhile maid and lad Squabble for roasted crab[apple]s.

66 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Etching, signed in pencil Samuel Palmer, lower right, printed in black ink on wove paper, a proof in the third state (of five), probably printed between 1873 and 1877 47/8 x 4 inches (12.5 x 10.2 cm) sheet 83/4 x 67/8 inches (22.2 x 17.5 cm) Provenance: J. Christopherson Exhibited: London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Etchings & Lithographs by 19th & 20th Century Masters, 1963 (46) Reference: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, pp.240–241, E4 iii/v

30 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 The Vine, 1852

The Vine or Plumpy Bacchus, an alternative title used by R.G. Alexander in his catalogue, illustrates lines from Antony and Cleopatra, and was published in Songs and Ballads of Shakespeare Illustrated by the Etching Club in 1853: Come thou monarch of the Vine Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne: In thy vats our cares be drown’d; In thy grapes our hairs be crown’d; Cup us till the world go round; Cup us till the world go round!

It is classical in mood, and the upper subject shows a bacchanalian scene. In the lower subject, putti collect bunches of grapes from a vine entwined around a massive tree trunk. It is reminiscent of the work of Palmer’s friend and fellow ‘Ancient’, Edward Calvert, whose wood engraving The Cyder Feast (1828) celebrates the same spirit of hedonism. Twenty-four years separated the creation of the two works, but Palmer always kept Calvert’s engravings in mind.

Palmer was elected to the Etching Club in 1850, and participated in a number of their collaborative publications. Other members included Charles West Cope, Thomas Creswick, Francis Seymour Haden, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Richard Redgrave and Henry Townsend.

68 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Etching, printed in black and red ink on chine appliqué mounted on a backing sheet, probably a proof before publication, as the sheet is larger than it is as published in Songs and Ballads of Shakespeare Illustrated by the Etching Club: the large paper edition measures 41.1 x 27.8 cm 12 x 81/2 inches (30.4 x 21.7 cm) sheet 233/8 x 17 inches (59.2 x 43 cm) Reference: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, p.241, no.E5 iv/iv

31 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 The Sleeping Shepherd’ c.1854

32 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 The Sleeping Shepherd’ c.1854

The scene is set in the early morning, as the sun rises behind a hill on which oxen are pulling a plough while rooks swoop over a wood in a dip beneath. A flock of sheep stand huddled together. The shepherd lies on the floor of a shed outside which a vine winds around a trellis. The right hand side of the composition is shaded, while the left is touched by the early morning sun.

The tranquillity of the foreground contrasts with the ploughman bent to his work on the distant hill.

Cat.31 is an unrecorded proof, which belonged to Palmer’s closest and lifelong friend George Richmond, shows that at an early stage the artist intended to include the title and two lines of verse. As with The Skylark, in The Sleeping Shepherd Palmer returned to a subject he had drawn and painted several times before, most recently in about 1854 (Lister 539). The essentials remain, although a dog in the Fitzwilliam Museum painting has been replaced with a book by the shepherd’s feet.

Other elements have been altered in the etching: the labouring ploughman is brought nearer and birds fly above the land. It appears to be one of the works in progress referred to at the meeting of the Etching Club in November 1854, and went by other titles including ‘Early Ploughman’ before it was published in 1857.

Etching, printed in black ink on chine collé, a proof in the first state (of four); unidentified collector’s mark SPB, recto

Etching, printed in black ink on wove paper, trimmed at the edge of the subject and attached to a backing sheet, an unrecorded proof with an engraved title and verse “The Sleeping Shepherd” “The ploughman seeks the upland dawn O’erwatched, the shepherd nods at dawn”, with the couplet inscribed in pencil by the artist, below 33/4 x 3 inches (9.5 x 7.6 cm) backing sheet 83/4 x 73/8 inches (22.3 x 18.8 cm) Provenance: George Richmond; and by descent Reference: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, p.242, no.E6

70 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Provenance: Alexander Dunbar Exhibited: London, Leicester Galleries, Etchings by W.R. Sickert And Engravings, Etchings & Lithographs by 19th & 20th Century Masters, 1967 (139) Literature: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, p.242, no.E6 i/iv

33 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 The Rising Moon c.1855

This work marks a radical departure from the small plates Palmer had previously etched. It is almost certainly the ‘new etching’ he presented to the Etching Club on 29 October 1855, and its scale and landscape format would be the standard for his future printmaking practice.

An English village nestles in a valley with a screen of cypress trees above and a herd of sheep in the foreground, dwarfing the shepherd behind, his crook over his shoulder. Elements of Shoreham, Devon, Wales, Italy and perhaps memories of Margate, combine in a harmony of pastoral calm.

72 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Etching, printed in black ink on india paper on a backing sheet, in the seventh state (of nine), as published in Etchings for the Art Union of London by the Etching Club, 1857 plate 10 57/8 x 83/4 inches (14.7 x 22.2 cm) sheet 101/2 x 141/4 inches (26.7 x 36.4 cm) Reference: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, pp.242–243, no.E7 vii/ix

34 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 The Early Ploughman c.1861

The Early Ploughman’s history began when Palmer was living in Kensington and he worked on the plate intermittently for the rest of his life, finally re-biting it in January 1880. In the intervening years it was published in P.G. Hamerton’s Etching and Etchers, in 1868 (in the fourth state), and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873 (a seventh state printed by Frederick Goulding) as ‘The morning spread upon the mountains’ (1296).

