exhibition catalogue

THE
EDWARDIANS
THE GOLDEN YEARS BEFORE
T H E WA R

THE FINE ART SOCIETY
7 – 23 DECEMBER 2011
148 New Bond Street · London w1s 2jt
+44 (0)207 629 5116 · [email protected]
www.faslondon.com

K E N N E T H M C O N K E Y
THE EDWARDIANS
THE GOLDEN YEARS BEFORE
T H E WA R
THE FINE ART SOCIETY
 · 


THE EDWARDIANS
B R I T I S H PA I N T I N G I N T H E A U T U M N O F
THE EMPIRE
left: detail from Mabel Pryde,
Kit with Harlequin Clothes, c.1905
[no.11]
         
as the sun burns through the morning mist. Barely a year has passed
since the guns fell silent in Northern France and politicians now
gather at the Palais d’Orsay to redraw the map of Europe. The men
are heading in opposite directions – one, a wayfarer on foot, possibly
a shepherd, sets off with his knapsack and stick; the other, a farmhand
astride a white shire-horse is bound for the fields. The picture is not
intended to be symbolic, but the morning after Armageddon was a
time when deeper meanings were close to the surface. This ‘turn’ in
the road might well represent a beginning of sorts and leaning gently
to the left, the ancient tree, clothed in ivy, could mark the spot where
both men face an uncertain future [fig.].
In  when George Clausen’s The Turn of the Road, Sunrise was
shown at the Royal Academy, an impatient generation, emerging in
the wake of the Great War, was, according to Edmund Gosse ‘hardly
willing to distinguish what was good from what was bad in the time
of their grandmothers’, so keen were they to ‘repudiate’ everything
Edwardian.¹ A changing moral, intellectual and artistic climate in
the years leading to up to the war had seen the emergence of social
reformers, Irish ‘Home Rulers’, ‘new’ psychologists, preservationists,
Post-Impressionists, sexologists and suffragettes. Victorian prophets
gave way to the jeremiahs of degeneration who in turn were replaced
by liberal intellectual apostles of social science. Between the Liberal
victory in  and the Great War, high inflation produced industrial
unrest, leading in turn to the rise of the Labour Party. Simultaneously
the women’s movement provoked civil disorder with attacks on
Fig.1: George Clausen,
Turn of the Road, Sunrise, 1920
[cat. no.30]
[1] Edmund Gosse, cb, ‘The Agony
of the Victorian Age’ in Some
Diversions of a Man of Letters, 1920,
(William Heinemann), p.313.


Fig.2: Stanhope A. Forbes,
22nd January 1901 (reading
the news of the Queen’s death
in a Cornish cottage), 1901,
Royal Albert Memorial Museum
and Art Gallery, Exeter
paintings by Clausen, John Lavery and John Singer Sargent in Royal
Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy. The old order was shaking
even before proselytes, pressure groups and dissident factions were
drowned out by the bombardment on the Western Front. Nowhere
had the signals been clearer than in the world of art.
The new century began in a mood of solemnity. An unexceptional
family group gathered round the table in a cottage is transformed by
news of Queen Victoria’s death in Stanhope Forbes’s nd January
 (reading the news of the Queen’s death in a Cornish cottage) [fig.].
The eye passes over the empty chair to the vase of wild flowers in
the window – symbolism starts with simple associations. We don’t see
the clicking frames of funeral footage, but they are there nonetheless.
Arguably in the art world, the Victorian age had been dead for
twenty years – the years that marked the beginning of Forbes’ and
Clausen’s careers. Around , the conditions of art production in
Britain changed irrevocably as the first age of mechanical reproduction, with swift communication across national frontiers was ushered
in. Technological change, then as now, was unregulated and unstoppable. Visual and verbal literacy developed apace as new processes were
routinely introduced and new publications replaced old ones.² For
the first time more people experienced more art in reproduction than
in public galleries. The elderly Art Journal and its modern rival, The
Magazine of Art, having weathered the challenge of The Studio, fell by
the wayside to be replaced by monthlies such as The Connoisseur and
The Burlington Magazine.³ It was now practically possible for a picture
painted in the French or German provinces to be brought to market
in Paris or Berlin, by train, and shown in an exhibition – and to be
reproduced in a British magazine within days. The speed and reliability of new transport systems made moving modern pictures from
city to city much easier. It became the norm for important works,
launched at the Royal Academy, to tour to Liverpool or Manchester
and then on to Glasgow or Dublin, where there were local artists’
societies to receive them. Rail and packet boat services supported a
mass migration of British art students to Paris, and Forbes had been
one of them.⁴ They facilitated the establishment of artists’ colonies in
picturesque places and the exploration of new ‘sketching grounds’ –
inaugurating a golden age for the artist-traveller.
These new conditions impacted upon old structures. Forbes’ Cornish faction was so powerful by  that one observer noted,
More pictures are painted in Cornwall in the course of the year than
in any county of England, save Middlesex … and the votes of the
Cornish contingent, it is said, can turn the scale in an election at the
Royal Academy.⁵
Setting out for Newlyn to paint children on the beach or in the
orchard, the young Laura Knight was making a political decision.
Purchasing a rotting hulk in the harbour at Falmouth – the Henry
Scott Tuke legend – was less bizarre than it might seem, if the market supported pictures of sailors taking their ease.
Attempting to import new talent in the face of increasing rivalry
from art dealers and other exhibiting societies, the Academy’s hold
on the best painters and sculptors was persistently under threat.
Nevertheless, it thrived. Lewis Hind observed that it had its ‘own
way of progression’, bided its time, and when it beckoned, then

[2] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations,
1970, (Fontana/Collins ed., trans.
Harry Zohn, 1973), pp.219–253
[3] The Art Journal began life
as The Art Union in 1839; The
Magazine of Art started in 1878; The
Studio in 1893; The Connoisseur
in 1901and The Burlington
Magazine in 1903. Both older
titles had responded positively to
the technological advances, but
neither fully embraced the growing
internationalism in art and design as
Charles Holme had done as editor
of The Studio. By contrast, the new
periodicals presented scholarship
of a fairly esoteric kind, and adopted
graphic styles of presentation to
appeal to a more discerning middle
class readership. Early editions
of The Burlington Magazine for
instance, used heavy paper and a
more ornate letterpress, with ‘tipped
in’ photo inserts.
[4] Edward Morris, French art in
Nineteenth Century Britain, 2005
(Yale University Press), pp.289–292
(Appendix 1).
[5] C. Lewis Hind, Days in Cornwall,
1907 (Methuen), pp.148–9.
[6] C. Lewis Hind, Adventures
among Pictures, 1904 (Adam and
Charles Black), p.69.
[7] The Society of Landscape
Painters, led by E.A. Waterlow
and A.D. Peppercorn for instance,
staged its first exhibition in the
winter of 1898–9 at the Dudley
Gallery, see Arthur Fish, ‘A Society
of Landscape Painters’, The
Magazine of Art, 1899, pp.218–221.
For the International Society, see
Philip Athill, ‘The International
Society of Sculptors, Painters and
Gravers’, Burlington Magazine,
vol.127, June 1985, pp.21–9; see also
Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A
Painter and his World, 2010 (Atelier
Books), pp.68–77, 80–84.
as now, ‘few can resist the aged finger’.⁶ Rival institutions like the
Grosvenor and New Galleries came and went. Artists’ societies proliferated for portraitists, landscapists, miniaturists and tempera painters.
There were select shows such as those of the New English Art Club,
large ‘art congresses’ held by the International Society of Sculptors,
Painters and Gravers from  onwards and the international brief
was expanded even further with the formation of the Allied Artists’
Association in .⁷ The closure of the New Gallery the following
year to make way for a cinema was arguably of greater consequence
than the staging of Roger Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists
exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in . The centrality of fine art
within British visual culture could no longer be assumed.
In the early years of the twentieth century no single guiding intelligence – or government minister – controlled and administered
these diverse dynamic forces. However Olympian the President of
the Royal Academy may be, his committees were never in a position
to legislate or regulate. Change in art education came slowly with the
renaming of the Government School as the Royal College of Art, and
the slow disintegration of the state system. Reforms had also been
introduced in the Academy Schools with foreign-trained Associates
such as Arthur Hacker, George Clausen and John Singer Sargent
appearing as ‘visitors’ in the late nineties. In , while still awaiting
full membership, Clausen was appointed, as Professor of Painting,
to great acclaim.⁸ Nevertheless, throughout the period, for different
reasons, the health of the ‘national school’ remained a live issue, until
in , with the Post-Impressionist ‘rumpus’ raging, the familiar cries
rose to a crescendo. For Fry and his cronies, only the most xenophobic
reporter could claim that the greatest empire in the world was also
producing the greatest art.
The Academy served a further, more controversial function in the
administration of the Chantrey Bequest, the fund with which works
of art could be purchased for the national collection.⁹ Although
not confined to current Academy summer exhibitions, the trustees
had, between  and , spent less than , of the ,
available to them, on paintings and sculptures shown outside the
Royal Academy. Of that, over three quarters went on works by
Academicians.¹⁰ In , D.S. MacColl exposed these abuses in the
columns of The Saturday Review and immediately found supporters
elsewhere.¹¹ Municipal collections in the industrial north that mimicked Chantrey purchases for the nation were following a bad example. In , Charles Holmes cynically declared, ‘if you have … bought
sentimental pictures … present them to your local gallery as quickly
as you can. You will then have the reputation of an art patron and
public benefactor. If you send them to Christie’s it will be declared
that you are a fool’.¹² The debate raged amidst growing concern for
the loss of Old Master paintings to collections in Germany and the
United States, and in the face of government apathy, the National Art
Collections Fund and the Contemporary Art Society were formed in
 and  respectively.
The presence in the market of highly prized seventeenth and eighteenth century portraits had a direct impact upon painters. J.J. Shannon
for instance, was advised by one of his critics to tone up his pictures so
that they might bear comparison with those that hung in the ancestral
halls of his patrons. Another chided him for his allegiance to ‘white
[8] Clausen’s lectures were so well
attended that extra seating had to
be installed. When published as a
collected edition (Royal Academy
Lectures on Painting, 1913, Methuen
and Co), they became an aesthetic
manual, being distributed as art
schools prizes.
[9] Under the terms of Sir Francis
Chantrey’s will, the trust’s capital,
£105,000, was released on the
death of Chantrey’s widow in 1877.
[10] The Trust was chaired by
the Academy President and
administered by its secretary.
[11] D.S. MacColl, ‘The
Maladminstration of the Chantrey
Bequest’, The Saturday Review,
25 April 1903; see also, Bowyer
Nichols, ‘The Chantrey Bequest and
its Administration’, The Westminster
Gazette, 5 June 1903; also Alfred
Thornton, The Diary of an Art
Student of the Nineties, 1938 (Sir
Isaac Pitman and Sons), pp.68–84;
Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation,
Exhibitions and the London Public,
1747–2001, 1999 (Manchester
University Press), pp.136–7. Forever
unwilling to involve itself in artistic
matters, the government made
its only significant intervention
in the visual arts in 1917, with the
Official War Artists’ Scheme to send
painters and sculptors off to record
activities on the Home Front and
the Western Front – see Susie and
Merrion Harries, The War Artists,
1983, (Michael Joseph), pp.8–73.
[12] Charles Holmes, Pictures and
Picture Collecting, 1903 (Anthony
Treherne and Co), p.55.
[13] Lewis Hind, ‘The Work of J.J.
Shannon’, The Studio, vol.viii,
1896, p.68; George Moore, Modern
Painting, 1893 (Walter Scott),
pp.190–1.
[14] Kenneth McConkey, John
Lavery, A Painter and his World,
2010 (Atelier Books), p.94.
[15] ‘M Rodin in London’, Daily
Chronicle, 16 May 1902, p.6.
[16] Walter Sickert, ‘Sargentolatry’,
The New Age, 19 May 1910; quoted
in Anna Gruetzner Robins ed., The
Complete Writings on Art, 2000,
(Oxford University Press), p.233.
[17] E.G. Halton, ‘Independent
British Art at Messrs Agnew’s’, The
Studio, vol.xxxxvii, 1906, pp.18–
32. David Croal Thomson, erstwhile
editor of The Art Journal and
director of the Goupil Gallery, but
now working for Agnew’s, staged
‘Some Examples of Independent
Art of Today’ in February 1906,
focussing upon the best Academy
and New English names.

