A RTI STS AT TH E F RY A RT & DE S IG N I N T H E N O RT H W E S T E S S E X CO L L EC T IO N
INTRODUCTION N IG E L W E AV E R
This substantially revised edition of Artists at the Fry reflects the growth and development of the Fry Art Gallery and the North West Essex Collection since 1985. It has become one of the most important collections of works of this period and the only comprehensive collection showing the work of these artists in their context.
E
Vaughan, Isabel Lambert, Kenneth Rowntree, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, all of whom drew some inspiration from the Essex landscape. In 1970 Edward Bawden moved to Saffron Walden where Sheila Robinson had preceded him and here he found an artistic and publicly spirited community that included Edwin and Olive Smith, Paul Beck and John Bolam. In 1988, the year before Bawden died, John Bellany put down his roots just outside Saffron Walden. Such a rich heritage meant that when the Fry Art Gallery Society formed itself in 1985, and re-opened the building in 1987, it was clear that the criterion of a ‘significant contribution to British art’ should be applied to those represented in the Collection; that the locale of North West Essex should be strictly observed and that residence during the twentieth century and onwards, should be the determining factors. The words ‘North West Essex’ were not in common
dward Bawden attracted many of the artists to the village of Great Bardfield. They were fiercely insistent that they were not a School, and had no manifesto. This was made clear in all their publicity for the three Open Studios that were held during the 1950s. Roger de Grey, the then President of the Royal Academy, was aware of this feeling when he officially opened the gallery in June 1987. He noted that there was ‘a stylistic similarity’ among those exhibited before going on to say that ‘there is something special going on in Saffron Walden which is perhaps not going on elsewhere… this area is unique in England for the way in which internationally famous artists have settled here’. If the Bardfield inhabitants should not be seen as a School their ‘neighbours’ outside the village were certainly not. But, nevertheless, once again, an unusually high number of artists of national significance had settled in the surrounding district – Michael Ayrton, Keith 3
I N T RODUC T ION successfully established as a permanent collection of usage in the mid 1980s, and represented our attempt to paintings representing the work of artists in this part of encompass what is now the local authority District of Essex, its importance will become increasingly evident as Uttlesford, and those parts of adjacent Braintree District the size of the collection grows and the quality of exhibits embracing Great Bardfield and the surrounding area. maintained’. It has since gone from small beginnings, It is now more commonly used to describe this aided by gifts from the artists and donors, to the centre largely rural part of Essex bordering on the three of excellence that we feel it counties of Hertfordshire, to be, exhibiting not only Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. art from 1930 to the present In 1985 the founding time, but also reflecting the Society, in acknowledgement area in which much of it was of its benevolent landlord, conceived. After just over the Fry family, chose to a quarter of a century of re-name and then re-open exhibiting it seems appropriate the building as the Fry Art to have some external review Gallery. It was previously and Andrew Lambirth’s known as the Gibson personal response appears Gallery after the original elsewhere in this book. founder in l856, a member We are fortunate to have the of the family who were support of a large membership also the town’s greatest and visitor base and each year benefactors. In 2002 the has seen an enrichment of the North West Essex Collection Collection so that we now have Trust, a separate charity, one of national importance in became responsible for the field of watercolour and oil the safekeeping of the Edward Bawden, Braintree Station, Linocut (detail) painting, print-making, book Collection which now illustration and ceramics that is open to everyone free of numbers nearly 2,000 items. charge. It remains a charity, managed and staffed entirely From the outset, Edward Bawden gave his backing by volunteers, without regular public funding. We are very to the proposal by Iris Weaver, with the support of Olive appreciative of the support that we have received from grant Cook, to establish the gallery and then create its unique giving bodies, private donors, the public and the artists. collection. He foresaw, in a letter in April 1986, ‘that when 4
T H E F RY A RT GA L L ERY This introduction appeared in a booklet written by Olive Cook on the North West Essex Collection, published in 1988, a year after the gallery was re-opened with its new remit. It was revised and republished in 2003 in the book Artists at the Fry.
