St Ives School : Bernard Leach.

Bernard Howell Leach, CH, CBE (5 January 1887 – 6 May 1979), was a British studio potter and art teacher. He is regarded as the “Father of British studio pottery”.

Biography

Early years (Japan)

Leach was born in Hong Kong, but spent his first years in Japan, until his father, Andrew Leach, moved back to Hong Kong in 1890. Later, he attended the Slade School of Fine Art and the London School of Art, where he studied etching under Frank Brangwyn. Reading books by Lafcadio Hearn, he became interested in Japan.

In 1909 he returned to Japan with his young wife Muriel (née Hoyle) with a view to teaching etching. In Tokyo he gave talks and attended meetings along with Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya, Yanagi Sōetsu and others from the “Shirakaba-Group”, who were trying to introduce western art to Japan after 250 years of seclusion. In etching, Satomi Ton, Kojima Kikuo, and later Ryūsei Kishida, became pupils of Leach.

About 1911 he attended a Raku-yakipottery party which was his first introduction to ceramics, and through introduction by Ishii Hakutei, he began to study under Urano Shigekichi 浦野繁吉, 1851–1923), who stood as Kenzan 6th in the tradition of potter Ogata Kenzan (1663 -1743). Assisting as interpreter for technical terms was the potter Tomimoto Kenkichi, whom he had met already earlier. From this time Leach wrote articles for the Shirakaba.

1913 he also drafted covers for Shirakaba and “Fyūzan”. Attracted by the Prussian philosopher and art scholar Dr. Alfred Westharp, who at the time was living in Peking, Leach moved to Peking in 1915. There he took on the Name 李奇聞 (for “Leach”), but returned the following year to Japan. – It was the year 1919, when young Hamada Shōji visited Leach for the first time. Leach received a kiln from Kenzan and built it up in Yanai’s garden and called it Tōmon-gama. Now established as a potter, he decided to move to England.

In 1920, before leaving, he had an exhibition in Osaka, where he met the potter Kawai Kanjirō. In Tokyo, a farewell exhibition was organised.

Back in England

Leach returned to England in 1920 on the invitation of Frances Horne. Horne was establishing a Guild of Handicrafts within the existing artist colony of St Ives in Cornwall. On the recommendation of a family friend, Edgar Skinner, she contacted Leach to suggest that he become the potter within this group. Leach and his wife Muriel were accompanied by the young Hamada Shoji and, having identified a suitable site next to the Stennack river on the outskirts of St Ives, the two established the Leach Pottery in 1920. They constructed a traditional Japanese climbing kiln or ‘noborigama’, the first built in the West. however the kiln was poorly built and was reconstructed in 1923 by Matsubayashi Tsurunosuke. Leach promoted pottery as a combination of Western and Eastern arts and philosophies. His work focused on traditional Korean, Japanese and Chinese pottery, in combination with traditional techniques from England and Germany, such as slipware and salt glaze ware. He saw pottery as a combination of art, philosophy, design and craft – even as a greater lifestyle. Publishing A Potter’s Book in 1940 defined Leach’s craft philosophy and techniques, and became his breakthrough to recognition.

In 1934, Tobey and Leach travelled together through France and Italy, then sailed from Naples to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they parted company, Leach heading on to Japan. Leach formally joined the Bahá’í Faith in 1940. A pilgrimage to the Bahá’í shrines in Haifa, Israel, during 1954 intensified his feeling that he should do more to unite the East and West by returning to the Orient “to try more honestly to do my work there as a Bahá’í and as an artist…”

Midlife

Leach advocated simple and utilitarian forms. His ethical pots stand in opposition to what he called fine art pots, which promoted aesthetic concerns rather than function. Popularized in the 1940s after the publication of A Potter’s Book, his style had lasting influence on counter-culture and modern design in North America during the 1950s and 1960s. Leach’s pottery produced a range of “standard ware” handmade pottery for the general public. He continued to produce pots which were exhibited as works of art.

Many potters from all over the world were apprenticed at the Leach Pottery, and spread Leach’s style and beliefs. His British associates and trainees include Michael Cardew, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, David and Michael Leach (his sons), Janet Darnell (whom Leach married in 1956) and William Marshall. His American apprentices include Warren MacKenzie (who likewise influenced many potters through his teaching at the University of Minnesota), Byron Temple, Clary Illian and Jeff Oestrich. He was a major influence on the leading New Zealand potter Len Castle who travelled to London to spend time working with him in the mid-1950s. Many of his Canadian apprentices made up the pottery scene of the Canadian west coast during the 1970s in Vancouver.

Leach was instrumental in organising the only International Conference of Potters and Weavers in July 1952 at Dartington Hall, where he had been working and teaching. It included exhibitions of British pottery and textiles since 1920, Mexican folk art, and works by conference participants, among them Shoji Hamada and US-based Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain. Another important contributor was Japanese aesthetician Soetsu Yanagi, author of The Unknown Craftsman. According to Brent Johnson, “The most important outcome of the conference was that it helped organize the modern studio pottery movement by giving a voice to the people who became its leaders…it gave them [Leach, Hamada and Yanagi] celebrity status…[while] Marguerite Wildenhain emerged from Dartinghall Hall as the most important craft potter in America.”

Later years.

He continued to produce work until 1972 and never ended his passion for travelling, which made him a precursor of today’s artistic globalism. He continued to write about ceramics even after losing his eyesight. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held a major exhibition of his art in 1977. The Leach Pottery still remains open today, accompanied by a museum displaying many pieces by Leach and his students.

Honours

• Japan Foundation Cultural Award, 1974.
• Companion of Honour, 1973 (UK).
• Order of the Sacred Treasure, 1966 (Japan).
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 1962.

Edmund de Waal’s book

Edmund de Waal, British ceramic artist and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster, had been taught pottery by Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Leach, at the King’s School, Canterbury. Whilst in Japan de Waal worked on a monograph of Leach, researching Leach’s papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum,

De Waal’s book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998. He described it as “the first ‘de-mystifying’ study of Leach. “The great myth of Leach,” he said, “is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsmen”.

De Waal noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics.

Writings (selected)

• 1940: A Potter’s Book. London: Faber & Faber
  • New edition, with introductions by Soyetsu Yanagi and Michael Cardew. London: Faber & Faber, 1976, ISBN 978-0-571-10973-9
• 1985: Beyond East and West: Memoirs, Portraits and Essays. New edition, London: Faber & Faber (September 1985), ISBN 978-0-571-11692-8
• 1988: Drawings, Verse & Belief Oneworld Publications; 3rd edition (1988), ISBN 978-1-85168-012-2

St Ives School : Sir Terry Frost.

Sir Terry Frost RA (born Terence Ernest Manitou Frost) (13 October 1915 – 1 September 2003) was an English abstract artist, who worked in Newlyn, Cornwall, but as part of The St Ives School.

Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, in 1915, he did not become an artist until he was in his 30s. During World War II, he served in France and the Middle East, before joining the commandos. Whilst serving with the commandos in Crete in June 1941 he was captured and became a prisoner of war.^‪ As a prisoner at Stalag 383 in Bavaria, he met and was taught by Adrian Heath. He said of his prison experience that it was a ‘tremendous spiritual experience, a more aware or heightened perception during starvation’.^‪

After the war, he attended Camberwell School of Art and the St. Ives School of Art. In 1951 he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Frost’s academic career included teaching at Bath Academy of Art, the Cyprus College of Art and the University of Leeds. Later he became Artist in Residence and Professor of Painting at the Department of Fine Art of the University of Reading.

In 1992, he was elected a Royal Academician and he was knighted in 2000.