74 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Etching, an early proof, printed in black ink on stout wove paper, inscribed ‘17. Early Ploughman W.P.(4) Working proof 4 ? not required for Exhibition’, verso, and annotated by Harold Wright, recto, probably between the fourth and fifth states 7 x 97/8 inches (17.9 x 25.1 cm) sheet 111/4 x 143/4 inches (28.5 x 37.7 cm) Reference: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, pp.244–245, E9

35 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 The Lonely Tower, 1879

Inscribed on an accompanying label ‘June 16 1882. This impression of “The Lonely Tower” was given given me

by Samuel Palmer, see his letter to me Dec. 1880. where he said it had been put aside for me F.G. Stephens.’ Also the lines from Il Penseroso which the artist illustrates The subjects which Palmer chose for his etchings were all close to his heart but perhaps none more so than The Lonely Tower. It came to be regarded as his finest etching by many of his contemporaries, but unusually the principal feature of the landscape was not only a particular place, but one which he could see in the distance from the room in Furze Hill House, Redhill where he had made his studio. The hill was close to the spot were his son had died.

In his last years, Palmer’s work became more careful, meditative and richly laboured, as William Vaughan has described it. F.G. Stephens had compared the work of the Shoreham period with Keats, and the later work with Tennyson. The melancholy is combined with richness and depth, and both The Bellman and The Lonely Tower appear complete as works of art and as statements of emotion long considered.

76 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Etching, signed in pencil S. Palmer, lower right, and inscribed Trial Proof, lower left, printed in black ink on wove paper, with the blindstamp A.H.P. Private Press, lower left corner of sheet; inscribed verso AP Club E 21st April 1879; in the fourth state (of seven) 71/2 x 10 inches (18.9 x 25.2 cm) sheet 123/4 x 163/4 inches (32.5 x 42.3 cm) Provenance: Frederic George Stephens, a gift from the artist 1880 Literature: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, pp.247–48, no.E12 iv/vii

36 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 The Bellman, 1879

The artist had known the lines from Milton which refer to the bellman since childhood, and he had already realised a vision of a figure entering a village as darkness settles in The Weary Ploughman. The image suggests a symbolic interpretation as well as the description in the poem, but most importantly for Palmer it brought back memories of Shoreham. He wrote to his friend, the artist and critic Philip (P.G.) Hamerton about the etched version: ‘I am very glad that you like my Bellman … It is breaking out of village-fever long after contact – a dream of that genuine village where I mused away some of my best years, designing what nobody would care for, and contracting, among good books, a fastidious and unpopular taste’.

In a letter to Leonard Valpy of 20 October 1864, Palmer wrote that the Milton project might be expanded to include prints, although it would be fifteen years before this came about: ‘The Etching dream came over me in this way. I am making my working sketches a quarter of the size of the drawings, and was surprised and not displeased to notice the variety – the difference of each from all the rest. I saw within a set of highly-finished etchings the size of Turner’s Liber Studiorum; and as finished as my moonlight with cypresses; a set making a book – a compact block of work which I would fain hope might live when I am with the fallen leaves.’

The Bellman was the first print by the artist published

by The Fine Art Society, and it would have been through an introduction from Valpy that this came about. Valpy also wrote an essay for the catalogue of the memorial exhibition and was, with the artist’s son, author of Samuel Palmer, a Memoir, published by The Fine Art Society in 1882.

78 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Etching, signed in pencil Samuel Palmer, lower left, printed in black ink on laid paper, with the blindstamp ‘Published by the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond St London W.’, lower margin edge, in the fifth state (of seven), with the remarque, published in an edition of 60 71/2 x 97/8 inches (19 x 25.1 cm) sheet 9 x 141/4 inches (23 x 36.2 cm) Provenance: Alexander Dunbar, bought at the Leicester Galleries Exhibited: London, Leicester Galleries, Etchings by W.R. Sickert And Engravings, Etchings & Lithographs by 19th & 20th Century Masters, 1967 (137) Literature: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, pp.246–47, no.E11 v/vii

37 SAMUEL PALMER 1805–1881 Opening the Fold, 1880

It was Palmer’s long-held wish to publish his own translation of Virgil’s Eclogues. He wished to emphasise the ‘pastoral essence’ of the original, one of the greatest works of Latin poetry. The project was ultimately completed by his son Herbert, who published his father’s text illustrated with etchings and facsimiles of drawings, posthumously in 1883 and 1884.

The artist only completed one etching for the book, Opening the Fold which was published as a precursor by The Fine Art Society in 1880, illustrating Eclogue VIII: Scarce with her rosy fingers had the dawn From glimmering heaven the vale of night withdrawn, Or folded flocks were loose to browse anew O’er mountain thyme or trefoil wet with dew, When leaning sad an olive stem beside, These, his last numbers, hapless Damon plied.

80 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Etching, signed in pencil, S. Palmer, lower right, printed in black ink on wove paper, in the fifth state (of ten), as published by The Fine Art Society 1880 61/2 x 91/8 inches (16.5 x 23.2 cm) Reference: R. Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, 1988, p.248, no.E13 v/x

38 JOHN PIPER CH 1903–1992 Tall Forms on Dark Blue, 1937

For more than a year before he created Tall Forms in Dark Blue Piper had been making purely abstract paintings in primary colours, much affected by his friends Hélion and Calder in Paris. But Piper then took a crucial step: constructing a free-standing sculpture of painted shapes, known now only from his photographs. He made this and other paintings of this object. The delight of Tall Forms in Dark Blue is that it is both abstract and a depiction of the secret space of this painted construction. It is beautiful and complex to look at, with contrasted shiny and matt paint and shapes cut away from the canvas, which is glued over a board.

