Goldmark Magazine - Number 39

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WINTER 2025/26

The Nest

Frank Dobson 1886-1963

Cast in 2020 from a 1930s plaster in an edition of 12. This is the only bronze edition.

Numbered, with Dobson Estate stamp and Black Isle Foundry stamp. H 34 cm. £27,500

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g WINTER 2025/26 NUMBER 39

2026 is almost upon us; another year flies by the gallery at breakneck speed.

Winter issues of our magazine afford a brief moment of reflection on projects past, and a glimpse of what’s to come.

We managed to put on four shows by Japanese potters this year, something we’ve never done before, ending with our eighth show of pots by the revered Ken Matsuzaki, whose Shino wares you’ll find illustrating this issue.

2025 also marks five years since Phil Rogers, the man who introduced us to Ken, passed away all too soon. His irrepressible spirit remains with us in the extraordinary pots he left behind him, also celebrated here.

As for next year, we have a calendar quickly filling up with major exhibitions and live music. Do keep an eye out for what’s to come. In the meantime, we hope the New Year brings you every joy.

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 4 © Hilary Davies 32 © Dr Julian Freeman 42 © David Whiting Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Vicki Uttley Design: Porter/Waterhouse, December 2025 Printed by Park Communications

CONTRIBUTORS Hilary Davies is a poet and essayist. She has published four collections with Enitharmon Press; her fifth collection, Compass Light, was published by Renard Press in September 2025. She has been an Royal Literary Fund Fellow at King’s College, London and the British Library, and is a Fellow of the Temenos Academy. She is a former Chairman of the Poetry Society, and a Hawthornden Fellow. In 2023 she was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year award. She has contributed to Art and Christianity, The Visual Commentary on Scripture, and The Tablet, and writes regularly on the poet and artist, David Jones.

Dr Julian Freeman is an independent Art Historian, author and critic, specialising in twentieth century British art, but writing and teaching on broader topics as a tutor and Co-ordinator in HE and FE. Since 2017 he has enjoyed a role as Gallery Educator for The Courtauld’ Public Programmes, and since 2021 has contributed to Goldmark diaries and exhibition catalogues.

David Whiting is an art critic and curator. His publications include a monograph on the late potter Gordon Baldwin, and for Goldmark the painter Robert Dawson. His most recent book, published in 2024, is Seeing with Another Eye; The Anthony Shaw Collection (arnoldsche). His study of the work of the artists John Copley and Ethel Gabain, also for Goldmark, is forthcoming.

goldmark Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 info@goldmarkart.com www.goldmarkart.com

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Contents 4. The Animals’ Christmas

20. Phil Rogers: On the Shoulders of Giants

From children’s primary school plays to shop window displays, the story of Jesus’ birth in a Bethlehem stable has become so ubiquitous that most of us hardly recognise its radical strangeness. For the poet Hilary Davies, however, the Nativity presents a rich and unusual tableau. At the heart of it can be found its most familiar and yet least questioned characters of all: the crowd of animals present in almost every visual representation of the Christ child’s birth. Here she traces the history of the animals’ Christmas, back to its earliest 3rd and 4th century roots in Christianity’s own infancy.

‘Clay,’ Phil Rogers wrote, ‘is truly a miracle of nature and in common with most other miracles of nature we rather take it for granted.’ Five years on from his passing, Phil’s presence is still felt here at the gallery in the rich body of pots he left behind him. A big man with big opinions about his art, behind his hearty defence of the Anglo-Oriental studio tradition in which he worked was a gentle voice, expressed in pots that always sought ‘a sense of adventure’. In this article we look back on Phil’s legacy and the principles behind his beloved work.

14. New Excursions: A Visionary Wartime Project The story of how the New Excursions poetry anthologies came to be is one of those endlessly entertaining rabbit holes that seems to get longer and more labyrinthine the further down you go. One of several national projects designed to raise morale in times of war, it should have been a flop, but owed its extraordinary success to the sheer range of personalities involved – from cantankerous critics and Neo-Romantic painters to a publishing firm of plucky Viennese émigrés.

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30. Eric Ravilious: A Downland Elegy Unusually, for a British landscape artist not named Constable or Turner, the life and work of Eric Ravilious has held a persistent grip on the public imagination some 80 or more years since his death off the coast of Iceland. With a new exhibition space now open at Towner Art Gallery specially designed to showcase Ravilious’ work (and the many relationships entwined within it), Julian Freeman – art historian and Eastbourne neighbour – delves into the history of this most enduring of reputations.

40. The Radical Antiquarian: John Piper as Author

50. Shino: Colours of Skin and Snow Having lain dormant for two hundred years or more, the revival of traditional Shino glaze – at the hands of two very different master potters – brought sumptuous tea wares reminiscent of snow, skin, and fleeting blossoms back into the Japanese public consciousness.

John Piper was certainly a team player – an artist who came alive in collaborative projects, whether as illustrator, designer, printmaker (or all three combined). Working with writers throughout his career, he developed a fine eye for the balance between graphic illustrations and typography.

But in his own writings – less commonly celebrated – art critic David Whiting finds the same originality of ideas and ‘mossy Gothic’ colour as characterised his very best work in paint and print.

57. HIGHLIGHTS • New arrivals at the gallery include original prints by Scottish artist William Maclean and celebrated engraver Clare Leighton • Six rare-as-hen’s-teeth oils by Mabel Royds and a Mexican Man Ray original gouache grace our Highlight features • Plus an overview of our 2026 calendar – a bumper year for gallery artist exhibitions, pots, and live music (now available archived on our new Goldmark Front Room YouTube channel)

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The ANIMALS’ CHRISTMAS Hilary Davies on the often overlooked characters of the Nativity story.

Christmas.

What do we think of when we hear that word?

What images crowd in on our mind?

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Over seventy years ago in A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas painted a wordpicture of extraordinary vividness that fuses the real and the imagined, the domestic and the symbolic, the everyday with the eerie, the given with the discovered. There is also plenty about the presents, the overindulgence in food and drink, if not quite yet the overwhelming commercialisation of Christmas, that we can recognise. Yet this story is rooted in the concrete surroundings of 1920s Swansea, in just the same way as Brueghel’s is in his famous painting of the Magi arriving on a freezing winter day through a noisy, snow-covered Flemish market to do homage to the almost invisible Christ child.

In Thomas’ account, too, Christ’s birth remains

tantalisingly absent from the narrator’s memoried preoccupations; only the peal of bells and the adults returning through the snow from chapel clearly hint at it. But there are plenty of animals; and the natural world, in the form of snow, dominates everything.

In Thomas’ word picture, there are bears and wolves ‘before the motorcar’, dogs ’ bay excelsior’ and snow ‘grows out of the hands of trees’. The natural world, and the children, know that something very special is happening.

It is therefore all the more striking to realise that there are absolutely no animals at all mentioned in the gospel accounts of Christ’s birth, a fact that commentators noticed and puzzled over from the very first centuries of

Opposite: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, 1563, Am Römerholz, Winterhur Left: Sarcophagus of Stilicho, Nativity Tympanum, 3rd / 4th century, Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio, Milan Below: Adoration of the Magi, 4th century sarcophagus, Vatican Museum

Christianity. The nearest we get is Luke’s reference to the baby being ‘laid in a manger because there was no place at the inn (Luke 2: 1-8 NRSV) and, in the same gospel, (Luke 2: 8-15), the apparition of the angels to the shepherds who, it is safe to assume, were surrounded by sheep. The usual explanation for the beloved and time-honoured presence of the ox and the ass is the mention in the opening verses of Isaiah (1:3-4) where he excoriates the infidelity of the Israelites to God, ‘the ox knows its owner; and the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people do not understand’. The gospel, in this typology, now redresses that infidelity.

But there is undoubtedly more to it than

this, for the association of animals with nativity begins very early on indeed. It is not a rationalising by scribes and theologians after the event, but is embedded in early Christian understanding of what this event really signified: the coming of God into the world as a human being, subject to all our frailties and, ultimately, subject to death.

There are plentiful examples of this on 3rd/4th century Christian sarcophagi in museums around the world. Indeed one of the earliest, or so it is thought, has only animals, no humans or celestial beings at all, as witnesses to the scene, no Mary, no Joseph, no shepherds, no magi, no angel.

It is a radical departure from the gospel

accounts, suggesting that oral, artistic and folk traditions had already integrated the animals as an essential part of the nativity.

Here, in relief on the so-called sarcophagus of Stilicho in the church of St. Ambrogio, Milan, just a (rather chunky and not particularly realistic) donkey and ox watch over the infant in the manger; all here is fleshly, warm, sensuous, silently watching.

In another depiction on a sarcophagus of similar date in the Vatican Museum, the stocky Phrygian-looking magi rush towards Mary whilst two astonished and open-mouthed camels peek their heads out between them: they too want in on the act, they too wish to marvel.

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Right: Arnolfo di Cambio, Il Presepe, c.1280, Santa Maria Maggiore Opposite: Paul Gauguin, Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen), oil on canvas, 1902-3, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields

The very fact that these various depictions are carved in stone serves subliminally to emphasise two crucial aspects of the nativity.

The first evokes the bodiliness of the newborn, barely arrived from the body of his mother into the cold night and wrapped in swaddling clothes precisely to mimic the warm constraints he has known in the womb; the second quite literally places the incarnate God into the world of the tangible: the smoothly carved stone tantalisingly invites the fingers to run over the folds of the baby clothes, the mane of the donkey, the rounded rump of the ox. These details say, this is a God we can see, hear, smell, touch.

Nearly a thousand years later, also in Rome, we find evidence of how enduring this ‘enfleshed’ understanding of the nativity is.

Two years ago I visited Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the oldest and most significant churches of the Christian world, for the first time. But its original name was in fact Santa Maria ad Praesepe,‘ St. Mary of the Crib’, because it was thought to house relics of the manger at Bethlehem. On the left as you enter, and in a slightly off-putting glass cubicle, you will find one of the masterpieces of Italian Gothic, Arnolfo di Cambio’s

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(attributed) 13th century nativity. It is influenced, like the Christian sarcophagi, by the statuary of the antique world, but something else has suffused the figures.

Because it is also influenced by the tradition of St. Francis and the crib he created at Greccio. St. Francis’ ‘ecological’ credentials remain one of the most famous things about him; Pope Francis, who tellingly chose to be buried in Santa Maria Maggiore, underlined just how pressing this message is for our times with his encyclical, Laudato Sí (2015) and even more urgently worded apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum ( 2023). How appropriate it is then that this sculptural group should be in this church.

It is a group that arrests the attention in many ways and for many reasons. But my eye was instantly and irresistibly drawn to the two animal heads on the left, the ox and the ass. The vagaries of conservation history have separated them from Mary and her baby but this only accentuates the weight of their presence. The donkey has the refined head of a thoroughbred from the ancient world: his gaze is slightly lowered, as if meditating or at prayer; his stillness is haunting. The ox is now so orientated that

he stares out at us, the spectator; his bulbous eyes, stubby horns, fetching forelock curls and soft muzzle make of him the gentle domestic animal par excellence. And yet… the more you pay attention, the more his gaze goes past you, connects with a vision that reaches far beyond the family scene behind him. This animal has knowledge of things that are not human, that surpass the human, things that cannot be spoken.

Seven hundred years later, that creatureliness is foregrounded again in a rare treatment by Gauguin of the Christmas story. The artist’s relationship with the Catholic faith in which he was raised was famously combative and increasingly estranged, especially after his self-imposed exile in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. Yet Gauguin never forgot the (actually extraordinarily broad and rich) education he received at the Petit Seminaire de la Chapelle Saint Mesmin near Orléans. However much he rejected the institutions of Catholicism, he was steeped in the Christian tradition.

This is very evident in Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen). Here we are surprisingly close to Dylan Thomas. The painting is in all probability a memory of the

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time Gauguin spent in Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu in Brittany in the late 1880s; Brittany was renowned for the tenacity of its adherence to Catholicism, and provided Gauguin with many opportunities to meditate upon Christian themes. This one, like the sarcophagus of Stilicho, is pared-back and radical. We are in a little Breton village where the low cottages are almost buried under thick snow; just the church steeple sticks up above the rooftops; the heads of the bullocks are directly under both, so that domestic dwelling place and God’s dwelling place both rest upon the horns and sleek faces of the oxen. Their left legs step in unison forwards, as if in homage – but the right side of the painting cuts through the nativity scene. Two indistinct figures, maybe both female and one kneeling, look out of the frame towards the Christ child we must intuit but cannot see. They are in a decorated alcove that is incongruously open to the fierce elements; behind the oxen two Breton peasant women bear witness by their mere presence. The more you look at this painting, the stranger it gets; or perhaps it is that in fact the more you become rooted in the understanding that the Christ story takes hold everywhere and in any circumstance.