He married Kathleen Clarke in 1945. They had five sons and one daughter. His sons Adrian and Anthony also became artists while another son, Stephen, is a comedian and actor. His grandson Luke is also an artist

St Ives School : Peter Lanyon

(George) Peter Lanyon (8 February 1918 – 31 August 1964) was a Cornish painter^‪ of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. Lanyon was one of the most important artists to emerge in post-war Britain. Despite his early death at the age of forty-six he achieved a body of work that is amongst the most original and important reappraisals of modernism in painting to be found anywhere. Combining abstract values with radical ideas about landscape and the figure, Lanyon navigated a course from Constructivism through Abstract Expressionism to a style close to Pop. He also made constructions, pottery and collage.

Lanyon was born in St Ives, Cornwall, the only son of W H Lanyon, an amateur photographer and musician. He was educated at Clifton College. St Ives remained his base, and he received after-school painting lessons from Borlase Smart. In 1937 he met Adrian Stokes, who is thought to have introduced him to contemporary painting and sculpture and who advised him to go to the Euston Road School, where he studied for four months under Victor Pasmore. In 1936-37 he also attended Penzance School of Art. In 1939 he met established artists Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, who had moved to St Ives on the outbreak of war. Lanyon received private art tuition from Nicholson.

The character of his work changed completely and he became very involved with making constructions. Throughout the 1940s the influence of Nicholson and Gabo remained strongly visible in his work

From 1940 to 1945 he served with the Royal Air Force in the Western Desert, Palestine and Italy. In 1946 he married Sheila St John Browne. Six children were born to the couple between 1947 and 1957. Also in 1946 he became an active member of the Crypt Group of Artists, St Ives. During the 1950s he became established as a leading figure in the St. Ives group of artists.

Lanyon took up gliding as a pastime and used the resulting experience extensively in his paintings. He died in Taunton, Somerset, as the result of injuries received in a gliding accident and is buried in St. Uny’s Church, Lelant.

In September 2010 Peter Lanyon’s work was honored with a large-scale retrospective exhibition: Peter Lanyon October 9, 2010 – January 23, 2011 at Tate St Ives. Curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays and Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain, it was the first thorough museum retrospective for almost forty years.

Life and career

• 1918 Born in St Ives Cornwall.
• 1947 First child, Andrew Lanyon
• 1948 Travelled around Italy in the summer.
• 1949 Founder member of Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall.
• 1950 First one-man exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, London. Began teaching at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham (until 1957) where William Scott was senior painting master Invited by Arts Council to contribute to their Festival of Britain exhibition 1953. Spent four months living in Italy on Italian government scholarship Elected member of the Newlyn Society of Artists.
• 1954 Awarded Critics Prize, by the British section of the International Association of Art Critics.
• 1957–60 Ran art school, St Peter’s Loft at St Ives with Terry Frost and William Redgrave.
• 1957 Visited New York for his first one-man show there, with Catherine Viviano Gallery and met Rothko, Motherwell and other artists, critics and collectors. He greatly admired the new American painting he saw both in Tate’s exhibition ‘Modern Art in the United States’ and on his trip to New York. Rothko’s work particularly thrilled him.

While Lanyon was becoming increasingly conscious of the English landscape tradition American art sped his development towards a looser and more open kind of painting.

• 1959 he was awarded second prize, 2nd John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool. He began gliding, as he explained ‘to get a more complete knowledge of the landscape’.
• 1961 he was elected Chairman of the Newlyn Society of Artists, Cornwall and was elected a Bard of the Gorseth Kernow, with the bardic name Marghak an Gwyns (Rider of the Winds) for services to Cornish art.
• 1962 he spent seven months painting mural commissioned for house of Stanley J Seeger, New Jersey.
• 1963 he spent three months as visiting painter, San Antonio Art Institute in Texas, also visiting Mexico.
• 1964 he visited Prague and Bratislava to lecture for the British Council.

Peter Lanyon died after a gliding accident on 31 August 1964 at Taunton.

St Ives School : Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham.

Island Sheds, St Ives No. 1 1940 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 1912-2004 Presented by the artist 1999 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T07546

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE (8 June 1912 – 26 January 2004) was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts, and The St Ives School.

Life

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, Fife, on 8 June 1912. As a child she showed very early signs of creative ability. Determining while at school that she wanted to be an artist, she set her sights on Edinburgh College of Art where, after some dispute with her father, she enrolled in 1931, and after periods of illness, from which she graduated with her diploma in 1937.

At the suggestion of the College’s Principal Hubert Wellington, she moved to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1940, near to where a group of Hampstead-based modernists had settled, at Carbis Bay, to escape the war.This was a pivotal moment in her life. Early on she met Borlase Smart, Alfred Wallis and Bernard Leach, as well as the painter Ben Nicholson and the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. Barns-Graham became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and the St Ives Society of Artists but was to leave the latter when, in 1949, the St Ives art community suffered an acrimonious split, and she became a founder member of a breakaway group of abstract artists, the Penwith Society of Arts. She was also one of the initial exhibitors of the significant Crypt Group. In the same year she married the young author and aspiring poet (later noted architect) David Lewis (the marriage was annulled in 1960).

She travelled regularly over the next 20 years to Switzerland, Italy, Paris, and Spain. With the exception of a short teaching term at Leeds School of Art (1956–1957) and three years in London (1960–1963), she lived and worked in St Ives. From 1960, on inheriting a house outside St Andrews from her aunt Mary Niesh (who had been a support to her throughout her art college years), she split her time between summers in Cornwall and winters in Scotland.

Post-war, when St Ives had ceased to be a pivotal centre of modernism, her work and importance as an artist was sidelined, in part by an art-historical consensus that she had been only as a minor member of the St Ives school. In old age, however, she received belated recognition, receiving honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews in 1992 and later from the universities of Plymouth, Exeter and Falmouth . In 1999 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Watercolourists. She was awarded a CBE in 2001, the same year that saw the publication of the first major monograph on her life and work, written by Lynne Green — W.Barns-Graham : A Studio Life (Lund Humphries). This publication was followed in 2007 by The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham : a complete catalogue by Ann Gunn (also a Lund Humphries publication). Her work is found in all major public collections within the UK.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham died in St Andrews on 26 January 2004. She bequeathed her entire estate to The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, which she had established in 1987. The aims of the trust are to foster and protect her reputation, to advance the knowledge of her life and work, to create an archive of key works of art and papers, and, in a cause close to her heart, to support and inspire art and art history students through offering grants and bursaries to those in selected art college and universities. Information about the trust and its activities is to be found at http://www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk

Art

Through the course of her life Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s work generally lay on the divide between abstract and representational, typically drawing on inspirations from landscape. From 1940, when she arrived in Cornwall, her pictures are exploratory and even tentative as she began to develop her own method and visual language. The influence of St Ives then starts to arise, to take hold as local shapes and colours appear in the images – the Cornish rocks, landscape and buildings. Perhaps the most significant innovation at this time derived from the ideas of Naum Gabo, who was interested in the principle of stereometry – defining forms in terms of space rather than mass. Barns-Graham’s series of glacier pictures that started in 1949, inspired by her walks on the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, reflect the idea of looking at things in a total view, not only from the outside but from all points, including inside. In 1952 her studies of local forms became more planar and two dimensional, but from the mid-1950s she had developed a more expressionist and free form attitude following journeys to Spain.

In the early 1960s, reflecting the turmoil in her personal life, Barns-Graham adopted a severe geometrical form of abstraction as a way of taking a fresh approach to her painting. Combined with a very intuitive sense of colour and design, the work often has more vitality than is immediately apparent. Squares tumble and circles flow across voids. Colour and movement come together and it is at this point in her work that St Ives perhaps exerts the least influence; rather, this approach more likely reflects an interest in the work of Josef Albers who was exciting UK artists at this time, in embracing new possibilities offered by the optical effects of a more formulaic abstraction.

