Claughton Pellew at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

                                                                                  

This weekend an exhibition of paintings and wood-engravings by the glorious and original Claughton Pellew opens in the Colman Project Space at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. I'm not sure how big this is going to be but Norwich also have a fine collection of watercolours, including their famous John Sell Cotmans, and you might be able to squeeze in the Sainsbury collection at the university, too.

                                                                         

Pellew received the Modern Printmakers treatment in March 2011, so you can always read it http://haji-b.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/conscientious-claughton-pellew.html for my own opinions. You will also get the low-down on his gradual rehabilitation by various enthusiasts, all of whom owe a debt to Anne Stevens whose personal collection became the basis for the position Pellew now holds as one of the most admired and best loved of all the many British wood-engravers.

                                                                                     

The show opens on 26th March and now ends in January, 2017, so there is plenty of time to see it.

                                                                                     

The embroiderers

                                                                                  

Now and again I come across an image of a woman sewing or doing embroidery or one that shows her work-basket or what might be some of her work and I wonder what happened to it all.  It's common enough in England to find the kind of tablecloths or tea cosies embroidered with silk or woollen flowers that were made to sell at church sales but fine embroidery is another thing. The watercolour portrait of Daisy Tuff drawn by S. G. Boxsius about 1916 even shows what might be two of the Pitman Craft series lying flat on the second shelf of the bookcase. But what happened to her work? I'm not certain that Daisy Tuff ever did any fine embroidery but she was an art teacher at the time the portrait was made (it's only a small section of a large watercolour) and they had far more practical skills than any art teacher would have today.
                                                                     

The basic story modern fine embroidery goes back to the 1860s. Once Jane Morris and her husband, William Morris, had rented Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, she set about doing work like the bedcover you can see on the oak bedstead, above. She and her sister then handed on their skills to Jane's younger daughter, May, who eventually made the hangings to go round the bed. At the age of twenty-three, May was placed in charge of the embroidery department of Morris and Co and in 1896 supervised the embroidery class at the new Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.
                                                                        

I suppose it is always possible that Frank Morley Fletcher's wife, Dolly, trained under May Morris (above) while Frank was teaching his class at the Central School. She certainly had an embroidery class of her own while they were living in Edinburgh but that is all that I know. And it isn't much. 
                                              

Men tended not to do embroidery but only make designs. J.H. Dearle who designed many of the floral backgrounds for Edward Burne Jones' tapestries, designed the screen. William Morris also produced designs for embroidery so he obviously understood what the craft involved, hardly surprising, really.
                                                                    

Phillips Needell was more attentive, which I suppose you would be if you had that kind of a name and I assume the woman shown doing embroidery in his colour woodcut is his wife, Anne, but I can't be sure. One thing you may have already noticed here is how commonly orangey terracotta was teamed up with blue-greens and turquoise. I certainly haven't chosen these examples deliberately. You only have to look at the colour of Daisy Tuff's dress and compare the section of  Boxsius's Seaside, below, with its chic use of a warm and cool combination.
                                                                                

As colours they were used not only by Arts and Crafts practitioners. They came to us by way of Iranian art and it was a commonplace of European orientalists to use the colours to suggest the East but as a colour combination with style, it goes right back to ancient Egypt, that mother of style.
                                                                        

Arthur Rigden Read being the artist he was and having a wife well occupied with her own work, suggested all kinds of crafts in his colour woodcuts. I think they must be Kathleen Rigden Reads embroidery wools and work-basket in the window in May morning. I should think, if you look hard enough, there may be other examples. These are just a few that have struck as I've looked through pictures and what have you. Hopefully, now, someone will turn up some of the work itself. Because I tell you now I know it's out there and certainly in the United States.