A year or two later the Bardfield artists began to disperse, although Edward Bawden remained at Brick House until 1970 when his wife died, then moved to Saffron Walden. John Aldridge never left The Place. Kenneth and Diana Rowntree had departed soon after the end of the war and Tirzah Ravilious, after moving to Wethersfield, had remarried and left Essex in 1946. George Chapman was inevitably drawn to the source of his inspiration, Wales. Marianne Straub moved to Cambridge and Audrey Cruddas found a house at Botesdale near Diss. Walter Hoyle stayed in the locality for some years to come and Michael Rothenstein continued to live in North West Essex at Stisted, where Bernard Cheese also eventually established himself. Sheila Robinson came to Saffron Walden in 1966 and it was there that Edward Bawden settled in 1970. If Bardfield itself is no longer a community of artists the North West Essex area is still, after great social and environmental changes, associated with the names of painters, print-makers, potters and sculptors. Michael Ayrton spent his last years at Toppesfield and encouraged his friend Keith Vaughan to renovate two cottages nearby for weekend use. The potter, Dan Arbeid lived and worked for twenty years at Wendens Ambo; Paul Beck, a former Royal College student, was established for more than ten years at Sewards End; the painter John Bolam came to Castle Street in Saffron Walden in the 1940s; Edwin and Olive Smith, who had been visitors to Bardfield since the mid 1940s, moved to Saffron Walden in 1962. John Bellany, originally from Scotland, moved to the area in 1990.
Olive Cook died in 2002 and the essay is now reprinted with minor updates. Many of those named have also died, but biographical detail of this kind has continued to be omitted in order to preserve Olive Cook’s original narrative.
Opposite: Edward Bawden, The Blue Plough, Saffron Walden, Linocut (detail) 14
T H E F RY A RT GA L L ERY
15
MADE IN ESSEX: A PERSONAL VIEW A N D R E W L A M BI RT H
As time goes on, the artists associated with North West Essex in the twentieth century do not settle more into a group but emerge with their individuality intact, if not enhanced, by the increased historical perspective. Eric Ravilious leads the field at the moment in the popularity stakes, but is closely followed by his old friend and sparring partner Edward Bawden.
T
Keith Vaughan is attracting the most interest and critical reassessment, with Michael Ayrton and the Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, following in the van. Among the other artists featured in the North West Essex Collection I am especially drawn to the photographs of Edwin Smith and the watercolours and etchings of Richard Bawden, Edward’s son. By housing this remarkable anthology of Essex art – which is not just of regional, but of national importance – it’s clear that the Fry Art Gallery does us a great service while offering an unparalleled resource of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure. My initial introduction, many years ago, to the artists of North West Essex came about by chance through an early interest in the work of Michael Ayrton. Sadly I never met him, but first learned about his art and ideas through a TV documentary broadcast shortly after his death in 1975. (I also recall an intriguing article in the Radio Times by Frederic Raphael, effectively a profile of his friendship with Ayrton.) As I began to research into Ayrton’s work,
he art public in general now pays them considerable heed, but academic interest also has not been slow to assert their artistic credentials and genuine originality. Both artists look stronger and stronger as increasingly we can see them plain, free of the thickets of contemporary context and peer competition. Of the others in what may be called the core group, John Aldridge and Kenneth Rowntree are the back runners, solid achievers whose work doesn’t have quite the glamour of the brand leaders. However, both are considerable artists, and Aldridge in particular deserves the sort of scholarly attention that will ensure his reputation for the future. Michael Rothenstein remains something of an outsider, partly by dint of his deep involvement in experimental print-making, though he is an important element in the Great Bardfield mix, while among those more on the geographical fringes, Eric Ravilious, Two Women Sitting in a Garden, Watercolour (detail) 17