Fig.3: John Singer Sargent,
The Acheson Sisters, 1902,
© Devonshire Collection,
Chatsworth. Reproduced by
permission of Chatsworth
Settlement Trustees.
Fig.4: William Drummond,
19 Fitzroy Street, c.1913–14,
Laing Art Gallery,
Newcastle upon Tyne

satin duchesses’.¹³ Many painters were caught in the trap of feeding
plutocratic tastes. Many collectors deliberately demanded that their
chosen portraitists emulate Van Dyck or Reynolds.¹⁴ The Sargent followers would concur with Auguste Rodin when, viewing The Acheson
Sisters [fig.] at the Royal Academy in , he hailed the painter as,
‘the Van Dyck of our times’.¹⁵ To the sceptical Walter Sickert writing in , these years were marked by ‘Sargentolatry’. He would
advise young painters to look elsewhere for the ‘high water mark of
modernity’ and he castigated the complacent critical consensus for its
sycophancy.¹⁶
The students of the s, James Pryde, William Nicholson and
William Orpen, felt no need to compete for clever quotations from
the art of the past. Coming from the black realism of Manet, there
was less tolerance for visual sophistry. All were drawn together with
Sickert, Lavery, Charles Sims and Henry Tonks and labelled ‘independent’ by the shrewd dealer, David Croal Thomson who attempted
to capture them in . They offered ‘the finest examples of modern painting as exemplified by the more advanced forms of artistic
thought’.¹⁷ But this was merely a taster. In , The Sunday Times
art critic, Frank Rutter, attempted to take on the Academy by forming the Allied Artists’ Association. His exhibition was to be ‘open’ in
that there was no jury, and ‘democratic’ in that no special privileges
were given to members or associates and it would embrace the most
radical foreign painters.¹⁸ The first show, modelled on the Salon des
Indépendants, staged at the Royal Albert Hall in July , contained
over  entries, and was therefore twice the size of the average
Royal Academy summer exhibition, and considerably larger than the
Armoury Show in New York, five years later. It might appear ersatz
and incoherent, but it nevertheless found purchasers for some of its
most radical selections.¹⁹ It too contained the pioneers of the modern
movement, but where the International Society was now less risky
and the New English in the thrall of Philip Wilson Steer, Henry
Tonks, Augustus John and William Orpen, it provided the fertile soil
for the consolidation of new arrivals such as the Fitzroy Street Group,
the forerunner of the Camden Town Group.
These young painters who had trained at the Slade and the radical
Westminster School of Art showed first and foremost in their own
studio open-days – a practice that was neither new nor original, but
exposed the artists’ working environment to clients, friends and fellow
painters. William Drummond’s connoisseurs in  Fitzroy Street [fig.]
are artists rather than prospective purchasers.²⁰ Ultimately the ambitious Allied Artists’ shows were not selective enough and separation
from other cliques was desirable. To progress, Drummond, Spencer
Gore and others must break away from the New English that, while
it retained its Impressionist core, was now embracing Symbolists and
muralists cast adrift by the closure of the New Gallery.
In November  the Grafton Gallery hit the headlines with
Manet and the Post-Impressionists.²¹ Although quality-assured by an
impressive committee, the selection was essentially that of Roger Fry,
assisted by the exhibition secretary, Desmond MacCarthy. Outrageous
notices followed. The Illustrated London News devoted a full page to
cartoons of angry exhibition visitors and a double page to offensive
canvases by Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Maurice Denis. An
apocryphal Academician was reported dissuading his students from
[27] McConkey, 2002, pp.19–22.
[28] Walter Lamb, The Royal
Academy, 1951 (G. Bell and Sons),
p.66.
[29] Charles Marriott and Edouard
J Claes, Allies in Art, A Collection
of Works in Modern Art by Artists
of the Allied Nations, 1917, (Colour
Ltd).
[30] For further reference see Sue
Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the
Great War, 2004 (Yale University
Press), pp.6–10.
[18] See Frank Rutter, Since I was
Twenty-five, 1927 (Constable),
pp.180–199; idem, Art in My Time,
1933, (Rich and Cowan), pp.134–7.
[19] One of Wassily Kandinsky’s
early abstracts was, for instance,
purchased by Michael Sadler.
[20] Wendy Baron, Perfect
Moderns, A History of the Camden
Town Group, 2000 (Ashgate),
p.90, identifies the three artists
in William Drummond’s 19 Fitzroy
Street, c.1913 as James Bolivar
Manson, Spencer Gore and Charles
Ginner, studying works by Ginner,
Drummond and Harold Gilman.
[21] Bruce Atlshuler and Phaidon
Editors, Salon to Biennial –
Exhibitions that made Art History,
2008, (Phaidon Press Ltd),
pp.85–98.
[22] Arnold Bennett, ‘NeoImpressionism and Literature’,
Books and Persons, Being
Comments on a Past Epoch,
1908–1911, 1917, (Chatto and
Windus), p.280. Despite extensive
vilification in the popular press, the
exhibition generated favourable
commentary in two short books by
Lewis Hind and Charles Holmes;
see Ian Dunlop, The Shock of the
New, Seven Historic Exhibitions
of Modern Art, 1972 (Weidenfeld
and Nicolson), pp.120–161; see also
Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern
Art in Britain, 1910–1914, 1997
(exhibition catalogue, Barbican Art
Gallery), pp.15–45.
[23] See Wendy Baron, Perfect
moderns, A History of the Camden
Town Group, 2000, (Ashgate).
[24] Richard Cork, Art Beyond the
Gallery, in Early Twentieth Century
England, 1985 (Yale University
Press), pp.61–115.
[25] For the Futurist, Second
Post-Impressionist and Twentieth
Century Art exhibitions, see Anna
Gruetzner Robins, 1997, pp.56–107,
139–158.
[26] Quoted from William Orpen,
The Outline of Art, n.d., [c.1925],
(Newnes), p.373.
[31] Anon., War Pictures, Exhibition
at the Royal Academy, 1919 (Issued
by Authority of the Imperial War
Museum).
[32] Fry was reviewing a book,
Bushman Drawings by H. Helen
Tongue in The Burlington in 1910
and using the opportunity to attack
the premises upon which Tonks’
teaching at the Slade was built;
see Lynda Morris ed, Henry Tonks
and the ‘Art of Pure Drawing’, 1985
(exhibition catalogue, Arts Council
and Norwich School of Art Gallery),
p.48.
entering. Some however, believed that the torrent of abuse, would
redound to the lasting shame of the London intelligentsia which was,
as the novelist, Arnold Bennett remarked, ‘too self-complacent even
to suspect that it is London and not the exhibition which is making
itself ridiculous’.²² Thereafter the catch-all ‘Post-Impressionism’ was
irrepressible. Small societies such as the Camden Town Group would
spring up for one or two exhibitions and then disappear.²³ In these
exciting years some of the most interesting work appeared in installations such as Spencer Gore’s decorations for Mme Strindberg, rather
than exhibitions.²⁴ London became the focus for even more anarchistic displays like the Futurist exhibition at the Sackville Gallery
and with the emergence of ‘neo-realists’ and Vorticists, an unbroken
momentum carried this sequence of controversial shows forward
to the display of war works by C.R.W. Nevinson at the Leicester
Galleries in the Autumn of .²⁵ At the outbreak of war, Nevinson
and his Vorticist colleagues had envisioned a modern world in which
mechanized war was an ultimate state. The French troops ‘returning
to the trenches’ [fig.] have lost their individuality, behave like parts of
a machine and are ‘lost in a process’.²⁶
Rutter’s and Fry’s conversions, meant that avant-garde collecting
had advocates and exemplars if not many adherents, and their efforts
were inevitably undermined by Futurist lunacy and constrained by
the Great War. The last of Orpen’s ‘Irish Trilogy’, Nude Pattern, The
Holy Well, incongruously shown at the New English in , clashed
with the Easter Rising in Dublin and the slaughter of the Ulster
Divisions on the banks of the Somme. Cracks were opening in the
imperial entablature. Exhibition and saleroom coverage in the press
shrank to make way for war reporting while ‘show trials’ like the
Romney Case in  tended to destroy general confidence in the
art market.²⁷ The Royal Academy, faced with bleak notices for its
summer exhibitions, brought together the Hibernian and Scottish
Academies to discuss war relief for impoverished artists. Energies
were mobilized into fund-raising auctions for the Red Cross and
the Artists General Benevolent Institution.²⁸ Political differences
were smoothed over as publications like Allies in Art appeared.²⁹ The
most controversial exhibition in London at the time was that of
Nevinson’s war paintings at the Leicester Galleries in the autumn
of .³⁰ Officialdom, slow to react, eventually initiated the War
Artists’ Scheme, and by , war seemed suddenly the only subject
worthy of a British painter. National struggle unified the factions
and realism was the only appropriate style. The great Academy winter exhibition on , which drew the strands of commissioning
together – as well as the crowds – acted as a watershed.³¹
So much, between  and  seemed to challenge the centrality of the Western European figurative tradition. The incredulity
of Henry Tonks at Fry’s apparent seriousness about the art of the
‘Bushmen’ is an ominous portent of greater failure.³² The past was
a Pandora’s box; the western European tradition, too rich; the market, too entrancing. A huge body of reference and responsibility that
delighted the Edwardian painter/professor, was now to be circumnavigated by future generations. At no point since the fall of the ancien régime, did the door close so swiftly and what lay behind it, to
paraphrase Gosse, was sealed up and forgotten. Young British artists,
like Clausen’s wayfarers, stood at the turn of the road.
Fig.5: C.R.W. Nevinson,
Returning to the Trenches, 1914–5

1
Oil on canvas
39 x 29 inches (99.1 x 73.6 cm)
Signed and dated lower right
JJ Shannon 1901
provenance: Sir George and
Lady Christabel Frampton; Meredith
Frampton; thence by descent
exhibited: London, Royal
Academy, Late Members, 1928,
no.47

sir james jebusa shannon ra 1862–1923
Christabel Frampton and her son Meredith, 1901
A mother reads to her son in Shannon’s portrait of Christabel
Cockerell. Playing with her fingers, the boy gazes into space, imagining the story. It is a scene that Shannon was familiar with. In
 he had painted Jungle Tales, (Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York), a picture in which his own daughters appeared similarly
enthralled. The stylistic changes between this and the present canvas
are noteworthy. Where Jungle Tales resorts to ‘aesthetic’ trappings,
the Cockerell portrait evokes the great traditions of eighteenth
century aristocratic portraiture. The test was set by Lewis Hind
who, when surveying Shannon’s work in , noted that modern
portraits must hang ‘cheek by jowl’ with those of ‘brilliant ancestors’ and that ‘the new master must see to it that the comparison is
not odious’.¹ Up to this point Shannon had been court painter to
Violet, Duchess of Rutland, the siren of the blue-blooded aesthete
circle known as the ‘Souls’.² By  he, along with other leading
portraitists had taken up the challenge of emulating th and th
century masters – Sargent had painted Mrs Carl Meyer and her children, and Lavery, Mrs Roger Plowden and Humphrey, (both ) in
the grand manner. In the present instance however, Shannon adopts
a more intimate viewpoint. Precedence is given to the child, while
his mother is cast in shadow. The artist may have wished to avoid
direct comparison with Arthur Hacker’s Christabel of the previous
year (Private Collection).
Christabel Cockerell (–) was Shannon’s contemporary,
and although she would later become Lady Frampton, she had
trained at the Royal Academy Schools in the early s. There she
met her future husband, the sculptor of Peter Pan, George Frampton
[see no.]. They married in  and their only son, Meredith, was
born in the following year. A talented painter of low-toned ruralist
subjects and domestic scenes, Christabel continued to exhibit up
to . Meredith went on to become one of the most famous and
applauded British academic painters of the s and ’s, mastering
a style of exacting precision and finish.
[1] C. Lewis Hind, ‘The work of
J.J. Shannon’, The Studio, vol.viii,
1896, p.68
[2] Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere,
The Souls, 1984 (Sidgwick and
Jackson), pp.46–53

2
Oil on canvas
30 x 14 inches (76.2 x 35.5 cm)
Signed and dated lower left,
ea Hornel/1901

edward atkinson hornel 1864–1933
Girls and Swans, 1901
Hornel’s period of experimentation following his trip to Japan
in , had come to an end by the turn of the century – as Bill
Smith notes.¹ The painter who had preferred in the early days of the
Glasgow Boys to remain aloof from the Royal Scottish Academy,
and who was sceptical of the motives of fellow-painters like James
Guthrie in advocating absorption, had retreated to the hills and
woodland streams of Galloway, ‘where trees, flowers, and birds
are patterned in the delightful convention of mosaic …’² Here he
employed three daughters of a local gamekeeper – Rose, Edith
and Maud Poland – as his models, and used photographs taken by
Robert McConchie in place of figure studies.
The present canvas relates to two later, larger works – Gathering
Mushrooms, , which features swans in the background, and
Gathering Primroses, , (both Private Collections) in which the
child in the immediate foreground adopts the same pose as that in
the present work. In each instance, the girls are discovering nature’s
bounty – one picks a wild flower for the others to see. Like many
artists of his generation, Hornel found the jeu d’esprit of childhood
a congenial subject. Smith sees him returning, in some measure, to
Bastien-Lepage, the hero of his youth and while this may indeed be
the case, we should not neglect the general context provided in the
stories of Kipling and Barrie, with their rich Victorian ancestry in
Lewis Carroll. By , Galloway had become Hornel’s ‘wonderland’
– equivalent to the orchards of Laura Knight [see no.] and the
west Cornwall woodlands of Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes.
[1] Bill Smith, Hornel, The Life and
Work of Edward Atkinson Hornel,
1997 (Atelier Books, 2nd ed., 2010),
pp.136–141.
[2] Anon, ‘The Glasgow School
of Painting. Art xi – 1. Glasgow
International Exhibition, 1901.
Catalogue of the Fine Arts. 2. The
Glasgow School of Painting. By
David Martin with an Introduction
by Francis H. Newbery … Edinburgh
Review, vol.cccxcviii, October 1901,
p.495.