What seems at first glance familiar – the snow, the oxen – starts to move into a landscape that is as much symbolic as real.

Now the animals come ever closer: in Giotto’s Nativity in the lower church at Assisi, the donkey and ox stretch their heads over the stable partition, as if they wish to nuzzle the swaddled child. It is undoubtedly far closer than any normal mother would be happy for farm animals to come to her newborn, but the message is unmistakeable: he is born for us, there shall be no separation from us.

In the Nativity from the haunting series of paintings of Christ’s life by the Korean Christian artist, Kim Ki Chang (artistic name: Unbo), a vast bullock forms the backdrop to the central scene, wrapping himself protectively round Mary, Joseph and the

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baby: you can almost lean into and snuggle up against his hot flank. A saddle hangs casually over a stable frame, hinting at a long journey completed only hours before. But in this nativity, there is one animal we have not seen previously: a splendid rooster, centre stage, pecking the dust. Nobody but the artist is paying him any attention. But we know that one day just before a terrible dawn he will crow three times.

I have said that the animals in so many of these depictions of the nativity seem to know things that cannot be spoken, things that are implicit and will only come to be recognised in the process of time. In the last three works of art I have chosen that connection is made explicit. In Lorenzo Monaco’s portrayal, the ox and ass peer over the partition as they do in Giotto’s work, but what a transformation is here: Mary no longer holds her baby but kneels in adoration before him, and the Christ child is naked, floating

on a spiky golden halo, clearly not any child of this world. But wait… the golden breath of the ox streaks directly down from the animal, linking the aureole supporting Jesus to the animal. The ox, like the Holy Spirit, is breathing life into the transfigured child. The child is on fire with his divinity, but it is the ox that is literally inspiring him. There is something here of Robert Southwell’s Burning Babe,

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow, Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear’.

Opposite: Giotto, Nativity, 1310s, Lower Church, Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi Above: Ki-Chang Kim (Unbo), The Birth of Christ, 1952-3, Seoul Museum Right: Lorenzo Monaco, The Nativity, c.1406-10, Metropolitan Museum of Art NY

The last two creatures we have not met until now. El Greco’s The Adoration of the Shepherds was painted probably in the decade after Southwell’s execution as a Catholic priest in Elizabethan London; both men were heavily influenced by their exposure to the baroque CounterReformation in Rome. As in Southwell’s poem, the light in the picture emanates out from the centre, from the baby, whom Mary unwraps from a bright white garment to show the shepherds, seeming herself to start back, uncertain of how this child has come to be.

The scene plays out in almost total darkness, the figures swirling and twisting in amazement and wonder; the diagonals and lines you might expect are broken off, deliberately thwarting any clear progression of the eye around the painting. Except for one. Directly beneath the baby, isolated from the dynamic figures and therefore paradoxically more striking, is one still, white form, head down, waiting for sacrifice: a lamb. He lies, silent and pure, a reproach to the hysterical acclamations above him and the rainbow arc of whizzing putti floating in the vault, though the sombre faces of

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Mary and Joseph betray that they have understood. This is the other side of the incarnation.

The last image I have chosen is tiny, intricate and complex. It is printed in a booklet of just four pages, each slightly smaller than standard A5. Beside it runs the poem that it was intended to accompany – I am careful not to say illustrate, though the two do share two elements: a Christmas tree decorated with real candles, and the star. The poem also shares some images with Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales: the feasting and the presents. In its turn the engraving, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, (1954), which is by David Jones, the celebrated Anglo-Welsh painter and poet, links back to the Welsh landscapes of Thomas, a friend of both Jones and Eliot, who was himself the publisher of both poets. The background of the picture is recognisably the hills and woodland of the south Wales Jones loved so much and where he lived for several years at Capel-y-ffin near Hay in Wye. But this is also the sacred wood that features in Jones’ poems, The Sleeping Lord, The Hunt, and The Anathemata, and the burning Christmas tree stands at its centre, just as does Southwell’s burning babe.

Beneath it, couched on a bed of flowers and herbs and illuminated by one single large altar candle, lies another new animal: a wounded hart. He is pierced by three arrows and blood runs from a gash in the centre of his flank. He wears a diadem round his neck, and his antlers weave and twist upwards towards the star and the lights of the Christmas tree; the trees of the forest, too, seem to dance and lean towards their beams.

There is a strange echo of the wild gesturings of El Greco’s nativity here, even as the hart sits still and dying, just like the lamb in the 17th century painting. In both Christ’s birth foretells, is inseparable from, his death. Like all Jones’ paintings and poems, this image is dense with layered meaning and effects: the eye could spend hours tracing and meditating upon them. And that is what

Eliot’s poem, ‘The Cultivation of Christmas Trees’ intends as well. He dismisses ‘the torpid, the patently commercial/ The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight’, and turns us, as do the theological signposts of Jones’ engraving, towards ‘the amazement/ Of the first remembered Christmas Tree’, whose presence shall throughout our lives evoke

Opposite: El Greco, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1605-1610, Metropolitan Museum of Art NY Below: David Jones, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, lithograph, 1954, Faber Ariel Poems Series

‘…a great joy Which shall also be a great fear…

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end And the first coming of the second coming.’

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NEW EXCURSIONS

Strange quirks of history connect this beloved poetry series with propaganda statistics and picture books, as our editor investigates…

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Occasionally – very occasionally – great art emerges from the most contrived of circumstances. New Excursions into English Poetry was one such project: a collection of seven poetry anthologies with sympathetic illustrations, published by Frederick Muller Ltd. from the latter half of the Second World War. The series announced itself as ‘something of a new experiment’, giving free rein to both illustrators (a roll-call of notable Neo-Romantics) and editors. ‘The authors are no hack compilers’, reads the jacket blurb: ‘the selections will be personal – they may even seem arbitrary and capricious – but

they will have unity and reflect the real temper of the anthologer.’

On the one hand, New Excursions arrived at a time of relatively strong receptivity to British poetry, old and new – just after the withdrawal of T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion in 1939, and after the birth of its spiritual successor, Horizon, spearheaded by Cyril Connolly. But looming over its head was the Ministry of Information, intent on establishing a programme of publications celebrating and preserving British culture at a time when the threat of German invasion was very real.

New Excursions, under the editorship of poets Walter James Turner (forthright literary editor for the Spectator and respected musicologist) and Sheila Shannon (with whom Turner was having an affair) joined a host of such ‘soft propaganda’ series. The best known remains Britain in Pictures, which paired famous authors with subjects of national identity and accomplishment. What should have been transparently jingoistic morale boosters succeeded, as did New

Excursions, on the sheer force of the personalities commissioned for the series: David Low on British Cartoonists; Edith Sitwell on English Women; Vita Sackville-West on Country Houses; Graham Greene on British Dramatists; John Piper on British Romantic Artists (more on this volume in David Whiting’s excellent article on page 40); John Betjeman on English Cities and Small Towns; Cecil Beaton on British Photographers; George Orwell on The English People.

These wartime books emerged at a time of much broader cultural and geographical mapping of the country – think of the beloved Shell Guides, or the New Naturalists, with illustrated covers by Bath Academy of Art’s Rosemary and Clifford Ellis. And this was an introspection borne out, in part, by the slow collapse of the British Empire, and by Britain’s isolation during the early months of the war: Britain in Pictures’ volume on India, for example, was written by Feroz Khan Noon, one of the architects of Pakistani independence.

But the real unsung hero of this new wave of illustrated publications was the ‘bookpackaging’ firm Adprint, founded in 1937 by the Austrian publisher Wolfgang Foges with help from his sponsor, Lord Glenconner.

Foges, who was Jewish, had fled his life in Vienna in 1934 after a Social Democratic Party uprising was violently quashed, leading to Austria becoming a one-party state. After Austria’s annexation by Hitler four years later, he was joined by Walter Neurath, a Viennese publisher of anti-Fascist textbooks for children who had attracted the ire of the Gestapo. Neurath had not even been granted citizenship by the time he was put on the Britain in Pictures project, and was briefly interned alongside other foreigners in a camp on the Isle of Man before the civil service managed to secure his release. He would go on to found the publishing house Thames and Hudson in 1949.

Foges and Neurath were the unseen hands guiding this new scheme of ‘soft propaganda’ publications. Both had experience of bringing

illustrations more closely alongside text, and in this they were aided by the arrival in May 1940 of Otto Neurath (no relation, confusingly) and his wife Marie Reidemeister, founders of the nascent Isotype Institute.

With their colleague, Gerd Arntz, Otto and Marie were pioneers of the ‘isotype’ illustration, in which statistics are depicted pictorially using basic symbols in order to convey complex or large numbers with ease and immediacy – perfect for the Ministry of Information’s propaganda pamphlets. Having already fled Vienna in 1934, they had escaped Holland on the last boat out of Scheveningen harbour before German occupation.

And so, behind this patriotic programme of books and pamphlets, full of selfexamination, was a team of refugees from central Europe, looking not inward but out to a world and life beyond the war. Together, outsiders and in produced, in the strangest of circumstances, something very special indeed.

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 English, Scottish and Welsh

Landscape 1700-c.1860 (1944) – John Piper, John Betjeman, Geoffrey Taylor

Geoffrey Taylor (born Jeoffrey Gibbs) was an Irish poet, born and raised between East Anglia and Sligo. A serial philanderer, he spent the late 1920s and ‘30s breaking up Robert Graves’ own domestic ménage à trois with the artist Nancy Nicholson and poet Laura Riding before remarrying and settling in Dublin, where he and John Betjeman met during the war, bonding over a shared love of neglected Victorian poetry.

Betjeman had second thoughts about working with Adprint again. In 1939 he had been so offended by the quality of the colour reproductions in his book Vintage London that he asked them not to print it. Three years later he was astonished to see it on bookshop shelves, the rights having been sold to Collins who had published it without telling him. As a result, this guide to the capital, written before the Blitz, recommended visits to buildings that now lay destroyed in piles

of rubble, a point which rather cruelly hammered home the importance of the New Excursions aim to preserve British culture.

But he was reassured by Taylor, who had received advance copies of their landscape volume: Piper’s pictures, he reported – in a deliciously sepulchral palette of black, ochre and deep purple – ‘are damn good and don’t, in my opinion, compete or fuss with the poems…’

Graham Sutherland had originally been tipped to illustrate this volume, but in private Piper fought ferociously for the commission.

In November 1942 he wrote to Betjeman ‘that the anthology was the best of its kind ever made and that G. Sutherland would miss the point of Faringdon Hill and Grongar Hill and everything else, and that I wanted to do nothing else so much’. In the end his insistence won out, his gloomy illustrations attending words by Clare, Coleridge, Pope, Tennyson and Wordsworth, alongside a host of ‘lesser-known people’ whom Betjeman joked had been salvaged exclusively from second-hand bookshops: ‘quiet Georgian rectors, village schoolmasters, peers in their libraries looking across the park, Victorian drunks and reformers and escapists...’

 The Poet’s Eye (1944) – John Craxton, Geoffrey Grigson

John Craxton was just 22 years old when he was approached in 1943 to illustrate this loosely-themed anthology of visionary poems, collated with the famously irascible writer Geoffrey Grigson (co-founder and editor of the inter-war literary magazine New Verse, in which he championed emerging poets Louis MacNeice and W.H. Auden).

After taking on the commission Craxton was invited to visit Graham Sutherland in his Pembrokeshire haunting grounds, with stays between Whitesands Bay and St Davids (in view of the cathedral) and at John Phillips’

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Picton Castle. Return visits over the following months, joining Sutherland on sketching trips, brought him deep into the dank South Wales countryside, to fields littered with stones and mushrooms – a damp reverie from which he had, eventually, to be dragged by a letter from Cowell’s director pleading him to return to Ipswich to complete his lithographs. In these pastoral scenes he merged the influences of Pembrokeshire and Samuel Palmer with Miro and Picasso and a growing desire for the heady warmth of the Mediterranean, as described by his friend Peter Watson, sponsor of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine. Craxton’s biographer, Ian Collins, points out that he needn’t have looked far for inspiration for his Arcadian figures: among the field workers in Pembrokeshire were Italian prisoners of war – swarthy, handsome, and easily identified by the red circles sewn to the backs of their shirts.