M A DE I N ESSE X: A PER SONA L V I EW embraced ideas with a passion that was highly articulate (hence his broadcasting skills), but he was not a natural painter or sculptor. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t do good and memorable work in both disciplines – he did – but art, despite his obvious commitment to it, was ironically not his natural medium. Words were, and he was a great talker and a very effective writer. Rarely are people who practise both painting and writing equally gifted in each discipline. Wyndham Lewis was, Ayrton was not. But he remains a highly interesting artist, well worth studying and unfairly eclipsed at the moment – probably by his own cleverness. And there are still certain sections of the art establishment that have never forgiven him for his intemperate attacks on Picasso – particularly when so much of his own work owed such an obvious debt to that master. Ayrton was perhaps most consistently inventive as a draughtsman and print-maker, but a carefully selected retrospective of his entire output would make fascinating viewing. As I came to know and care more about modern British art, I found it just about possible to make a living by writing about it, if I worked seven days a week and took no holidays. One of my first and relatively long-lived assignments was conducting interviews with artists for the popular monthly Artist’s and Illustrator’s Magazine. I did this for six years, and interviewed more than 40 artists, from Maggi Hambling to Gillian Ayres, via Ruskin Spear, Cecil Collins and Victor Pasmore. One of my first subjects, in 1988, was Edward Bawden. I visited Bawden in his last home, in Saffron Walden, and was immensely impressed by his surroundings
my enthusiasm grew and I discovered he had lived for many years in Essex. In 1952 he moved to Bradfields, a house just outside Toppesfield, where he lived until the end of his life. I remember liking very much in reproduction a series of still-life paintings that Ayrton had painted in the early 1950s, soon after his move to the country. They consisted of the usual still-life subjects: flowers, fruit and vegetables, wine glasses, a joint or a fish, and reflected his new life as a rural painter married to Elisabeth, a very distinguished cook (and cookery writer). Much later I was to see some of these pictures in Elisabeth Ayrton’s west country home, whither she had moved after her husband’s sudden death. I remember being struck anew by the intimacy and affection with which they were painted. In the following years my interest in Michael Ayrton diminished somewhat, the more I studied art history, and the more closely I looked at art. But one of my first ambitions as a potential art critic had been to write a book about him, so when I heard that Frederic Raphael had been commissioned to write Ayrton’s biography, I was sorely disappointed. I contacted him and he employed me for a time as his research assistant, until the project was quietly shelved. In the end a biography did appear in 1994, written by Justine Hopkins, Ayrton’s step-granddaughter. Looking at Ayrton’s work now it is easy to see why it appealed so strongly to writers and intellectuals generally. CP Snow, Jacob Bronowski and Julian Huxley were all Ayrton friends and collectors, and George Steiner called him ‘one of the half-dozen most powerful minds I have ever been privileged to be close to’. Ayrton 18
THE ARTISTS These biographical notes were originally prepared by Olive Cook for the booklet The North West Essex Collection: an Introduction in 1988, and were revised by Professor Martin Salisbury in 2003 for the first edition of Artists at the Fry. Further revision has been undertaken in 2012 for the second edition. The brief entries are not comprehensive and other artists who are represented in the North West Essex Collection are listed at the conclusion. JOHN ALDRIDGE
years later by his first one-man show at the important Leicester Galleries in London. In 1934, he exhibited at the prestigious Venice Biennale, after which he began to be noticed internationally. In 1949 he became an assistant at the Slade School and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1954, then a full Academician two years later. His oil paintings always demonstrated an intimate sympathy with nature and in particular, the Essex landscape, and his beloved garden and home. Aldridge enjoyed a private income and his career was never commercially inspired, refusing to use agents and sold his work at moderate prices. He was a fine portrait painter, a superb example being that of his great friend Robert Graves, the poet, now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and there is a self portrait in the Fry Art Gallery. He stayed regularly with Graves and Laura Riding on the island of Majorca.
