The mystery of Laurence Bell

 

A few years ago, a reader did a lot of research into a young artist called Lawrence Bell who trained at the Bushey School of Art in Hertfordshire. Since then other documents have appeared online  suggesting that this Lawrence Bell died in France in 1916. This leaves me no nearer to saying anything very useful about this intriguing maker of colour linocuts. (see later post for the correct spelling of his name). It doesn't help that there have also been persistent rumours for some while now that Bell was Canadian although without anyone coming up with any evidence, so I think we have to ignore that. What we are left with are the prints themselves and, as work keeps appearing on the market and finding its way onto the internet, there is now far more to go on than there was five or ten years ago.

The only dated print I know of is Winter where Bell added '36' after his signature. This makes Bell look like one of the late-comers to the colour print scene. James Milner was another. A retired teacher, he returned to colour woodcut in the thirties. Norah Pearse was yet another. Both have had posts here on Modern Printmakers. Bell has not been so fortunate despite lobbying on his behalf by loyal readers who are also avid collectors of his work. But here readers have a considerable advantage over Modern Printmakers because I own only one example, a small card I managed to pick up cheaply on ebay. The point is that this was enough to confirm the general consensus that Bell used lino and oil-based inks. It also strikes me that he may have made use of a press. This was nothing unusual. Robert Gibbings and John Hall Thorpe did the same from about 1916 onwards. Nevertheless, I think all these factors suggest someone who was prolific during the thirties when he made twenty or more colour prints in addition to etchings and watercolours.

What is unusual is how many of Bell's subjects like Kirstenbosch in Cape Province (above, top), can be identified. Another place he visited was Chateau Gaillard in Normandy and there is at least one print of Naples. But most prints depict south-east England where so many artists worked and whose subjects helped to make their prints saleable. The Mermaid Inn at Rye in Sussex (second from top) stands out as Bell at his most vigorous. It is fairly obvious to me that other subjects are the Kent and Sussex churches and the local Romanies. The churches are too distinctive  to be anywhere else while the travelling folk were favourite subjects of Arthur Rigden Read who also exhibited at Rye. Identifiable subjects were always easier to sell and while the old streets of Rye and sturdy churches of Kent provided likeable subjects, his publisher was firmly based at Burlington Gardens off Bond Street in London. The Fine Arts Publishing Company were an established business had been publishing photogravure work since the C19th and this is why I tend to think the prints were printed on a press. They are certainly relatively common otherwise readers would not be telling me they had found yet another.

I wish I could say more. Despite a reputation for including trees of the Clarice Cliff variety in almost all his prints if he could manage it, Bell's best work is rugged, autumnal and enduring. Perhaps not surprising then that anyone would claim he was Canadian. There is a sense of the pioneering outdoors in Bell. His land is a land of log-cabins and his big-scale inns and small-scale churches look as though they belong in the Rockies more than rural Sussex where inns and old churches are all the same size. That kind of wayward originality made him very much a man of his time and if the prints have a deliberate generic appeal, no one could ever accuse Bell of being bland and inoffensive. So you wonder how it could be that such an artist now is more or less anonymous.