Nonetheless there is evidence to suggest that many images did stem from observations of the world around her. This is seen in a series of ice paintings in the late 1970s and then in a body of work that explores the hidden energies of sea and wind, composed of multiple wave-like lines drawn in the manner of Paul Klee. The Expanding Form paintings of 1980 are the culmination of many ideas from the previous fifteen years – the poetic movement in these works revealing a more relaxed view.

From the late 1980s and right up until her death, Barns-Graham’s paintings became more and more free; an expression of life and free flowing brushwork not seen since the late 1950s. Working mainly on paper (there are relatively few canvases from this period) the images evolved to become, initially, highly complex, rich in colour and energy, and then, simultaneously, bolder and simpler, reflecting her enjoyment of life and living. “in my paintings I want to express the joy and importance of colour, texture, energy and vibrancy, with an awareness of space and construction. A celebration of life — taking risks so creating the unexpected.” (Barns-Graham, October 2001) This outlook is perfectly expressed in the extraordinary collection of screen prints that she made with Graal Press, Edinburgh, between 1999 and 2003.

The St Ives School : Dame Barbara Hepworth.

Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. She was “one of the few women artists to achieve international prominence.” Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St. Ives during the Second World War.

Early life

Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire, the eldest child of Gertrude and Herbert Hepworth. Her father was a civil engineer for the West Riding County Council, who in 1921 became County Surveyor. An upwardly mobile family, and a dominant father determined her to exploit fully her natural talents. She attended Wakefield Girls High School, and won a scholarship to and studied at the Leeds School of Art from 1920. It was there that she met her fellow student, Henry Moore. They became friends and established a friendly rivalry that lasted professionally for many years. Hepworth was the first to sculpt the pierced figures that are characteristic of works by both. They would lead in the path to modernism in sculpture.

Ever self-conscious as a woman in a man’s world, she then won a county scholarship to the Royal College of Art and studied there from 1921 until she was awarded the diploma of the Royal College of Art in 1924.

Early career

Following her studies at the RCA, Hepworth travelled to Florence, Italy in 1924 on a West Riding Travel Scholarship. Hepworth was also the runner-up for the Prix-de-Rome, which the sculptor John Skeaping won. After travelling together through Siena and Rome, Hepworth married Skeaping on 13 May 1925 in Florence. In Italy, Hepworth learned how to carve marble from the master sculptor, Giovanni Ardini. Hepworth and Skeaping returned to London in 1926, where they exhibited their works together from their flat. Their son Paul was born in London in 1929.Her early work was highly interested in abstraction and art movements on the continent. In 1933, Hepworth travelled to France with Ben Nicholson, where they visited the studios of Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuşi. Hepworth later became involved with the Paris-based art movement, Abstraction-Création. In 1933, Hepworth co-founded the Unit One art movement with the artists Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson, critic Herbert Read, and the architect Wells Coates.[7] The movement sought to unite Surrealism and abstraction in British art.

Hepworth also helped raise awareness of continental artists amongst the British public. In 1937 she designed the layout for Circle: An International Survey of Constructivist Art, a 300-page book that surveyed Constructivist artists and that was published in London and edited by Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo, and Leslie Martin.

Hepworth married the painter Ben Nicholson on 17 November 1938 at Hampstead Register Office, following his divorce from his wife Winifred. The couple had triplets in 1934, Rachel, Sarah, and Simon. Rachel and Simon also became artists. The couple would divorce in 1951.

St. Ives

Hepworth, her husband Ben Nicholson and their children first visited Cornwall at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

Hepworth lived in Trewyn Studios in St. Ives from 1949 until her death in 1975. Hepworth said that “Finding Trewyn Studio was sort of magic. Here was a studio, a yard, and garden where I could work in open air and space.” St. Ives had become a refuge for many artists during the war. On 8 February 1949, Hepworth and Nicholson co-founded the Penwith Society of Arts at the Castle Inn; nineteen artists were founding members, including Peter Lanyon and Bernard Leach.

Hepworth was also a skilled draughtsman. After her daughter Sarah was hospitalized in 1944, she struck up a close friendship with the surgeon Norman Capener. At Capener’s invitation, she was invited to view surgical procedures and, between 1947-1949, she produced nearly eighty drawings of operating rooms in chalk, ink, and pencil. Hepworth was fascinated by the similarities between surgeons and artists, stating: “There is, it seems to me, a close affinity between the work and approach of both physicians and surgeons, and painters and sculptors.”

In 1950, works by Hepworth were exhibited in the British Pavilion at the XXV Venice Biennale alongside works by Matthew Smith and John Constable. The 1950 Biennale was the last time that contemporary British artists were exhibited alongside artists from the past.

During this period, Hepworth moved away from working only in stone or wood and began to work with bronze. Hepworth often used her garden in St. Ives, which she designed with her friend the composer Priaulx Rainier, to view her large-scale bronzes.

Death of son Paul

Her eldest son, Paul, was killed on 13 February 1953 in a plane crash while serving with the Royal Air Force in Thailand. A memorial to him, Madonna and Child, is in the parish church of St. Ives.

Exhausted in part from her son’s death, Hepworth travelled to Greece with her good friend Margaret Gardiner in August 1954.They visited Athens, Delphi, and many of the Aegean Islands.

When Hepworth returned to St.Ives from Greece in August 1954, she found that Gardiner had sent her a large shipment of Nigerian Guarea hardwood. Although she received only a single tree trunk, Hepworth noted that the shipment from Nigeria to the Tilbury docks came in at 17 tons. Between 1954-1956 Hepworth sculpted six pieces out of Guarea wood, many of which were inspired by her trip to Greece, such as “Corinthos” (1954) and “Curved Form (Delphi)” (1955).

Late career

The artist greatly increased her studio space when she purchased the Palais de Danse, a cinema and dance studio, that was across the street from Trewyn in 1960. She used this new space to work on large-scale commissions.

Hepworth also experimented with lithography in her late career. She produced two lithographic suites with the Curwen Gallery and its director Stanley Jones, one in 1969 and one in 1971. The latter was entitled “The Aegean Suite” (1971) and was inspired by Hepworth’s trip to Greece in 1954 with Margaret Gardiner. The artist also produced a set of lithographs entitled “Opposing Forms” (1970) with Marlborough Fine Art in London.

Barbara Hepworth died in an accidental fire at her Trewyn studios on May 20, 1975 at the age of 72.

Galleries holding her work

There are two major museums dedicated specifically to the art of Barbara Hepworth: the Barbara Hepworth Museum in St. Ives and the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire.

Her work also may be seen at:

• The University of Birmingham,
• Catherine’s College, Oxford,
• The School of Music at Cardiff University,
• Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, West Yorkshire
• Clare College,
• Churchill College
• Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hall), Cambridge
• Snape Maltings, Snape, Suffolk
• On the facade of the John Lewis department store, part of the John Lewis Partnership, on Oxford Street
• The Mander Centre, Wolverhampton (removed 2014)
• Kenwood House
• Outside the Norwich Playhouse[30]
• On the grounds of Winchester Cathedral next to The Pilgrims’ School
• Leeds Art Gallery
• Tate Gallery
• Kröller-Müller Museum
• Pier Art Gallery in Stromness
• Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand

Marble portrait heads dating from London, ca. 1927, of Barbara Hepworth by John Skeaping, and of Skeaping by Hepworth, are documented by photograph in the Skeaping Retrospective catalogue, but are both believed to be lost.

Commissions

In 1951 Hepworth was commissioned by the Arts Council to create a piece for the Festival of Britain. The resulting work featured two Irish limestone figures entitled, “Contrapuntal Forms” (1950), which was displayed on London’s South Bank. To complete the large-scale piece Hepworth hired her first assistants, Terry Frost, Denis Mitchell, and John Wells.

From 1949 onwards she worked with assistants, sixteen in all. One of her most prestigious works is Single Form,[36] which was made in memory of her friend and collector of her works, the former Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, and which stands in the plaza of the United Nations building in New York City. It was commissioned by Jacob Blaustein, a former United States delegate to the U.N., in 1961 following Hammarskjöld’s death in a plane crash.