Looking back across Piper’s career, it does not now seem to us surpris­ing that he found himself unable to remove the subject from his work for very long, but when seen in the context of the dogmatic and theoreti­cal arguments between the propo­nents of abstraction and figuration, Piper’s move away from non-objective abstraction was clearly a very definite statement to make to his friends and contemporaries. Whilst the paintings of 1935 and 1936 had been rigorous in their abstraction, the paintings of 1937 begin to show references to the real world creeping back in.

Further evidence of Piper’s frustra­tion with the purer forms of abstrac­tion (and, indeed, also the excesses of surrealism) is clear in his essay ‘Lost, A Valuable Object’ that was published in 1937 in The Painter’s Object, edited by his wife.

In this, Piper clearly strives to return to a form of subject, not at this point a fully-figurative subject, but one which has a meaning beyond pure geometrical relationships. He is clear that he does not want to just reproduce fact, but to bring out some of the qualities of such a subject and use these within his compositions.

Tall Forms might have been included in Piper’s first solo exhibition in May 1938 at the London Gallery in Cork Street (an occasion shared with a Picasso exhibition on the floor above). This was an exemplary gathering of Piper’s latest work, and he displayed beside each other his abstracts and collages of the coast, making apparent their shared abstraction and depicted space.

82 | the fine art society 1876–2016

2012 John Piper 1903–1992 shown at The Fine Art Society.

In his introduction to the catalogue, David Fraser Jenkins wrote: The key work in this exhibition is the most unexpected, the one seemingly most unlike the others, the early abstract painting Tall Forms on Dark Blue, 1937.

Before this time Piper had been a slow starter, and had not got into the Royal College of Art until his early twenties. But from then on he was an immensely quick learner …

Oil and ripolin on canvas laid on board 30 x 103/4 inches (76 x 27.5 cm) Signed and dated 1937, inscribed Abstract Composition and further inscribed on the reverse Provenance: The Leicester Galleries, London; Dr J.E.O. Mayne in 1959; Christie’s London, October 1997, (21), Private Collection Exhibited: London, The Leicester Galleries, Artists of Fame and Promise, July-August 1959, no.96 (as Abstract Composition (1937)); Durham, Grey College, University of Durham, John Piper: A Retrospective, April-May 1999, no.2, illustrated p.4; London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, John Piper in the 1930s: Abstraction on the Beach, April-June 2003, no.44, illustrated p.132 and 133 (detail).

Literature: S. John Woods (intro.), John Piper, Paintings, Drawings and Theatre Designs 1932–1954, Faber & Faber, London 1955, illustrated pl.26.

39 HERBERT GEORGE PONTING 1871–1935 The ‘Terra Nova’ at the Icefoot, Cape, 1912/13

This photograph is one of Herbet Ponting’s most famous works which he took on Captain Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition, a race to the South Pole, between 1910 and 1913. Though the mission to the Pole was successful, the British did not win the race, and Scott and his companions tragically died on the return journey. In the face of criticism for the expedition, Ponting felt obliged to prove that other important achievements had been made. Not only was he the first professional photographer to photograph the continent, Scott was the first explorer to make photography a notable department of a Polar expedition. The result of Ponting’s work was exhibited at The Fine Art Society in 1913, in a lavish catalogue unusually including illustrations.

This photograph was taken on arrival in the Antarctic.

The expedition’s vessel, The Terra Nova, a former whaling ship, was moored to the sea-ice off Cape Evans where it was unloaded. The iceberg floating in the foreground appears to loom dangerously close but this is only an illusion of perspective. What Ponting has aptly captured here is the threatening force of the Antarctic’s barren and formidable landscape.

Green toned carbon print 291/2 x 231/2 inches (75 x 59.7 cm)

84 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1913 The British Antartic Exhibition 1910–1913: Exhibition of the Photographic Pictures of Mr. Herbert G. Ponting FRGS was shown at The Fine Art Society Every day some new fact comes to light – some new obstacle which threatens the gravest obstruction. I suppose this is the reason which makes the game so well worth playing.

ROBERT FALCON SCOTT

40 Eric Ravilious 1903 – 1942 HMS Actaeon, 1942

Ravilious was appointed an Official War Artist in December 1939 and given the rank of Captain in the Royal Marines. He was attached to the Admiralty and in February 1940 reported to the Royal Dockyard at Chatham. The War sparked Ravilious to produce some of his most inventive watercolours, and he was exposed to new subject matter that fed his innate sense of design and composition.

HMS Actaeon was a floating training and research facility housing the Royal Navy torpedo school, and part of a larger shore establishment at Portsmouth named HMS Vernon. Actaeon itself was a 50-gun ‘fourth rate’ launched in 1832 and attached to the torpedo school in 1876. She had been commissioned originally as HMS Vernon but was renamed in 1886 to avoid confusion and the torpedo school took over her name.

In the Second World War, and following on from the increasing use of mines, Vernon took on responsibility for mine disposal and developing mine countermeasures. The staff were able to capture a number of enemy mines and develop successful countermeasures. A number of officers working with Vernon were awarded Distinguished Service Orders for their successes in capturing new types of mine.

Some of these were the first Royal Naval decorations of the war.