Leslie Moffat Ward: news from nearby

                                                                       

Leslie Moffat Ward could travel as far as he liked to find fresh subjects but the farther he went, so far as I am concerned, the less he often gained by going there. In fact, unless he kept to the Isle of Purbeck, he almost always fell short of what he did best. There were exceptions but, even so, the Cotswolds or the Sussex Downs, can be quite a lot like Dorset in their massiveness. So, this post will not provide anything comprehensive but will take a look at what I like best about him. That said, turning up his best work hasn't been straightforward. His quaint and telling night-scenes seem to unavailable anywhere online. It is beyond me.
                                                                              

He moved to Bournemouth as a child and spent his adult life working as a teacher at the school of art right from its opening in 1913 until his retirement in 1955. Some of the time Thomas Todd Blaylock was headmaster and following his own early retirement after the war, turned out some outlandishly colourful colour woodcuts. Ward was more restrained and more distinctive. He also worked well within the British landscape tradition and I find it difficult to understand why his work remains such a minority or even local enthusiasm, especially when his irresistible etching A mile to Worth Matravers (1932) can be seen illustrated in Kenneth Guichard's well-known  British Etchers 1850 - 1940. But there you are. Stuff happens.
                                                                            

In common with Samuel Palmer, the naïve vision tends to make people assume the work itself may be lacking in sophistication. But as with Palmer, the effect of the art was achieved by a rigorously original approach to technique and respect for the work of other artists. I can see those two cows in the foreground of Near Bradle, Dorset (1951) in Salomon van Ruysdael, ingenious but nevertheless well-observed moo-cows. Ward goes in for pattern-making, too, but never overdoes it, and no one could ever call him decorative; he selects with care, his crooked road in A mile to Worth Matravers is what helps make the print and it is exaggerated but light, shade and the effects of weather all soften the effect.

The Isle of Purbeck for readers out of the UK lies south-west of Bournemouth and is partly surrounded by the English Channel and the large inlet of Poole Harbour. It isn't somewhere I know but Dorset is one of the most distinctive counties in Britain and Ward obviously responded to the place in a way he did to nowhere else. So, there is no point anyone saying (as they have tried to do quite recently) that Ward had some kind of breadth just because he depicted the Pool of London, say, or the Lake District or Ronda. Making big claims for your own enthusiasms doesn't actually help the artist much and I don't want readers to miss the point of Ward. In terms of style (especially given those art deco sycamores) it is hard to believe there could be twenty years between the first two prints ion the post but there are subtle differences between them. The second is a work of maturity made when the artist was sixty-three and was deploying a range of skills and displaying a depth of vision that wasn't there before. There is an academic tinge there, too, but hardly a surprise given his background as a teacher. But he had the job because he had the skills. For instance, he was well-able to simplify form in the way he did in The condemned dwelling. It gives the print the naïve impact it has. But in the later work, to use the wonderful phrase by the French artist, Paul Serusier, he was searching out the greys; there are no extremes of shadow and dazzling light of the kind you can see in The long man of the Downs (above). He has a terrific sense of tone, so delicate and discriminating he can approach an etching like a watercolour. Beyond that, the perspective is beautifully rendered. Like a Chinese brush drawing, it reads upwards but also makes use of recession in the Western manner, (both more obvious in The long man of the downs).
                                                                                  

The way he works the surface with so many marks gives everything that typical sense of solidity. It's a paradox but this is what true visionary art entails. He was also enquiring. You only have to look at the way he looks into the ruined dwelling or explores the nooks and valleys of the uplands. There is nothing vaporous about Ward. Even his clouds are muscular - especially his clouds! And I think his idea of the countryside is a true one - the ruined houses, the bent figures with their cattle or tools, each farm with its own incline and huddle of trees. You only get that sense of place when you know somewhere well enough. He is like S.G. Boxsius in the way he takes you round but Ward's tour is better-informed. It is what Oliver Rackham once called 'social countryside', a country of paths and lanes which everyone from cowmen to ramblers makes use of. It is of course diminutive but then you can't have everything.
                                                                                 