Controversy

On 20 December 2011, her 1969 sculpture Two Forms (Divided Circle) was stolen, from its plinth in Dulwich Park, South London, suspicions are that the theft was by scrap metal thieves. The piece, which had been in the park since 1970, was insured for £500,000, a spokesman for Southwark Council said.

One of the edition of six of her 1964 bronze sculpture, Rock Form (Porthcurno), was removed from the Mander Centre in Wolverhampton in the spring of 2014 by its owners, The Royal Bank of Scotland and Dalancey Estates. Its sudden disappearance led to questions in Parliament in Sept. 2014. Paul Uppal, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West said: “When the Rock Form was donated by the Mander family, it was done so in the belief it would be enjoyed and cherished by the people of Wolverhampton for generations… It belongs to, and should be enjoyed by, the City of Wolverhampton.”

Recognition

Hepworth was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1959 Sāo Paolo Bienal She also was awarded the Freedom of St. Ives award in 1968 as an acknowledgment of her significant contributions to the town. She was awarded honorary degrees from Birmingham (1960), Leeds (1961), Exeter (1966), Oxford (1968), London (1970), and Manchester (1971). She was appointed CBE in 1958 and DBE in 1965. In 1973 she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Following her death, her studio and home in St. Ives became the Barbara Hepworth Museum, which came under control of the Tate in 1980.

In 2011, the Hepworth Wakefield opened in Hepworth’s hometown of Wakefield, England. The Museum was designed by the famed architect David Chipperfield.

Gallery

• 

List of selected works

1928	Doves
1932–33	Seated Figure
1933	Two Forms
1934	Mother and Child
1935	Three Forms
1936	Ball Plane and Hole
1937	Pierced Hemisphere 1
1940	Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red)
1943	Oval Sculpture
1943–44	Wave
1944	Landscape Sculpture
1946	Pelagos
	Tides
1947	Blue and green (arthroplasty) 31 December 1947
1949	Operation: Case for Discussion
1951	Group I (Concourse) 4 February 1951
1953	Hieroglyph
1954–55	Two Figures
1955	Oval Sculpture (Delos)
1955–56	Coré
1956	Curved Form (Trevalgan)
1956	Orpheus (Maquette), Version II
	Stringed Figure (Curlew), Version II
1958	Cantate Domino
	Sea Form (Porthmeor)
1959	Curved form with inner form – anima
1960	Figure for Landscape
	Archaeon
1961	Curved Form (Bryher)
1962–63	Bronze Form (Patmos)
1963	Winged Figure
1963-65	Sphere with Inner Form
1964	Rock Form (Porthcurno)
	Sea Form (Atlantic)
	Oval Form (Trezion)
1966	Figure in a Landscape
	Four-Square Walk Through
1968	Two Figures
1969	Two Forms (Divided Circle)
1970	Family of Man
1971	The Aegean Suite
	Summer Dance
1972	Minoan Head
	Assembly of Sea Forms
1973?	Conversation with Magic Stones

People : Nick Darke Cornish Playwright …… Cornwall In A Different Light

Nick Darke born Nicholas Temperley Watson Darke (29 August 1948 – 10 June 2005) was an Cornish playwright and writer, poet, lobster fisherman, environmentalist, beachcomber, politician, broadcaster, film-maker and chairman of St Eval Parish Council.

Life and writings

Nick Darke was born in Bodmin in Cornwall and lived most of his life in Porthcothan where his family have lived for four generations after moving there from Padstow. His grandfather was a sea-captain who spent his life at sea and was wrecked twice at the Cape of Good Hope. His father T. O. Darke, was a chicken farmer, fisherman and a distinguished ornithologist . His mother was the actress Betty Cowan. He was educated at St Merryn Primary School and Truro Cathedral School, from where he was expelled for getting drunk on sports day. He then attended Newquay Grammar School and subsequently trained as an actor at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. After making his professional début in repertory at the Lyric, Belfast, he went on to learn his craft at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, England, where he acted in over eighty plays and directed Man Is Man, The Miser, Absurd Person Singular, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and A Cuckoo in the Nest, 1977–79. At Stoke he wrote his first full-length play, Never Say Rabbit in a Boat in 1977. He gave up acting to write full-time in 1978. Over the next twenty-eight years, he wrote twenty-seven plays which have been performed in theatres all over the world (eight for The Royal Shakespeare Company and two for The National Theatre). He also wrote for radio, television and film.

Many of his plays reflect Cornish society and culture such as the tin mining, countryside, fishermen and the quirky nature of country living. During the later part of his career he worked regularly with the theatre company Kneehigh Theatre. One of his last works, the documentary The Wrecking Season (2004) which he wrote and narrated, charts the lives of Cornish beachcombers, of which he himself was one having moved permanently back home to Porthcothan in 1990. He married the painter Jane Spurway in 1993 and is the father of film-maker Henry and stepfather of Jim, a marine scientist. He was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1996 taking the Bardic name Scryfer Gwaryow (‘Writer of Plays’).

While recovering from a stroke that he suffered in January 2001, Nick Darke was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died, aged 56, in June 2005. A unique beach funeral ceremony was followed by burial in St Eval churchyard. His son Henry and wife Jane Darke continued his legacy in film. The Art of Catching Lobsters, written and directed by Jane Darke, is a moving account of her husband’s death and the grieving process. Premiered on BBC Four on 27 September 2007 it was subsequently shown at the 2007 Cornwall Film Festival A film version of his first play Never Say Rabbit in a Boat is in pre-production and will be made by APT Films. His son Henry Darke has made a film version of Danger My Ally.

In 2009 the Cornwall Youth Theatre Company began Darke Visions, an eighteen-month festival running from Spring 2009 to Summer 2010 celebrating the life and work of Cornwall’s foremost playwright, with the performance of Hells’ Mouth (directed by Harry and Theresa Forbes-Pearce); The Body (directed by Tom Faulkner); and Ting Tang Mine (directed by Rory Wilton and Emma Spurgin Hussey). These plays went on tour in Cornwall during March/April 2009. In 2011 the theatre group o-region toured small-scale venues with a new show One Darke Night which also celebrated Nick Darke’s rich legacy. Combining specially commissioned film (featuring Nick’s son, Henry) and a small cast of players, the play fused extracts from lesser-known works with firm audience favourites such as The King of Prussia and extracts from Nick’s other writings. Compiled by Simon Harvey who had worked with Nick on the production of his final play Laughing Gas in 2006, the production provided fresh insight into the remarkable range and diversity of Nick’s catalogue of work.

Nick Darke’s literary voice is very distinctive and although many of his characters, plots and settings are rooted in the Cornish past, his themes are often of relevance to the Cornwall of today. As one of his earliest reviews, in The Financial Times stated: “Darke gives shape to a Cornish idenitity that feels vital and real and has nothing to do with clay pipes and clotted cream”. Although he made a vital contribution to the culture of Cornwall in the last quarter of the 20th century, he himself claimed only that his greatest achievement (and that of his wife Jane) was convincing North Cornwall District Council not to mechanically rake the beaches in their area that was damaging the natural eco-structure

The Nick Darke Award

The Nick Darke Award has been developed by Nick Darke’s widow, with the support of Nick Darke’s family and Falmouth University. Funded by the university, the annual award is a financial prize aimed at writers, giving them time to write, and offer some support through the writing process. Submissions can be in any of the genres that Nick Darke himself excelled – stage, screen or radio. See the official Nick Darke website for details.