 Sea Poems (1944) – Mona Moore, Myfanwy Piper

Having helmed the influential abstraction review Axis in the mid-1930s, Myfanwy Piper donned her editorial cap once more for this maritime anthology. Her illustrator, Mona Moore, had from early 1941 worked for Recording Britain and the War Artists’ Committee, particularly in Wales, where she documented the ruins of the Swansea Blitz and, on director Kenneth Clark’s secret orders, the decommissioned Manod slate mines in Blaenau Ffestiniog where the National Gallery had stashed its collection of Old Master paintings to protect them from bombing raids. Moore’s use of lithography’s airy and chalky textures make for an effective evocation of the changeable salt-breezes in Piper’s highly personal selection, reflecting the ‘alluring, hostile, indifferent, treacherous’ human attributes that are part of the ocean’s powers of seduction.

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 Poems of Death (1945) – Michael Ayrton, Phoebe Pool

 Soldiers’ Verse (1945) – William Scott, Patric Dickinson

New Excursions found William Scott on the cusp of an awkward transition in his career: just as he was asked to contribute to a project celebrating the national character, the Ulsterborn Scotsman was looking to escape the pervasive ‘Englishness’ critics saw in his wartime watercolours. He had lived in France before the war, in Pont Aven, and with the inspirational arrival of a major Picasso / Matisse show at the V&A a year later would completely revaluate his painting, once associated with Neo-Romantics John Minton, Michael Ayrton, and Keith Vaughan, turning to the more open avenues of still life. The empty soldier’s coat that hangs on barbed wire on the cover of this War Poetry collection evokes, of course, the devastating loss of life he had seen just months ago – but could it also suggest, perhaps, the artist shedding his Romantic skin, slipping away from the carnage and drama that had defined his art for the past five years to begin anew?

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Michael Ayrton’s illustrations for this anthology were suitably haunting – shades of decay and mythological overtones of the kind that shaped his later visions of Daedalus and the Minotaur. Little could he know that similar shadows were secretly cast over this project. His collaborator, Phoebe Pool, was an erstwhile reviewer for the Spectator and later an art historian; she had also been recruited as a spy for the USSR in the 1930s, acting as a courier for Anthony Blunt (member of the famous ‘Cambridge Five’, and later Pool’s PhD supervisor at the Courtauld).

Though prone to depression throughout her life, her publications (on Picasso, Degas, Constable and French Impressionism) were successes, particularly with undergraduate art students. Betrayed by Blunt in 1964, MI5 organised for her Courtauld colleague, Anita Brookner, to extract her own confession of guilt. Pool later threw herself under a tube train in 1971. Her death, alongside two others, put an end to MI5’s investigations for fear of public backlash.

 Travellers’ Verse (1946) – Edward Bawden, Mary Gwyneth Lloyd Thomas

Walter Turner’s own sudden death in November, 1946, from a blood clot did not prevent the arrival of the last two volumes in his New Excursions series. There are glorious nods toward Paul Nash’s Garden of Cyrus in this contribution by Edward Bawden, with intimations of exotic far-flung lands.

Bawden no doubt drew on his wartime exploits in these illustrations, having travelled to Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia during his time as an Official War artist. His adventures, as described by print historian Pat Gilmour, included ‘following a camel cavalcade to Addis Ababa and circumnavigating Africa on his return, only to be shipwrecked off Lagos, taken to Morocco by a French vichy warship and interned in Casablanca. Rescued by the Americans, he eventually arrived back in England via America.’

 Poems of Sleep and Dream (1947) – Robert Colquhoun, Carol Stewart

By 1947, Robert Colquhoun – inseparable from his cohabitor, Robert Macbryde – was considered one of the rising stars of a new generation of British artists fusing Expressionist figuration from the continent with the homegrown Surrealism that lay at the heart of Neo-Romantic painting. His illustrations for this eclectic collection of poems reveal what an extraordinary influence the presence of Jankel Adler had been on the two Scottish artists’ lives, with whom they shared a house and studio in 1943. An exile of war, Adler brought with him direct contact with pre-war European modernism – Klee, Picasso – that fed Colquhoun’s visions of wracked figures apparently fighting for survival in the aftermath of the global conflict.

If New Excursions had confirmed anything, it was that British art’s character was enriched during the war by an embrace and union of outside influences with inward looking.

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PHIL ROGERS

On The Shoulders of Giants

Five years on from his passing, we look back on the larger-than-life legacy of our first gallery potter.

I

’ve been thinking a lot lately about the story of William Herschel, an astronomer who wanted to look at the sun. An expatriate composer living in Bath, Herschel had no formal training as a scientist but fell into it through sheer curiosity.

Buying himself a telescope and various instructionals, he quickly became obsessed, grinding his own mirrors and lenses as he expanded his horizons. In 1781 he discovered Uranus, a bewildering accomplishment which saw him appointed as the King’s Astronomer.

In order to study sunspots, he had tried using different colours of darkened lenses to reduce the direct sunlight on his eyes and discovered, by chance, that some colours conveyed heat and little light, others light and little heat. To determine whether

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one colour of light would heat or illuminate more than any other, he used a crown glass prism (like Newton before him) to split white light across a tabletop. Using a board with a slit just large enough for one band of colour to pass through at a time, he measured the temperature of each stream landing on the table. His suspicions were true: colours across the spectrum seemed to register different temperatures across a distribution.

But he also noticed that temperature readings beyond the table, past the stream of visible red light, were hotter still: the heat of invisible ‘infrared’ radiation. He had made a major discovery, without even realising it: that light and heat were each expressions of the same electromagnetic spectrum.

What does Herschel’s story have to do with studio pottery?

Very little on the surface of it – except that this image of him scrabbling away in the dark, with makeshift equipment, building on the work of those that came before him, seemed to me an oddly appropriate metaphor for the trials and tribulations of the workshop, as the potter Phil Rogers once described them to me. Phil, like Herschel, was an artist first. He had no formal training as such and was largely self-taught, learning more from the pots of others he liked to call his ‘absentee tutors’. But pottery, he would stress, is a scientific art: multidisciplinary, dependent on the hard-won knowledge of others, the greater part of which involves no creativity at all – whether that be the ‘back-breaking drudgery’ of wedging clay, mixing glazes, or stacking piles of wood.

At the heart of good pottery, Phil would say, was the challenge ‘to succeed by daring to fail’. In the end Herschel was not convinced by his own data; he left the topic some years later, dissatisfied, without realising the significance of what he had found. But in his investigations he had built upon Newton’s findings, and paved the way for future scientists to do the same with his own. The potter Bernard Leach, borrowing from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, would say you have to ‘drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.’ Phil, paraphrasing Isaac Newton, put it rather more tactfully: ‘We are all, in this line of work, standing on the shoulders of giants.’

This winter will mark five years since Phil passed away. I would have been 10 or 11 when I first met him, slightly in awe of his giant frame and the gentle voice that didn’t match it. He seemed to have stepped out of an Asterix book, or the Welsh Rugby starting fifteen. We had many of his pots at home, but I think I knew him best from the yunomi and guinomi stacked in cupboards and on mantelpieces about the house. The names alone of these unpretentious and tactile little drinking vessels indicate the broadly Anglo-Oriental, cross-cultural vocabulary of forms and glazes with which he typically worked, but that label alone does little to describe the surprising deftness of

the fingers and thumbs that shaped them. Phil brought extraordinary variety and sensitivity to scale in these pots that seemed counter to his huge hands, and which he knew, proportionate to a vase or medieval jug, would bring him little financial return. As we look back at his work in years to come, that gentleness and sympathy at small sizes will remain a large part of his legacy.

Phil was a big man, and with that came big opinions about how his craft was practised and promoted. His vocal distrust of the drift in ceramics editorials towards promoting ‘sculptural’, fine-art-adjacent work and his forthright railing against the minimalist trend of the 2000s for what he described as ‘anaemic’, thinly-thrown grey and white stoneware earned him as many adversaries as it did friends. For what it’s worth, from our own conversations I suspect Phil’s opinion on the broad church that ceramics has now become was more nuanced than his more dogmatic broadcasts would suggest. This public-facing aspect of his life (he was a four-term Chair of the Craft Potters Association) belied the softness that he expressed in his pots, and which often came out in private gestures. In 2014, while visiting Phil’s exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery, I mentioned that I was getting married later that summer. When I returned from my honeymoon several weeks later, I found wrapped in brown paper a stack of seven plates with beautiful calligraphic designs dashed across their surface, their slightly umbrous nuka glaze reminiscent of traditional Shodai pots from Japan. When I called to thank him, he explained that whenever he made gifts of sets of plates he would try to make seven, ‘just in case someone breaks one doing the washing up.’ Shamefully, I’m down to five.

A close look at any of Phil’s pots will tell you he had a great many heroes, from renowned studio potters to unknown craftsmen. English slipware, German salt glaze, Dutch-American settlers pots, Joseon Korean pottery – each fed into his repertoire.

But more than any other potter, more than Bernard Leach, whose A Potter’s Book had set him on his path as a largely selftaught student potter, Phil admired Hamada. In the great game of composers versus interpreters, Hamada, like Leach, falls awkwardly between the two. He was not strictly an innovator: he did not, like the artist-potters who came after him, aggressively reshape pottery in his image; neither did he revive a tradition, like his contemporaries in Bizen and Mino, so much as invent one anew in the sleepy town of Mashiko, taking the local clays and glazes he found there and combining them, with great dexterity, with features drawn from Okinawa and elsewhere.

His real legacy was of bridging traditions, cultures, borders.

Phil was convinced there was an element of genius to his work: an intuitive gift that found articulation in the tension in a bowl,

Above: Buncheong bowl, slip on dark clay with clear glaze Opposite: Phil Rogers in his Rhayader studio, 2014

view more Phil Rogers at goldmarkart.com

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from rim to foot, or the placement of a motif across a pressmould bottle face – features he sought to replicate in his own work. I think he recognised, too, that this genius extended to the management and marketing of Hamada’s image too, carefully extricating himself from the ‘anonymous’ tradition of Mingei folk crafts to find fuller artistic expression elsewhere.

Phil used to call his inheritance from Leach and Hamada ‘more a genre than a tradition’. It’s an important distinction, particularly when we look back at Hamada’s early role as an ‘Intangible Cultural Property Holder’ (more colloquially, a ‘Living National Treasure’). While his contemporaries, like Toyozo Arakawa and Munemaru Ishiguro, were awarded the same titles for reviving or preserving particular types of historical work, Hamada’s honour was for the more elusive ‘Mingei (‘folk craft’)’ – neither a technique nor a catalogue of forms, clays or glazes. Phil knew that Hamada’s contribution was less about the preservation of long-held practices and more the art of an individual – an expression of soul, essentially, that could have been allied to any one tradition or another and found something to say within it. While he was himself a ‘preserver’ of sorts, through his muchloved textbooks on Ash Glazes (1992) and Salt Glazing (2003), the most important facet of a potter’s work remained, for him, its ‘spirit of adventure’, irrespective of process.

But Phil was not an innovator either – not in the sense of someone who looked to push the envelope, or to break the mould, for its own sake. He greatly respected those who had and could, but I think he recognised his value did not lie there.

He was, like many of his contemporaries, a refiner. History prefers to remember inventors, but refiners are no less important.

They bridge the gap from one generation to the next. They make better what came before. They expand, diversify, enrich what was started by others – just as Herschel had, inadvertently, expanded and enriched Newton’s theory of light, providing the groundwork for scientists working decades after his death.

More than chasing novelty, I think Phil was wary of staving off stagnation, knowing that the path he had chosen was narrow, making nuance and variation challenges in themselves. Like Hamada, returning time and again to the same broken straw motif with his brush, there was a sense that in each repetition a different response might come about: that the same pot at one time could represent or embody some quite different feeling when produced at another. Phil was not interested in newness for newness’ sake. Novelty for him meant more local challenges: could an equivalent of Shigaraki clay or Korean Buncheong decoration be formulated from what he had at hand? Could they retain the qualities of the original, while speaking of something specific to his very different geographic and cultural location in 21st-century mid-Wales?