3
Oil on canvas
51½ x 39¾ inches
(130.8 x 101 cm)
Signed lower left, Sickert
provenance:
Commissioned by M. Mantren,
Dieppe; Frederick Fairbanks,
France, 1902; Arthur Tooth
& Son, London; 2nd Duke
of Westminster, London;
his sale, London, Christie’s,
3 July 1942; Alex, Reid &
Lefevre, London; Arthur Tooth;
Royan Middleton, Aberdeen
1944; private collection,
Scotland; Lefevre Gallery,
London, 1997; The Fine
Art Society, 2000; private
collection.
exhibited: Paris Salon des
Independents, 1903 (2234);
Sickert, The Fine Art Society,
London and Edinburgh 1973
(42); Sickert Paintings, Royal
Academy, London, Van Gogh
Museum, Amsterdam, 1992
(30); Important xix& xx
Century Works of Art, The
Lefevre Gallery, London, 1997
(19); Walter Sickert: Paintings
Drawings and Prints, The Fine
Art Society, 2000 (6).
literature: Wendy
Baron, Sickert Paintings
and Drawings, New Haven &
London 2006 p.241, no.130.10
reproduced in colour; Lillian
Browse, Sickert, London,
1943, pl.19; S. Packenham,
60 Miles from England: The
English at Dieppe 1814–1914,
London 1967, p.202; Wendy
Baron, Sickert, London 1973,
pp.68–9, 71, no.157; Denys
Sutton, Walter Sickert, London
1976, pp.110–11; Wendy Baron
and Richard Shone, Sickert
Paintings, Royal Academy of
Arts, London 1992 pp.114, 124,
reproduced.

walter richard sickert ara 1860–1941
St Jacques, Dieppe, 1902
Jacques-Emile Blanche famously dubbed Walter Sickert ‘the Canaletto
of Dieppe’ for his numerous depictions of the town’s churches, its narrow
streets, harbour and sea front. He, more than any other painter, caught the
‘spirit of the place’.¹
Sickert’s first experience of Dieppe was on a family holiday in , when
as a would-be actor he stayed with Oscar Wilde and Johnston ForbesRobertson. His honeymoon was spent there in , by which time his
ambitions had turned to painting. The trip was memorable for his second
meeting with Edgar Degas and a chance encounter with Paul Gauguin
whose efforts to paint the harbour seemed unremarkable to him at the time.
However, it was the formidable body of work produced during his
extended stay in the town after  that justified Blanche’s soubriquet.
Within this group of pictures the most important pictorial scheme is that
represented in St Jacques, Dieppe. One might almost say that the church
became Sickert’s obsession. He haunted the surrounding streets glimpsing
exposed corners; he sat by cafés, florists’ stalls, baker’s and butcher’s shops to
observe its windows and buttresses; the south door was recorded from the
rue Pecquet and the rear corner from the rue du Mortier-d’Or. The most
important viewpoint and that which came to symbolise the church more
than any other was that of the facade facing the rue St Jacques. Baron lists
no less than eleven versions of the present composition and many other
smaller paintings of the façade, as well as related drawings.² The temptation
would be to compare these persistent reworkings with Monet’s celebrated
Rouen Cathedral series. However, where Monet’s project was time-limited,
with a clear commercial objective, and a beginning and end, Sickert’s was
more ruminative.
Within the St Jacques corpus, the present work stands out for his scale
and its style. It was commissioned by M. Mantren, owner of the Hôtel
de la Plage, to decorate the hotel restaurant. The scheme comprised four
canvases similar in size to St Jacques, Dieppe, and two equally large narrow
uprights depicting the harbour. Mantren disliked the pictures and immediately sold four of them to an American visitor, Frederick Fairbanks who
agreed to lend them to the Salon des Indépendants in . Sickert seems
to have been aware of Mantren’s intentions, but continued with the project
– writing in a letter Sir William Eden, ‘...I can’t do anything by halves, & it
has been like playing over a piece of music’.³
Music indeed is a fine analogy. Sickert was not a decorative painter, as
the term was commonly understood at the time. The light rococo scènes de
débauche which Mantren may have had in mind, were not within his range.
What emerges in this most imposing of the St Jacques pictures is a work less
preoccupied with handling and more concerned with making a bold design
statement. This, it must be said, does not reduce the subtlety of gradation
in the sky and the sensitive treatment of evening sunlight glinting on the
surface of the fourteenth century rose window.
[1] Blanche’s Dieppe, 1927
(Paris, Éditions Èmile-Paul
Frères) was dedicated to
Sickert. He notes, ‘Le Dieppe
pictural s’incarnait pour nous
en Walter Sickert. Son esprit
redoubtable, la seduction de
sa personne nous avaient tous
magnétisés …’ (p. 60). See also
John Willet et al, The Dieppe
Connection, the Town and its
Visitors, 1992 (The Herbert
Press). Lillian Browse, Sickert,
1943 (Faber and Faber), p.42
notes that Sickert originally
inscribed ‘Eglise SaintJacques’ in large printed letters
at the bottom of the canvas,
but these were subsequently
painted over, ‘presumably by
the artist’.
[2] Wendy Baron, Sickert,
Paintings and Drawings, 2008
(Yales University Press),
pp.239–244.
[3] Wendy Baron and Richard
Shone eds, Sickert Paintings,
1992 (exhibition catalogue,
Royal Academy of Arts), p.124
(entry on the present picture).

4
5
[1] George Moore, ‘The Garret’,
The Saturday Review, 23 June
1906, p.785; quoted in Kenneth
McConkey, The New English, A
History of the New English Art Club,
2006 (ra Publications), pp.102–3.
[2] Ida Nettleship was the daughter
of a painter, John Trivett Nettleship,
who specialized in animal scenes.
She studied at the Slade from 1892
to 1898 and was a friend of Gwen
John and Ursula Tyrwhitt. She
married Augustus in January 1901,
against her parents’ wishes.
[3] T.W. Earp, Augustus John, 1934,
(T. Nelson & Sons Ltd and T.C & E.C.
Jack Ltd), pp.12–13.
[4] The model for the present
drawing, although unidentified,
is thought to represent Dorelia
McNeill, also a friend and travelling
companion of Gwen John, and
the drawing is likely to have been
made c.1904. The Fine Art Society
is grateful to David Fraser Jenkins
for these suggestions. Dorelia met
Augustus and Ida early in 1903
and from the following year, lived
with them, becoming the artist’s
favourite model and common law
wife after Ida’s death in March 1907.
[5] Ibid, p.14
augustus edwin john om 1878–1961
Ida Nettleship
augustus edwin john om 1878–1961
Head of Dorelia, c.1904
The most admired of a talented generation of students
at the Slade School of Fine Art, Augustus John’s early
reputation depended as much on his drawings as on his
paintings. In a world where the quick impression was at a
premium, these accomplished studies in red conté crayon
were much admired. By  such was the competition for
John’s drawings that George Moore dubbed them ‘Chelsea
masterpieces’, implying that they were stylish seductions.
The painter, he bemoaned, had yet to find his true subject
matter.¹
There can be little doubt however that penetrating studies such as Ida Nettleship and Head of Dorelia are more than
superficial impressions. In the first, John depicts Ida, shortly
after their marriage in , in a detailed study that may lead
to a full-length portrait.² Orpen carried out a similar exercise in the same year, after his marriage to Grace Knewstub,
also in . In an incisive summary of John’s strengths T.W.
Earp, writing in , spoke of the universal admiration for
these early drawings. ‘In his studies of the figure and pencil
portraits, from the Slade onwards’ he wrote,
… the line is a wonderful instrument. Firm and supple,
it is never very broad, but when at its most tenuous it still
bears triumphantly the allotted pressure of volume, as the
delicate arches of Gothic architecture support their imposed
mass. Each detail is controlled and sensitive; there is nothing
superfluous, no ornamentation to divert from the result as
a whole. The shading is economic, and never used ... for a
means of escape from a difficulty. The curves are free, with
the easy sweep of a signature, yet ruled by general logic …³
In the second, later drawing, Dorelia, John’s mistress by this
time, shoots a glance off to the side, as if catching a casual
remark.⁴ The moment is caught with formidable dexterity.
These drawings appeared regularly in the upper rooms at
the Chenil Gallery where, for instance, no less than ten
entitled Head of a Girl were shown at an average  gns, in
John’s exhibition in . Earp stressed the ‘representational
selection’ of this later phase in which ‘the line is its instant
symbol’,
Pen, ink and wash
11⅛ x 5 inches (28.2 x 12.7 cm)
Signed lower right John

The finished drawing is thus a first instead of a consequent
process. But the preliminary stage of vision has been so
strenuously pursued that the line, for all its candour, is
decisive. It is academic in the best sense of the word, and
it is alive.⁵
Conté crayon on paper
11⅛ x 5 inches (28.2 x 12.7 cm)
Inscribed centre left, John
On loan for this exhibition from a
private collection

6
Oil on canvas
18¼ x 24 inches (45.1 x 61 cm)
Signed and dated lower left,
Stanhope A Forbes 1903
provenance: M. Alton Bazeley,
thence by descent¹
stanhope alexander forbes ra 1857–1947
The Milk Cart, 1903
A photograph taken in  and reproduced in The Art Journal,
shows Stanhope Forbes working on a canvas entitled Their Ever
Shifting Home (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney).² The
setting is Mousehole, and the subject, a poor gypsy family on the
move. The painter wears a hat, scarf and thick wool overcoat against
the cool evening air.
Throughout his life, painting on the motif, in this case, in the
open air, was a kind of religion for Forbes and in the s, success was sometimes measured against the difficulties of realization. ‘Painting’, he declared, ‘is more successful when carried on in
discomfort’.³ By  however, when A Cornish Village Street was
painted, the artist had forsaken the brutal facts of life in favour of a
more everyday scene. In the previous year, when the Newlyn School
was fêted with a retrospective survey exhibition at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery, Charles Holmes writing in The Academy summed up
the glorious mundanity of the Forbes repertoire.
A village street, the life that passes through it, and the life that
jog-trots within its cottages, would give him subjects for a lifetime. Why, he might say, look up or around when there is so much
paintable passing before my eyes … In life I never want to look
a second time on the subjects that Mr Forbes paints … but the
paintings themselves captivate me through the downright excellence
of the painting and drawing and the honesty of the observation.⁴
[1] Alton Bazeley was an architect
who lived in Plymouth. He was a
collector of pictures by members
of the Newlyn School and his
sister Lilian was an accomplished
watercolourist and member of a
local society of artists.
[2] Wilfrid Meynell, ‘Mr Stanhope
Forbes ra’, The Art Journal, 1892,
p.66.
[3] C Lewis Hind, Stanhope
A Forbes ra, 1911 (Art Journal
Christmas Number), p.23
[4] clh, ‘From Cornwall to
Whitechapel’, The Academy and
Literature, 5 April 1902, p.369.
[5] Norman Garstin, ‘West Cornwall
as a Sketching Ground’, The Studio,
vol.??, 1909, p.114.
[6] Mary R. Mitford, Sketches of
English Life and Character, with
Sixteen Reproductions from the
Paintings of Stanhope A Forbes,
ara, 1909 (T.N. Foulis), was part of
a colour illustrated series including
both Irish and Scottish ‘life and
character’.
At this time, Forbes’ palette took on the bright colours of summer
and, fascinated by sunshine and shade, he moved inland to work
in tiny hamlets like Roseworthy, tucked in the wooded ‘coombes’
between Penzance and St Ives. Thatch and whitewash replaced the
undressed stone and slate rooves of the Newlyn and Mousehole in
these cottage clusters, and roads were, as elsewhere in English villages, still unmade. These new Cornish pastorals celebrated everyday occurrences such as the arrival of the milk cart, or the Ayrshire
herd returning to pasture from the milking shed. In each instance,
the locals gather at doorsteps to watch – the women, as Norman
Garstin observed, gossiping or chiding their offspring.⁵ So accurately did they epitomize rural life that Forbes’ canvases were chosen
to illustrate Mary Mitford’s Sketches of English Life and Character in
.⁶ For this the painter produced variants on the present picture
– Bringing Home the Milk and The Evening Hour. Such canvases
representing ‘primordial’ daily rituals re-charged Forbes’ career,
marking a moment that was swiftly passing. When for instance,
he returned to Roseworthy in the thirties, more modern roofing
materials had replaced thatch and the street, once picturesque, was
now ‘macadammed’.


7
Oil on paper laid on to canvas board
18 x 12 inches (45.7 x 30.5 cm)
signed H.S.Tuke and dated 1905,
lower right
provenance: The artist to
A.J.Taylor Esq., Morshead House,
Richmond, (£15); Private Collection,
uk and by descent.
exhibited: Falmouth Art Gallery,
1905 (?)
literature: B.D. Price ed.,
The Registers of Henry Scott Tuke,
1879–1928, 1980 (r545, as Study
for Pictures rca 1907)¹

henry scott tuke ra rws 1858–1929
Sleeping Sailor, 1905
In May , a French barque, the Mazatlan, having lost its mast in a
storm, was towed into Falmouth harbour and moored at the eastern
breakwater. While decisions were being taken concerning the ship’s
future, Henry Scott Tuke obtained permission to go on board with
his models to make sketches. He had returned from the opening
of the Royal Academy where The Three Companions was on display
to find that the town had been swept by a Methodist revival and
his most important model, Harry Cleave, having been ‘converted’,
was now reluctant to sit. Cleave had been posing for at least five
years and had been one of the principal figures in Ruby, Gold and
Malachite, the painting which, at Hugh Lane’s instigation, was purchased by the Corporation of London for the Guildhall Art Gallery
in .³ Within a short time, Cleave’s doubts were assuaged and he
was back working for Tuke.
It seems likely that as he painted Sleeping Sailor in the summer of
, Tuke had no fixed idea of the composition which would finally
emerge as his principal Academy exhibit of , Sailors Yarning
(collection of Sir Elton John), which featured a dozing seafarer. As
he sketched the weather was conducive. He noted in his diary on
 May , ‘Another brilliant day. Harry on the mizzen boom’.
The sense of dolce far niente in Sleeping Sailor suggests that sketching
is almost an end in itself – such is the delight in the use of materials
it so convincingly conveys. Comparisons with Sargent and Sorolla
are apposite.
[1] Tuke’s register indicated that
this work was sold to F. Taylor,
Morshead House, Richmond Hill
– presumably a mis-reading of
A.J. Taylor of the same address.
Taylor had also purchased a study
of Charlie Mitchell (r 539) for £5.
Price interprets rca as Royal
College of Art where Tuke was an
examiner. Royal Cambrian Academy
may also be a possibility.
[2] David Wainright and Catherine
Dinn, Henry Scott Tuke, 1858–2929,
Under Canvas, 1989 (Sarema
Press), p.97.
[3] Catherine Wallace, Catching
the Light, The Art and Life of Henry
Scott Tuke, 2008 (Atelier Books),
pp.85–6.
[4] Quoted from Wainright and
Dinn, 1989, p.97.