Plays

• Mother Goose (1977; Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent) – pantomime
• Never Say Rabbit in a Boat (1977; Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent) – his first full-length play, set in Cornwall about an ageing rabbit catcher and a beach seine net company. Hellyar Jan is also a fisherman, smuggler and born liar. The action takes place on the beach of a small bay in North Conrwall and in Hellyar’s old house on the cliff above.
• Low tide (1977; Plymouth Theatre Company) – about tourism set on a beach.
• Sinbad the Sailor (1978; Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent) – pantomime
• Summer Trade (1979; Orchard Theatre) – takes place in a pub somewhere on the North Cornish coast the day after the ex-landlord’s last night. The new landlord has plans to modernise.
• Beauty and the Beast (1979; Orchard Theatre) – pantomime
• Landmarks (1979; Chester Gateway Theatre) – set in the thirties in rural England when horse met the tractor for the first and last time.
• A Tickle on the River’s Back (1979; Theatre Royal Stratford East) – set on the Thames about a family of lightermen and the decline of the industry on the river over the last 20 years.
• High Water (1980; Royal Shakespeare Company) – set on a beach early one morning. Two men meet to go wrecking and discover they are father and son.
• Say Your Prayers (1981; Joint Stock Theatre Company) – set in the time of the Roman Empire, and based on an interpretation of the teachings of St Paul. The play takes a wry look at Christianity as the ‘Born Again’ movement develops into a powerful right-wing lobby in the USA, while the established church in Britain is at its lowest ebb yet.
• The Catch (1981; for The Royal Court Theatre Upstairs) – two fishermen bedevilled by the European Economic Community cast their nets for a different kind of catch – cocaine.
• Cider with Rosie (1981) – growing up in the idyllic English countryside between the two world wars (based on the autobiography of Laurie Lee of the same name)
• The Lowestoff Man (1982; Orchard Theatre Company) – sequel to “The Catch”, a mysterious American arrives to claim his cocaine
• The Body (1983; Royal Shakespeare Company) – an eccentric West Country community contend with the presence of an American airforce base. “Under Milk Wood meets Dr Strangelove“, was one critical verdict. It was written during the cold war with the USSR when many were concerned about American nuclear weapons on British soil. Nick had a friend whose farm backed onto the St Mawgan Air Base. Every morning the farmer went to check his sheep while a US Marine followed his movements with a gun. In Nick’s research he learned how Marines were trained, broken down and rebuilt so they’d be effective fighting men. Nick said that The Body was a play about identity.
• The Earth Turned Inside Out (1984; community play for the Borough of Restormel, Cornwall) – the rivalries of two Cornish mining communities set in 1815 at a time when the Cornish copper mining industry was healthy but prone to market forces.
• Bud (1985; Royal Shakespeare Company) – fifty-year-old Bud has spent twenty years without rancour or spite working his wife’s farm but his peaceful existence comes to an abrupt halt when a misjudgement forces him to question his motivation and examine the ‘acid drop scorchin holes in the startched napkin of our marriage’.
• The Oven Glove Murders (1986, The Bush Theatre, London) – described by one critic as “an acerbic response to the British cinema revival led by Chariots of Fire“, the play is a writer’s experience of the film industry. A playwright has a screenplay set in The Greenham Common peace camp given the Hollywood treatment by a young producer; a similar premise is the basis of the film The Strike by The Comic Strip team two years later.
• The Dead Monkey (1986; Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Pit) – a childless Californian couple sit down to a candlelit supper to commemorate the death of their fifteen-year-old pet. The party sours after a series of discomforting revelations. Nick Darke’s best known play, The Dead Monkey has been staged many times around the world, including a major USA revival featuring David Soul and in Germany in translation as Der tote Affe.
• Ting Tang Mine (1987; for The National Theatre) – reworking of the community play “The Earth Turned Inside Out”: the fate of two competing mining communities used as a parable for Thatcher’s Britain.
• A Place Called Mars (1988; community play for Thornbury, South Gloucestershire). The play is set on a haunted marshland.
• Kissing The Pope (1989; Royal Shakespeare Company) – originally known as Campesinos, this is Nick Darke’s play for Nicaragua. Set in revolutionary South America, its main themes are about becoming a man in a violent world and about having to decide why to kill before you know why to live. As part of his research, Nick travelled to Nicaragua during the war and wrote a moving diary of his experiences that was published with the play text by Nick Hearn Books – see Published Works.
• Fears and Miseries of the Third Term – part contributor (1989, Young Vic Studio).
• Hell’s Mouth (1992; Royal Shakespeare Company) – story after Sophocles, set in post-apocalyptic dystopia with Cornish nationalists fighting for independence from England.
• Danger My Ally (1993; Kneehigh Theatre) – is about what happens to two eco-warriors when they are caught trying to blow up an open-cast mine. (The title is taken from the autobiography of F.A. “Mike” Mitchell-Hedges, the English adventurer and traveller who was the real Indiana Jones of his day.)
• The Bogus (also known as Quoit) (1994; Kneehigh Theatre) – billed as a pan-Atlantic tragi-comedy of murder, corruption and nuptials. When an assassin’s bullet lands Arthur May, President-Elect of the USA, six feet under, John Sty dons his persona and leaves Springville, Utah, on a one-way ticket to the village of Quoit in Cornwall.
• Knock Out The Pin (1994; Cornwall Youth Theatre Company) – about Newquay
• The King of Prussia (1996; for Plymouth Theatre Royal/Kneehigh Theatre) – based on the life and times of 18th century Cornish smuggler, John Carter of Prussia Cove, West Cornwall. Nick saw this as a play about looking after your community – the opposite of what he felt was happening in Cornwall and the rest of Britain in the 1990s. He felt the Thatcherite Free Market economy expoused in the 1980s was breaking up industry everywhere and leaving communities vulnerable.
• The Man with Green Hair (1997; Bristol Old Vic) – drew its inspiration from the Camelford water pollution incident of 1988. A water company somewhere in Cornwall has had a slight mix-up with its chemicals and poisoned the water supply. The mustard-keen pollution control officers want to expose the dirty dealings, the water company and the government want to cover it up. The local community side with the water company, for fear of destroying the lucrative tourist trade.
• The Riot (2000; for Kneehigh production at the National Theatre) – set in the fishing village of Newlyn in 1896, about the so-called “Sabbath riots”, when the devout Cornish fisherman whose Methodist beliefs forbade them to fish on Sundays demonstrated violently against the Sunday fishing fleet from Lowestoft.
• Laughing Gas (2005; o-region) a comedy about the life of Sir Humphry Davy unfinished at the time of Nick Darke’s death; completed posthumously by Cornish actor and playwright Carl Grose and produced by the Truro-based production company o-region.
• One Darke Night (2011; o-region) – a compendium of extracts from Nick Darke’s plays spanning nearly thirty years of his writing career, together with film commentary and extracts from his other writings; intended for simple staging with a small number of performers, emphasis on the words.

Television and films

• Dancers (a dance therapy programme, TV, 1982)
• Farmers Arms (BBC1 ‘Play for Today’, 1983)
• The Bench (TV, 1999)
• Breaking the Chains (film, 2000) Writer: John Angarrack, Director/producer: Nick Darke. Cornish historian John Angarrack talks to Nick Darke about Cornish cultural suppression and the way forward.
• The Cornish Farmer (film, 2004) Writer: Nick Darke, Directors: Nick Darke/Mark Jenkin, Producer: Jane Darke. Nick Darke talks to his old friend, Warwick Cowling, about threshing and other farm practices. The film uses 8 mm archive film shot by Nick’s father in the 1960s in St Eval.
• The Wrecking Season (film, 2004; commissioned by the Arts Council and directed by his wife, Jane Darke, first broadcast on BBC4 22 July 2005) a film about beachcombing on the Cornish coast – available on DVD from Boatshed Films.
• The Art of Catching Lobsters (film, 2005; first broadcast on BBC4 27 September 2007), Nick and Jane’s second film was initially conceived as a film about Nick’s recovery from a stroke through such activities as beachcombing and lobster fishing. Nick was then diagnosed with terminal cancer and the film became a record of his attempts to pass on his knowledge and experience of lobster fishing and the ways of the sea to his son Henry, as well as a poignant documentary about love, loss and the grieving process—also available on DVD from Boatshed Films.
• Nick Darke also appeared in the Exmouth to Bristol episode of the TV series “Coast”