Opposite: Wood-fired Shigaraki-style bottles Above: Tall ash glaze vase with applied pellet decoration

price guide inside back cover

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As Phil had noticed, the word ‘traditional’ sometimes inures us to what was really going on in such exercises. In one exhibition of his work I remember being strangely taken with an otherwise unassuming pot. A medium-sized vase, the walls slightly concave, with squared shoulders and a wide, open mouth with a pronounced lip, over which parchment could be drawn and tied to keep contents sealed. The body had been incised with little flicks of a tool, nicking out triangular hollows that had filled with glaze and which capped swiftly and thinly incised lines, together resembling grasses in the wind. The glazes were ash – a cool, glassy elm and a darker pine, in this instance, each over a loosely-brushed white slip, so that the grass motifs seemed to dance in, out, over and between their breezy background.

This form was an Albarello vase: a medicine jar, once richly decorated in the colourful Islamic motifs of Iraq, Syria or Moorish Spain, and later adopted by Italian craftsmen during the Renaissance, who realised it could also have a decorative capacity and become something altogether more luxurious – a history lesson that function and form are not sealed together, but sometimes shifting out of step. Phil’s pot still retained its vestigial lip, which now serves no purpose, but without which it would appear bald and unfinished. The same form (slightly squatter) was a favourite of Hamada’s, who enjoyed the hieratic pride of its open mouth.

Here was a pot, then, that brought together history from Spain, the Middle East, and quattrocento Italy, via a Japanese 20th century potter, enlivened with 16th century Korean decorative techniques and ash glazes sourced from local Welsh woodland.

Bernard Leach, reflecting 50 years after he and Hamada first came together in England in 1920, described how cultural blending on such a scale was a new phenomenon specific to the modern-day studio potter. In their own experiments, they had been ‘servants of something greater than ourselves’, a ‘slowly evolving interplay and maturity of man. By which I do not mean a grey internationalism obliterating the local colour of each component people but an endless series of combinations determined by the depth and truth of creative minds answering the questions and conditions which surround them.’

‘As each of us lived into that different world, our own was enriched and enlarged. We also learned to see our own civilisation from outside with the long view of half a world away.

This made our homecomings strange as well as familiar and left both of us for the rest of our lives with the task of accepting or rejecting concepts, shapes, textures, colours, patterns and techniques of pots from East and West. This is part of the responsibility of an artist of our time. It was never the task of

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Above: Yunomi, ash glaze over white slip in incised decoration Opposite: Phil throwing a teabowl in his studio, 2014

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an individual potter before our time….Today the individual potter has to carry this responsibility on his own shoulders. In other words, he has to be a recreative artist.’

The crisis for the traditional potter comes when that tradition itself is considered passé, dry, extinguished. What is there left to say in the Leach-Hamada vein? For Hans Coper, working in the wake of Leach and Hamada’s studio pottery movement but finding its precepts out of step with post-war metropolitan living, the potter’s practice meant getting comfortable with existential uncertainty. ‘Practising a craft with ambiguous reference to function one has occasionally to face absurdity,’ he wrote in the 1960s. ‘More than anything, like a demented piano tuner, one is trying to approximate phantom pitch. One is apt to take refuge in principles which crumble.’

More than several of his contemporary ‘Anglo-Orientals’, Phil also recognised how ill-suited those same principles were to the pace and demands of modern life, though he remained more committed to them than Coper. Growing out of Leach and Hamada’s Mingei philosophy, these were principles of beauty in the everyday object, in opposition to factory methods yet still tied, indirectly, to the original practice of pottery as repetitive work – ideals that placed those who followed them squarely in that dangerous and populous hinterland between fine art on the one hand and production pottery on the other.

Studio pottery at this scale is a proclamatory art: the work is produced in greater quantities than most painters or sculptors could ever achieve – even Hamada could make 10,000 pots a year from his main kiln. Consistency – hardly the sexiest word in art criticism – becomes, in the art of functional studio pottery, an important marker of quality and prowess: Hamada (as far as Phil was concerned) famously never made a bad pot (or certainly hid or disowned them well enough that they are seldom attributed to his name). It is consistency that prevents the calamitous venture of being a potter from becoming unsurvivably expensive, and it is undoubtedly the source of its greatest frustrations – the principal reason why really good potters tend to hit their stride in later years, when there has been enough time to learn mistakes and trial, test and refine. And so potters are judged not just on their ‘masterpieces’, but on a deeper kind of attitude embodied by their career: a way of life, for want of a better term. The earthen tones of oatmeal, ash and iron glazes which ceramicists of the 1970s and ‘80s reacted so strongly against (and quite understandably) were not solely an aesthetic choice; they were tied up with moral and sensible choices too, an ethical principle that ‘to take from what is on offer is enough’, to enjoy the immediacy of what could be dug from the ground. Today such principles remain alive and well, from urban movements promoting the use of recycled materials

in glazes to remoter, rural programmes like the Bornholm Wild Clay project, established by Phil’s one-time apprentice Anne Mette Hjortshøj. As she would be quick to point out, this is not a revolution. Wild Clay used to be called just ‘clay’, and digging it out and blending it with materials and minerals available to hand was what any potter did, what tied them to their sense of place, and which collectively supplied a distinct character to their work. A person in communion with the matter of place, and from that place and matter a particular vocabulary derived – of colours, textures, forms and scales.

It is the mark of great pottery that, consistently, the work produced somehow contains and distils this attitude, in all its nuance, with the same ease that it might contain and supply food or drink, as Phil’s work always did. Do his pots have a ‘Cambrian’ feeling? Many of his Welsh collectors seemed to think so. A favourite technique involved displacing straight lines around the belly of a pot to give them a lilt like the Welsh language, or like echoes of the hilly landscape beyond his Rhayader workshop window. To me, such lines recall Dylan Thomas’ ‘force that through the green fuse drives’ all living things, a poetic circle captured in the cyclical nature of ash glazes, and of pottery more broadly: earth shaped and hardened by the burning of wood fuel, all to return to the soil again one day.

Leach compared Hamada to the tree ‘growing from his own earth and roots upwards and outwards, and like a tree flowering and shedding seed back to earth again…Now his pots are known and admired all over the world for like trees they have sap in them – the natural life force which everybody shares, but few use wisely.’ Phil’s pots remain too, evidence of his own lively character, his sensitivity to eye, touch and use, the guiding principles that he protected and maintained as times changed around him, and which still to us seem worth preserving for generations to come.

Opposite: Large wood-fired vase in Shigaraki-style clay with ash glaze and impressed stamp decoration

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Eric Ravilious A Downland Elegy

Living within walking distance of the famous Beachy Head chalk cliffs, Julian Freeman is familiar with Eric Ravilious country. With a new exhibition space now open at Towner Art Gallery dedicated entirely to Ravilious’ life and work, here he reflects on the artist’s long-enduring legacy.

On 2 September 1942, the aircraft from which (Honorary) Captain Eric Ravilious RM, Official War Artist, was hoping to observe an air / sea rescue search off Iceland failed to return.

No bodies were recovered, and – eventually – following some disgraceful official heel-dragging, Ravilious was officially declared dead. He was 39, the first of three British official artists to perish during the Second World War: the others were Albert Richards and Ravilious’ friend Thomas Hennell (both killed 1945), both estimable artists in their own ways. However, despite the inevitable categorisation of ‘a half-used life’, the breadth and substantial quality of Ravilious’s pre-war activities, together with the very high regard in which he was held as an artist, craftsman and designer by his contemporaries, mentors and patrons, set him apart, and ensured that his posthumous reputation did not suffer unduly in the ensuing decades. It was a fact reinforced when Ravilious’ copyright ended in 2012.

Were there ever before so many giclée reproductions of Cuckmere Haven or Chalk Paths?

It’s relatively unusual for a place to proactively seek to be so closely associated with a single local artist, but since 2009, when Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery reopened following relocation, the gallery has chosen to create an emphatic affinity with Ravilious and his work. Some might say that this has been excessive. After his death, in its original location in the lee of the Downs, the Towner quietly ensured that Ravilious’s work received due attention. He had been brought up in Eastbourne, and was resident until 1922, The Towner had bought two of

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his watercolours before the war (one of them the very fine Downs in Winter of 1934), and in time came to hold a strong collection of his wood engravings, several of which drew wholly or partly on local topography. In due course the gallery agreed a series of extended loans with the Ravilious family that continue to the present, and these have undoubtedly made a major contribution to the gallery’s identity. But it’s also arguable that from 1945 almost until the Millennium, the combination of the Towner’s location, in an eighteenth-century manor house in secluded wooded parkland at the landward side of Beachy Head, offered focus of a different kind, for – if it were wanted – a visit to the place might proffer commemoration, or solitude, or solace and nostalgia in equal measure. The permutations were several. And then, of course, there were The South Downs

themselves. The present National Park runs from Winchester to Eastbourne, and the landscape defines the entire area. At their eastern end the Downs provide the settings and the backdrops for many of Ravilious’s watercolours, and, given that he only turned to watercolour as his principal mode of expression in 1932, their range is both extensive and surprising.

Unfortunately, despite its undoubted charm, the everincreasing operating costs of an eighteenth-century grade II listed building, coupled with other serious issues including insufficient storage, conservation, and public access made it clear that the Manor House was fast becoming unfit for purpose.

The gallery had far exceeded the physical demands made of it, and despite its excellent stewardship and undoubted attractiveness its function and activities needed urgent review and modernisation. Having announced the Towner’s closure, the planned resale of the Manor House, and its replacement with a purpose-built gallery on the Eastbourne seafront, the Council conducted two lengthy public consultations, thereby revealing divisions in the town that should not have been unexpected, driven quite reasonably by sentiment and nostalgia.

At the Manor House, the ‘Ravilious connection’ with Eastbourne, and what might be correctly termed the ‘spirit of place’ that the presence of his watercolours of Sussex locations had quietly evoked, assumed an increased importance. Just how this could be replicated in a modern concrete building on the Eastbourne prom posed questions following its rebranding (as ‘Towner’ – think ‘Tate’) that it has struggled to answer fully, despite an increasingly diverse exhibition programme that has included the home-grown, major touring exhibition, ‘Ravilious and Friends’ in 2017.

Opposite: Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood, c.1930 Left: Pegasus (Leo), from The Almanack, woodcut, 1929

price guide inside back cover

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In Autumn 2025, Towner has trumpeted (there is no other term) the launch of ‘a new, bespoke space dedicated to the much-loved British artist Eric Ravilious...’ and repeats what has become a regularly repeated mantra, its status as the ‘custodian of the largest collection of works by Ravilious…the definitive Ravilious experience for general visitors and scholars alike…’

As if to support this came the simultaneous announcement that Towner and The Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden had jointly acquired twenty-four woodblocks by Ravilious and three by his wife Tirzah Garwood. They had been missing for 75 years, following Ravilious’ and Garwood’s respective deaths, but were now ‘saved for the public.’

The nagging question remains: why now? There’s a strong sense that what might be termed Ravilious’s ‘landscape vision‘ – the ‘look’ of his downland, and some of his coastal watercolours – is being referenced to support other projects, but given the

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complicated life of its subject, it’s worth returning to the likely beginning: his childhood at 11 Glynde Avenue, Hampden Park near Eastbourne. The Ravilious family did not enjoy a settled family life but in 1909 were sufficiently confident to move to that address: it is possible that they may have moved again within a few years, but on arrival Eric would have been aged about 6. He later recalled that escape from often-discordant family situations downstairs was possible by retreating upstairs to his bedroom and losing himself in the absorbing magnificence of the panorama from his window. Then, without post-1945 building, it was a superb vantage point, a vista across almost open country as far as the South Downs, as their huge escarpment swings south-eastwards from due west, to run towards Eastbourne and Beachy Head. It’s still a stunning view, and an impressionable little boy would have marked it. Hampden Park itself, with its boating pond and woodland, was a future watercolour, and only a few minutes’ walk away, and as Ravilious grew older, locations around the town - the art college, the old Manor House and its gardens - would have been just over an hour on foot.

Ravilious spent his adolescence and early adult life in and around Eastbourne, attending its School of Art from 1919-22, before gaining a scholarship to the Design School at The Royal College of Art between 1922-25. His scholarship was marked by four key events, the first of which was the creation, and the enduring friendship, of an unusually talented class of studentdesigners, including Enid Marx, Edward Bawden and Barnet Freedman. All are represented in Towner’s new display. Secondly, Ravilious became increasingly absorbed with woodblock engraving, then enjoying a renaissance as an illustrative medium, and a connoisseurship of its own. Third, and in many ways that most professionally important for Ravilious, was the arrival of Paul Nash as a visiting tutor. Though Nash’s contract lasted only a matter of weeks, all his students paid eloquent testimony to his relaxed attitude to his teaching, a markedly different experience to the rigid approach they encountered from others.