Ward also took an architect's pleasure in neat new roads and houses and well-placed trees. State schools like Bournemouth taught a broader range of practical skills than they do today, including the bascis of geometry and architecture. What Ward summons up is that kind of diversity, there are social shades of meaning of the kind you find similar designer-artists like Eric Ravilious. It is a world of focus and workmanship and the applied arts as well as the imagination. The more you look, the more you understand.
                                                                                    

                                                                    
                                                                          

 

A footnote about Malcolm Salaman & Arthur Briscoe

                                                                                              

 

There was a mention recently (in the post about Shinsui Ito and his 'Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Keith) of some etchings by the British artist, Arthur Briscoe. Briscoe only had his first six prints published in April, 1925, when he was fifty-one or fifty-two, so if what Walter Phillips says is accurate, he must have been at Malcolm Salaman's flat in the first half of that year because he returned to Canada in the June.
                                                                   

It's interesting for this reason. The visit possibly adds some history to a single print, perhaps not that uncommon because artists would inscribe individual prints often enough and make them easy to identify. Presumably Briscoe or his publisher, Harold Dickens, had provided Salaman with some review proofs prior to publication. There may also have been a trial proof of  Clewlines and buntlines among them. It was published in October later that year but Briscoe inscribed the proof  'To Malcolm Salaman'. As well he might. Salaman was the grand old man of British print (and you may be able to get some clue of this is Ernest Lumsden's own portrait published only one year later) and it was within his power, as Phillips acknowledged, to make the career of an artist he took to.
                                                                   

Briscoe had his own three-ton cutter, which he sailed along the Essex coast near the little port of Maldon, but in 1922 he had joined the crew of a Polish training ship, the Lvov, and sailed on her from Rotherhithe to Genoa. (You can see the ship being towed from Birkenhead where Briscoe was born and with the Liver Building on the Pierhead at Liverpool, behind. The ship was originally launched at Birkenhead in 1869.) The drawings he made during the voyage provided the basis for the first of his distinctive maritime etchings. Someone possibly had a good idea because the etchings came out when the market was at his most profitable. Etchings were already going for enormous prices and when Briscoe had a first print show of twenty-seven etchings at the Lefevre Gallery in October, 1926, it sold out. But times change and less than thirty years afterwards, an etching by Briscoe went for only two quid. Yes, and I am sure you have guessed the one it was. It was inscribed 'To Malcolm Salaman' and I wonder who owns it now.

                                                                            
The information about the ups and downs of Briscoe's prices and some other details comes from Kenneth Guichard British Etchers 1850 - 1940. So far as the ups go, Clewlines and buntlines is currently for sale at New England Art Exchange for $950. The Capstan (again from 1926 and showing cadets working on the Lvov) is available from the Allinson Gallery for $1,950.
                                                                          

 

Walter Phillips 'Winter woodcuts'

Walter Phillips was one of those in between artists who it takes some while to discover the kind of art that suits them. He has been claimed by the Canadians as one of their own, reasonably enough because he produced the work he is known for while in Canada (and the National Gallery were buying his woodcuts within only a few years of them being made). But I am not sure Canada does him much justice by this claim. His father came from a Welsh nonconformist background and in common with all Methodist ministers he went from place to place as a preacher in the manner of John Wesley (and as Christ had done before John Wesley) so the artist had a portable childhood and I am sorry to have to tell the National Gallery of Canada this but Phillips, in common with so many other artists, came from nowhere and what you see here are his pictures of nowhere.
                                                            

He did receive some art training on the way and, once he finally settled for a time at school in Worcestershire, he was sent for a number of afternoons a week to Birmingham School of Art. Five years in South Africa followed, not the obvious place to go as a would-be artist, and when he returned to Britain without having made enough money to go on with his training at one of the ateliers in Paris, he settled down to life as a teacher of art in Salisbury and then got married. Canada came next but only for a while. After ten years in the country, he was back with his wife and children in England and, according to Phillips, it was only because the children missed Canada that the Phillips went back to Winnipeg. For Winnipeg it was he came from.
                                                                             