Radio

• Foggy Anniversary (1979)
• Summer Trade (1980)
• Landmarks (1981)
• Lifeboat (1981)
• The Catch (1983)
• So Long as Lobsters Swim the Sea (1997; Another Strand feature) – described as “An occasional series where those well-known in one field talk about another consuming interest in their lives. Nick Darke, author of many plays for radio, the National Theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, is also a keen fisherman. He talks about his lobster pots and nets off Padstow.”
• Cider with Rosie (radio adaptation of Laurie Lee’s autobiography) (1998), in two episodes broadcast by BBC as “The Classic Serial”.
• Gone Fishing (1998)
• Bawcock’s Eve (1999) – a mystery story set in Mousehole, Cornwall.
• Flotsam & Jetsam (1999) – a family tale based in Porthnant Bay, Cornwall.
• The King of Prussia (1999) – set off the Cornish coast in 1789. A mad king, heavy taxes, and smugglers…and in the other direction, a country on the brink of revolution. Based on his play of the same name.
• Underground (feature on Cornish tin mining) (2000) – voices of miners and their families are woven into a text by Nick Darke and music by Jim Carey.
• In quest of Joseph Emidy (2000) – the amazing story of Joseph Antonio Emidy an African slave who eventually became a violinist in the Lisbon Orchestra, fought in the Napoleonic Wars, then settled in Falmouth and became a successful teacher and composer. Produced by Juliam May, with contributions from Richard McGrady (musical historian), Tunde Jegede (composer), Nancy Naro (slavery expert) and Emidy’s descendants.
• The Fisherman’s Tale (2000) – a group of travellers take shelter in a motorway service station from appalling weather. There is no radio or TV, so to keep each other entertained they each tell a story. Darke’s contribution to the “2000 tales” series “, written on the 600th anniversary of Chaucer’s death. The (verse) text was first performed as a play as part of the Darke Night Out production – see Plays above. Aunt Feen, part-time caretaker of a house on Bobby’s Bay, St Merryn, decides to supplement her income by letting the property to a young man, Jim, without the knowledge of the house’s absentee owner Hugo Bryson Spelles – see the official Nick Darke website for the full text http://nickdarke.net/archives.
• Atlantic Drifting (BBC Radio 4 documentary produced by Simon Elmes, 30 November 2001 – the forerunner of The Wrecking season film)
• Dumbstruck (2003; first broadcast on BBC R4) – documentary using an audio diary Nick kept during his rehabilitation after a stroke.
• Hooked (2005; first broadcast 18 July 2005 BBC R4) – a comedy drama-documentary telling the story of a Cornish couple who are asked for their advice by a Londoner on how to fish for sea-bass, who subsequently cashes in on his new knowledge. Recorded on Porthcothan Beach.

Nick Darke also appeared on the Radio 4 programme “Nature” (broadcast 16 February 2004).

Other projects

• The Lobster (1998) for speaker and chamber group (‘Thoughts of a crustacean upon entering a trap’, text by Nick Darke). Performed at the QEH in 1998 by Nicole Tibbels (speaker) with the Mephisto Ensemble conducted by the composer, Christopher Gunning (born 1944). Recorded by them on the Meridian label (CDE 84498).

Published works

• The Body (RSC playtext: Methuen Publishing, pbk 1983); ISBN 0-413-53340-9
• Ting Tang Mine & Other Plays (New Theatrescripts: Methuen Publishing, pbk 1987); ISBN 0-413-17930-3
• Kissing The Pope – play text and Nicaraguan travel diary (Nick Hern Books, pbk 1990); ISBN 1-85459-047-2
• Cider with Rosie (Heinemann Plays: new edition, hrdbk, 1993); ISBN 0-435-23295-9
• The Riot (Methuen Modern Plays: Methuen Drama, pbk 1999); ISBN 0-413-73730-6
• Nick Darke Plays (Methuen Contemporary Dramatists: Vol 1, pbk 1999) – incls “The Dead Monkey”, “The King of Prussia”, “The Body” and “Ting Tang Mine”; ISBN 0-413-73720-9

People : Frank Bramley , Newlyn School Artist, Known For Paintings Of Interiors …

Frank Bramley RA (6 May 1857 – 9 Aug 1915) was an English post-impressionist genre painter of the Newlyn School.

Personal life

Bramley was born in Sibsey, near Boston, in Lincolnshire to Charles Bramley from Fiskerton also in Lincolnshire.

From 1873 to 1878 Bramley studied at the Lincoln School of Art. He then studied from 1879 to 1882 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where Charles Verlat was his instructor. He lived in Venice from 1882 to 1884 and then moved to Newlyn, Cornwall.

Bramley married fellow artist Katherine Graham, daughter of John Graham from Huntingstile, Grasmere, Westmoreland, in 1891.The couple lived at Orchard Cottage, which at the time was called Belle Vue Cottage, from 1893 to 1897. In 1895 they moved to Droitwich in the West Midlands.They lived at Bellue Vue House in 1889 and by 1900 had settled at Grasmere in the Lake District.

Bramley died in Chalford Hill, Gloucestershire in August 1915.

Career

Having returned to England from Venice in or after 1884, Bramley established himself in the Newlyn School artist colony on Rue des Beaux Arts in Newlyn. Along with Walter Langley and Stanhope Forbes, he was considered to be one of the “leading figures” of the Newlyn School.

In contrast to other members of the Newlyn school, Bramley specialised in interiors and worked on combining natural and artificial light in his paintings, such as A Hopeless Dawn.

During his time in Newlyn, Bramley was a particular exponent of the ‘square brush technique’, using the flat of a square brush to lay the paint on the canvas in a jigsaw pattern of brush strokes, giving a particular vibrancy to the paint surface. In the early 1890s, his palette became brighter and his handling of the paint looser and more impastoed, while his subject matter narrowed to portraits and rural genre paintings.

An example of Bramley’s use of the square brush technique is his painting Domino!.

His A Hopeless Dawn (1888) is held by the Tate Gallery, London after having been purchased for the nation by the Chantrey Bequest and is one of Bramley’s most favored works. Praised by the Royal Academy, Penlee House also appreciate this Bramley work: “The painting’s strong emotional and narrative content, together with its aesthetic appeal and tonal harmony, make this one of the most admired Newlyn School works to this day.”

Bramley was one of the founders of the New English Art Club, but left the organization after having received condemning comments from Walter Sickert.

In 1894 Bramley became an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) and in 1911 he became a Royal Academician (RA). He was also a gold medal winner at the Paris Salon.

Exhibitions

• 1884 – 1912: Royal Academy
• 1890: Domino, Dowdeswell Exhibition

Works

Selected paintings include:

• A Venetian Market Girl,
• Primrose Day,
• Everyone His Own Tale,
• Domino,
• Eyes and No Eyes,
• A Hopeless Dawn,

People : Sir Alfred Munnings, Artist Of The Newlyn School & Former President Of The Royal Academy ….

Sir Alfred James Munnings KCVO, PRA (8 October 1878 – 17 July 1959) was known as one of England’s finest painters of horses, and as an outspoken critic of Modernism. Engaged by Lord Beaverbrook’s Canadian War Memorials Fund, he earned several prestigious commissions after the Great War that made him wealthy.