The Germans began placing booby traps in some mines to counter attempts by Vernon’s staff to capture them. One exploded in a mining shed at Vernon on 6 August 1940, killing an officer and four ratings and seriously injuring a number of other personnel.

Ravilious was attached to the torpedo school under the supervision of Lieutenant West. West was a mine disposal officer and he was one of the figures in the famous group Ravilious portrayed walking out to the shoreline to disable a washed-up magnetic mine. Decorated for his bravery by the King, West was given the watercolour of HMS Actaeon

by Ravilious in thanks for all his help while he was attached to him. In the original frame Ravilious had it put in, this watercolour has remained with West’s family ever since, and has never before been exhibited.

86 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1939 Eric Ravilious wrote enthusiastically to his friend Diana Tuely: Since I wrote the other day I have received an invitation to be a war artist for the Navy, and go to the Admiralty on Wednesday. It is a fantastic proposition to arrive on Sunday and Christmas Eve at that, but there it is, and I feel excited and throw my bonnet over the windmill.

Pencil and watercolour, signed in pencil Eric Ravilious, upper left 17¼ x 23 inches (44 x 58.5 cm) PROVENANCE: Lieutenant West RN; and by descent

41 ANNE REDPATH OBE RSA ARA RSW 1895–1965 Pink and Grey Still Life, 1942

Redpath’s still lifes of the 1940s represent some of her best work. They have balance, authority and inventiveness. Pink and Grey: Still Life is probably one of the largest still lifes that Redpath painted in her career and is a natural extension of her studies in painting various shades of white. It also demonstrates her love of the manipulation of surface texture. This she developed from her Mediterranean trips where she admired the Italian Primitives and developed a modern approach to achieving different textures in her surfaces even scraping the canvas with a small piece of chain-mail that she kept in her studio.

Oil on panel, signed Anne Redpath, lower right 32 x 36 inches (81.3 x 91.4 cm) Exhibited: Glasgow, The Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 1942 (716)

88 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1961 Anne Redpath talking in a BBC film directed by George Bruce, first shown in ‘Counterpoint’ on 31 January 1961, explained: My friends used to say ‘Of course that’s not really what is in front of Anne, she’s just made a vision of something that she has seen’, which meant that even then it wasn’t actually a completely realistic translation of what was in front of me, it was still just a kind of vision, a translation of the vision that I had seen from these white dishes, flowers, on a table, and I didn’t depart all that far from the thing in front of me. Lots of other people thought I did depart quite a distance, you know, and they didn’t like my idea of things that seemed quite real, and yet looked as if there was no law of gravity, and I have always had to explain that I wasn’t interested, and nor was a painter interested, in the laws of gravity.

42 DAVID ROBERTS RA 1796–1864 Interior of SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, 1861

David Roberts was born in Edinburgh but his success was in England and abroad. He trained as a housepainter and decorator. His speciality was topographical and architectural painting, with the detail usually being extremely accurate. He had a rare ability to paint from studies made many years earlier.

There is a variant with the same viewpoint, same date and similar size, in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, acquired in 1902; and a large, upright 1858 painting of the same subject, but from further back in the church, in Manchester City Art Gallery, acquired in 1920. The columns of the altar are covered in red damask, which indicates that the painting was made about Christmas time.

Oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, and inscribed verso To my ever dear Christine on [her] birthday 1861 [her 40th birthday] 201/2 x 291/2 inches (52 x 75 cm) Provenance: Christine Bicknell, the artist’s daughter; inherited by her husband Henry Bicknell in 1872, his sale at Christie’s 1881 Exhibited: London, The Architectural Society’s Room, Conduit Street, 1865, lent by Mrs Henry Bicknell Literature: J. Ballantine, The Life of David Roberts RA, 1866, p.253, no.250 (noted given to Mrs Bicknell).

90 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1978 The work of David Roberts was including in the ground-breaking exhibition Eastern Encounters: Orientalist Painters of the Nineteenth Century at The Fine Art Society. When Roberts first visited Venice in 1851 he commented: Venice in my opinion cannot be painted … the first ten days so bewilder you the mind cannot settle down to judge of it calmly.

43 FREDERICK CAYLEY ROBINSON ARA RWS 1862–1927 The Oak Addresses the Spirits of the Trees, 1911

An intriguing and enigmatic character, Cayley Robinson like many British artists in the early twentieth century, was influenced by the new idealism in art that was sweeping across Europe. Studying at the Académie Julian in Paris between 1891and 1894, he became deeply influenced by the artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Of his work, Robinson was particularly taken by Le pauvre pêcheur, 1881, which exhibited themes of obvious biblical resonance, coupled with what was seen at the time, as a dull palette and a radical refusal to paint from traditional perspectives.

After a visit to Florence in 1898, he took to studying the techniques of tempera painting and the work of Giotto, Mantegna and Michaelangelo. As a result much of Robinson’s paintings are characteristic of 15th century Italian works on tempera: symmetrically balanced, flattened images with much of the focus being drawn to foreground.

Caley Robinson was a deeply spiritual man and illustrated books such as The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi, 1915 and A Book of Quaker Saints, 1922. Many of the illustrations he completed had haunted and mysterious qualities, the most celebrated series being 16 works he produced to illustrate Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1911 book The Blue Bird: a fairy extravaganza in six acts, which follows a young woodcutters son on his allegorical journey towards the meaning of spiritual joy and the truth of human happiness.

Two years previously he had designed and produced the costumes and stage sets for the theatrical production at the Haymarket Theatre, and as such they are indicative of what is seen as traditional theatrical scenery.

