Gertrude Brodie's 'Castle Hill, Settle'

 

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It has taken a long time for a second picture in Gertrude Brodie's lamps of Settle series to turn up, but it was worth the wait. Castle Hill, Settle (above) came up for auction in Gloucestershire this month and joins The hill over Settle (below) as part of series which may add up to about a dozen drawings. I think it depends how many lamps there were because I assume she did a picture for every lamp the town had. Brodie was born at Redbridge, Essex, in 1882 and went to Settle to teach at Settle Girls High School and moved to Giggleswick School nearby. She also had a career as an illustrator though I have only been able to track down two books, both of them literary. An edition of John Milton's Lycidas with illustrations by her appeared in 1903. The only other book I know of contains texts by French dramatists and came out in 1940.

Settle is a small town in the north Yorkshire district of Craven. As you see from the pipe going  up the wall, Brodie's lamps used gas power. The town had its own gas company and a number of street lamps were installed by the 1850s though on a visit to Settle about eighteen months ago, I noticed none of them had survived. It takes an artist with imagination to do what Brodie did and decide on a series of gouache and conte crayon drawings featuring the town's street lamps. The two pictures we know of are in the same style, with the bold drawing and subtle colours of travel posters of the 1920s. As I expected when I last wrote about Brodie, you can now she made the lamps prominent and emphasised the idea of a series by adding a small lamp beside her name like chop-marks for Koson or Urushibara. Also telling is the free-form style of the trees in line with the Glasgow School. That aside, what makes the pictures work is the descriptiveness - what surprised me during my visit was how true the colours she used are to the town and the surrounding country. This is all down to skill and a desire to get it right. (The photograph I have taken is too blue. The paper of the picture is light cream laid.)

One of the great things about the new image is Brodie's inclusion of the wooden billboard. In a neat touch of observation the sign reads 'J Handby registered plumber gas fitter heating engineer'. There is intelligence at work here. She is not only informative in different ways, she links the series up by referring to an engineer who may have installed the system. This kind of deftness and relevance puts her in the centre ground of modern British illustrative art - she just isn't as famous as Eric Ravilious or David Gentleman. But then she is not as expensive as either of them - not as yet, anyway. Someone paid £460 for Castle Hill, Settle, on 17th February, a lot more than I paid for The hill over Settle about 1984. But as both Brodie and her plumber knew, it pays to advertise. I wondered why there had been so much recent interest in such an old post of mine. Now I know.