But in between something had happened. Phillips had gone through a process of self-creation of a kind that isn't uncommon. What is more unusual is the way Phillips provided us with the documents describing what happened although what he said has to be handled with caution and, in the end, the true facts about those troublesome years of self-discovery in Canada are hard to make out because the more concise Phillips is about his predicament, the more confusing it becomes. Just like Canada, Phillips makes claims that always leaves me feeling dubious.
                                                                    

He presented himself as a woodcut pioneer and I suppose in some ways what he said was true. There wasn't much in the way of woodcut in Canada at the time but claiming he had never seen any work by any of the Japanese landscape masters when he began to make woodcuts, takes some believing. He disliked etching, we know that; his fastidiousness comes across loud and clear when he describes the smell and mess of the process but how he stumbled on woodblock is impossible to make out. Again he claimed that he remembered a helpful article written by Allen Seaby but unfortunately that particular article came out three years after he began his own exploration of woodcut and it would have been very little use when it came to making woodcuts properly. He talked about trying different kinds of paper and emphasised his resourcefulness by saying he once tried printing on lavatory paper before he tried a piece of old hosho paper he had lying around. Yet how did that paper get there?
                                                                    

But what he made was different and unlike any of the colour prints being made in England around about 1916. He is most like Seaby (and Seaby admired what Phillips was doing) but Seaby kept to subject and in the end he is much more like the rather abstract German artist Paul Leschhorn or the designer-artists of Vienna. What Phillips did discover for himself was a sense of space in Canada. Ironically, his winter woodcuts are very small and as soon as I saw one for the first time in front of me, (it was The lily, the one at the top of the post), that was what I liked. Phillips wasn't trying quite so hard and it came across as natural - notes, in fact, from a small island.
                                                                         

Winter woodcuts came out as a portfolio of prints in 1936. He had already produced three other portfolios. It was one way of recycling work. Snow bank (second from the top) had been sent out as a Christmas card in 1923, with Phillips making a note that an edition of 100 had been made, while The lily was sent out as a Christmas card in 1925 (and Seaby received one). Like William Giles, Phillips could be quite free and easy with his editions. At least one of Giles prints came out in three different editions but then both Phillips and Giles could sell them. They were also friends, hardly surprising. Not only that, it was Giles who provided the connection with the old country and, paradoxically, who introduced him to the refined practice of Japan.
                                                                    

But then Phillips' memory played all kinds of tricks with time. He was aware of his isolation. Back in Canada, he recalled the time he had spent in London, how informed and cosmopolitan it was compared with Winnipeg. There was Salaman's flat with the heaps and heaps of prints, the atmospheric studios of Chelsea that were dedicated to art. But you only have to look at the small prints here to see how he manoeuvres and the way space and perspective are malleable. In the end, Phillips wasn't very bothered about facts What is so wintry about Pom-pom dahlias you might ask? It is the irregularity that is so appealing. The blocks he used are never square; there is give-and-take about these images. The lily is there because it was sent out at Christmas. Winter woodcuts is no more about a season than the prints are about a place.

I should have added that these images are from the Loch Gallery, Winnipeg, and my thanks are due to them. They had the complete portfolio for sale but it is now sold.

Shinsui Ito 'Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Keith'

                                                                                     

One day in 1923 the Canadian artist, Walter Phillips, was taken to Notting Hill Gate in London to meet the critic and writer, Malcolm Salaman. There was something provincial and naïve about Phillips' reaction to Salaman's flat, heaped as it was with prints of all kinds from old master to whatever peccadillos or whim had appeal in the market for etchings. For instance, there was Arthur Briscoe's manly array of rigging and seafarers and Elyse Lord's foppish, oriental confections. And there Miss Elizabeth Keith. And what did they think about her? Because, as with Phillips, there was something naïve in her own make-up. Phillips' work looked fine until it came up against real printmaking talent like Ian Cheyne and then, I'm afraid, it was sent packing. In a similar way, Keith's Tokyo publisher, Shozaburo Wantanabe, was possibly tempting fate when he arranged to have an artist as talented as Shinsui Ito prepare a design with Keith as its subject simply because Keith's weaknesses would be made all too obvious.
                                                                           