The work is illustrative of the scene in Act III which describes the boy’s encounter with the spirits of the forest.

Watercolour and charcoal, signed Cayley Robinson 191/2 x 231/2 (49.5 x 59.7 cm) Exhibited: (probably) London, Leicester Galleries, 1911 (19); London, The Fine Art Society, 1969 (139); London, the Royal Academy, The Handley-Read Collection, 1972 (E 135); London, The Fine Art Society, The Handley-Read Collection, 1974 (66); London, The Fine Art Society, 1975 (10); London, The Fine Art Society, Scottish Painting 1777–1927, 1977 (40) 92 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1969 The exhibition The Earthly Paradise: F. Cayley Robinson, F.L. Griggs and the painters and craftsmen of the Birmingham School was held at The Fine Art Society.

The Oak comes slowly forward. He is fabulously old, crowned with mistletoe and clad in a long green gown edged with moss and lichen. He is blind; his white beard streams in the wind. He leans with one hand on a knotty stick and with the other on a young Oakland, who serves as his guide. The Blue Bird is perched on his shoulder. At his approach, the other trees draw themselves up in a row and bow respectfully.

Maurice Maeterlinck

44 PAUL SANDBY 1731–1809 Woolwich

Paul Sandby was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy and one of the preeminent British landscape painters of his time. Born in Nottingham in 1731, Sandby quickly developed his talent for draughtsmanship and joined the topographical drawing room of the Board of Ordnance at the Tower of London, where he excelled. From the 1750s to the 1770s Sandby travelled around Britain painting country houses and pastoral views, as well as ruins and mills in the landscape. He has been credited both with developing topography into art and with championing watercolour as a medium of significance in its own right. Although best known for his landscapes he was also a cruel caricaturist and rival to Hogarth.

Sandby was appointed chief drawing master at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1768 until his retirement in 1796. When there he lived in lodgings at Old Charlton in and painted a number of views of Woolwich, including this work. The tower with the flag is probably St Mary Magdalene built on the site of a medieval church between 1732 and 1739.

Watercolour and pen and ink on paper mounted on card; signed Paul Sandby lower right 18 x 24 inches (46 x 61 cm) Provenance: The Fine Art Society, London, April 1960; Mary Sayles Booker Braga Exhibited: London, Guildhall Art Gallery, Paul Sandby, 1725–1809, 1960 (53)

94 | the fine art society 1876–2016

2009 Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain - A Bicentenary Exhibition was shown at Scottish National Gallery.

The ‘only man of genius’, who has painted ‘real views from Nature in this country’.

Thomas Gainsborough

45 WALTER RICHARD SICKERT 1860–1942 Street Scene, c.1882

Street Scene is one of Sickert’s earliest paintings. Wendy Baron in her Catalogue Raisonné of Sickert’s paintings and drawings has suggested that the inscription ‘To Miss Maud’ might refer to Whistler’s model and mistress Maud Franklin, but that more probably it refers to Miss Helen Maud, an actress Sickert admired. Baron has suggested if Miss Maud was the recipient it must have been gifted prior to her marriage to Herbert Beerbohm in September 1882. Although the location has not been identified the architecture appears English rather than Continental.

Sickert’s approach was greatly influenced by the cutting edge of French impressionism, notably the series of paintings Monet made of the effects of sunlight on architecture, but made it wholly his own with his richer, granular palette and innovative composition.

Oil on panel, signed W.Sickert and inscribed To Miss Maud, lower left 93/8 x 61/8 inches (24 x 15.9 cm) Provenance: Helen Maud, a gift from the artist; Sotheby’s 14 December 1960 (129); G Strauss; David Gibbs; The Hon Mrs Michael Lyle; The Riemore Trust; Private Collection Exhibited: London, The Fine Art Society, Sickert Loan Exhibition, 1973 (5) Literature: W. Baron, Sickert: Paintings & Drawings, 2006 p.152, no.14

96 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1881 The first of Sickert’s paintings ever to be exhibited in public was hung in a mixed show at The Fine Art Society.

46 WALTER RICHARD SICKERT 1860–1942 Outside the Frari, Venice, c.1939

Walter Richard Sickert, ever inventive and experimental, turned his approach to painting on its head during his last years as an artist. From 1927 onwards, after a lifetime spent painting from directly observed drawings, he plundered a remarkable range of secondary sources to establish the design of his paintings. Newspaper photographs were the basis of striking life-size portraits; publicity photographs and cinema stills the basis of powerful, often close-up, cinema and theatre paintings; snapshots taken by his third wife, Thérèse Lessore, the basis of his 1930s landscapes in Thanet and Bath; blackand-white woodcuts and engravings by his favourite Victorian illustrators the basis of colourful ‘Echoes’. His sense of adventure when painting never flagged. Every source, however prosaic, was the springboard for daring recreations.

Occasionally prints by earlier masters caught Sickert’s eye. A notable example is his painting Lucretia of 1932–3 (private collection) derived from an etching and engraving by Bernard Picart, published in 1734, after a painting of Tarquin and Lucretia c.1570 by the Venetian painter Jacopo Palma il Giovane (1544–1628). Outside the Frari is one of two very late Venetian paintings also based on old prints, in this case an etching included in Vol.1 of Il Gran Teatro di Venezia first published in 1717

by Domenico Lovisa. The 65 topographical views of Venice gathered together by Lovisa included, as plate 9, Veduta del Campo detto de’ Frari by Andrea Zucchi after Giuseppe Valeriani.