Biography

Alfred Munnings was born 8 October 1878 at Mendham, Suffolk across the River Waveney from Harleston in Norfolk. His father ran a water-mill on the river at Mendham. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a Norwich printer, designing and drawing advertising posters for the next six years, attending the Norwich School of Art in his spare time. When his apprenticeship ended, he became a full-time painter. The loss of sight in his right eye in an accident in 1898 did not deflect his determination to paint, and in 1899 two of his pictures were shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. He painted rural scenes, frequently of subjects such as Gypsies and horses. He was associated with the Newlyn School of painters, and while there met Florence Carter Wood (1888–1914), a young horsewoman and painter. They married on 19 January 1912 but she tried to kill herself on their honeymoon and did so in 1914. Munnings remarried in 1920; his second wife was another horsewoman, Violet McBride. There were no children from either marriage. Although his second wife encouraged him to accept commissions from society figures, Munnings became best known for his equine painting: he often depicted horses involving in hunting and racing.

War artists

Although he volunteered to join the Army, he was assessed as unfit to fight. In 1917, his participation in the war was limited to a civilian job outside Reading, processing tens of thousands of Canadian horses en route to France — and often to death. Later, he was assigned to one of the horse remount depots on the Western Front. Munnings’ talent was employed in his position as war artist to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade, under the patronage of Max Aitken in the latter part of the war. During the war he painted many scenes, including a mounted portrait of General Jack Seely Warrior in 1918 (now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). Munnings worked on this canvas a few thousand yards from the German front lines. When General Seely’s unit was forced into a hasty withdrawal, the artist discovered what it was like to come under shellfire.

Munnings also painted Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron in 1918. In what is known as “the last great cavalry charge” at the Battle of Moreuil Wood, Gordon Flowerdew was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for leading Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Royal Canadians) in a successful engagement with entrenched German forces.

The Canadian Forestry Corps invited Munnings to tour their work camps, and he produced drawings, watercolors and paintings, including Draft Horses, Lumber Mill in the Forest of Dreux in France in 1918. This role of horses was critical and under-reported; and in fact, horse fodder was the single largest commodity shipped to the front by some countries.

The Canadian War Records Exhibition at the Royal Academy after war’s end included forty-five of Munnings’ canvasses.

Later career

Munnings was elected president of the Royal Academy of Art in 1944. He was awarded a knighthood in 1944. His presidency is best known for the valedictory speech he gave in 1949, in which he attacked modernism. The broadcast was heard by millions of listeners to BBC radio. An evidently inebriated Munnings claimed that the work of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso had corrupted art. He recalled that Winston Churchill had once said to him, “Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his … something something?” to which Munnings said he replied, “Yes Sir, I would”.

He died at Castle House, Dedham, Essex, on 17 July 1959. After his death, his wife turned their home in Dedham into a museum of his work. The village pub in Mendham is named after him, as is a street there.

Munnings was portrayed by Dominic Cooper in the film Summer in February, which was released in Britain in 2013. The film is adapted from a novel by Jonathan Smith.

At auction

His immensely popular sporting art works have enjoyed popularity in the United States as well as the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Represented by agents Frost & Reed of London while he was alive, Munnings’s works were bought by some of the wealthiest collectors of the day. As of 2007, the highest price paid for a Munnings painting was $7,848,000 for The Red Prince Mare, far above his previous auction record of $4,292,500 set at Christie’s in December 1999. It was one of four works by Munnings in the auction. The Red Prince Mare is a 40-by-60-inch oil on canvas that was executed in 1921 and had an estimate of $4,000,000 to $6,000,000.

Writings

• An Artist’s Life (London 1950)
• The Second Burst (London 1951)

The Finish (London 1952)

People : Henry Scott Tuke , Newlyn School Artist And Photographer …

Henry Scott Tuke, RA RWS (12 June 1858 – 13 March 1929), was an English visual artist; primarily a painter, but also a photographer. His most notable work was in the Impressionist style, and he is probably best known for his paintings of nude boys and young men.

He was born into a Quaker family in Lawrence Street in York. He was the second son of Daniel Hack Tuke (1827–1895) and Maria Strickney (1826–1917). In 1859 the family moved to Falmouth, where Daniel Tuke, a physician, established a practice. Tuke’s sister and biographer, Maria Tuke Sainsbury (1861–1947), was born there. Tuke was encouraged to draw and paint from an early age and some of his earliest drawings—from when he was four or five years old—were published in 1895. In 1870, Tuke joined his brother William at Irwin Sharps’s Quaker school in Weston-super-Mare, and remained there until he was sixteen.

In 1875, Tuke enrolled in the Slade School of Art under Alphonse Legros and Sir Edward Poynter. Initially his father paid for his tuition but in 1877 Tuke won a scholarship, which allowed him to continue his training at the Slade and in Italy in 1880. From 1881 to 1883 he was in Paris where he met Jules Bastien-Lepage, who encouraged him to paint en plein air. While studying in France, Tuke decided to move to Newlyn Cornwall where many of his Slade and Parisian friends had already formed the Newlyn School of painters. He received several lucrative commissions there, after exhibiting his work at the Royal Academy of Art in London.

In 1885, Tuke returned to Falmouth where many of his major works were produced. Tuke became an established artist and was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1914. Tuke suffered a heart attack in 1928 and died in March, 1929. Towards the end of his life Tuke knew that his work was no longer fashionable. In his will he left generous amounts of money to some of the men who, as boys, had been his models. Today he is remembered mainly for his oil paintings of young men, but in addition to his achievements as a figurative painter, he was an established maritime artist and produced as many portraits of sailing ships as he did human figures. Tuke was a prolific artist—over 1,300 works are listed and more are still being discovered.

Early life

Tuke was born at Lawrence Street York, into a prominent Quaker family. His brother William Samuel Tuke was born two years earlier in 1856. His father, Daniel Hack Tuke, a well-known medical doctor specialising in psychiatry, was a campaigner for humane treatment of the insane. His great-great-grandfather William Tuke had founded the Retreat at York, one of the first modern insane asylums, in 1796. His great-grandfather Henry Tuke, grandfather Samuel Tuke and uncle James Hack Tuke were also well-known social activists. The Tuke family’s ancestry can be traced back to Sir Brian Tuke, who served as an adviser to King Henry VIII of England (replacing Sir Thomas More).

In 1859 the family moved to Falmouth in Cornwall where it was hoped the warmer climate would benefit Tuke’s father, Daniel, who had developed symptoms of tuberculosis. Daniel survived there and lived on until he was 68. He established a small doctor’s practice in his house in Wood Lane. His sister, Maria Sainsbury Tuke (1861–1947)—who wrote a biography of her brother after his death—was born there. William went on to study medicine but Henry—or Harry as he was called by the family, showed no interest in the profession. Tuke was encouraged to draw and paint from an early age. Tuke and his siblings were taught by a governess at home. Maria described their childhood in Falmouth as “a very happy and healthy one” and the long summer days spent on the beach and swimming in the sea had a lasting effect on Tuke and other enduring memories were the firm friendships the young Tuke formed.

In 1874 Tuke moved to London, where he enrolled in the Slade School of Art. It was in Falmouth that the young Tuke had been introduced to the pleasures of nude sea bathing, a habit he continued into old age. After graduating he travelled to Italy in 1880, and from 1881 to 1883 he lived in Paris, where he studied with the French history painter Jean-Paul Laurens and met the American painter John Singer Sargent (who was also a painter of male nudes, although this was little known in his lifetime).

During the 1880s Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers such as John Addington Symonds, most of whom were homosexual (then usually called Uranian) and who celebrated the adolescent male. He wrote a “sonnet to youth” which was published anonymously in The Artist, and also contributed an essay to The Studio.

Newlyn School

In 1883, Tuke returned to Britain and moved to Newlyn, Cornwall joining a small colony of artists including Walter Langley, Albert Chevallier Tayler and Thomas Cooper Gotch. These painters, and others, became known as the Newlyn School. He worked from Rose Cottage at Tregadgwith Farm, Cornwall at the head of the Lamorna valley.

In Newlyn, in 1884, Tuke completed his first painting of boys in boats. Called Summertime, it depicts two local boys, John Wesley Kitching and John Cotton in a punt called “Little Argo”. Tuke’s style was more impressionistic than the other Newlyn painters and he only stayed a short time. However, he remained close friends with many of the artists until his death.