8
Coloured chalks on tinted paper
14½ x 9 inches (36.8 x 22.8 cm)
Inscribed lower centre, Edward
Service; lower right W Strang/1905
william strang ra 1859–1921
Lt Col. Edward Service, 1905
Although he saw himself as an allegorical painter and etcher,
William Strang developed a reputation for what were known as
‘Holbein Heads’ – carefully worked drawings in coloured chalks
emulating Hans Holbein’s fine portraits of members of the Tudor
court in the Royal Collection. The present drawing is one of these.
Strang’s encounter with Holbein came early in his career. As a
student at the Slade School of Fine Art in  he was a pupil of its
newly appointed Professor, Alphonse Legros. Legros’ respect for the
Master of Augsburg originated in the rigorous training he received
in Paris from Lecoq de Boisbaudran who demanded that the young
would-be painter memorize Holbein’s Erasmus in the Louvre, and
reproduce it accurately in the studio, on his return. Legros instilled
in his pupil a profound respect for Holbein’s complete fidelity to
appearances and his consequent failure to flatter his sitters. Frank
Newbolt, writing in , was well aware of the current tendency
to flatter, and to provide ‘dashing and vivacious likenesses in which
there lurks a touch of caricature’. For him, Strang’s accurate eye,
‘imbued with a sense of human beauty’, would avoid such pitfalls.¹
Strang’s route to this form of portraiture was through printmaking – and classic plates such as the Rudyard Kipling and the RB
Cunninghame Graham of .² However he cannot have been prepared for its popularity at the turn of the twentieth century. It has
been estimated that he produced over five hundred portrait drawings in the ten years after .³ During these years a retrospective
exhibition was held in London in  and the draughtsman went
twice to New York to fulfil commissions. Despite his uncompromising objectivity, sitters flocked to his studio and marvelled at his ability to negotiate their ugly corners. C.R. Ashbee, one of his subjects,
recalled that
[1] Frank Newbolt, ‘The Chalk
Drawings of William Strang ara’,
The Magazine of Fine Arts, vol.2,
1906, p.7.
[2] Frank Newbolt, ‘The Etchings
and Engravings of William Strang
ara’, The Magazine of Fine Arts,
vol.2, 1906, pp.247–258.
[3] Philip Athill, William Strang ra,
1859–1921, Painter-Etcher, 1981
(exhibition catalogue, Graves Art
Gallery, Sheffield), p.22.
[4] C.R. Ashbee, unpublished
typescript of memories, Victoria and
Albert Museum, vol.iv, p.71, quoted
in Athill, 1981, p.22.
… in each of his portraits there is some touch of his sitters’ ugliness
revealed in the beauty of the draughtsmanship … those of us who
… have sat for our portraits and prize the results … are also grimly
conscious of an unpleasant something in ourselves that we don’t
mention but that our love of truthfulness would not have us conceal
… they have the quality of Dr Johnson, they are lexicographical.⁴
It is in this spirit that we approach the portrait of Edward Service,
a military man whose very vulgarity is so delicately perceived that it
attains its own bizarre beauty.


9
Oil on canvas board
23 x 21 inches (58.5 x 53.5 cm)
provenance: Nancy Nicholson
and by descent to her son Sam
Graves
exhibited: London, Goupil
Gallery, Paintings by the late Mabel
Nicholson, 1920

mabel pryde 1871–1918
Nancy with Rabbit
Mabel Pryde’s portrait of her only daughter, Nancy, reveals a girl who
inherited her mother’s independence of mind. Born Annie Mary
Pryde Nicholson (–) she was third of the four children of
Mabel and William Nicholson. After her marriage to the novelist,
Robert Graves, she refused to take his surname and brought up her
two daughters as ‘Nicholsons’. Biographers of Graves and Nicholson
have suggested that she was, in later life, fuelled by resentment at her
mother’s early death and the fact that as a painter, Mabel Pryde
never attained the reputation she deserved. Conveying something
of the concision of Van Dyck and Velazquez, her portrait with a pet
rabbit goes some way towards correcting this deficiency.

10
Oil on canvas
28½ x 33½ inches (72 x 85 cm)
provenance: Nancy Nicholson
and by descent to her son Sam
Graves
exhibited: London, Goupil
Gallery, Paintings by the late Mabel
Nicholson, 1920
literature: Sanford Schwartz,
William Nicholson, 2004 (Yale
University Press), p.141 (illus)

mabel pryde 1871–1918
Kit with Harlequin Clothes, c.1905
An infant – a boy still wearing a dress, after the fashion of the day –
sits on a miniature windsor chair. Before him is a large hand-painted
drum over which, a harlequin’s costume has been thrown.¹ Leaning
against it is a harlequin’s wooden sword with a bent, blunted point
and bright red handle, along with a leather belt and a toy horse.²
There is what may be a shoe box in the background and other items
of discarded clothing used for dressing-up. This chaos décoratif is
what confronts us in Kit with Harlequin Clothes, a picture of the
young Christopher Nicholson (–).
Known as Kit, Christopher was the last of the four children of
Mabel Pryde and William Nicholson. The back view and threequarter profile almost conceals his identity, but we recognize his curly
light brown hair from William Orpen’s magisterial A Bloomsbury
Family, c., (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) as an
infanta, also wearing a dress. Orpen’s group portrait tells us a great
deal about this extraordinary ménage. In the shadows stands Mabel,
her children arrayed around the dining table, with her dandy husband, seated in profile, looking above and beyond the diminutive
Kit. They are confined to a small room in Mecklenburg Square, and
crowded in by the Nicholson’s large collection of framed ‘Chapbook’
prints. William Nicholson was not pleased with Orpen’s results;
although in some senses it provides a wonderful revelation of an
artistic marriage in which the dominant male overshadows the
female’s exceptional talent – clearly demonstrated in the present
work. Mabel, the younger sister of James Pryde studied alongside
her future husband at Hubert von Herkomer’s art school at Bushey
in the early s. Ben, her first child was born in . Much of
her surviving work dates from the point when in, around , Kit
was aged four. Sadly, Mabel Nicholson died at the age of , during
the flu epidemic of . She is thought to have contracted the disease when seeing her second son, Anthony, on his departure for the
Western Front, where he was killed.
[1] In a note to the Tate Gallery,
Timothy Nicholson, the artist’s
grandson referred to this picture
and described what it likely to be a
drum, as a large box of dressing-up
costumes. See www.tate.org.uk/
servlet/ViewWork
[2] These are of course the sword,
belt and harlequin suit worn by
Nancy Nicholson in nos.11 and 12.

11
mabel pryde 1871–1918
The Artist’s Daughter, Nancy, as Harlequin
12
Oil on canvas
39¼ x 24¼ inches (101 x 82.5 cm)
Oil on board
7½ x 11¾ inches (19 x 30 cm)
Kindly lent by The Fleming
Collection
provenance: Nancy Nicholson
and by descent to her son Sam
Graves
exhibited: London, Goupil
Gallery, Paintings by the late Mabel
Nicholson, 1920;
London, Barbican Art Gallery,
Impressionism in Britain, 1995,
no.180 as The Artist’s Daughter,
Nancy, as Pierrot
mabel pryde 1871–1918
Harlequin Asleep
exhibited: London, Goupil
Gallery, Paintings by the late Mabel
Nicholson, 1920
literature: Country Life, 17 April
1920, p.509 (illus)
literature: Bill Smith, A Picture
of Flemings, n.d. [c.1990] (Valin
Pollen International plc on behalf
of Robert Fleming Holdings Ltd),
p.28
Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism
in Britain, 1995, (Yale University
Press), p.6 (illus), 182
Bill Smith and Selina Skipwith, A
History of Scottish Art, The Fleming
Collection, 2003, (Merrell), p.82
Mabel Pryde’s paintings of her daughter Nancy dressed in harlequin
costume demonstrate exceptional precocity. The large full-length
version (Tate Britain) echoes Manet who in works such as The Fifer
presented a boy in uniform against a monochrome background.
Whistler has also been proposed as a possible inspiration for Mabel
Pryde’s sophisticated use of tone and heraldic flashes of colour, but
these painters of the late nineteenth century were merely emulating
the great Spanish Caravaggesque masters of the seventeenth century. The influence of Velazquez, Zurbaran and Ribera on Pryde’s
circle was profound. It would therefore be easy to ascribe Mabel
Pryde’s hispagnolisme to her brother, her husband and her husband’s
friends, William Orpen and William Rothenstein, were it not for
the suave handling of the harlequin pictures. These in their way are
as daring and reductive as Nicholson’s landscapes at Rottingdean
[see no.].


13
Oil on canvas
87¼ x 48 inches (221 x 122 cm)
Inscribed bottom right, J Lavery
Verso, Mrs McEwen with Margaret
and Katharine / by John Lavery /
5 Cromwell Place London sw, 1907
exhibited: London, New Gallery,
1908, no.251
literature: Frank Rutter, ‘The
Passing of Venus’, The Academy
2 May 1908, p.74
Frank Rinder, ‘The New Gallery’, The
Art Journal, 1908, pp.171–2.
‘The New Gallery’, The Athenaeum,
2 May 1908, p.548.
‘The New Gallery’, The Graphic,
2 May 1908, p.618 (illustrated p.611).
wkw, ‘The Twenty-first Summer
Exhibition of the New Gallery’, The
Studio, Vol.44, June 1908, p.51, illus
p.45 as Mrs McEwen of Bardrochat
with Kathennie and Elizabeth (sic).
Anon, ‘The New Gallery’, The Times,
24 April 1908, p.10.
Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery
and his Work, n.d., [1911] (Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co), p.188.
[1] Mary Frances Dundas (1864–
1944) was the daughter of Henry
Robert Duncan Dundas of Dundas
and Catherine Anne Carrington
Napier, the daughter of Robert
Cornelis Napier, 1st Baron Napier
of Magdala. Napier had served on
the North West Frontier, during
the Indian Mutiny and in the daring
rescue of British Diplomats in
Abyssinia. He ended his career as
Commander-in-Chief in India. Henry
Robert Duncan Dundas of Dundas,
her father, was the then current
representative of one of the oldest
Scottish clans, dating back to the
12th century. Like the Napiers, his
family had served the British Empire
in India in the late 18th and 19th
centuries. Their family seat at the
time of Mary Frances’s marriage
was Dundas Castle at South
Queensferry. Their town house,
Dundas House, a Palladian Villa in
St Andrew’s Square, Edinburgh, is
now the headquarters of the Royal
Bank of Scotland.

sir john lavery ra rsa rha 1856–1941
Mrs McEwen of Marchmont and Bardrochat,
with her daughters, Katharine and Elizabeth
In Lavery’s Mrs McEwen of Marchmont and Bardrochat, with her
daughters, Katharine and Elizabeth, a woman and her two girls look
directly at us. Mary Frances Dundas McEwen appears aloof, and her
children, nestling in the folds of her skirt seem shy, yet curious about
the business of being painted. Her illustrious lineage on her mother’s side can be traced back to her grandfather, Field Marshall Sir
Robert Napier, First Baron Napier of Magdala, a veteran of colonial
campaigns.¹ For fifteen years she had been married to Robert Finnie
McEwen, the current head of an old Scottish clan, with its seat at
Bardrochat in Ayrshire.² A sophisticated and fashionable woman,
Mrs McEwen had clear expectations of her chosen painter, ruling
out intimate sketches or portrait interiors – both of which Lavery
could provide. Grandeur, scale, formality and aesthetic refinement,
were what was required in this case.
The social splendour of the full-length portrait had been rediscovered by painters and patrons at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a form that immediately implied distinction and John
Lavery was one of its early practitioners. Following the success of
his large commemorative canvas portraying The State Visit of Queen
Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition, , his position as
the leading young artist in the west of Scotland was unchallenged.³
This important commission from Glasgow City Council effectively
underwrote his career by giving him an entrée to his future clientele – members of the Scots aristocracy, the professional classes and
nouveaux riches industrialists. Their advanced tastes matched the
painter’s aesthetic preoccupation with grand manner portraiture of
the type being developed by James McNeill Whistler, John Singer
Sargent, Giovanni Boldini. All were emulating the work of seventeenth century court painters, but where Sargent and Boldini looked
increasingly to Van Dyck, Whistler and Lavery were devotees of
Velazquez.⁴ Early in his career, Lavery had imbibed Whistlerian
principles which insisted upon figures standing back from the
spectator, ‘within their frames’.⁵ In the last years of Whistler’s life,
when he and Lavery were in regular communication, the American
painter denigrated the flashy brushwork and vulgar realism of much
contemporary portraiture, insisting upon the restraint and decorum
of the Spanish master.
Lavery shared these beliefs. He visited the Prado on two occasions in  and , and copied Velazquez’ portraits. Henceforth,
much attention would be given to the placing of the figure within
the rectangle, the sense of movement in its pose and the subtle relationships of colour and tone. These abstract qualities, recognized by
stylish Scots sitters, distinguished his work from that of his immediate rivals on the international stage. He was not constrained by
[2] The McEwens maintained
estates and a country house in the
Scottish Borders at Bardrochat in
Ayrshire. The Marchmont estate in
Berwickshire was acquired from the
Home family in 1913, by the sitter’s
husband, Robert Finnie McEwen.
McEwen was a lover of the arts and a
gifted musician who offered financial
support to composers. Both his
houses, Bardrochat and Marchmont,
were remodelled by the distinguished
Scots Arts and Crafts architect, Sir
Robert Lorrimer. McEwen and his wife
had four children – two sons and two
daughters. The youngest daughter,
Elizabeth Jeannet Mary, (b 1902) on
the left of the picture, died in 1913.
Her sister Katharine Isobel, (b 1900)
married Roger Lawrence Lumley,
11 Earl of Scarborough, a Foreign
Secretary in the inter-war period
and Lord Chamberlain at the time of
the accession of Queen Elizabeth ii.
Katharine served the Queen Mother as
Lady-in-Waiting and was a recipient of
the Royal Victorian Order in 1962.
[3] For further reference see Kenneth
McConkey, Sir John Lavery ra, 1993
(Canongate), pp.56–62.
[4] Whistler never visited the Prado.
Sargent’s visit to Spain occurred in
the winter of 1879–80 and Boldini’s
in 1889.
[5] ‘Mr Whistler: Proposition No. 2,
Academie Carmen’, quoted from A
Catalogue of the Pictures, Drawings,
Prints and Sculpture at the Third
Exhibition of the International
Society of Sculptors, Painters and
Gravers, 1901, pp.11–12. Whistler and
Lavery first met in 1886, they were in
contact in the 1890s when Whistler
moved to Paris and from 1898, they
were President and Vice-President
repectively of the International
Society of Sculptors, Painters and
Gravers. Lavery was one of Whistler’s
pall-bearers at the time of his death in
July 1903.
[6] Lavery procured the commission
to paint J.J. Cowan’s portrait
(National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh) for Whistler.
[7] The Kingston Lacy Las Meninas
(National Trust), now given to Mazo,
was in Lavery’s day, popularly thought