Venice meant much to Sickert. He lived and painted there in 1895, 1896, 1900, 1901 and 1903–4. His first wife left him in Venice. A few years later, on his return to Venice, he wooed and proposed marriage to another – but was turned down. He not only painted its greater and lesser sites, but first developed his characteristic interiors with figures there, posing local prostitutes in his rooms at Calle dei Frati. His command of Italian – including the Venetian dialect – was fluent. He visited the city for the last time in December 1929, probably to 98 | the fine art society 1876–2016

discuss the one-man showing of his work in the British Section at the Biennale of 1930. He did not paint there in 1930: indeed Venice had not been a theatre for his own work since 1904. Yet in his last 15 years, something drove him to revisit Venice in his imagination.

Outside the Frari includes no figures derived from extraneous contemporary sources. However, in line with his intense focus upon the organisation of his compositions during the 1930s, Sickert manipulated the original print to strengthen the potency of its design. It is as if he used the cropping and zooming facilities of a modern camera to produce a radical edit of his source material. Just as Sickert all but eliminated the contexts captured in the source photographs of his late full-length portraits in order to bring the subjects right up to the surface of his canvas, so he mercilessly cropped Zucchi’s image. He took off a little at the top, more on the right (two bays of the flanking building) and about a third of the total on the left (excising much of the campo beside the campanile). By honing in on a tighter area, the sense of bustle and the impact of the monumental archtecture which dwarfs the figures are hugely reinforced. The lively incidents are all imported from the engraving.

They include in the foreground a man in a wheelchair being pushed from the back and towed by a man with a rope in the front; women selling vegetables or fruit from baskets on the bridge; a dog sniffing another in the right foreground; and in the middle ground a man in a boat being helped ashore while behind them another man walks gracefully balancing a filled sack on his head.

The visible squaring-up, used to facilitate the transfer from the engraving to a much larger canvas, strengthens rather than detracts from the monumental design.

Robert Emmons, Sickert’s first biographer, his one-time pupil, and first owner of Outside the Frari, cited its date as 1939 when it was exhibited in 1950 at the Leicester Galleries. It is exceptionally close in style, handling and presentation to Temple Bar, painted c.1940, which the artist’s sister-in-law as well as his dealer at

47 WALTER RICHARD SICKERT 1860–1942 Tipperary, 1914

the Beaux Arts Gallery compared to a very late Titian, a comparison which also holds good for Outside the Frari.

The freedom with which the paint has been applied as an interwoven pattern of broad brushmarks on a coarselywoven canvas, the dominance of ochres with flickering creamy highlights, above all Sickert’s sheer energy and creativeness are indeed Titianesque. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that when Sickert painted Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, albeit at second hand through Zucchi, he would have been reminded of Titian whose early masterpiece, Assunta, hangs over its high altar.

The scene painted by Sickert exists to this day, but the bridge has been heavily modified in the interests of safety. The stepped footbridges of the eighteenth century now have high and aesthetically clumsy balustrades.

Outside the Frari has had a distinguished provenance, including – besides Emmons – the playwright Wolf Mankowitz and the actor Lawrence Harvey. They may well have been attracted not only by the sheer beauty of its colour and texture and brushwork, but also by its dramatic qualities: it is not hard to see it as a set for The Merchant of Venice. WENDY BARON Oil on canvas 301/8 x 251/8 inches ( 76.3 x 63.9 cm) Provenance: Dr. Robert Emmons; His sale; 1 June 1956, lot 124; Wolf Mankowitz; Lawrence Harvey; Michael Parkin, 1974; Sotheby’s, London, 2 November 1983, lot 34; Mr. Simon Richard; Sotheby’s, Johannesburg, 6 November 1984, lot 240; Private Collection, Asia Exhibited: London, The Leicester Galleries, Paintings and Drawings by W.R. Sickert from the Collection of Dr Robert Emmons, May–June 1950 (21), here dated 1939 Literature: W. Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, 2006, p.559, cat. no. 774; W. Baron, The Sources of Two Late Views of Venice (adapted from an essay published by Baron in The Burlington Magazine, September 2015)

100 | the fine art society 1876–2016

Sickert made a number of paintings and drawings of his young model Emily Powell, who he nicknamed ‘Chicken’, playing the grand piano in his studio in the first winter of the First World War. She was the daughter of his landlord of his studio, 26 Red Lion Square, with whom he was clearly familiar before becoming a tenant there. He titled at least three of these, after the popular wartime song It’s a long way to Tipperary. As Baron suggests this could be the painting Sickert referred to in a letter to Miss Sands saying ‘Chicken has been playing the contes d’Hoffman while I have been painting her reflection at the piano’. Where other studies show only the pianist, this work employs a highly inventive composition which depicts the actual and reflected worlds side by side. These parallel realities divide gendered roles and spaces in wartime: the female figure is at leisure, in the interior, whilst the male figure is a soldier in uniform looking out to the public arena.

Oil on canvas, signed and dated Sickert – 1914, lower right 20 x 16 inches (51 x 40.5 cm) Provenance: Martin Oliphant; Sotheby’s 26 November 1969 (346); Rutland Gallery; Mrs Dudley Samuel; her sale Christie’s 27.3.97 (36); Private Collection Literature: W. Baron, Sickert, 1973, no.352, fig.248; W. Baron & R. Shone, Sickert Paintings, 1992, p.244, fig.169; W. Baron, Sickert Paintings & Drawings, 2006, pp.427–28, no.447

1973 The first one-man show of Sickert at The Fine Art Society: a loan exhibition to celebrate the publication of Wendy Baron’s first monograph on the artist.