Falmouth

Tuke painted oil studies of young male nudes during a tour of Italy in his early twenties in 1881, but the theme did not become central to his work until after 1885, when he had moved to Falmouth, then still a secluded part of Cornwall and a part of the country with a very mild climate that was more agreeable for nude bathing. There Tuke focused on maritime scenes and portraits, which showed boys and young men bathing, fishing and sunbathing on sunny beaches. He settled at Swanpool, a fishing port, bought a fishing boat for £40, and converted it into a floating studio and living quarters. He rented two rooms in Pennance Cottage, situated between Pennance Point and Swanpool Beach.The cottage remained Tuke’s permanent base until his death, although he often lived aboard boats. Here he could indulge his passion for painting boys. His early models were brought down from London but he soon befriended some of the local fishermen and swimmers in Falmouth who became his close friends and models. These included Edward John “Johnny” Jackett (1878–1935), Charlie Mitchell (1885–1957), who looked after Tuke’s boats, Willie Sainsbury, Tuke’s eldest nephew, Leo Marshall, Georgie and Richard Fouracre (sons of his housekeeper), George Williams – younger son of close neighbours, Maurice Clift – nephew of a family friend, Ainsley Marks, Jack Rolling (in some sources spelt “Rowling”) Freddy Hall, Bert White and Harry Cleave. Due to Tuke’s habit of interchanging heads and bodies of his models in his paintings, it is often not possible to identify each figure exactly. All of Tuke’s regular models were eventually called up during the First World War, and some did not return, including Maurice Clift—a model for August Blue—who was killed in France.

He would often commute to London—Falmouth was well served with a railway service—and he was not isolated from the London art scene. He produced numerous portraits of society figures, local officials and members of the Tuke family circle. He also painted many more saleable landscapes and was well regarded as a painter of ships in sail. Henry Scott Tuke was elected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1900 and Royal Academician in 1914.

Style

Tuke favoured rough, visible brush strokes, at a time when a smooth, polished finish was favoured by fashionable painters and critics. He had a strong sense of colour and excelled in the depiction of natural light, particularly the soft, fragile sunlight of the English summer. Although Tuke often finished paintings in the studio, photographic evidence shows that he worked mainly in the open air, which accounts for their freshness of colour and the realistic effects of sunlight reflected by the sea and on the naked flesh of his models.

In his early paintings, Tuke placed his male nudes in mythological contexts, but the critics found these works to be rather formal, lifeless and flaccid. From the 1890s, Tuke abandoned mythological themes and began to paint local boys fishing, sailing, swimming and diving, and also began to paint in a more naturalistic style. His handling of paint became freer, and he began using bold, fresh colour. One of his best known paintings from this period is August Blue (1893–1894), a study of four mostly nude youths bathing from a boat. The Looe artist, Lindsay Symington (1872–1942), modelled for the blonde boy holding onto the boat in the water; though not a regular model, Symington was a good friend of Tuke, the latter often visiting the Symington family home, Pixies’ Holt, at Dartmeet. Tuke painted some female nudes but these were not as successful as his male nude paintings.

Although Tuke’s paintings of nude youths undoubtedly appealed to his gay friends and art-buyers, they are never explicitly sexual. The models’ genitals are almost never shown, they are almost never in physical contact with each other, and there is never any suggestion of overt sexuality. Most of the paintings have the nude models standing or crouching on the beach facing out to sea, so only the back view is displayed.Tuke is also regarded as an important maritime artist. Over the years, he painted many pictures of the majestic sailing ships, mainly in watercolour, that were common until the 1930s. Tuke was often fascinated with the beauty of a fully rigged ship, and since his childhood could draw them from memory. His decision to move to Falmouth in 1885 was, in part, influenced by the constant presence of the ships there.

Tuke enjoyed a considerable reputation, and he earned enough money from his paintings to enable him to travel abroad and he painted in France, Italy and the West Indies. In 1900 a banquet was held in his honour at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1914.

Major examples of his male nudes were purchased by major art galleries including The Bathers at Leeds Art Gallery in 1890 and August Blue at the Tate, London in 1894. But he was also well known as a portraitist, and maintained a London studio to work on his commissions. Among his best known portraits is that of soldier and writer T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”).

Death

In later life he was in poor health for many years, and died in Falmouth in 1929 and was buried in a Falmouth cemetery close to his home. Tuke kept a detailed diary all his life but only two volumes survived after his death and have since been published. He also kept a detailed artist’s Register which survives and has been published by the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in Falmouth.

Legacy

After his death, Tuke’s reputation faded, and he was largely forgotten until the 1970s, when he was rediscovered by the first generation of openly gay artists and art collectors. He has since become something of a cult figure in gay cultural circles, with lavish editions of his paintings published and his works fetching high prices at auctions.

Commemoration

The student halls of residence at University College Falmouth are named after Tuke, a tribute to him as both an artist, and a famous resident of the town. At the time they were built and named, the school was known as the Falmouth College of Arts. Also in Falmouth is a collection of 279 of Tuke’s works belonging to the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, the largest such collection in public ownership. The bulk were donated by a single collector in the 1960s, but the Society maintains a policy of adding to the collection.

Exhibitions and publications

During the 150th year after H.S. Tuke’s birth, there were three exhibitions of his work:

• 2008-05-03 to 2008-07-12: Catching the light: the sunshine paintings of Henry Scott Tuke.
• 2008-09-06 to 2008-09-27: Tall ships.
• 10 May – 12 July 2008: Catching the Light: A Retrospective of Henry Scott Tuke”, Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro
• 7 June – 12 July 2008: A Hidden Treasure Revealed: A selection of the works on paper by Henry Scott Tuke from the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro.
• 21 July – 28 August 2008: Catching the Light: The Art of Henry Scott Tuke at the Fine Art Society, New Bond Street,

People : Artist And Lover, Arthur Lett-Haines

 

Arthur Lett-Haines (1894 – February 25, 1978), known as Lett Haines, was a British painter and sculptor who experimented in many different media, though he generally characterised himself as “an English surrealist”. He was part of a London artistic circle, which included D. H. Lawrence, the Sitwells and Wyndham Lewis.

Arthur Lett was born in 1894, the son of Charles Lett and Frances Laura Esme Lett (who afterwards married S. Sidney Haines). He was educated at St Paul’s School.

In the First World War he served in the British Army.

In 1916 Lett-Haines married Gertrude Aimee Lincoln at Hailsham, but when he met the painter Cedric Morris in 1918, the latter moved in with them and in 1919 his wife Aimee left on her own for America. Morris and Lett-Haines lived together until his death, Haines largely subordinating his own artistic career to promote that of his partner. This relationship lasted some 60 years, despite its open nature that included attachments on both sides such as Haines’ affair with the artist and author Kathleen Hale.

After initially living at Newlyn, they moved to Paris in 1920, becoming part of an expatriate artistic community that included Juan Gris, Fernard Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Nancy Cunard and Ernest Hemingway. They returned briefly to London in 1926, before moving in 1929 to Suffolk.

In 1937, Morris and Haines founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham. When it burned down in 1939, the school was relocated to Benton End, a mansion near Hadleigh. Operating on a live-in basis that mingled artistic development with a social circle, its pupils included Lucian Freud, Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, David Kentish, Maggi Hambling, David Carr, Joan Warburton and Glyn Morgan.

The school closed when Haines died in 1978, though Morris continued to live at Benton End until his death in 1984.

Portraits of Lett-Haines

A sandstone portrait sculpture exists of Lett-Haines by John Skeaping dating from 1933. This work came about after the breakup of Skeaping’s marriage to Barbara Hepworth, when Skeaping joined the artists’ colony at the house of Cedric Morris in Higham, Suffolk.