                                                          

To start with,  Keith would have been incapable of the bold candour of Shinsui's blues, pinks and marmalade orange. Nor could she have achieved the subtle simplicity of the hands, the uprightness of the back nor, most importantly, the scepticism of that steady gaze of hers. But here were two artists bartering gaze for gaze and while it is obvious that Keith was in no way intimidated, Shinsui rose to his subject as Keith could not. Only look at the brilliance of that swirl of marmalade feathers around her head, that frivolous crown of glory. Who chose the hat? Shinsui, Keith or even her zealous publisher? It sets off the pale north European skin so perfectly. Nothing remains of the young Japanese beauties that were Shinsui's stock-in-trade. Instead we have a perceptiveness so acute it verges on satire. The outlandishness of the hat, the tumbled folds of her blouse, the intrepid eyebrows, that crooked mouth, they all invites us, by way of minute exaggeration, to take pleasure in this rather extraordinary European with her tomboyish, adventurous ways. Look at her in front of that sumptuous car sharing a garland with her friend and fellow-Scot, Kate Bartlett. What amuses us is what amused Shinsui.

I need to credit and thank Darrel Karl at Eastern Impressions for the photograph of Keith and Kate and Charles Bartlett.



                                                                                                                                                    

Margaret Romanes: art & psychoanalysis

               

 

Yes, I know. The Scottish artist, Margaret Romanes, with her bird and flower woodcuts that somehow seem to miss the point, is probably the last person you would associate with the methods of Sigmund Freud. But there it is and, I have to say, Still life with blue jug is worth a second look. For someone who had no training, she had the essential understanding of form necessary to make a print without a keyblock. It all ends up looking like a linocut (and nothing wrong with that) and she clearly felt she had to make the colours bright enough to distinguish between her various shapes. But at least it is wall-to-wall colour unlike so many of her better-known prints. And I am not going to go on about those.
                                                                                

What is interesting is that she could perform in cream and grey just as well. She was encouraged to paint by Stanley Cursitor. He had started out as a young man down from Orkney in the lithographic printing business before going on to train in fine art at Edinburgh College of Art during the fairly short period before the first war when Mabel Royds was teaching at the department. In common with Scottish contemporaries like Anna Findlay and Francis Blair, Romanes also made her way down to St. Ives in Cornwall. I think 'only select' was the watchword she used when she made St. Ives, Cornwall. It owes a good deal to Cursitor's post-war studies in monochrome but she was wise enough to learn from him and, in fact, she describes the huddle of sunlit buildings just as well as the still life objects but uses far fewer colours. The source of light is evident, the shadows intriguing. All of which goes to show that not all depth psychology has to be sinister.
                                                                             

None of these prints are dated so it is hard to make very much sense of her career  but in the late twenties, Dr. Winifred Rushforth arrived back in Edinburgh fresh from the Tavistock Clinic where she had been undergoing psychoanalytic training. I'm not sure what the exact time sequence was but her husband took the job of registrar at the College of Art after his business in India failed. Romanes then began her training under Rushforth and funded the setting up of the Davidson Clinic where Rushforth could work supporting mothers and children as she had done in India. It struck me as extraordinary at first that an artist who had made prints with not the least hint of surrealism or psychological depth would become a psychotherapist. But that was what she did. All of which really should remind us how little we know about these artist and their lives.


Some of the prints are for sale at Sulis Fine Art but, as you can see from the Cornish woodcut, the condition is less than perfect. They turned up in a job lot at auction in Edinburgh so her work is still floating about somewhere.