Gertrude Brodie's 'Portrait of a tree in Giggleswick'

     

I wanted readers to know that another poster-size work by Gertrude Brodie has turned up. Unless the previous two, this one has a direct link with the artist herself because the reader's grandmother became friends with Brodie after she taught her at Settle High School. The drawing was then given to the former pupil following her marriage at the church in the picture and has remained in the family ever since. As ever, I am very grateful to the reader for sending the image to me. As other readers will know, Brodie has staying power and is the kind of artist you do not push in a cupboard but hang on your wall.  Portrait of a tree at Giggleswick (above) would certainly join my own The hill over Settle which is hanging on the wall only a few feet behind me as I write. I should also say it wasn't always there. My mother loved it so much, it hung in her home for many years.

Brodie was onto something with her poster-size drawings. Wherever she went, she used the same format which allowed her to make the best of the narrow Yorkshire streets, stately trees and church towers. So for as I can make out she employed gouache and conte crayon for all the four pieces by her we know of and it is the consistent use of the same size of picture and the same medium that suggests someone who was serious about her work.

To go over the little we know about her biography, she was born at Redbridge, Essex, in 1882 and taught at Settle High School and Giggleswick School. Both schools are in small towns in the old North Riding of Yorkshire. She then returned to Essex where I assume she went on working in the same way and made View from my Essex window (above). I am including this to allow readers to make comparisons. So far as I am concerned, what impresses me is the combination of a decorative style and a successful overall tone. As you see, this differed from picture to picture. Also compare the very different moods. The calm sense of withdrawl in the Essex picture is very different from the vigorous sense of movement at Giggleswick, with the wild growth of its beech trees, sloping uneven streets and uncertain sky. Here is an artist who could do both public and private and who had a strong enough sense of form and firm enough handling of technique to get across how very different the two counties she worked and lived in were.

Brodie died in 1967 and deserves to be better known. But then I could say that about so many. 

Gertrude Brodie's 'View from my Essex window'

 

I am sure readers will remember the second of two posts about a series of conte crayon and gouache drawings by the Essex artist and teacher, Gertrude Brodie, which I called 'The lamps of Settle'. I am pleased to say yet another drawing by this sensitive artist appeared on the British auction calendar in November, this time an intimate and subtle view of the Essex countryside from the artist's bedroom window.

The picture went up for sale in Scarborough in November, but apparently did not sell. The auction certainly had no sale price up and presumably it didn't reach its reserve. This can be the only explanation because, as you see, the work was drawn to the same high standard as my own The hill over Settle and Castle Hill, Settle (below).

 

The device of looking from a window was employed by a number of British C20th artists, including Lucien Pissarro, Arthur Rigden Read, Claughton Pellew and John Nash. I hardly need to say that Brodie is classic Modern Printmakers, a skilled, rather literary artist whose talent was ignored when British art became pseudo-modern. Fortunately, provincial auction houses take note of Modern Printmakers and put Brodie into some kind of a context when they offer her work for sale. Admittedly, that doesn't happen very often. Castle Hill, Settle went for £460. Please take note. Because there will be more.

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.

Gertrude Brodie & the lamps of Settle

                                                                                        

I have always been intrigued by Gertrude Brodie's use of the small lamp symbol beside her signature because it suggests a conscious artistic identity for someone who is now very obscure indeed. Although there seems to be one book that she illustrated, she made her living as an art teacher, first at Settle Girls High School and then Giggleswick School, also in the town. (For people outside the UK, Settle is a market town in the North Craven district of Yorkshire in the north of England.)

                                                                                        
I've owned this conte crayon and gouache drawing by her for many years but it's only recently come back into my possession and set me off thinking about her again. Part of the original appeal was that her work had a good graphic quality and I would be surprised to learn that she didn't know the colour woodcuts made by Jack B Yeats for the Cuala Press in Ireland. Her work has a similar reliance on dark outlines and a similar vigour and fluidity - the figures are very Yeats - and I place Brodie in the company of colour woodcut artists for this reason.

The building you can see on the right is The Folly, a large C17th century house that now houses a museum. I now learn from their website that Brodie produced a series of drawings of the town which confirms my earlier suspicions that here was an artist with a tendency. Two are called 'The lamps of Settle and I think we can assume her lamp symbol sits alongside that arts and crafts signature of hers. I think we can also take it as read that the pictures included one of the street lamps that you see to the left.

What I like about the picture is its tone and the subtlety of the colours.The narrow street running up into the centre is rather awkard in the way it disappears and the truncated building is odd but she obviously wanted to concentrate our attention on the two-way traffic of rural and urban in a town like Settle. Having just returned from the old town of Girokastra in Albania I know exactly what she means. She isn't only subtle in her colours, she is perceptive about place. The lamps would have had such a modernising effect in a town like Settle. I think she was conscious of the disparity between the wooded hill and the lamps; there is a sense of small-town drama here.