the inherited rules and conventions of the full-length portrait. Early
examples that show variations in the format and the introduction
of sons and daughters as secondary figures, began in the early nineties with Mrs Lawrie and Edwin,  (Modern Gallery, Venice)
and Mrs J.J. Cowan and Laura,  (Private Collection).⁶ They were
often planned in small oil sketches, just as Reynolds had done, and
Velazquez was thought to do.⁷ The practice did not stop him from
altering compositions if necessary, at a late stage – as occurred with
Père et Fille,  (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).⁸
By , Lavery had left Glasgow for London and already had
spent extended periods of time painting in Rome and Berlin. The
Baillies of Glasgow however recalled him to paint a large mural of
Shipbuilding on the Clyde, for the newly-constructed City Chambers
and he was pursued south by Scottish clients such as Mr Justice
Darling, Sir Patrick Ford and Robert Finnie McEwen of Bardrochat.
In all three instances, husbands commissioned portraits of their
wives and children. Mrs McEwen of Bardrochat, with her daughters,
Katharine and Elizabeth, was executed either just before or just after
Lavery’s winter sojourn in Tangier and in time for the opening of the
spring exhibition of the New Gallery in .⁹ Although he avoided
the byways of Aestheticism for which it was renowned, Lavery saw
the New Gallery as an important outlet for painters who had been
considered too avant-garde for the Royal Academy. As an outsider,
he submitted to it and to the International Society of Sculptors,
Painters and Gravers during his vice-presidency, –.¹⁰ Only
in  when elected Associate, did he return to the Academy, at
which point his reputation was unassailable.¹¹
Lavery realised that in  the competition for commissions
of the McEwen type lay in fellow New Gallery exhibitors such as
James Jebusa Shannon and George Henry.¹² Sargent, also exhibiting, was not regarded as being as ‘executively brilliant as usual’,
although he had established important precedents for ‘mother and
children’ groups.¹³ But where Shannon and Henry indulged in pyrotechnics and contorted poses, courting comparison with eighteenth
century portraitists, Mrs McEwen of Bardrochat, with her daughters,
Katharine and Elizabeth was admired for its restraint and for the
subtlety of it colour harmonies. Lavery sought distinction in a simple arrangement of standing figures. The hostile Athenaeum critic
conceded that although the tonal gradations had been ‘tampered
with’ to reduce the contrasts in the heads, the work ‘has movement
and distinction’. The more generous Graphic, which illustrated the
painting, referred to its ‘refined colour scheme’, while Frank Rinder,
in The Art Journal praised the picture for its ‘fresh and gracious
unity’. ‘The design’, he declared, ‘aptly suggests protectiveness; the
quiet greys and gleaming whites are suavely handled …’ And The
Studio, concurred, noting that it,
…pleases by its elegance and dignity of arrangement … as a
decorative composition it is … admirable and it is designed with
excellent taste.
In what was to be the penultimate New Gallery exhibition, Frank
Rutter bemoaned the passing of old fashioned beauty, of the PreRaphaelite type. The show’s centrepiece was a large tapestry entitled
The Passing of Venus, woven by Morris and Co, and based upon the

last cartoon produced by Edward Burne-Jones. The new beauty lay
in subtle arrangements and sensitive handling of character that the
present work exemplified.¹⁴ As the New English Art Club became
more exclusive and orientated towards former Slade students, the
New Gallery was briefly the main alternative London salon to the
Royal Academy and it flourished in the early years of the century.¹⁵
It was therefore the ideal place in which the restrained harmonies of the McEwen group could be displayed. Mary Frances
Dundas McEwen dressed in diaphanous greys and pale gold might
be sufficient on her own, but for contemporary observers, Elizabeth
and Katharine added innocence to her experience. In addition to
a demanding subject, Lavery faced the challenge of representing
her restless youthful offspring who are intrigued by the process of
being painted. Maternal ‘protectiveness’, noted by Rinder, was the
sub-plot of the ensemble. As in Mrs Spottiswoode and Betty, 
(unlocated), Lord and Lady Windsor and their Family,  (The
Earl of Plymouth) and Mrs MacConochie and her Three Children,
 (Private Collection) there was an interesting overall design to
be established. Addressing the problems of coherence in a figure
group, undoubtedly prepared Lavery for his most important challenges such as The Artist’s Studio  (National Gallery of Ireland,
Dublin) and The King, The Queen, The Prince of Wales, The Princess
Mary, Buckingham Palace,  (National Portrait Gallery).¹⁶ This
roll-call was however punctuated by that significant moment in
 when Mrs McEwen and her daughters arrived in the studio in
 Cromwell Place.
to be Velazquez’ autograph sketch
for the painting the Prado Museum.
[8] McConkey, 1993, p.75.
[9] Although the precise dating
of Lavery’s trips to Tangier is
impossible, he seems to have left
London early in the New Year,
returning in March.
[10] After Whistler’s death in 1903,
Lavery maintained the role of Vice
President under Auguste Rodin.
[11] His work was acquired for
national collections in Paris, Berlin,
Munich, Venice, Rome, Brussels,
Pittsburgh, and Buenos Aires, and
he was an honorary member of many
foreign academies.
[12] Shannon’s Mrs Miller Graham
and her Daughter, and Henry’s The
Marchioness of Tullibardine, were in
the same New Gallery show.
[13] For fuller discussion of this
sub-genre including works by
Solomon J. Solomon, John da
Costa and others, see Kenneth
McConkey, Edwardian Portraits,
1987 (Antique Collectors’ Club),
pp.30–34. Sargent’s exhibit at
the New Gallery in 1908 was Izmé
Vickers, 1907 (Industrial Machinery
Leasing Corporation, Los Angeles).
For further reference see Richard
Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray,
John Singer Sargent, The Later
Portraits, 2003, (Yale University
Press), pp.188–9. For reference to
Sargent’s child portraits see Barbara
Dayer Gallati, Great Expectations,
John Singer Sargent Painting
Children, 2005 (Brooklyn Museum
in association with Bullfinch Press,
New York).
[14] The gallery, now staging its
21st annual exhibition, had been
established as a breakaway rival to
the Grosvenor Gallery, taking some
of its key exhibitors, like Edward
Burne-Jones. After its opening in
1888, the Grosvenor only lasted
for two years before its collapse in
1890. On its demise, the New Gallery
took virtually all of the Grosvenor’s
‘aesthetic’ artists and others who
were at odds with the Academy.
[15] After a weak exhibition in
1909, and with falling admissions,
the Gallery was closed, sold off and
converted into a cinema.
[16] McConkey 1993, pp.113, 119–
125. At this point, 1913, Robert Finnie
McEwen had approached De Laszlo
for a second portrait of his wife, in
which she is shown seated, wearing
a black dress (sold Sotheby’s,
12 October 1988, lot 25). McEwen’s
sons, John Helias Finnie McEwen
and James Robert Dundas McEwen
were also painted by De Laszlo in
1915.

14
Oil on board,
7⅛ x 5⅞ inches (18.1 x 14.9 cm)
Signed verso, Kelly
exhibited: London, Royal
Academy, Exhibition of Works by Sir
Gerald Kelly kcvo, ppra, 1957,
no.80 (?)

sir gerald festus kelly pra 1879–1972
Café de Paris, Monte Carlo, c.1908
In January , Gerald Kelly arrived in Marseilles where he painted
small oil sketches of the old port. By mid-February he had moved
along the Corniche and was working in the centre of Monte Carlo.
Here the dazzling Café de Paris caught his eye for tiny pochade
studies of remarkable fluency. Sitting under the palms and looking
across the square, he strips the building of its ornate Second Empire
detailing to produce a Moorish vision of what might as easily be the
Citadel in Cairo.
During his twenties Kelly was an inveterate traveller, painting in
Picardy, Provence and Andalusia before  and Burma in .
Son of the vicar of Camberwell, and of Irish extraction, he arrived
in Paris in , determined to become a painter. He appears not
to have registered at any of the popular ateliers, but used his social
skills to engineer encounters with Degas, Rodin, Cezanne and the
famous Impressionist dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel.¹ He also joined
the circle of expatriate artists and writers that included Arnold
Bennett, Somerset Maugham, Clive Bell, Milner Kite, J.W. Morrice
and Roderic O’Conor. From  onwards his pictures were shown
at the Salon and this may have brought him to the attention of
Hugh Lane who was currently selecting the first exhibition of Irish
Art for the Guildhall Art Gallery.
Throughout these eventful years, Kelly responded to the European
cross-currents, admiring Sargent and Zuloaga in his Spanish figure
studies which Maugham regarded as revelations of the country’s
soul.² Kelly’s seascapes, some of which were painted at Calais, are
Whistlerian in character, while splendid street scenes such as Café
de Paris, Monte Carlo recall sensuous feeling for paint we find in tiny
sketches by Morrice.
[1] Derek Hudson, For Love of
Painting, The Life of Sir Gerald Kelly,
kcvo, pra, 1975, (Peter Davies),
pp.12–20.
[2] ws Maugham, ‘A Student of
Character: Gerald Festus Kelly’, The
Studio, vol.lxiii, 1914, pp.163–169.

15
Oil on canvas
30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Signed and dated lower right,
A Talmage 09
exhibited: London, Goupil
Gallery, London from Dawn to
Midnight, 1909, no.18
literature: The Athenaeum,
20 February 1909, p.233
Anon, ‘Art Notes. The Goupil
Gallery’, The Observer, 28 February,
1909, p.5.
A.G. Folliott Stokes, ‘Mr Algernon
Talmage’s London Pictures’, The
Studio, vol.46, February 1909, p.29
(illus p.26)
[1] Walter Sickert, ‘Introduction’,
London Impressionists, 1889
(exhibition catalogue, Goupil
Gallery, London).
[2] Henry James, English Hours,
1905 (William Heinemann, with
illustrations by Joseph Pennell),
p.22. For James it was ‘perfectly
open to [the London-lover] to
consider the remainder of the
United Kingdom, or the British
Empire in general, or even, if he
be an American, the total of the
English-speaking territories of the
globe as the mere margin, the fitted
girdle’; quoted in Brigitte Bailey,
‘Travel Writing and the Metropolis:
James, London and English Hours’,
in American Literature, vol.67, no. 2,
June 1995, p.201.
[3] Algernon Mayrow Talmage was
born at Fifield in Oxfordshire, the
son of a clergyman. Both his mother
and his paternal grandmother were
Cornish. After Bushey, he seems
to have gone to Cornwall by 1893,
where he taught at the St Ives
School of Landscape and Marine
Painting run by Julius Olsson. He
was, according to Charles Marriott,
‘one of the most talented and
certainly most popular of the St
Ives painters … a most attractive
personality; modest and slightly
reserved but always ready to do
a kind action for a friend’; quoted
in David Tovey, Pioneers of St
Ives Art at Home and Abroad,
1889–1914, 2008 (Tewkesbury,

algernon talmage ra 1871–1939
Full Summer, Hyde Park Corner, 1909
Theatre scenes, small Whistlerian pictures of Chelsea, and St
John’s Wood represented ‘London’ for Walter Sickert’s London
Impressionists in . The legacy of Dickensian social realism,
played out in premium plates in the illustrated weeklies was too
strong. Despite the fact that he called for London’s artists to address
its ‘magic’ and ‘poetry’, few were willing to go beyond the ‘kodak’
naturalism of William Logsdail’s St Martin-in-the-Fields, 
(Tate Britain).¹ Poets might rhapsodise the city streets at night, and
travel books describe its topography, but up until  the city had
little to match Camille Pissarro’s classic contemporary depictions
of the Parisian boulevards. Henry James described London as ‘the
biggest society in the world’; arguably the city’s painters had yet to
measure up to its imperial grandeur.²
Into this mélée stepped Algernon Talmage, a young painter with
a growing reputation. Having trained at Hubert von Herkomer’s art
school at Bushey in Hertfordshire, Talmage had moved in  to
St Ives, where, for fifteen years, he painted and taught.³ According
to one of his contemporaries, A.G. Folliott Stokes, he was a scion
of the plein air movement, believing implicitly in working on the
motif, rather than converting small studies into exhibition pieces in
the studio – the method advocated by Sickert and others. Thus he
obtained a ‘highness of key’ and ‘subtle diffusion of light and atmosphere’ that were difficult to revive when divorced from his subject.⁴
Early works in the West Country reveal that Talmage was one of the
growing band of British painters who deployed French Impressionist
techniques in classic landscape settings. In this he took his cue as
much from Alfred East and Arnesby Brown as from Claude Monet.
However, annual painting trips to Northern France with his students, brought him closer to the latter, and we may assume that by
the staging of the large Impressionist exhibition in London in ,
Talmage had studied the French masters at first hand.⁵
Talmage had been working in Picardy in  and was on his way
back to Cornwall when he stayed a few nights near Trafalgar Square
and immediately succumbed to the visual appeal of the metropolis.⁶ ‘The appeal of his country’s capital was irresistible’, according
to Folliott Stokes,
Motor omnibuses, hansom cabs, brewers’ drays, gilded coaches,
costers’ barrows, and the dark funereal hearse pass in endless
succession through the broad thoroughfares, while youth and age,
vice and virtue jostle each other on the pavements. The drama of life
in a nutshell …⁷
Talmage instantly resolved to remain close to his new subject matter, exhibiting The Cab Rank, Trafalgar Square (unlocated) at the