Nash quickly recognised Ravilious’s facility as a wood-engraver: he proposed him for membership of the Society of Wood Engravers and his encouragement was surely influential as Ravilious developed this facet of his work. His ideas would increasingly mark Ravilious’ own technique as a wood-engraver and his subject-matter, and proved to be transferable skills when (the fourth key event) after his graduation from the RCA, Ravilious returned to Eastbourne, to teach at its School of Art part-time. There, one of his students was Eileen ‘Tirzah’ Garwood.

They married in 1930 and soon moved away, first to London and, finally, to Castle Hedingham in Essex in 1935, and neither made extended visits to Eastbourne thereafter.

Above: Eric Ravilious, Bedstead, 1939, Towner, Eastbourne Left: The Ravilious Collection at Towner, Eastbourne, photos by Tom Thistlewaite

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Right: Eric Ravilious, Sussex Church, woodblock, photo by Cameron Brown Opposite: Eric Ravilious, Furlongs, 1934, On loan from a private collection, Towner, Eastbourne

Despite the superlatives, in fairness, Towner’s new gallery does what it claims. It presents an attractive and strong visual account of Ravilious’ life and work in an enlarged, agreeable space. It usefully and clearly cross-references all his creative pathways, and his connections, for, as a man, he has gone into British art history as a highly agreeable companion, intelligent and literate: like most of his generation, and certainly his closest friends, he was a keen correspondent, and the absence of good conversation depressed him. The display hints at this, but it needs to give greater emphasis to Ravilious’ recognition of the value of research, for in several important creative areas he was an auto-didact, and his acquired skills as a printmaker were unquestionably honed by repeated visits to the V&A and the British Museum. Today’s art and design students could learn some sound basic practice from this display, but it needs a little time: there are no quick fixes. It’s absorbing, and no essential corners are cut, though researchers who need more should do some prep before visiting, for Ravilious’ relationships with his friends, and particularly with Tirzah Garwood, were very important and, sometimes, uncomfortably complex. If more is needed, Andy Friend’s masterly and highly readable study Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship is easily obtained, and necessary to cover Ravilious’ lifelong friendship with Bawden, especially their important co-existence at Brick House, Great Bardfield, Essex. This alone cannot be easily or sufficiently illustrated in a constrained fashion, even when the display boasts the preliminary design for the Morley College murals

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(bombed with tragic loss of life on 15 October 1940). Of equal significance in this context are Ravilious’ extra-Eastbourne locations, especially Newhaven harbour, and its wealth of maritime shapes, and the cottage at Furlongs, near Beddingham, Lewes, rented by the artist Peggy Angus in 1933, and first visited by Ravilious in 1934. Angus’s home-designed wallpaper is prominent in Towner’s new display, and the downland views around Furlongs (now privately owned) proved transformative for Ravilious’ vision, particularly in the way he saw and coloured the landscape, prompting the possibility of adapting its forms to improve his compositions without creating composites.

The appearance of the Ravilious gallery marks what may prove to be a pivotal moment in Towner’s evolution, for as it opens to the public, a mile or so up the road, close to Beachy Head, another development is unfolding, at the site of Black Robin Farm. First disclosed in 2023, it’s a partnership between Towner and Eastbourne Borough Council, ‘a world-class culture and education centre in the unique landscape of the South Downs National Park’…

Framed thus it’s a laudable concept with some worthy features, and a few that appear over-expectant. A more sanguine online report of August 2025 describes progress – slower than first anticipated – and insecurity concerning funding, but soon introduces the name of a familiar figure: ‘…it is the landscape of Eric Ravilious and countless artists who have been inspired by the downland curves, skyscapes and the shimmering sea...’

Myths are often more transient than they may at first appear.

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JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

Eric Ravilious TWELVE MONETHS A delightful series of wood engravings illustrating an account of the calendar penned by the forgotten Elizabethan poet Nicholas Breton (1554-

Full set of 24 prints presented in two frames

1626). Cut in 1927, the series was printed by Robert Gibbings in an edition of 500 for the legendary Golden Cockerel Press and published a year later. Two vignettes were made for each ‘moneth’: one showing the elements at work, the other a seasonal human activity.

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SPECIAL OFFER £7,500 Including frame, vat and uk delivery Normal price £9,900

*We have managed to secure one set only

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

January - June, frame size 21 x 84 mm

July - December, frame size 21 x 84 mm

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The RADICAL ANTIQUARIAN

JOHN PIPER as AUTHOR

The multi-talented John Piper collaborated with writers throughout his long career, but in his own words – as David Whiting explores – he had as much to say about 20th century Britain as he did in oil paint and inks.

Previous page: John Piper, cover for Buildings and Prospects, lithograph Above: John Piper, photograph of a scarecrow, reproduced frontis. Oxon, 1938

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I

t was an indication, some might suggest, of the critic Peter Fuller’s growing conservatism as a critic that he began to sing the praises of John Piper. There were actually, on the face of it, certain parallels. Piper developed as an avant-garde and progressive abstractionist in the 1920s and 30s, and then became, by the Second World War, a more representational and ‘traditional’ artist, going on to produce what Fuller called a“Romantic topography”, returning to the passions of his youth.

In a kind of symmetry, Fuller was first known as a forward-looking critic of the left, before turning more reactionary, moving over to more established art forms in his later career. But the workaholic Piper, for all the apparent consolation and elegy of his subsequent subjects, would also be making art that could be powerfully transformative, injecting new life into our varied but sometimes fragile landscape through potent imagery of its monumental splendours and humbler abandoned features.

He may have received numerous public commissions and even royal patronage, but the left-leaning Piper never felt that comfortable in any establishment ‘club’. He was appalled when his old colleague, Henry Moore, perhaps less-focussed by old age, accepted a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts (now less stuffy of course, but still then a bastion of orthodoxy), an institution both artists had kept well clear of. In his best postwar output (high productivity admittedly led to some unevenness and repetition), we actually see the work of a radical antiquarian who was, by the 1980s, the most prominent survivor of the Neo-Romantic impulse that took so much from our native geography. There was something regenerative too about his increasingly shimmering colour and the famously moody skies.

East Anglian medieval towers were illuminated, looking as if they had been lit from within. Old flinty walls were flecked with primary hues. Just as his work as a war artist recorded what might be irrevocably lost by bombing, so his subsequent endeavour was a constant effort to find and prize the ignored, sometimes understated aspects of our architectural texture.

Like his close friend and collaborator John Betjeman, another singer of the unsung and unfashionable, Piper was to prove an early light in 20th century conservation, but crucially this was expressed not only through paintings, prints and illustrational work, but in the articulate but still under appreciated prose of his own books.

Piper's writing career really began in the 1930s, both as cofounder of the art journal Axis in 1935 (edited by his wife Myfanwy Evans), and as art critic for The Listener, as well as contributing to various other journals. But it is in books like British Romantic Artists, published in 1942, that we get a fuller idea of his broader philosophy about the specialness of the regional. In it he wrote, “British art deals in the particular. The

particularisation of Bewick about a bird’s wing, of Turner about a waterfall or hill town, or of Rossetti about Elizabeth Siddall, is the result of a vision that can sense in these things something significant beyond ordinary significance...” It is this invoking of native identity, in location and object, that Piper brought to his pen. His antiquarian passions made him a child of the 18th and 19th century as much as one of 20th century modernism.

His interests owed much to the Picturesque, and the English Sublime, his enthusiasms driven in part by early travel writers like William Gilpin and Thomas Pennant, as well as poets such as John Dyer and William Wordsworth. Piper’s eye was based, like John Betjeman’s, not only on a church crawler’s curiosity, but on more overlooked aspects of a continuing and

contemporary ‘Picturesque,’ in Britain’s ‘pleasing decay’. His awareness of Continental modernism gave him a nose for the currency of earlier vernacular traditions in buildings and design, as well as the innately surreal aspects of our surroundings. This traveller's emphasis on the home-grown, particularly in his articles from 1936 for The Architectural Review, showed how ”from the word go”, as Richard Ingrams said, "Piper’s message was to tell his fellow countrymen that if they wanted to find things of beauty or visual interest they need look no further than their own noses.” The first of his essays for the Review was on Anglo-Saxon sculpture, still at that period an underrated topic, its details photographed dramatically by Piper “in dark corners of country churches with Myfanway holding a lantern”,

Left: Sutton Waldron, lithograph, 1948 Above: British Romantic Artists, William Collins, 1942

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Above: Customs House, Poole, lithograph with pochoir, 1951 Opposite: Images from Buildings and Prospects, Architectural Press, 1948 (top and left) and Oxon, A Shell Guide, 1938 (right)

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as the Review's editor J.M. Richards later recalled. It was one of several pieces which related Britain’s earliest art to trends in modernism, Piper writing of this sculpture, “the purely nonfigurative artists of some early…crosses were the forebears of the pure abstractionists of today. There were also early reactions against recognised forms, and obvious expressions of the subconscious, that find a parallel in Surrealism. Many a Picassolike profile is to be found on 12th century fonts and capitals”.

Buildings and Prospects, published in 1948 by the Architectural Press, collected several of these articles from the Architectural Review, together with contributions to journals such as The Cornhill Magazine and Orion. The book further clarified his ideas about visual parallels in art and the English locality. He explained that one essay, ’The Nautical Style’, in discussing and illustrating the functionalist properties of lighthouses, custom houses, harbour lights and other nautical machinery, was “written in a wave of enthusiasm for the possibilities of modern seascapes, and in the light of constructivist painting and the beachscapes of Picasso and Braque.” Meanwhile ‘Fully Licensed’, an examination of public houses, “deals with the setting of the nearest thing we know in England to Continental café life, the English equivalent to the setting of the Cubist still-life with its wine bottle and Le Journal, substituting for these The Evening News and a bottle of Guinness”. He also included a more recent piece, ‘Pleasing Decay’, an elegiac William Morris-influenced tract on the beauties of architectural erosion and considered restoration which was equally informed by artists as diverse as Cotman and Utrillo and those modern painters who thought about texture and “prophesied the beauty as well as the horror of bomb damage”. Buildings and Prospects typified the best of Piper’s books as beautiful objects too. Full of his own photographs as well as old prints, he provided a three colour lithograph of street facades in Devizes as a title page spread and dust wrapper. The book was, typically with all his written work, an indicator of wider artistic endeavours, as he explored its themes in concurrent and future paintings and prints. It also showed his twin debt to both the European avant-garde and the characteristic fabric of his own country.

Piper’s energy as a topographer was most notably shown in his work on the Shell county guides, both as author and their sometime editor. His first personal contribution was in 1938 with Oxon, a wonderfully evocative treatment of Piper's home territory of Oxfordshire. Commissioned by Jack Beddington at Shell, the series sponsor, the guides employed John Betjeman as initial editor, and who soon brought on board 'Mr Piper’ (as he always called him). Oxon, like Paul Nash’s volume on Dorset, was the most idiosyncratic of handbooks for the new motorcar tourist. Like the series in general, it was an antidote to the

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Above: Oxon, double page and cover, A Shell Guide, 1938 Opposite: The Pebble Alcove, Stowe, screenprint, 1986

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contemporaneous Little Guides and The King’s England books, which had little interest in architecture after 1700, and certainly not in Victorian building, a passion for both Piper and (in particular) Betjeman. Oxon, later revised as Oxfordshire, again encapsulated the whole Piper, with its pithy prose, descriptive photographs and line drawings. The book is as much about atmosphere as anything else, and while missing the detail of Nikolaus Pevsner’s architectural guides that came out from 1951, the antiquarianism, if shorthand, is very sharp, describing and illustrating features missing from previous guidebooks.

His notes were accompanied by imagery not only of memorial brasses, tombs and Romanesque carving, but roadside signage, scarecrows and harvest festival fruit. More cautionary was a photo of ugly modern ribbon development at Kidlington.

Myfanwy, herself a gifted commentator, added an essay on ‘Deserted Places’, finding forgotten relics that must have long since been ‘restored’, ‘improved’ or vanished altogether. In his entry on Dorchester Abbey, Piper wrote about the potential issue of 19th century renovation zeal; ‘…a building that has been much loved and used, much neglected, mutilated and restored (Butterfield and Scott were both called in by the

Victorians), but that originally had such richness and excellence of workmanship that nothing - time, weather or man - could spoil it”. The same qualities characterised his Shropshire guide, co-written with John Betjeman, but postponed until 1951 because of the War. By the time of Piper’s later contributions to the series, as co-author on Wiltshire in 1968, and uncredited co-writer on Kent a year later, the books were greatly enlarged, with more space for his crisply poetic photographs.

