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Second Nature: The Art of Charles F. Tunnicliffe ra
Charles Tunnicliffe Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné
on truth to nature was detrimental to art as it reduced the maker to the role of an imitator: What is truth anyhow? When you are painting a picture the only truth that we know is aesthetic truth and that is to be true to one’s aesthetic feelings, that’s all. If you come near the bird in anatomical detail, that’s just as well.101 An ‘aesthetic composition’ based on the ‘impression of a flock of birds’ would not result in a presentation with which a ‘scientific ornithologist would agree.... Yet it might be true to the artist’s eye – that is what they look like at the moment the artist was impressed by them.’102 It is significant that these remarks were not made in an art-historical journal but addressed to an audience of wildlife enthusiasts who would be less inclined to judge the merit of a bird artist’s work on aesthetic grounds. The persistence of this memetic approach
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to Tunnicliffe’s work is reflected in True to Nature, the title of a BBC Wales television documentary that was broadcast in the autumn of 1981, more than two-and-a-half years after Tunnicliffe’s death. The nature of Tunnicliffe’s work, as well as the question of its intended audience, makes it difficult to ‘judge’ it in the way that he, apparently, wanted it to be considered: ‘purely by its aesthetic effect and not by its similarity to nature’. For decades, Tunnicliffe’s work had appealed primarily to bird fanciers and wildlife enthusiasts; and even though he numbered among them, Tunnicliffe, a Royal College of Art graduate, resented being pigeonholed to such a degree that he could not help but take issue with the views of his admirers: ‘I have shocked quite a lot of people by saying “To hell with nature!” Nature is made to be used, not to be dictator, as far as the dyed-in-the-wool artist is concerned.’103
Fig. 10 Sitting Hare, 1938 Oil on unprimed linen, 590 x 800 mm (23¼ x 31½ in.) Macclesfield Museums
Tunnicliffe challenged the distinction as soon as it was made: ‘Whatever your approach, you will find that your naturalistic treatment can have a very decorative quality, and that a decorative treatment can create an illusion of atmosphere though none has been consciously attempted.’95 This squaring of the decorative and the representational is as central to Tunnicliffe’s sense of creativity as it is to his understanding of the nature of his work as a commodity. Although his ‘bird paintings’ were at times deemed ‘unusual’ for being ‘both accurate and decorative’,96 the chief criterion with which critics judged Tunnicliffe’s prints was fidelity. ‘Most of the modern wood-cuts of birds ... portray what can only be termed as monstrosities’, a reviewer of A Book of Birds opined in 1937, ‘and one can scarcely imagine any genuine bird-lover looking at them without ... wishing that we might have a Hitler to order their abolition.’ By comparison, Tunnicliffe’s prints were ‘really like birds, not only in detail but in their characteristic and natural poses’.97 The critique appeared in the magazine British Birds and was aimed at an audience to which Tunnicliffe increasingly appealed, even as he continued to produce nature-themed images for advertising and book illustration. While a specialised audience was able to discern the accuracy with which Tunnicliffe rendered the natural world, critics,
historians and curators largely neglected to engage with his work as art. In a review of My Country Book that aired on 22 May 1943 on the BBC Forces Programme as part of the series What I’m Reading Now, British countryside enthusiast S. P. B. Mais stated that Tunnicliffe ‘had no pseudo romanticism to overcome’. Never having been ‘off the farm’ during the ‘first 19 years of his life’, Tunnicliffe had ‘lived as close to the animals as Walt Whitman always wished that he could’. As a result, Tunnicliffe was ‘able to convey their forms and their spirit more faithfully than any other artist of [his] time’. The dismissal of Whitman as a poet of nature aside – a response, perhaps, to a perceived Americanisation of the BBC at wartime – the review suggests that what made Tunnicliffe’s work superior was his ‘scientific’ approach to nature.98 Among art historians, this sentiment was echoed by Hamilton, who, in his assessment of Tunnicliffe’s wood engravings, argued that their maker had the ‘clear, dispassionate eye of a scientific draughtsman’.99 Late in his career, Tunnicliffe came closest to a defence of his work, rejecting the very standard by which it was generally judged. A ‘picture is a purely man-made thing and the result of man’s mentality’, he argued, and to ‘let nature dictate is impure’.100 According to Tunnicliffe, an insistence
Fig. 11 Fox, December 1964 Pencil, watercolour and white body colour on paper, 533 x 760 mm (21 x 30 in.) Oriel Ynys Môn, Anglesey