forthcoming Royal Society of British Artists’ exhibition. He commenced an intensive eighteen-month period of study in preparation
for a solo exhibition of  canvases at William Marchant’s Goupil
Gallery in February  on the theme of ‘London from Dawn
to Midnight’.⁸ Although the ghost of Whistler still hung over
night scenes in the city, critics applauded the ‘new artistic aspect’
of Talmage’s interpretation, particularly in his ‘daytime’ works.⁹ The
Observer for instance, was pleased to see him tackling ‘new problems’,
as ‘... he rings up the foggy curtain and allows sunlight, full summer
sunlight, to stream upon the animation of Hyde Park Corner’.¹⁰
The Art Journal regarded his vision of ‘London in daylight’ as ‘skilful and penetrative’ and The Athenaeum commented that he was happier with the obvious glitter of sunlight. Singling out the present
canvas and a canvas of Piccadilly (Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Adelaide) the critic noted that,
… the blazing Hyde Park Corner, Full Summer (), and the
lighter gaiety of The Glittering Stream (Piccadilly) (), are
sufficiently characteristic of two typical London scenes to make them
desirable for that army of exiled Englishmen to whom this is indeed
the City of Romance.¹¹
The ‘army’ of exiles were those custodians of the Empire lodged in
distant outposts. Surprisingly, it was the lack of pompous architecture at Hyde Park Corner which commended it to Henry James. A
‘London-lover’, James penned ‘an apology’ for what many regarded
as a ‘bungled attempt at a great public place’. This ‘beating heart of
the great West End’ contained a ‘shabby, stuccoed hospital, low park
gates … commonplace frontages’ and a triumphal arch without its
crowning sculpture. When James’s essay was republished in ,
three years before Talmage’s painting, Park Lane was still a lane, and
although Decimus Burton’s Wellington Arch had been successfully
moved in , its new sculpture, Peace Triumphant and Quadriga
by Adrian Jones, was not yet installed.¹² A further four years would
elapse before this was remedied, by which time the motor buses, so
prominent in Talmage’s painting, had completely replaced the old
horse buses.¹³
Nevertheless, on a ‘fine day’ James was dazzled by the ‘flood of life
and luxury’ he observed at Hyde Park Corner.
The edifices are mean, but the social stream itself is monumental and
to an observer … there is more excitement and suggestion than I can
give a reason for in the long, distributed waves of traffic … the air
is coloured and almost scented by the presence of the biggest society in
the world.
Implicit in James’s description was the recognition that new arrivals
from Victoria Station would mingle with landaulets leaving Rotten
Row and Hansom cabs plying between Piccadilly and Knightsbridge
at this important junction. And while this was the image of the
imperial city so dear to the army of exiles, Talmage’s summer scene
was much more. It immediately surpasses the London scenes of
his rivals, Alexander Jamieson and Joseph Oppenheimer, while his
nocturnes anticipate the palette of Arthur Hacker’s later London
pictures.¹⁴
Despite the fact that London Impressionism has been studied,

Talmage’s contribution and that of his contemporaries remains to
be explored.¹⁵ In  it was obvious to the critic of The Times that
the painter ‘inclines to the doctrines of the Impressionists’.¹⁶ In the
present case, undoubtedly the most important canvas in the Goupil
exhibition, close examination of the crowds passing under the
trees at the edge of the park reveals a handling of paint that recalls
Monet’s high Impressionist brushwork. Talmage, like his mentor,
noted that white dresses observed in a sunlight and shade against a
backdrop of foliage, appeared pale blue.
However, where Monet’s boulevard scenes – and those of
Jamieson and Oppenheimer – were observed from fixed first and
second floor vantage points, Talmage placed his easel in the street.
He was a participant in the ‘social stream’. The crowds did not pose,
nor did the motor buses cease their steady flow. For Folliott Stokes,
Full Summer and The Glittering Stream both render in harmonious
colour schemes the busy pleasure and the leafy charm of the West End.¹⁷
The painter was preoccupied with recognizing ‘the higher qualities of the imagination’ and ‘the psychological value in all Nature’s
handiwork’ over and above ‘mere cunning of hand and eye’. Thus
it was not simply the ‘outward mask’ of London that Talmage had
tried to capture, but moods, colour and ‘the teeming, thronging life
of her streets’.¹⁸
Wilson Books), pp.143–4; see also
idem, Creating a Splash, The St
Ives Society of Artists, 1927–1952,
2003 (Tewkesbury, Wilson Books),
pp.177–8.
1906 Marchant acquired an upper floor
from Howell and James’s old shop and
extended the business with four new
top-lit galleries, in order to hold larger
mixed exhibitions, known as ‘Salons’.
[4] ag Folliott Stokes, ‘The
Landscape Paintings of Mr Algernon
Talmage’, The Studio, vol.xlii,
p.188.
[9] The Builder, 20 February 1909,
p.219. Having been staged in 1905,
Whistler’s posthumous retrospective
exhibition containing nocturnes of the
Thames, remained a critical reference
point.
[5] In the spring of 1905 Durand
Ruel staged a large Impressionist
exhibition at the Grafton Gallery,
containg 55 Monets and 48
Pissarros – at least ten of the latter
were cityscapes painted in either
Paris or Rouen.
[10] Anon, ‘Art Notes. The Goupil
Gallery’, The Observer, 28 February
1909, p.5.
[11] The Art Journal, 1909, p.128; The
Athenaeum, 20 February 1909, p.233.
[6] Folliott Stokes, 1907, p.192,
announced ‘a series’ of pictures
‘now being done by Mr Talmage in
London’ and reproduced The Cab
Rank, Trafalgar Square, (unlocated)
in the current Royal Society of
British Artists exhibition.
[12] Henry James, 1905, pp.18–23;
James’s original essay appeared in
1888.
[7] ag Folliot Stokes, ‘Mr Algernon
Talmage’s London Pictures’, The
Studio, vol.xlvi, February 1909,
p.26.
[14] Kenneth McConkey,
Impressionism in Britain, 1995 (Yale
University Press/Barbican Art Gallery)
pp.63, 135, 141–2, 169–170, 202.
[8] The Goupil Gallery, in Regent
Street, was the London branch of
an old and distinguished dealership,
Boussod, Valadon and Co. Vincent
van Gogh had worked there in the
1870s. Marchant, son of a Bristol
iron-founder, was educated in
France following the death of his
father. He worked for Goupil’s
Paris office in the nineties after the
death of Theo Van Gogh before
taking over the London branch. In
[13] The first motor bus was licenced
in 1897, but it took a further 15
years for horse buses to completely
disappear.
[15] See for instance Anna Gruetzner
Robins, A Fragile Modernism, 2007
(Yale University Press), p.123 ff;
see also Eric Shanes, Impressionist
London, 1994 (New York, Abbeville
Press). Neither author considers the
later ‘Impressionist’ portrayal of the
city.
[16] The Times, 16 February 1909, p.6.
[17] Folliott Stokes, 1909, p.29.
[18] Ibid p.23.

16
Watercolour on paper
23½ x 19½ inches (60 x 49.5 cm)
Signed lower right, Laura Knight
Verso, on label, Mrs Laura Knight /
Penzer House / Newlyn / Cornw …
provenance: John Herbert
Roberts, 1st Lord Clwyd of Bryn
Gwenallt; thence by descent
exhibited: London, Royal Society
of Painters in Watercolours, Spring
Exhibition, 1909, no.163
laura knight dbe ra 1877–1970
In the Orchard, c.1908
Critics took note when Laura Knight showed In the Orchard and The
Beach (Tyne and Wear Museums, Newcastle upon Tyne) simultaneously in London exhibition in . The latter was, according to
The Manchester Guardian a work of ‘distinction’.¹ Although she had
been exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of
Painters in Watercolours prior to her arrival in Newlyn, the move to
Cornwall, coupled with her innovative use of watercolour, radically
changed her fortunes. It was a medium undergoing re-assessment
at the time.²
From the start of her career, Knight had been a keen observer
of children’s behaviour. Girls in The Beach are paddling in a sandy
pool while her canvas entitled The Boys, purchased in  by Hugh
Lane for Johannesburg, shows local lads skylarking in Newlyn harbour. It was a work in which she overtook Henry Scott Tuke ‘in one
bound’ according to P.G. Konody.³ However, there can be no closer
scrutiny of appearances than In the Orchard, where three girls go
searching for windfalls. The two younger children play peek-a-boo
around their chaperone. The observation of clasped hands is critical.
Knight’s fascination with sunlight and dappled shade, was a consistent feature of work that directly influenced her followers such
as Hilda Fearon and Dorothea Sharp. Here she notes the delicate
mauves in shadows and the warm ochres of reflected lights within a
scheme that conveys the white heat of late summer.
For Norman Garstin such pictures breathed new life into the
Newlyn School.⁴ Knight’s meeting with Stanhope Forbes introduced her to a painter and his pupils who had already moved away
from the tonalism of the school’s early years. The village itself was
transformed. A new harbour replaced the old slipways, pleasure craft
were supplementing the fishing fleet and this had brought ‘life and
animation that no one could have dreamt of a quarter of a century
ago’.⁵ The experience was a liberation for Knight. In later years she
recalled the work of this period as
[1] Laurence Housman in his
reviews of the Academy (The
Manchester Guardian, 3 May 1909
and 7 May 1909) recommended
The Beach for consideration as a
Chantrey purchase.
[2] Laurence Binyon, ‘The British
Watercolour’, The Saturday Review,
19 December 1908, p.753.
[3] The Observer, 1 May 1910, p.17.
[4] Norman Garstin, ‘The Art of
Harold and Laura Knight’, The
Studio, vol. lvii, 1912, pp.182–200.
[5] Norman Garstin, ‘West Cornwall
as a Sketching Ground’, The Studio,
vol.xlvii, 1909, p.114.
[6] Laura Knight, Oil Paint and
Grease Paint, 1936 (Penguin ed.,
1941, vol.2), p.193
… an expression of joie de vivre from which I was suffering. An
ebullient vitality made me want to paint the whole world and say
how glorious it was to be young and strong …⁶
The mood of elation however, is only sustained by the careful observation evident in her orchard watercolour of .


17
Oil on canvas board
11¾ x 15¾ inches (29.8 x 40 cm)
signed with an initial lower left, and
dated ‘1909/n.’
provenance: with Chenil
Gallery, London; Sir Michael
E. Sadler; Christie’s, London,
30 November 1928, as ‘The South
Downs, near Brighton’, incorrectly
dated 1900; Lady Jones; Christie’s,
South Kensington, 16–17 October
1980; with Browse & Darby, London;
Christie’s, London, 20 June 1995
exhibited: London, Chenil
Gallery, Provençal studies and other
works by Augustus John and other
artists, November – December 1910,
no. 92.
London, Goupil Gallery, William
Nicholson, April – May 1911, no. 8.
London, Browse & Darby, William
Nicholson and Ben Nicholson:
paintings and drawings 1919–1945,
June – July 1983, no. 1.
sir william nicholson 1872–1949
The Downs, Rottingdean, 1909
Writing in London Magazine in , Ben Nicholson recalled the
summer of  when his parents rented a beautiful old Georgian
vicarage in Rottingdean in Sussex. His father, William Nicholson
was in demand as a portrait painter and he retained his London
house. Nevertheless the garden at ‘The Grange’ had, according to
Ben, ‘a special charm because it opened out into two fields which
stretched up on to the Downs where my father made many of
his paintings’.¹ Nicholson had first visited Rottingdean in  to
make a woodcut portrait of Rudyard Kipling for  Henley’s New
Review and the cliff-top walks and the big shapes of the Downs
clearly impressed him. These rolling chalk hills were almost devoid
of trees and hedgerows, their form merely described by shepherds’
paths, referred to as ‘ways’.
The present work, one of the first Rottingdean canvases, is likely
to represent the view looking south-west towards Cattle Hill,
between Roedean and Ovingdean. It was first exhibited as the
only downland landscape among the four Nicholsons shown at the
Chenil Gallery to accompany Augustus John’s Provençal Studies in
December .² The Downs, Rottingdean reappeared the following
spring in Nicholson’s solo exhibition where a sequence of similar
spartan landscapes was particularly admired. They were worked into
the fictionalized account of an aesthete’s visual education written by
Lewis Hind and serialized by The Art Journal as ‘The Consolations
of an Injured Critic’. Here, a young painter goes off to the Downs
and in the course of conversation reveals that,
[1] Quoted in Andrew Nicholson ed.,
William Nicholson, Painter, 1996
(Giles de la Mare Publishers Ltd),
p.99. See also Marguerite Steen,
William Nicholson, 1943 (Collins),
pp.110 ff; Sanford Schwartz, William
Nicholson, 2004 (Yale University
Press), p.112 ff.
[2] To John’s collection of recent
studies painted at Martigues,
the Chenil Gallery appended 4
Nicholsons, 6 Orpens, 2 Muirheads,
a Pryde and an fhs Shepherd.
[3] Lewis Hind, ‘The Consolations
of an Injured Critic: viii’, The Art
Journal, 1911, p.358; Reprinted as
The Consolations of a Critic, 1911
(Adam and Charles Black), p.93.
[4] For an excellent discussion
of the Nicholsons, father and son,
see Merlin James, ‘Words about
Painting’, in The Art of William
Nicholson, 2005 (exhibition
catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts),
pp.21–33.
Recently Nicholson had an exhibtion of tranquil, big line landscapes
of the Down country, thinly painted on rough canvas, very simple
and spacious. I like them all …³
None of John’s work in December , or that of any of his fellow
exhibitors matches the abstract severity of The Downs, Rottingdean,
and its suave, reductive simplicity even makes the poised abstractions of Ben Nicholson suddenly seem fussy.⁴