The aforementioned British Romantic Artists was Piper’s contribution to Collins’ ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, a wide-ranging propagandist celebration of its history and science, culture and society, published in the midst of the conflict with Hitler. Though he didn’t feature his own work in the book, this was clearly a kind of manifesto for his own artistic roots and outlook as they had clarified by this period, with his abstraction now behind him. He wrote eloquently, “As a race we have always been conscious of the soft atmosphere and changeable climate of our sea-washed country, where the sea is never quite free from mist, where the light of the sun is often more pale and pearly than it is fiery. But it has not resulted in congenital softness of vision. It has inspired the sharp-outlined visions of Blake as well as the vague adumbrations of Whistler’s nocturnes". The book showed a natural preference for the earth-bound visions of Constable, Palmer and Cotman (“a true romantic who found his outlet in antiquarianism.”) over the apocalyptic dramas of John Martin. He devoted space to good 19th century illustrators, but regarded the sentimentality of much Victorian narrative as “trivial”. For Piper the surface structure of much English Impressionism also lacked substance, echoing Gauguin’s and Van Gogh’s reservations about some of their Impressionist forebears. But he found it in his Neo-Romantic contemporaries, like Paul Nash, Frances Hodgkins and Graham Sutherland, the latter whose preternatural landscapes celebrated “tumbled rocks, tangles of gorse on sea walls, the sun falling behind a volcanic pile of mountains”. Piper’s war-time prose remains fluent and vivid to this day, in part because it is so profoundly visual, and he could be witty and amusing too.

Piper and Betjeman not only collaborated on the Shell guides, but on short-lived architectural handbooks published by John Murray. They were initially published as a kind of successor to the Shell books, which had been briefly paused by the War. The duo co-wrote volumes on Buckinghamshire and Berkshire between 1948-9, with a third, on Lancashire, added by Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh in 1955. Though they lacked some of the character of the Shell volumes, they were still incisive, both in terms of the prose and the photography (and with striking covers designed by Piper). The gazetteers offered more detail on buildings, a foretaste (though more opinionated) of Pevsner’s

county guides. Again both authors displayed a still rare appreciation of the Victorian and Edwardian, and were just as attentive to the local vernacular and to building materials, along with their familiar discussion of ecclesiastical delights. There were plenty of barbs too, for example when talking about Wyatville’s pastiche medieval “toy fort architecture” at Windsor Castle or the lack of individuality in Amersham’s modern suburbs.

Stowe, the great 18th century park and house, had eight pictorial pages to itself, with Piper later to devote several prints and a sumptuous private-press book of images to its many features.

Though they found merits in the individual character of some ‘Metroland’ villas, most 20th century design was excluded where it was found to be indistinguishable from that in any other home county. Examples of Modern Movement functionalism, which had striking examples in both areas, were also largely ignored.

price guide inside back cover

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Piper found one of his most satisfactory book subjects in the far south-east of England, that of Romney Marsh, a 1950 title in the King Penguin series, edited by Pevsner. With its isolation and scattered villages, sea-edged and under a broad sky, this flat corner of Britain, christened by the writer the Revd Richard Barham as the world's ‘fifth continent’, had everything Piper appreciated. The writer R.M. Healey said, “To me, this slim volume, with its blue-marbled dust jacket, atmospheric pen and ink drawings of marshland churches, and quite brilliant (there is no other word) watercolour illustrations - not to mention a Piperish introduction and set of notes on the region’s churches - encapsulates what the artist is all about”. Piper included panoramic views across the Marsh, images of the coast at Dungeness and Lydd, and characteristic churches like Old Romney, Fairfield and Ivychurch. It is his ability to set the geographical scene, again conveying the unique nature of a locale, before detailing its features, that works so well in words and illustrations. Here he writes lyrically about surface grain and hue with a close focus rarely seen in contemporary tourist guides; “There is an extraordinary richness of summer vegetation, the grass is lush and the dykes and banks, when uncut, are thick with reeds and water plants. In winter the reeds still blow in the dykes, showing a pale-yellow flank of close stalks with feathery crowns of grey or purple-black fonds…The fences... grow an emerald lichen that at first seems to dust, and finally screens the pale-grey wood. They are an important feature in marsh colour…” The book instigated future visits to the Marsh too, Piper completing further pictures of most of its churches.

He adopted a more polemical tone in his treatise Stained Glass; Art or Anti Art?, published in 1968. The book was a useful primer into the aesthetic philosophy of a leading stained glass designer who had recently cut his teeth on major window commissions at Coventry Cathedral and its Roman Catholic counterpart in Liverpool. This medium was a central preoccupation of his later career, so discussing here its merits and demerits was natural enough. Emphasising the possibilities of spiritual architectural colour, exemplified by his purely abstract work in both these two buildings, his almost evangelical tone called on clergy to be bolder in their commissioning, and for students to develop fresh radical ideas for glass. He saw its success as pure craft as all too rare; “…as craft it is in constant need of the direction and control and nourishment of all kinds from art, from painting, sculpture and architecture. It seldom gets it”. In Piper’s view the rare exceptions had indeed all been realised by fine artists - in partnership with craftspeople.

Collaborating with the distinguished stained glass artist Patrick Reyntiens, Piper would work on many figurative projects too.

He showed the pragmatic ease with which he could move

Opposite: Swansea Chapel, lithograph, 1966 Above: Romney Marsh, A King Penguin Book, 1950

between abstraction and representation. It is his expressive and painterly sense of colour that always predominates, and as Gabriel Coleman wrote, “light and its conversation with architecture”.

The poet Stephen Spender said that John Piper’s art was a “fusion of a lifelong search for a contemporary idiom with a passion for tradition”, and again and again his books give us a sense of this complex lineage. He certainly belongs in the pantheon of important British artist writers and critics, along with, amongst others, David Jones, Thomas Hennell, Michael Ayrton and Patrick Heron. His texts on art and on county archaeology are significant not only because of the light they throw on his wider endeavours, but because they deepen our perception of the individuality and distinctive weather of our own regions. He helped to validate a kind of alternative modernism by stressing those aspects of our homeland, however humble, that needed appreciation and rescue. It is what his Times obituary called, echoing Fuller’s words, “a visionary topography", one that went beyond mere nostalgia. To Piper its implications were more immediate, more urgent, a legacy that could be reclaimed in paintings, prints, photographs and his remarkable prose. In the end it was evoking the inherent ‘genius loci’ that mattered most.

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C O L O U R S

B Y

N U M B E R

SHINO

With its pink-white palette of skin, snow and spring blossoms, Shino glaze has long captured the public imagination in Japan – never more so than in its 20th century revival at the hands of two distinctly different potters…

Thousand Cranes Kikuji Mitani, the protagonist of Yasunari Kawabata’s famous short story Thousand Cranes, is in something of a bind.

With the death of his father, he finds himself entangled with the women who once formed the older man’s complicated romantic orbit.

He has been invited to a tea ceremony hosted

by Chikako Kurimoto, his father’s former mistress and now a spinster tea instructor.

Though their affair was fleeting, the meddlesome Chikako has insinuated herself into the Mitani family home, and Kikuji has been lured here on false pretences: Chikako is eager to arrange a marriage with a young woman named Yukiko Inamura, adorned, when Kikuji first meets her, with a kerchief patterned with a thousand cranes: a motif of purity, cleanliness and hope.

Yukiko’s quiet beauty stirs him, but the ceremony dredges up memories of his father’s past affairs. At the same occasion, Kikuji encounters Mrs. Ota, another of his father’s lovers, whose dignified sorrow contrasts sharply with Chikako’s gleeful venom. Soon they are drawn into a passionate, tormented affair, mirroring the

very relationship she shared with his father.

Wracked with remorse, Mrs. Ota’s anguish eventually becomes overwhelming. Her suicide marks a sudden turning point in Kawabata’s delicate narrative and leaves Kikuji grappling with a complex mixture of grief, responsibility, and unresolved desires.

This emotional turmoil deepens when Kikuji encounters Fumiko, Mrs. Ota’s daughter.

Acutely aware of her mother’s suffering, she tries to distance herself from Kikuji, yet a bond forms between them, undercut by a shared sense of loss and unbelonging. Their meeting places, shaped by the ritualistic atmosphere of informal tea rooms, serve as intimate but fraught settings where every moment passes in an eternity.

As Kikuji’s sordid situation unravels with the interventions of the manipulative Chikako, we are introduced, periodically, to Kawabata’s second cast of characters: the ceremonial tea wares, many of them once belonging to Kikuji’s father, that pass as gifts from mother to daughter, mistress to son, becoming conduits for the memories that intensify the psychological entanglement between our key players. Chief among these are a water jar and a tea bowl, each in a luscious, thick white glaze called Shino that seems, whenever Kikuji looks upon it, to blush like the skin of a woman. In the water jar presented to him by Fumiko, holding her mother’s funerary flowers, he is reminded of his lover’s once soft, warm body, just as he sees Mrs Ota’s form vicariously in the gentle curves of her daughter. Even the rim of her Shino teabowl he finds kissed with the stain of Mrs Ota’s lipstick – a stain, Fumiko remarks, that won’t come out, no matter how hard she tries.

As the story draws toward its haunting conclusion, these pink-white vessels seem almost to soak up Kikuji’s emotional desolation. These pots, he wonders, made some three or four-hundred years ago – how many lives have they watched around them come and go? How many strange careers pass by?

Ken Matsuzaki, Rectangular Vase, Yohen Shino and natural ash glaze, 2025

In this exquisite short novel Kawabata hoped to have captured the decadence into which he felt tea ceremony culture had fallen, the decadence of Japan itself, recovering from the war – and the beauty of a long-lost age, the 16th century height of the tea ceremony’s sway; a beauty capable of soothing and of wounding, symbolised by the alluring red flush in a white Shino glaze.

Mono No Aware There is a very strong feeling in much Japanese art of the part as an evocation of the whole. We talk about the keshiki, or ‘landscape’, of a pot’s surface, where the contour of a rim – or indeed a flash of colour, like the red that Yasunari Kawabata describes ‘floating’ up from deep within white Shino – seems to conjure a grander poetic theme.

Images like these abound in Thousand Cranes: of green tea in the well of a white or black bowl, ‘like traces of early spring’, for example. When Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968 – the first Japanese writer to do so – he described in his lecture how such evocations can be found at the roots of Japanese aesthetic culture. ‘When we see the beauty of the snow,’ he writes, ‘when we see the beauty of the full moon, when we see the beauty of the cherries in bloom, when in short we brush against and are awakened by the beauty of the four seasons, it is then that we think most of those close to us, and want them to share the pleasure.’ This same feeling found expression in the exchange of love poems at the 11th century Japanese imperial court, whose early chronicles saw the birth of Japan’s literary tradition, and it lies, Kawabata tells us, at the heart of the 16th century tea ceremony too. It is an aesthetic influenced by Zen Buddhist thought, looking beyond the tableau of the changing seasons to a deeper, stiller movement permeating all things. ‘The snow, the moon, the blossoms, words expressive of the seasons as they move one

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into another, include in the Japanese tradition the beauty of mountains and rivers and grasses and trees, of all the myriad manifestations of nature, of human feelings as well.’ It’s not surprising that Kawabata chooses Shino – the colour of snow, the moon, of cherry and plum blossoms – to capture the transitory sadness and beauty of Kikuji’s story – a feeling, in Japanese literature, referred to as mono no aware.

Like many philosophical concepts in Japanese, mono no aware is difficult to explain. A literal translation might read ‘the sorrow of things’, like our own ‘nostalgia’ or ‘melancholy’, but the 18th century critic Motoori Norinaga who popularised the term stressed that it covered every kind of strongly felt emotion. To know mono no aware, he writes, is simply to be deeply moved by something – so deeply moved, in fact, that one can hardly express it except through images drawn from the natural world (as when Kikuji, reflecting on his troubles, looks across to the alcove in his home and sees hanging ‘in a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.’) ‘Aware’ in traditional Japanese poetry is an act of sighing – ‘Ah!’ – a sigh of pain and of love in equal measure.

It is, in other words, a spontaneous response: when mono no aware becomes unendurable, it must be expressed, and it can find that expression in the simplest of images.