Born in 1905 in Woolwich, Aldridge lived in Great Bardfield from 1933 until his death in 1983. He shared with Edward Bawden a passion for gardening, and the creation of the garden at Place House, his Tudor home, was one of his lifelong achievements. It features frequently in his paintings, as did the English landscape as a whole. Aldridge received no formal art education but painted from an early age. After graduating from Oxford University in 1928 he settled in London with excursions to Paris, Germany, Italy, Tenerife and Majorca. Aldridge’s first exhibition was in London in 1931 with the Seven and Five Society. This was followed two Opposite: John Aldridge, Builders at Work, Brick House, Great Bardfield, Oil (detail) 27
T H E A RT IS TS
John Aldridge, Still Life with Pipe, Mixed media
hand-made blocks of these wallpapers are now with the London wallpaper manufacturers Cole & Son. The Fry Art Gallery has a considerable holding of his oils, drawings and designs for wallpapers and his work is in the collections of the Tate Gallery, the Royal Academy
In 1938, John Aldridge entered into a rare commercial venture, a collaboration with Edward Bawden on the production of wallpaper designs. The two of them formed ‘Bardfield Wallpapers’, but this was curtailed with the advent of the Second World War and the 28
T H E A RT IS TS
PAUL BECK Born in Kent in 1926, he studied initially at the Gravesend School of Art, followed by three years at the Royal College of Art, where fellow students included David Gentleman and Len Deighton. After graduating, a period of design and advertising work for various London agencies was followed by a full-time lectureship at Croydon College of Art. After a move from London to Saffron Walden in 1959, Beck became Senior Lecturer at Cambridge School of Art from 1963 to 1970. He followed a career as a painter, printmaker and designer including working with a number of theatre groups designing posters and publicity material, among who was the innovative and influential Prospect Theatre Company. Prospect was a major, full-time touring company and Paul Beck’s graphics are synonymous with its heyday. Paul Beck worked with a number of other theatres, the Cambridge Theatre Company, Exeter’s Northcott Theatre and the Greenwich Young People’s Theatre among them. His paintings and prints have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Malvern Festival, Graffiti Gallery, London, the Royal Academy summer exhibitions; City Gallery, Milton Keynes and Chuo-Ku Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. Paul Beck lived at Sewards End, near Saffron Walden, from 1959–73. He now lives in Kent.
Paul Beck, Hoy’s Cart, Linocut 36
T H E A RT IS TS
JOHN BELLANY The son of Scottish fisher folk, born in 1942, his roots have been an important factor in Bellany’s work: fishermen, fishing boats, fish, gulls, dramas and the sea inform much of his work added to which is a mastery of both oil and watercolour. This has led to his being acknowledged now as one of the most distinguished British artists of our time. The necessity of a liver transplant in 1988 brought Bellany from London to Cambridge, following which in 1990 he moved to near Saffron Walden where he has lived since. Educated at the Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, Bellany taught for sixteen years from 1968, but thereafter has forged his reputation, in exhibiting very widely in England and internationally. In 2009 the Fry Art Gallery had an exhibition of his work, including local landscapes, alongside his portraiture and allegorical work.