18
Oil on canvas,
20 x 30 inches (51 x 76.2 cm)
Signed lower left c.r.w. nevinson
provenance: Sir Michael CulmeSeymour; J.B.L.Barrington, Esq;
The Fine Art Society, August 1985;
Private Collection, New York, until
2011.
exhibited: London, Imperial War
Museum, C.R.W. Nevinson – The
Twentieth Century, 1999, no.5

christopher richard wynne nevinson 1889–1946
Canal at Charenton, Île-de-France, Ivry-sur-Seine, 1913
Two men pulling a barge form the motif of Christopher Richard
Wynne Nevinson’s Canal at Charenton. The area, known for its
flourmills, received grain via the river Marne from the ‘bread-basket’
fields to the east and south of Paris. Charenton was canalized, and
it was not unusual to see bargees dragging loaded barges along its
embankments. However, unlike Impressionist landscapes painted in
the industrial banelieue, the present canvas emphasizes structure at
the expense of atmosphere and the use of colour is consequently
restrained. In Nevinson’s work we sense the pull of new ideas,
directing the young painter towards Cubist and Futurist abstraction.
The son of two writers, Henry Woodd Nevinson and Margaret
Wynne Jones, Nevinson attended St John’s Wood Art School in
, before enrolling at the Slade School of Fine Art, the following
year.¹ Encouraged by his parents’ radical views, in part inspired by
the Futurist, Marinetti, he was advised by Henry Tonks to abandon
painting and take up journalism. However, while still a student, his
first painting was exhibited at the Friday Club and buoyed up by
this success he visited Paris in  and returned the following year
for the winter of –, attending the Atelier Julian and the Cercle
Russe where Henri Matisse was teaching. During this exciting winter he shared a studio with Modigliani, met the Futurist painters,
visited Gertrude Stein’s salon and the studio of Pablo Picasso. The
jagged, angular paintings and prints he produced in the Paris hinterland at St Ouen, La Villette and Charenton are transitional, but
they nevertheless reveal the extent of Nevinson’s speedy absorption
of the Cubo-Futurist syntax. This was a sensibility in flux – and
one that would soon emerge with the celebrated Departure of the
Train de Luxe in Frank Rutter’s Post-Impressionist and Futurist
Exhibition at the Doré Gallery in . However, in these prelude
months, the world around him in the backwaters of Paris provided
constant stimulus – aptly summed up by John Rothenstein in two
short, sweeping sentences.
Wherever he went every manifestation of life presented itself to
Nevinson as an object of fascination. To have his creative interest
aroused, he had but to look.²
[1] Henry Woodd Nevinson was an
author and war correspondent who
reported on the Spanish-American
War, the Boer War and the Balkan
Wars of 1912. Margaret Wynne Jones
was also a writer and Sufragette,
active in the ‘Poor Law’ and ‘Home
Rule’ debates.
[2] John Rothenstein, Modern
Englsih Painters, Lewis to Moore,
1956, (Eyre and Spottiswoode),
p.127.

19
william gordon burn murdoch frsgs 1862–1939
Piccadilly Circus at Night: in the Golden Age
before the War
Few images of the hub of Empire are more arresting than William
Gordon Burn Murdoch’s Piccadilly Circus at Night. Although it simply records excited Londoners flooding from glowing theatre foyers,
for writers at the turn of the twentieth century the Circus symbolized much more. Arnold Bennett, describing its ever-changing
character throughout a typical day concluded that it,
Oil on canvas
36 x 50 inches (91.5 x 127 cm)
Signed lower left,
WG Burn Murdoch, and
inscribed with title on
the stretcher
… symbolises the secret force which drives forward the social
organism through succeeding stages of evolution ... The imponderable
spirit of the basic fact of society broods in the Circus forever ... ¹
He was of course referring to the stark contrasts in contemporary
society. With its constantly revolving parade of flowers-sellers, newspaper vendors, fashionable patrons of Swan and Edgar, theatre-goers
and suffragettes with their posters, Piccadilly Circus epitomized the
great complex engine of British society – perpetually turning,
See it after the performances on a matinée day, surging with
heroines. See it at eight o’clock at night, a packed mass of taxis and
automobiles, each the casket of a romantic creature, hurrying in
pursuit of that ideal without a name. Later the place is becalmed,
and scarcely an Englishwoman is to be seen in it until after the
theatres, when once again it is nationalized and feminized. The shops
are black, the flower-sellers are gone; but the electric skysigns are in
violent activity, and there is light enough to see those baffling faces as
they flash or wander by.²
It seems at first bizarre that such a scene should have been so convincingly portrayed by an Edinburgh painter who had Nationalist
sympathies. Artist, writer, hunter and explorer, William Gordon
Burn Murdoch studied under Verlat in Antwerp and under
Carolus Duran in Paris in the early s. He worked in Madrid,
Florence and Naples during extensive European travels early in
his career and the taste for adventure led him in  to join the
Dundee Antarctic Whaling Expedition, publishing an account of
his adventures in .³ Back in Edinburgh he renewed his friendship with Patrick Geddes and Charles Hodge Mackie, presenting a
short story, ‘Lengthening Days’, in The Evergreen. This recounts the
flight of an artist to the barren lands of the North during springtime, ‘with his travelling-box and his paints and pencils’. Such was
Burn Murdoch’s commitment to exploration that, while exhibiting
regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy, he became a member and
later Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, serving on
its Council on several occasions. In  he published a further
account of his travels, this time to India, Burma and China, following in the footsteps of the Prince and Princess of Wales, while his

[1] Ibid, p.108.
[2] Arnold Bennett,
Paris Nights and Other
Impressions of Places and
People, 1913 (New York,
George H Doran Co), p.107.
[3] Geoff Swinney,
‘William Gordon Burn
Murdoch (1862–1939)’,
at www.rgsg.org/ifa/
highlight4.html
[4] The Evergreen, A
Northern Seasonal, Spring
1895, (T Fisher Unwin),
pp.44–6.
[5] He began exhibiting in
1882 and showed regularly
at the Royal Scottish
Academy until 1919.

experiences as a whaler and polar bear hunter were recounted in .
Yet for one so open to the call of the wild, it remains extraordinary that Burn Murdoch should produce a painting of Piccadilly
Circus at Night. Attracted to extremes, this haunt of the human
animal may well have represented the apex of advanced civilization.
Its theatres – the London Pavilion and the Criterion were new and
its monument, the Shaftesbury Memorial, an even more recent, and
highly popular addition. Standing by the arcade under the County
Fire Office gave him an uninterrupted view of a panorama vividly
captured by the poet Arthur Symons,
The Circus is like a whirlpool, streams pour steady outward from
the centre, where the fountain stands for a symbol. The lights glitter
outside theatres, music-halls and restaurants; lights coruscate, flash
from the walls, dart from the vehicles; a dark tangle of roofs and
horses knots itself together and swiftly separates at every moment; all
the pavements are aswarm with people hurrying.⁷
Symons could almost be describing the present work. Standing by
Burn Murdoch’s vantage point, he noted that, ‘few walk on the left
side of Piccadilly or the right of Regent Street, though you hear
tongues a-chatter under the arcade’. It was a convivial spot selected
by Ernest Dudley Heath in his Piccadilly Circus at Night c.
(Museum of London), while Joseph Oppenheimer represented the
‘whirlpool’ Circus in  from the second floor of the Criterion, just
before motor vehicles began to appear. However Burn Murdoch’s
closest rival was Arthur Hacker whose Royal Academy Diploma
picture of , A Wet Night at Piccadilly Circus approaches the scene
from Piccadilly rather than Regent Street.
Many writers, Symons included, were preoccupied with the
comparison between London and Paris. French visitors asked to
be taken to London’s bohemia, but for Symons there were no true
equivalents of Montmartre and the quartier latin. The seedy streets
behind Shaftesbury Avenue beyond the arcade in the present picture
were notorious for their baudy houses, but there were no studios in
this district. These were tucked away in Chelsea, or in the respectable suburb of St John’s Wood. Arthur Ransome needed a whiff of
caporal tobacco from a little shop in Soho to transport him to the
Bal Bullier. Yet Burn Murdoch was not looking for bohemia; the
anthropologist in him sought the social microcosm and there was
no better place to carry out his observations than under shadow of
the London County Fire Office.

[6] The Criterion Restaurant and
Theatre on the extreme right of
Burn Murdoch’s painting was built
in 1873–4; the London Pavilion
with its classical portico in the
centre opened in 1885; and the
Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain
(Eros) had been unveiled on 29 June
1893.
[7] Arthur Symons, London: A Book
of Aspects, 1909 (Privately Printed),
p.24
[8] Symons, 1909, p.25.
[9] For reference to Oppenheimer’s
Piccadilly Circus, (Private
Collection), see Kenneth McConkey,
Impressionism in Britain, 1995 (Yale
University Press), pp.169–70.
[10] Ibid, p.135.
[11] Arthur Ransome, Bohemia in
London, 1907 (Chapman and Hall),
p.114. Ransom argued the case for
Chelsea as London’s Bohemia, but
it lacked the cafes and theatres of
the ‘Boul Mich’.

20
Oil on canvas
30 x 25 inches (76 x 63 cm)
Signed orpen, lower right

sir william orpen ra rha 1878–1931
Miss Dorothy Stiles, 1916
In , with the portrait of Miss Lily Carstairs, Orpen’s portraiture
took on a new dimension. The sitter, a daughter of the American
art dealer, Charles Carstairs, was placed against a dark back-drop
and the uncluttered directness of her portrait was greatly admired
by critics. The painter returned to this successful half-length format
when commissioned to paint Dorothy Stiles, the following year.
Miss Stiles was the daughter of Sir Harold Stiles, a distinguished surgeon who originally hailed from Lincoln. He studied
at Edinburgh University, specialised in anatomy and in  won
the surgical prize essay of the Edinburgh branch of the Royal
College of Surgeons. Stiles was one of the first clinicians to study
the anatomy, pathology, and surgery of the breast and his pioneering
work on the spread of cancer led to the Royal College of Surgeons’
Walker prize in . Three years later he took up a residency at the
Edinburgh Children’s Hospital where he practiced for much of his
career, becoming president of the Association of Surgeons of Great
Britain and Ireland in , and of the Royal College of Surgeons of
Edinburgh from  to .
Thus, Dorothy grew up in the Scots medical world. A companion
portrait by Orpen indicates that she was a keen golfer at a time
when, following the example of Margot Asquith, it became fashionable for young women to practice the sport. There were a number of
important courses near the Stiles’ family home at Whatton Lodge,
Gullane in East Lothian.
However, in the present portrait ‘Dolly’ Stiles adopts a more conventional pose. Echoes of Romney in the soft ruffled neckline of the
sitter’s blouse, contrasting with the sheen of her silk taffeta shawl,
must have tested the painter. Orpen was too well aware of the traditions of eighteenth century portraiture not to feel their impact in
contemporary dress. He would have seen the press reports indicating that Henry Huntington’s disputed Romney double full-length
of the Mrs Siddons and Fanny Kemble was about to come to trial and
may well have taken a passing interest in the dispute. Nevertheless,
for all its eclecticism, Miss Dorothy Stiles presents us with a striking
personality who clearly appealed to the painter.

21
Oil on canvas
16 x 20⅛ inches (40.6 x 51.2 cm)
Stamped lower right, sf Gore
provenance: By descent to the
artist’s widow, Mollie Gore; Agnew’s
London; ra Bevan, by descent.
exhibited: Sudbury,
Gainsborough’s House, The Bevan
Collection: A Selection of Paintings
by British Artists including the
Camden Town Group and a Tribute
to John Nash, 1978, no.38

spencer frederick gore 1878–1914
The Thames at Richmond
When his recent work was shown at the Chenil Gallery in May
, The Studio noted that Spencer Gore was ‘one of the small band
of painters who cultivate the flower of impressionist art in England
– a soil still somewhat alien to it’. The statement is remarkable
because it comes almost thirty years after the word ‘impressionist’
first entered critical parlance in Britain, and six months after Roger
Fry had coined its controversial derivative, ‘Post-Impressionist’.
While older claimants to the term had entered the Royal Academy
by , the tendency was still identified with a ‘small band’ and still
contested. Nevertheless, Gore, for one writer at least, possessed ‘an
acute and subtle sensibility to the beauty of what is usually called
commonplace’.¹ He was primarily interested in colour and tone
and despite his flirtation with decorative abstraction in the autumn
of , in his designs for Mme Strindberg’s Viennese-style avantgarde club, the ‘Cave of the Golden Calf ’, Gore continued to believe
that painting should be responsive to lived experience – a defining
characteristic of Impressionism.²
Shortly after his move to Richmond in the summer of  he
portrayed a stretch of riverbank close to where his Slade School
mentors, Philip Wilson Steer and Fred Brown had worked.
However, where Steer’s tentative perspectives were atmospheric and
his river at Richmond clothed in morning mist, Gore blocks in the
bold shapes of trees and buildings on the riverbank with speed and
confidence. He may perhaps have been trying to reclaim the structural use of colour developed in the previous year at Letchworth, but
his subject was unyielding. It was only in the suburban hinterland, in
Cambrian Road and Chisholm Road street scenes and in a sequence
of views of Richmond Park that the preoccupation with structure
returns.³
The present work originally formed part of the distinguished collection of Robert Alexander and Natalie Bevan, the son and daughter-in-law of Gore’s Camden Town contemporaries, Robert Polhill
Bevan and Stanislawa de Karlowska. It hung originally beside the
fireplace in the drawing room of Boxted House, their home on the
Essex-Suffolk border. Robert and Natalie’s dedication to the innovative work of the previous generation was profound, and it continues to be celebrated.⁴
[1] ‘Studio Talk’, The Studio, vol.lii,
1911, p.314.
[2] Richard cork, Art Beyond
The Gallery, 1985 (Yale University
Press), p.61 ff.
[3] See Frederick Gore ra,
Spencer Gore in Richmond, 1997
(exhibition catalogue, Museum of
Richmond).
6SHQFHU*RUH
[4] See Alice Strang et al, From
Sickert to Gertler, Modern Art from
Boxted House, 2008 (National
Galleries of Scotland).