One of the astonishing features of Sickert’s late work is the sense it gives of renewal, of range, and of a degree of freshness in terms of the art context of his time which are remarkable in one of his age.

Richard Morphet

48 GRAHAM SUTHERLAND OM 1903–1980 Study for ‘The Origins of the Land’ 1950

The mural The Origins of the Land was commissioned in for the ‘Land of Britain’ pavilion at ‘The Festival of Britain’ held on London’s South Bank in 1951. The festival had been conceived by the government to celebrate British culture and to mark the beginning of a new era, following the hardships of the Second World War. The canvas, measuring 14 x 10 feet (4.25 x 32.7 metres), was painted in the basement of the Tate Gallery and in 1952 was returned there and entered the collection of the Tate, presented by the Arts Council of Great Britain.

The artist submitted designs for the mural in July 1950 but they were returned for further discussion. As a result there were a considerable number of studies relating to The Origins of the Land, fifty-three of which were shown at the Redfern Gallery in 1952. There was also an exhibition of studies at Curt Valentin Gallery in New York the following year.

The commission coincided to some degree with the themes Sutherland was then exploring in his work. In a letter he wrote to the Tate Gallery in 1957 he described his painting: Broadly speaking the picture is divided as if in sections through the crust of the earth. You will notice the layers one on top of the other. It is as if you were looking at a cliff face. In the foreground the forms (and this is a very generalized statement) represent principals of organic growth, the pterodactyl flying is a hint of pre-history, while the rocks at the top of the cliff are intended to represent the action of water and wind on the earth’s surface. There are some flames at the extreme base and they naturally represent a sort of symbolism of heat of the interior of the earth.

Watercolour, signed and dated Sutherland 1950, lower left 10 x 211/4 inches (25.5 x 54 cm)

102 | the fine art society 1876–2016

2003 The centenary exhibition Graham Sutherland 1903–1980: Forms in the Landscape was shown at The Fine Art Society.

He does not, like the ‘abstract’ artist, give up imitation in favour of a new pictorial reality; on the contrary, he seems to imitate objects with the most literal accuracy; only these objects have no material existence. And yet they convince us that they could exist. This is due partly to the moment of vision in which they were identified, and partly to his skill in endowing them with the structure and articulation of living things. kenneth clark

49 JAMES JACQUES JOSEPH TISSOT 1836–1902 Emigrants, c.1875

This painting is one of the most important images of Tissot’s series of depicting the Thames and its docks.

It is known in this particularly beautiful, small version and a larger version (now lost), as well as one of his most successful etchings. The subject, one of the greatest Victorian social problems, was very personal to Tissot as he was able to convey his taste for imbalance and estrangement. The model is Kathleen Newton, Tissot’s life partner.

A painting titled The Émigrants was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879, where it was described

by The Times as one of Tissot’s ‘smaller pictures… an old sailor helping an emigrant mother overlaiden with children down the gangway-ladder, in which the background is formed by the intricate rigging of the ships in the dock’.

Oil on paper laid on panel, signed J.J. Tissot, lower right 153/4 x 71/4 (40 x 18.4 cm) Provenance: Thomas Agnew & Son, London (CM6756); Private Collection, New York Exhibited: London, Grosvenor Gallery, 1879 (93) Literature: ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, The Times, 2 May 1879, p.3; M.J. Wentworth, James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of his Prints, 1978, p.199, fig.45f; M. Wentworth, James Tissot, 1984, p.104, pl.83; C. Wood, Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques-Joseph Tissot 1836–1902, 1986, p.66, pl.63; W.E Misfeldt, J J Tissot prints from the Gotlieb Collection, 1991, cat.38, pp.104–5

104 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1880 Exhibition of Etchings by Braquemond, Flameng, Seymour Haden, Herkomer, Hook, Palmer, Rajon, Tissot, Waltner, Whistler, and others, shown at The Fine Art Society.

Our industrial and artistic creations can perish, our morals and our fashions can fall into obscurity, but a picture by M. Tissot will be enough for archaeologists of the future to reconstitute our epoch.

L’Artiste, 1869

50 JAMES WARD 1769–1859 The Falls of the Clyde After a Flood, 1852

In dramatic landscapes and as a painter of animals, James Ward achieved renown as one of the leading artists of the British Romantic movement, in the great age of landscape art which included Turner, Constable, Cotman, Varley and Cox. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1807 and a full member in 1811, but told Joseph Farington that he did not ‘wish to be admitted to the Academy as a Horse-Painter.’ At the time, despite George Stubbs’ achievement, animal painting was considered lowly in comparison to historical or allegorical painting.

The Falls of the Clyde is the collective name for four waterfalls near New Lanark in the south of Scotland. It comprises Bonnington Linn, Corra Linn, Dundaff Linn and the lower falls of Stonebyres Linn. Its popularity among visitors grew after visits from William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott: Wordsworth immortalised Corra Linn in a poem written in 1812.