Figured Shino Today, Shino is somewhat ubiquitous – an export that has travelled to Europe and the United States especially, where the starkly different character of American clays, kilns and potters has given this glaze a new tradition all its own. But at the time of Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes, published in 1949, Shino wares still retained an air of mystique even in their native Japan. Even the name ‘Shino’ is of unknown origin, emerging some hundred years after such

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Above: Shino Teabowl known as Bridge of the Gods (Shinkyo), late 16th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art NY Opposite: Shino potters Toyozo Arakawa (left) with Tokuro Kato (right), c.1984

works were first made.

This white glaze, the first of its kind in Japanese pottery, emerged at the height of the Momoyama period (1573-1615), and in its earliest forms was remarkably simple, made with nothing but a little local clay and feldspar, a silicate mineral found abundantly in rocks that could be dug straight from the earth (‘feldspar’, from the German, translates literally as ‘field flake’). But it is a glaze capable of great variety, despite its apparent simplicity, subject to wild changes in character depending on when and how it is applied, dried, layered and fired. One Shino laid over another may melt at different temperatures, creating a thick, cascading effect reminiscent of snow drifts. Of particular interest to the potters who originated it was the pitting

effect in Shino’s surface that seemed to resemble the skins of citrus fruit, and its capacity for ‘crawling’ when the clay content is high and it is thickly applied. As the viscous glaze shrinks more aggressively than the clay beneath it during the firing, it retracts over the surface of the pot, revealing a pattern of spidery cracks across its face.

Shino was one of several loosely grouped styles of tea ware that flourished under the patronage of the warrior aesthete Furuta Oribe. At a time when aristocrats and tea connoisseurs kept detailed chakaiki tea diaries – not unlike the descriptions of the ceremonies given in Kawabata’s story – Oribe’s reputation for eccentricity grew through reports of his less conventional tastes. In particular, Shino and its cousin

styles presented ample opportunity for patterning and motifs – something otherwise missing from the traditional Chinese bowls, caddies and kettles that had, until then, been the prevailing vogue in tea culture. With iron pigment, designs could be brushed on beneath the surface of the Shino glaze, or the whole pot could be submerged in a slip made from iron-rich clay and water, with motifs scraped back before the Shino was applied to effect a design in negative.

With darker patterns dancing over and under the milkish white surface, these pots were said to approximate the elegant decorations of Chinese white and blue porcelain, but Shino has a distinct quality all its own: a rosy warmth owing to the iron it takes on from the clay and pigment beneath it, that in the right hands can even transform Shino’s white surface to crimson – like the red that floats from deep within the Shino of Thousand Cranes, like a blush.

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Toyozo and Tokuro Within a few hundred years of its invention Shino would virtually disappear, to such an extent that by the early 20th century knowledge of how to formulate and fire the glaze had been completely lost. Two potters, more than any other, would be responsible for its revival – and in temperament they could not have differed more.

Toyozo Arakawa was born and raised in Tajimi, not far from Toki, in the heart of the old province of Mino. Here, in a shallow valley cut through by the Toki river, good clay was abundant and pottery was a longstanding industry, going back many generations. A modest mountain range separates both towns from Seto, a few miles south as the crow flies, location of one of Japan’s six ancient kiln sites and long believed to have been the centre of Shino and Oribe ware production during the Momoyama period.

But in the spring of 1930, a chance encounter led Arakawa to a major discovery.

In an exhibition in nearby Nagoya he had spotted on a Shino teabowl, decorated with a bamboo shoot motif, a red fire-coloured mark that seemed out of place for Seto clay and recalled instead a shard he had found among the ruins of an old kiln in Mino.

Returning the very next day to this spot, an archaeological site called Mutabora, he began digging and immediately put his hands upon a Shino shard with the very same bamboo decoration. ‘As though in a dream, I worked until dusk,’ he later wrote, ‘completely engrossed in the excavation and collection of other reference material. From that day until now, no other teabowl shard with a bamboo-shoot design has come to light.’

This unearthing rewrote the story of Shino’s origins, and it gave meaning to Arakawa’s own journey in pottery too. The realisation that Momoyama tea wares had been fired in his birthplace, and that he had been responsible for this discovery, filled him with immense purpose: ‘It was as though I had

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been struck by a thunderbolt.’ He immediately resolved to build a kiln like that which had once stood at Mutabora and to revive the old ways of the past – work for which, in 1955, he was recognised as a Living National Treasure.

Beside the restrained and composed Arakawa, Tokuro Kato was a potter of very different sensibilities: a prankster and selfprofessed ‘country bumpkin’, brilliant but flawed, who liked nothing better than to poke fun at the pomposity of academic critics.

Born in Seto, like Arakawa he was drawn to the ambitious tea wares of Oribe’s time, but when he published his own historical revision, proving that a form of traditional Seto wares had also originated in Mino, he was ousted from his hometown by disgruntled locals who took great pride in their ancient potting lineage, living the rest of his life in nearby exile. With this first rejection, he resolved to outdo his forebears, producing tea bowls and water jars of extraordinary vigour and individualism. Eventually his detractors conceded his brilliance, awarding his Oribe wares the title of ‘Intangible Cultural Property’ – only to rescind the award several years later, when it was discovered (in what ranks among the most devastating scandals in Japanese ceramic history) that Kato, with his son, had forged an ancient Seto vase so convincing that expert curators had requested it too be awarded the very same title and preserved for posterity.

That Kato was punished for demonstrating the very same excellence that had seen him begrudgingly rewarded in the first place did not go unnoticed. For years until their deaths in 1985, Arakawa and Kato – unamicable rivals, by all accounts – stood to represent the very best in what contemporary Oribe wares, Shino in particular, could look like.

Matsuzaki and Murasaki Arakawa’s and Kato’s radical revival of the Shino tradition prompted waves of young

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Above: blossoms outside Ken Matsuzaki’s wood stack, Mashiko Opposite: Ken Matsuzaki, Yohen Shino vase with natural ash glaze, 2025

potters to return to the forms and glazes of the Momoyama heyday. For the young Ken Matsuzaki, eager to escape the shadow of his mentor, Tatsuzo Shimaoka, and Shimaoka’s own teacher, the great Shoji Hamada, Shino and Oribe offered rich avenues for exploration. Like Kawabata, he found their distinct colours and forms almost seductive: ‘Shino pottery, in its authentic style, has a scarlet colour phenomenon on its surface, somewhat like rouge brushed over white skin’ he wrote in an exhibition catalogue some 20 years ago. His own unique contribution to this revived tradition came in exposing Shino-glazed works to the chaotic fire and ash of his wood kiln. Oribe wares, after all, had been born in an era of civil war across Japan, as warlords fought for supremacy in their bid to unify the country.

Such pots represented not just an emerging Japanese aesthetic identity, distinct from the Chinese and Korean traditions that

inspired them, but a search for fragile beauty in an age of violence. The image of white Shino discoloured and veiled with Yohen (literally ‘kiln change’) could not have been more poetic.

Prolonged reduction in this multichambered kiln, over the course of eight days – requiring 4,000 bundles of chestnut and pine wood, and upwards of 50 bags of charcoal – extracts an extraordinary richness of colour from Matsuzaki’s clays, deposits molten ash in snow-falls and rivulets round the shoulders of vases, and, in the case of the usually pillow-white Shino, blackens with soot, traps bubbles of silvery carbon, and occasionally, in very heavy reduction, effects a metallic sheen across their surface.

This ‘gold’ Shino, which Matsuzaki pioneered two decades ago, was in fact an accident – the result of introducing charcoal in great quantities to the kiln, spiking its temperature upwards. What he had sought

instead was to lower it steadily, while keeping a reducing atmosphere, in pursuit of a Shino colour he has been chasing for many years: a deep purple (‘murasaki’) Shino achieved, with great notoriety, in the late 1970s by the legendary Tokuro Kato.

The word Murasaki derives from the plant from which purple dye was once obtained in Japan, but it is most prominently associated with Lady Murasaki, the pen name of the lady-in-waiting author of the Tale of Genji. This early novel is among the foundational texts of all Japanese culture.

Concerned with the tribulations of courtly life and written at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries, before the rise of the military samurai class – a time, Kawabata writes, ‘when ripeness was moving into decay. One feels in it the sadness at the end of glory, the high tide of Japanese court culture’ – the Tale of Genji is suffused with images of mono no aware, and so too does this murasaki colour evoke feelings of rich maturity. The process of obtaining it in Shino is not dissimilar to the murasaki dyeing process, in which silks were repeatedly bathed in water coloured by the crushed root of the plant, soaking up more dye with each submersion. In the case of the Shino, a long, reducing firing draws out the iron within the clay body into the glaze, darkening its usually white colour. With the right clay blend – trialled over multiple years – the shade can be as deep and dark as a ripe plum, the paler highlights, where the Shino is at its thickest, reminiscent of a waxy bloom covering its skin, like hot breath on a winter’s evening.

The Scent of Purple When Tokuro Kato first exhibited his infamous Murasakinioi tea bowls (‘the scent of purple’), they caused something of a sensation. Critics were divided; one friend of the artist thought them ‘vile things…a bad joke…dirty and without an inkling of charm’. Kato, who

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embraced wholeheartedly his coarse reputation, described himself as a kind of ‘worm’, ‘Surviving by consuming the soil...

Wandering around mountains and fields in search of good clay, I am a clay pilgrim. Earth is my lover.’

What the critics could agree, however, was that these purple pots reflected Kato’s essence as a potter: mischievous, experimental, talented yet conceited, unafraid of pushing the acceptable bounds of Seto wares. His natural flair made for a poignant point of comparison to the more reserved and introspective Toyozo Arakawa; neither potter were on good terms during their lives, though each could be said to have contributed (and represented) the duality of Oribe’s Shino wares: at times austere, at others soft and inviting; exuberant or restrained; soothing and wounding, just like Kawabata’s Shino vessels.

For his own part, Matsuzaki has kept elements of both masters alive in his work.

Leaning into Kato’s infamous ‘unrefinement’, he describes his own Murasaki with a second, unpronounced kanji ‘埜’, an ancient word for ‘field’ suggestive of something rustic and wild. He shares something of the long romanticism of Lady Murasaki’s courtly era, but also that gentle austerity of the Zen priests who, together, brought knowledge of mono no aware to the heart of Japanese art. And in his own pots, he comes close to the kind of evocations Kawabata gave at the root of Japanese ideals of beauty: the snow, the moon, the cherry blossoms – images of change, like a white Shino glaze, rouged with human colour.

Above: Ken Matsuzaki, Murasaki Shino teabowls, 2025 Opposite: Mabel Royds, Trees in the Snow, oil on board

HIGHLIGHTS

A Mexican Man Ray and rare Mabel Royds oil sketches are among our latest gallery arrivals.

New To The Gallery Our latest art and ceramics arrivals  Will Maclean A Highland Woman

 Pablo Picasso Untitled (Seated Man) From the earliest years of his career to his death in 1973, Pablo Picasso made over 2,400 prints in an astonishing range of subjects and sizes. Unfailingly creative, he saw printmaking as an area no less suited to experimentation than his canvases and in which he could explore the major themes of his career: from his obsession with the old masters to the women who shared and shaped his life. Cavaliers d’ombre (‘The Shadow Riders’) was a collaboration with the French writer Geneviève Laporte, with whom he had a brief affair in 1951, spending their summer together in St Tropez. This is one of seven etchings from the suite, executed after Picasso’s drawings: a bacchanal character of the kind he liked to imagine living wild among the lush vegetation of the south of France.

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Scottish artist Will Maclean has long investigated the unearthed roots of Highland history and sea-faring mythology in his art. Born in Inverness to a fishing family, after serving as a teenager on a merchant ship, Maclean attended Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, where he was first introduced to printmaking. A Night of Islands, a suite of 10 etchings published in 1991 in a small edition of 40, blends visual culture with poetry – in the case of this print, Sorley Maclean’s moving portrait of a working Highland woman at the end of her life, her body shaped by her labour, here evocatively bordered with strands of the kelp she picked to feed her children and her employers.

 Jacques Villon Papiers Somewhat overshadowed by his brothers Marcel and Raymond Duchamp, Jacques Villon (pseudonym of Gaston Émile) like his sister, Suzanne, remains unfairly underrated.

An early adopter of Cubism, Villon went on to become a painter-etcher too, leaving behind an impressive body of printed work for which he won major awards. This series of lithographs was produced in the very last year of his life before his death in 1963 – evidence of a lifelong commitment to geometric abstraction.