JOHN BOLAM Born in 1922 in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. John Bolam continued to paint and exhibit on a regular basis until his death in 2009. He originally studied furniture design at the High Wycombe School of Art. Early work drew inspiration from the landscape of the Chilterns and Thames Valley, and demonstrated a keen affinity with the English Romantic tradition of poets and painters. A strong family commitment to the values and beliefs
John Bellany, Woman of the North Sea, Oil 37
T H E A RT IS TS
Robert Colquhoun, Horse & Rider, Lithograph
OLIVE COOK Olive Cook died in 2002 after a long and extraordinarily creative and productive life. She liked to describe herself as a ‘painter by inclination’, and her spirited, naive paintings demonstrate clearly her passion for paint and collage. She was, however, better known for her output as a writer. She was born in Cambridge in 1912 and read modern languages at Newnham. She did not study at art school, but on leaving Cambridge worked for a time for the
Robert MacBryde, Woman at Table, Lithograph
their influence was diluted by their generally chaotic lifestyle which prevented them from attaining the reputations as artists that some thought they deserved. 43
T H E A RT IS TS
Eric Ravilious, Caravans, Watercolour 44
T H E A RT IS TS
OLGA LEHMANN Born in 1912, in Chile, the first of three children of a French father and Scots mother, Lehmann was initially educated by an English governess and then sent to an American college in Santiago. She later won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she studied under Allan Gwynne-Jones and Vladimir Polunin. Olga Lehmann’s paintings and murals have been seen by millions, as they were in the background of numerous American television series such as Dynasty and The Colebys. Her huge output encompassed work for theatre, film and television as graphic designer and costume designer, but notably, as portrait painter to the Hollywood stars. Lehmann’s work as a designer for film covered most of the major Hollywood studios as well as Elstree and Pinewood in England. She worked with the great directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger on Oh Rosalinda!! (1955), and other well known films which bore her name included Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950), The Master of Ballantrae (1953), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), The Millionairess (1960), The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Kidnapped (1971). In the 1940s and 50s Olga Lehmann contributed numerous illustrations to the Radio Times from her Hogarth Studio base in Fitzrovia and from her Saffron Walden home she would also paint landscapes of North West Essex, landscapes which, according to the Sunday Times Magazine (3 March 1986), ‘have something of the quality of such painters as John Nash or Rowland Suddaby’. She continued
Olga Lehmann, Summer, Scraper Board 50
T H E A RT IS TS working into her eighties, wintering in Los Angeles with her son and returning to Saffron Walden for the summer. She died in Saffron Walden in 2001.
ERIC RAVILIOUS Along with Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious is one of the most widely celebrated of the artists represented in this Collection, interest in his work having grown greatly in recent years. As with many talented careers cut tragically short, a sense of myth has developed around the man, his life and work. Born in London in the same year, 1903, as Bawden, Eric Ravilious moved to Eastbourne while he was still a young child, enrolling at Eastbourne School of Art, and then in 1922 won a place at the Royal College of Art, where he encountered fellow student Edward Bawden who was to become a life-long friend. Amongst the most influential tutors at the college at this time, was Paul Nash. Ravilious and Bawden were highly regarded as students in the Design School, and each were awarded Travel Scholarships to Italy. In 1928 the two were helped by Professor William Rothenstein, the Principal of the College at the time, to gain the commission to paint murals for the Refreshment Room in Morley College, London along with fellow graduate Charles Mahoney, who worked on the walls of the Concert Hall. The commissioning of two such young artists caused much interest in the press and the mural was acclaimed when it was finished. It was destroyed in the bombing during the Second World War.
Eric Ravilious, Neptune, Watercolour 51
A RTI STS AT TH E F RY Artists at the Fry describes the background to works in the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, Essex. The Gallery’s North West Essex Collection is based on the artists of Great Bardfield including Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Michael Rothenstein, John Aldridge and Kenneth Rowntree, who lived in this small Essex village between 1930 and 1970, and other artists who have also lived and worked in the area, notably Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, (and currently) John Bellany. T H E F RY A RT G A L L E RY, C A S T L E S T R E ET, SA F F RON WA L DE N , E SS E X , C B10 1 BD Telephone (including pre-recorded information out of hours) 01799 513779 w w w.f r yar tgal ler y.org Cover: Michael Rothenstein, Cockerel Turning Round, Linocut. Endpapers: Artist portraits of Edwin Smith, Marianne Straub, Edward Bawden, Michael Rothenstein, George Chapman, Sheila Robinson, Eric Ravilious, ChloÍ Cheese, John Bellany, Bernard Cheese, John Aldridge, Tirzah Garwood, R ichard Bawden, Walter Hoyle, Olive Cook.