Oil on canvas 491/2 x 39 inches (125 x 99 cm) Literature: J. Ward and C. R. Grundy, James Ward RA, 1909, p.43, no.297; E. J. Nygren, The Art of James Ward RA 1769–1859, 1976; O. Beckett, The Life and Work of James Ward RA, 1995, p.193, no.97 Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1852 (1125)

106 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1904 The artist, quoted by Julia Frankau in William Ward, A.R.A. James Ward, R.A. Their lives and works: When I was about five years old I was suffered to go in a cart through Deptford and Greenwich and I can now picture myself seated in the middle of a load of apples, turnips and carrots, hearing a man bawling through the villages and myself enjoying the sights of the shipping, with all the rude clamour of the streets. At the same age I was sent with a man to deliver cider at a place called Pratt’s Bottom in Kent. The effect on my infant mind is beyond description.

51 CAREL WEIGHT CBE RA 1908–1997 Trip to the Moon, c.1933

The surreal paintings of Carel Weight from the early 1930s largely depict strange events in commonplace settings. The idea of Trip to the Moon is that it is a simple treat, like a fairground ride, available to seaside holidaymakers for sixpence.

According to R. V. Weight, the artist said the painting was based on an early film which burlesqued the idea of space travel. He wrote: ‘He gives to it all the spirit of those seaside outings we enjoyed long ago – when we could only succumb to the pressures of every promotion paraded, such as Mr Batty’s Wonderful Winkles and his Wonderful Trip to the toylike asymmetrical crescent which hangs in the sky of crimson-lake. A balloon begins its wobbling ascent into the extravaganza of colour, with a crackpot astronomer astride the top peering through his telescope at the terrestrial horizon and, presumably because of that, scratching his head.

The margins are decorated with arabesques of kite strings and fish nets, masks and funny dolls with funny feet, fishes and so on. Weight is drawing on material endeared to his childhood – from the delightful old comics: Chips, The Monster, Comic Cuts and the like (he confesses to having favoured The Gem and The Magnet).

His Balloon Trip to the Moon echoes the twopennycoloureds rather than the penny-dreadfuls. But for me, the Balloon Trip resembles more a plate from the Songs of Innocence – Holy Thursday, for instance, especially in its lower marginal decoration.’

Oil on panel 23 x 141/2 inches (58.5 x 37 cm) Provenance: Betty Swanwick, Will Richeson Jr., California Exhibited: London, Leicester Galleries, Carel Weight, 1946 (134); London, The Fine Art Society, Spring 1991, (62) Literature: R. V. Weight, Carel Weight, A Haunted Imagination, 1994, ill. p.25

108 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1982 Carel Weight in conversation with Norman Rosenthal, for the catalogue of the Retrospective Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts: I like what Dickens said that he created his characters and they ran away with him, and that’s what happens with me and my pictures.

52 JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 1834–1903 Nude model reclining c.1900

This work is probably one of three pastels of Ethel Warwick drawn on 4 June 1900 at Whistler’s studio at 8 Fitzroy Street, according to Margaret MacDonald, who describes the drawing as follows: The other two studies have the same pink drapes over the studio round-backed sofa with its cylindrical cushions, against a pink background. The model was drawn over a study of a woman in blue against a yellow background, drawn lengthways and signed with a butterfly below the sofa. The final butterfly was drawn on the sofa over a larger version. The lovely colours, the bright touches of white and lemon, blue and purple, do not disguise the alterations completely. The paper is cool brown.

Whistler drew several outlines of the body tentatively, rubbed the colours in with a stump, and added touches of pink and light red to her face, bright pink on her hand, and orange at her feet, to give warmth and light to the form. Finally he placed highlights with the flat end of the pastel on her breasts.

Ethel Warwick’s identity has not been established, but she also modelled for Philip Wilson Steer. According to Rosalind Birnie Philip, on the day this and the other pastels were drawn, Whistler also received visits at his studio from several patrons and their daughters, the New York dealer E.G. Kennedy and Whistler’s biographers, Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell.

Chalk and pastel on brown paper, signed with butterfly, right 67/8 x 103/4 inches (17.5 x 27.2 cm) Provenance: Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip; Sir Bruce Ingram, bought at P & D Colnaghi; L Hermann; Private Collection, bought Agnew’s Exhibited: Glasgow, Hunterian Art Gallery, Whistler Pastels, 1984 (70); New York, M. Knoedler & Co, Notes, Harmonies, Nocturnes, 1984 (60); London, Tate Britain, Degas, Sickert, Toulouse-Lautrec, 2005 Literature: M. F MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler Pastels, Drawings and Watercolours: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London 1995, pp.577–78, no 1606 110 | the fine art society 1876–2016

1884 In the catalogue for his exhibition ‘Notes’ – ‘Harmonies’ – ‘Nocturnes’ at the gallery Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell, Whistler wrote: The work of the master reeks not of the sweat of the brow, suggests no effort, - and is finished from its beginning.

We are most grateful to Wendy Baron for her generous contributions.

Published by The Fine Art Society for the exhibition The Fine Art Society: A Celebration, held at 148 New Bond Street, London, from 6 June to 7 July 2016. isbn 978 1 907052 67 5 Catalogue © The Fine Art Society Text © The authors 2016 · All rights reserved Designed and typeset in Minion by Dalrymple Printed in Belgium by Albe De Coker Front cover: detail from Eric Ravilious HMS Actaeon, 1942 [cat.39] Back cover: Samuel Palmer The Sleeping Shepherd c.1854 [cat.31]

The Fine Art Society 1 4 8 new b ond street · l ond on w1s 2jt + 44 (0)20 7629 5116 · art@faslondon.com www.faslondon.com

The Fine Art Society Dealers since 1876

4 | the fine art society 1876–2016