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 Clare Leighton Snow Shovellers, New York

 William Nicholson, Guardsman (The Horse Guards)

Now regarded as one of the preeminent engraver-illustrators of the 20th century, Clare Leighton (1898-1989) grew from inauspicious beginnings: her writer parents preferred the company of her brother, Roland (ex-Uppingham student and poet, killed in action in 1915), while she was known in the family as ‘the bystander’.

A student of the Slade and the Central School, by the late 1920s Leighton had carved a significant reputation with her wood engravings depicting working rural and city life. She spent the latter half of her prolific career in America, where she is still much celebrated to this day.

With the first major retrospective of his work in over two decades now open at Pallant House gallery in Chichester, the multi-talented William Nicholson (1872-1949) is enjoying a revival of interest. A master of oils, whose reflections remain the envy of aspirant still life painters, Nicholson’s career was forged in commercial work as one half of the poster design duo ‘The Beggarstaffs’ (alongside James Pryde). The stark woodcut style Nicholson innovated for his posters were more avant-garde than we give them credit, paving the way for ambitious graphic designers cutting their teeth in the early 20th century.

 Sid Burnard, Toro Loco Relying only upon driftwood finds, without human alteration, Sid Burnard’s constructions can take years to come together. This tribute to Picasso’s bicycle seat bull’s head was one such piece, the fortuitous rusting of now lost metal fixings providing Sid’s hommage with a pair of appropriately flared nostrils.

 Mabel Royds, On the River Ganges (detail) Paintings by the remarkable, under-appreciated talent Mabel Royds (1872-1941 ) are incredibly scarce – so we were delighted to chance upon a private collection of six enigmatic oils on board (see our special feature overleaf).

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Mabel Royds: Forgotten Treasures Six unseen oils reveal an underrated talent Goldmark have championed the work of Mabel Royds for over 20 years now.

A collection of six scarce oils remind us of her irrepressible talents.

Chance occasionally turns up treasures from long forgotten artists, overlooked women in particular. Mabel Royds(1874-1941) was one such woman – an exceptional artist who, though championed in the 1920s by the likes of Malcolm Salaman in The Studio, never won proper recognition for her work in her lifetime. A handful of oil paintings made by Royds on small, bevelled wooden boards have recently resurfaced, revealing how her unique style emerged after life-changing experiences.

A pupil of Henry Tonks at the Slade, Royds studied under Walter Sickert in Paris before becoming a teacher in Toronto and then Edinburgh. It was there she met her future husband and fellow artist Ernest Lumsden.

Together they shared a love of travel, and of India especially, where they spent much of the war as newlyweds after Lumsden was declared unfit for military service.

Returning to England in 1917, motherhood (and strained finances) put an end to Royds’ professional career, but her creativity could not be stopped. She continued to work at home, employing the rich colours of Indian art to sumptuous effect in her paintings and prints.

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Unable to afford quality materials, Royds turned to unorthodox solutions: sixpenny breadboards instead of traditional woodblocks and, in the case of these distinctive oils, bevelled slats that appear to have been ransacked from a chest of drawers. Their delicate impasto suggests the influence of Sickert’s tonal painting, but there are obvious deviations here too: Cézanne’s squared brushstrokes; Munch’s expressionist landscapes; Van Gogh’s cloisonnism, in which the vibrant colours of nature paintings in particular are delineated with darker outlines.

Royds, like Van Gogh, had a keen interest in Japanese woodblock prints, and modelled her own woodcut printing on the traditional Japanese system using barens and gradated ink tones. But her individuality comes out in the special stimulus of Indian temple art, especially those she saw in the mountain

‘…motherhood (and strained finances) put an end to Royds’ professional career, but her creativity could not be stopped…’

Opposite top: On the River Ganges, oil on board Opposite bottom: A Mossy Tree, oil on board Left: Orchard, oil on board Below: The Dales, oil on board

dwellings in Ladakh, high in the Himalayas.

Their strong, flat, decorative patterning undeniably shaped the way Royds looked to her very different circumstances in England, where farmsteads and rolling dales seem almost like they could be found in the valleys of Northern India.

Paintings by Royds like these, outside of the Lumsden archive held at the National Gallery of Scotland, are exceptionally rare: when Goldmark acquired the residue of Royds’ estate two decades ago, there remained only a handful of oils. None have made their way to the gallery since – until now. They suggest an extraordinary natural talent at work, expertly merging sources of inspiration, whose career – much of it passing without an audience, in the privacy of her own home – is well due a revival.

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Man Ray Goes to Hollywood An oddball Surrealist original from the artist’s wartime life The arrival of arch-Surrealist Man Ray at the Curwen Studio on Midford Place, a slim alleyway off Tottenham Court Road, should have been the highlight among the more bizarre moments in the print atelier’s history.

He had been commissioned by Edmund Newman, English rep for the Consolidated Fine Art Company in New York, to join a host of world-class artists in Europe and across the pond making editioned prints to furnish the apartment walls of flashy American clients. The series of ‘monument’ lithographs Man Ray produced under Stanley Jones’ watch recall the artist’s Surrealist sculptures, works he called the ‘Objects of my Affection’ – strange collocations of appropriated everyday items, in the manner of Dada collage, that play with feelings of familiarity and unease.

But then, just a few months later, John Lennon and Yoko Ono came by the studio, also under the aegis of the Consolidated Fine Art Co. Together they had just invented ‘Bagism’ – an oddball form of protest against deep-seated prejudices, which involved housing themselves jointly in a giant sack, obscuring their bodies from the shoulder down. Lennon celebrated their latest media notoriety by drawing a series of pretty frank autobiographical erotic scenes, destined for exhibition at the Bond Street gallery. It only took the police two days before the show was shut down and half the work seized on the grounds of obscene indecency.

Man Ray had been somewhat upstaged – but then he was used to it. As he saw it, he had even upstaged his own career with the invention of the ‘Rayograph’ – photograms, made without a camera by exposing objects on light sensitive film. A frequent refrain of his autobiography, published in the early 1960s, is his disappointment at the way his reputation as a photographer obfuscated

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Right: Un Monument III (Brown), lithograph, 1968 Opposite: Zarapé, gouache, 1943, later used as a preparatory design for a lithograph made at the Curwen Studio.

his work as a painter and assembler (he was, after all, the first artist to be exhibited by the Galerie Surréaliste in 1926, and had been making Dadaist constructions for another ten years before that).

In the personal archives of Stanley Jones, acquired by Goldmark back in 2023, alongside the ‘monument’ lithographs could be found this unusual original watercolour ‘Serape’. Dated to 1943 and named after the traditional Mexican striped shawl, it appears to have been brought by the artist to the studio as a potential work for lithographic interpretation: a stone plate was made replicating the strange, slightly totemic figure-form that sits on top of the pattern of stripes.

Mexico, of course, was a place of particular importance to the Surrealist movement in the wartime years, when it provided a place of refuge for artists fleeing occupied France.

As early as 1936 the Guatemalan poet Aragón had written to André Breton urging him to relocate to ‘the land of convulsive beauty, the land of edible delusions…in short, a land of dream, unavoidable by the surrealist spirit.’ Man Ray, like many others, did leave his studio in Paris in the end, but where others came to Mexico, he went north of the border to Hollywood.

What was, for the likes of Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, a migration or pilgrimage was for Ray – born in Philadelphia

and raised in Brooklyn – a homecoming of sorts, but he was unhappy to have left Paris behind. In his autobiography he described how his status had not travelled with him.

Los Angeles in 1940 presented a very different experience to other artists arriving in the Americas for the first time, only to be seduced by the sun, the wild flora and fauna, the death culture of central America. There was no Surrealist well to draw upon in LA like there was in Mexico, or indeed in New York, where Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17 print studio had relocated in the same year, bringing Surrealist attitudes to the likes of Jackson Pollock. Better known for his photography, he found himself approached not for exhibitions but fashion shoots and films. His paintings and sculptures appeared more often as movie props than they did museum pieces, while his first solo show in LA – with the novice gallerists William Copley and John Ployardt, a rich-kid painter enthusiast and an amateur Surrealist working

‘California was a wilderness for me…there could be no general acceptance of my ideas and my work since I had no talent for ingratiating myself...'

as a lackey animator at Disney – took place in a bungalow in the heart of the Beverly Hills. The only purchases made were by the owner, Bill Copley, in part to uphold a 15% sales obligation. The catalogue to the show was titled ‘To Be Continued Unnoticed’.

LA did, however, have its fair share of Mexican influence, increasingly so in the war period when labour shortages drove immigration south of the border. During the Depression, around two million Mexicans living and working in America had been deported – many of them children, many of them U.S. citizens by that point – but with employment avenues vacated by volunteer soldiers leaving for Japan and Europe, Mexican men and especially women returned to fill those empty jobs, though they were not always welcomed with open arms. In this tense atmosphere, young, hip pachucos took pride in their immigrant identity with their extravagant dress sense – baggy Zoot suits and bright, coloured fabrics which drew condemnation in times of textile rationing.

Increased arrests of so-called ‘delinquent’ Mexican youths resulted, eventually, in 1943 in a series of attacks between pachuco gangs, LAPD, and sailors stationed in the local area.

Zoot-suited Mexicans were dragged from cinema theatres and diners and mobbed, stripped, and beaten with clubs in the street.

In this febrile context, Man Ray’s wartime Serape takes on a quite different note of colourful defiance, not unlike the recognisable Tehuana dress that features in Frida Kahlo’s paintings. By 1951, Man Ray had returned to Paris with his wife, Juliet.

His studio – ransacked during the war – had since been taken over by new residents in the shake-up of post-war habitation. But this sketch stayed with him: an ‘Object of Affection’, perhaps, from a more bizarre period in this Surrealist’s strange life.

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Calendar Coming in 2026 Ceramics

Art 2026 looks to be a bumper year for gallery artist exhibitions at Goldmark. After a successful touring year, with his exciting new take on the Tales of the Brothers Grimm returning from major outings in Harrogate and Scarborough, Christopher P. Wood will be showcasing his latest, luminous landscapes – from mysterious vignettes inspired by Samuel Palmer and the visionary tradition in Shoreham to mountain ranges of the imagination. Oliver Bancroft – feted with exhibitions of his films at Kettle’s Yard and the Pompidou – will return to the gallery too with an enigmatic collection of paintings made over the past two or three years: an eclectic union of disparate influences, from the Thames shoreline (within walking distance of his studio) to pre-Renaissance Siennese painting.

We’ll also pay tribute to the late, great John Farrington, Shropshire-based chronicler of rural stories; present new estate casts from the exceptional work of sculptor Frank Dobson; and launch our feature-length documentary and new book on the storied career of Anthony Gross.

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After a year of Japanese ceramics in 2025, our pottery calendar looks to more varied borders. Homegrown Charlie Collier, whose love of pots was honed under an intense apprenticeship at Jim Keeling’s Whichford Pottery, represents a new generation of young makers preserving the adventurous spirit of our best studio pottery. Currently based at Kigbeare in Devon, Collier has worked hard to find his own voice in an enduring tradition familiar to Goldmark customers. We’re delighted to welcome him for this first solo show at the gallery in March 2026.

This coming year will also see the return of Korean veteran Kang-hyo Lee, whose monumental Onggi-inspired jars and dynamic punch’ong decoration have earned him a reputation as one of Korea’s stand-out ceramic artists. And we’re looking forward to Anne Mette Hjortshøj’s fourth exhibition at the gallery, showcasing the very best of her ongoing experiments with local clays tirelessly tracked down and dug up around her home on the island of Bornholm. A feast for all lovers of functional pottery!

Music Local friends and followers of the gallery will know that we have been hosting live music performances in our main exhibition space for the last 20 years. Our 2026 lineup is looking more enticing than ever. We kick off the year with British Jazz Awards winner Sara Dowling and the Sam Braysher Quartet on the 24th January, one of just two UK shows (their Goldmark gig is the night before they play at the famous Ronnie Scott’s in London). On 3rd February we will be welcoming the wonderful Sam Lee back for a third performance in the Gallery Front Room. And on 12th April, renowned British saxophonist Art Themen will grace our stage with his organ trio.

With so many extraordinary performances from genuinely legendary artists over the past two decades, we are also delighted to announce that we have launched a new YouTube channel, Goldmark Front Room, showcasing archived video and recordings of past concerts for all to listen. It has been a great privilege to be able to support independent musicians and enjoy their music in such intimate surroundings. Here’s to many more in the future.

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Edward Bawden, lithograph from the New Excursions series

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cover image: Anne Mette Hjortshøj’s barn, Bornholm, Denmark Photo by Jay Goldmark

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