22
frederick cayley robinson ara rws 1862–1927
The Departure by Sea
For a British student studying contemporary painting in Paris in the
early s, the encounter with Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ Pauvre
Pêcheur (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) in the Musée du Luxembourg
must have been momentous. Here was something that seemingly
revived the mystic-religious fervour of the Italian Primatives in the
fourteenth century and effectively questioned the rapid spread of
Impressionism with its basis in plein air sketching. Puvis was a conceptual artist concerned with the ‘ideal’. While Burne-Jones, G.F.
Watts and Aubrey Beardsley were admirers of the great French artist, it waited until the early years of the new century for his work to
be truly absorbed.¹ This occurred in the writings of Charles Ricketts,
the formation of the Society for Painters in Tempera in , and
with the publication of the English version of Arsène Alexandre’s
monograph on the painter in . Ricketts captured something
of the fascination of Pauvre Pêcheur, declaring that ‘it produces an
effect of remote beauty as of a work by a strange unknown master of
some distant clime and period’.² Young artists such as Mary Sargent
Florence and Mary Young Hunter felt the impact of this new
‘Idealism’; Augustus John emulated Puvis with The Young Pyramus,
in , but it was arguably Frederick Cayley Robinson returning
from Florence in  who brought the deepest understanding of
the new idiom. In Dawn, , he shows a boat, becalmed with a
gaunt figure standing in it prow. ³ Thereafter, arrivals and departures
by the shores of lifeless lagoons became one of Cayley Robinson’s
signature themes.
The Departure by Sea reiterates the splendid stillness of Dawn,
as mariners make sail from an ancient fort in the gathering gloom.
The pace is slow; the actions are deliberate; the land is emptied of
inhabitants. The sea, though treacherous; is more navigable than the
unforgiving landscape. Working at Glasgow School of Art, the rugged beauties of the Highlands and Western Isles, with their myths,
legends and old monastic settlements would have been familiar to
him. This same austerity would inform Robinson’s The Landing of St
Patrick, (Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane) commissioned by
Hugh Lane for the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin
and elements are to be found as late as  in The Call of the Sea.⁴
Few canvases, more than these by Cayley Robinson, sum up the
Edwardian intelligentsia’s yearning for the ascetic and the spiritual.
In an age of high capitalism, such pictures called to rejected values
and neglected beliefs. Their bold abstractions spoke of less materialistic times when hermits and saints walked the British shores.

Oil on canvas
35½ x 51 inches (90.2 x 129.5 cm)
[1] See Robert Upstone, ‘Echoes
in Albion’s Sacred Wood’, in
Serge Lemoine ed., From Puvis de
Chavannes to Matisse and Picasso,
Toward Modern Art, 2002, (Thames
and Hudson), pp.277–289.
[2] Charles Ricketts, Pages on
Art, 1913 (Constable and Co), p.78;
see also Arsène Alexandre, Puvis
de Chavannes, n.d. [1905] (George
Newnes Ltd).
[3] C Lewis Hind, ‘Ethical Art and
Mr Cayley Robinson’, The Studio,
vol.xxxi, 1904, p.239.
]4] See Philip McEvansoneya,
‘Hugh Lane and mural painting:
designs for the Gallery of Modern
Art, Dublin’, Irish Architectural and
Decorative Studies, The Journal
of the Irish Georgian Society, vol.
vi, pp.163–181. For The Call of the
Sea, see Frederick Cayley Robinson
ara, 1862–1927, 1977, (exhibition
catalogue, The Fine Art Society),
no.67 (illus)

23
Oil on canvas
22 x 18 inches (55.9 x 45.7 cm)
Signed with initials and dated 1914,
lower right
provenance: T Geoffrey
Blackwell obe, n.d.
exhibited: London, New English
Art Club, Spring 1914, no.183
London, Tate Gallery, Henry Tonks,
1936, no.11
literature: Anon., ‘The New
English Art Club’, The Athenaeum,
30 May 1914, p.769
Henry Tonks, ‘Notes on Wander
Years’, Artwork, no.20, Winter 1929,
p.221 (illus)
Joseph Hone, The Life of Henry
Tonks, 1939 (William Heinemann),
p.310, 327

henry tonks 1862–1937
The Fortune Teller, 1914
A mother and father and two children, huddled together, listen
intently as a fortune-teller addresses a budgerigar in Henry Tonks’
New English Art Club exhibit in the spring of . At this moment,
the future for these expectant faces might well seem portentous.
Tonks devotes his attention to their happy, expectant faces – adding
to the drama with delicate studies of hands, carefully posed. The
Athenaeum regarded the picture as ‘charming in its naiveté’.¹
Tonks was however, far from naive. Trained as a surgeon, he
found an aptitude for drawing in classes run by Fred Brown at the
Westminster School of Art in . He began to exhibit in  and
following Brown’s appointment in , he joined the staff of the
Slade School of Fine Art, where he remained until retirement in
. Drawing was Tonks’ primary preoccupation, as is evident from
the heads and hands in The Fortune Teller.² He was also fascinated
by birds.
Imported into Britain in large numbers in the late nineteenth
century budgerigars and other small song-birds were sold by hawkers and urchins in the streets and markets to be kept as pets in cages.
So popular was this activity that it became the subject of John Butler
Yeats’s early canvas, The Bird Market,  (Hugh Lane Gallery,
Dublin). Tonks had tackled the subject in The Birdcage in 
(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), a picture which was lavishly praised
when shown in the New English Art Club and at Brighton.³
At seaside resorts however, budgerigars – particularly those that
could imitate the human voice – were often employed by fortunetellers and it is such a scene that we see here. The picture was acquired
in  by the wealthy publisher Geoffrey Blackwell – a substantial
patron of New English Art Club artists. He started to collect in
 and by the time he bought The Fortune Teller, he owned at least
five other works by Tonks, in addition to pictures by Philip Wilson
Steer, D.Y. Cameron, Clausen, Charles Conder, Charles Holmes
and Walter Russell.⁴ Tonks sketched pastel portraits of Blackwell,
his wife and baby daughter – and the painter and he were lifelong
friends.
[1] Anon., ‘The New English Art
Club’, The Athenaeum, 30 May 1914,
p.769.
[2] In 1936, a monochrome pastel
study was in the collection of Lady
Kendall-Butler.
[3] See for instance The Art
Journal, 1908, p.156; Lynda Morris
ed., Henry Tonks and the ‘Art of Pure
Drawing’, n.d. [1985] (exhibition
catalogue, Nrwich School of Art
Gallery), no. 7.
[4] J.B. Manson, ‘Mr Geoffrey
Blackwell’s Collection of Modern
Pictures’, The Studio, vol.61, 1914,
pp.271–282.

24
Pencil, watercolour, gouache,
coloured chalk and pen and
black ink
20½ x 15½ inches (52 x 39.4 cm)
provenance: Lord Goodman;
Spink; private collection.
exhibited: London, The
Piccadilly Gallery, December
1963; London, Tate Gallery, Paul
Nash: Paintings and Watercolours
November-December 1975, no.30,
reproduced.
literature: Andrew Causey,
Paul Nash, 1980 (Oxford University
Press), no.99.
paul nash 1889–1946
Summer Landscape, 1914
The last weeks of peace before the Great War marked a pivotal period in Paul Nash’s
life and career. It was a moment of intense creativity after a time of gestation and
consideration. The veteran Royal Academician Sir William Blake Richmond advised
him to turn to landscape to find expression and it was a course Nash duly followed.
In July  Nash and his fiancee Margaret Odeh left London and made an extended
trip to the North to visit the poet Gordon Bottomley (–). Bottomley lived
at The Shieling at Silverdale, near Carnwath in Lancashire on the southern edge
of the Lake District. The hills rose up behind the house, while the front offered an
expansive view across Morecombe Bay. Nash, who knew only the southern counties
of England and had made only one brief trip abroad to Normandy in , was awed
by his experience of the Lakesland landscape. He and Margaret walked nearly every
day in the hills during their three week stay, and Nash found in the experience a new
rhapsodic one-ness with nature. He wrote afterwards to his patron Edward Marsh:
I came away, I believe, a rather humbler and wiser man. Their house is a treasure
box of books and pictures within, and surrounded by an enchanted jungle without.
Its windows command the silver bay and grey hills one way and look east across fine
stony, stumbly grey green country to the Mountains. You can’t think with what awe
and apprehension I regarded those distant mountains. Soon we approached them and
got to grips and they turned out kindly green and brown fellows.¹
[1] Quoted Andrew Causey,
Paul Nash, 1980 (Oxford University
Press), p.53, n.h.
[2] Ibid., n.j.

To his friend William Rothenstein he added: ‘I saw a new country quite different to
mine – boney and stark at places & infinitely varied in design’.²
The experience spurred Nash to intense creativity. He started twenty six watercolours while he stayed with Bottomley. Yet despite his avowed admiration for the
rugged terrain of the mountains, most of them are exquisitely lyrical compositions
of pastoral harmony such as Apple Pickers, now in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery and
the present work, Summer Landscape. The ripening corn here suggests an implied
symbolism of fertility and nature’s benificent bounty and it recalls most closely
the visionary pastoral serenity of Samuel Palmer in such works as A Cornfield by
Moonlight with the Evening Star (c., British Museum). Nash, like Palmer, very
clearly felt himself at one with nature in this period, and it stimulated him to move
away from the purely imaginary creations of previous work to some new expression
rooted in his deeper experience of the natural landscape.
On the way back Nash and Margaret stopped off in Leeds to visit Michael
Sadler (–). Uniquely in Britain Sadler had gathered a collection of advanced
European art including works by Kandinsky and Gauguin (including The Vision
after the Sermon). Nash was greatly stimulated by this exposure to the avant garde,
although he also wrote enthusiastically of the ‘many Constables and early watercolourist fellows’, importantly artists who articulated a distinctive vision of English
landscape.
Nash returned to London from the North filled with the new potential of expression in his art, but it was a moment of calmness before the storm. In August, after
the outbreak of war, Nash enlisted for active service with The Artists’ Rifles.
 

25
Bronze
Height: 19 inches
Inscribed pp/gf/1915
exhibited: London, The Fine Art
Society, Peter Pan and Eros, Public
and Private Sculpture in Britain,
1880–1940, 2002 (another cast)
literature: Benedict Read,
Victorian Sculpture, 1982 (Yale
University Press), pp.31–5–7, 365
Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture,
1983 (Yale University Press), p.218

george james frampton ra 1860–1928
Peter Pan, 1915
No single artefact encapsulates the Edwardian cult of childhood
more succinctly than George Frampton’s Peter Pan. It was, as Peyton
Skipwith has pointed out, installed on  May , without public fanfare in Kensington Gardens at the spot where, in the J.M.
Barrie’s story, Peter Pan flies from the children’s nursery and lands
on the south-west bank of the Serpentine, known as Long Water.¹
Barrie commissioned Frampton to produce the piece and its sudden
appearance was intended as a surprise ‘for nannies and their young
charges’ as they walked through the park. The Times informed readers that this ‘figure of Peter Pan blowing his pipe on the stump of a
tree, with fairies and mice and squirrels all around’ was Mr Barrie’s
‘Mayday gift’. The bronze was instantly popular and quickly became
iconic.
The origins of Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s friendship with the
Llewellyn Davies family are well-known. The first story, The Little
White Bird, was published in , followed by a stage play, Peter
Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, two years later in which
the characters of Captain Hook and Tinkerbell were introduced.
A compendium children’s edition, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,
appeared in .
Barrie’s first idea for the statue occurred at this time, and he asked
Michael Llewellyn Davies to pose in costume for a sequence of photographs as his elfin hero. The costume – an essential part of Peter’s
subsequent identity – had been designed by William Nicholson for
the play in .² Frampton therefore had much to go on as he prepared his plaster version of the figure for the Royal Academy in .
As Skipwith notes, after his initial training at the Academy Schools,
Frampton had gone to Paris where he would have seen the naturalistic public sculptures of Emmanuel Frémiet – often containing
details of exotic plants and animals, which may in part have inspired
the much humbler rabbits, squirrels and other woodland creatures
that surround the base of Peter Pan.³
Following the defeat of Belgium, Frampton was moved to donate
a cast of the sculpture to the Palais d’Egremont in Brussels as a
war memorial and other casts went to Canada, Australia and New
Jersey. In  a further caste was erected in Sefton Park, Liverpool,
from which the Fine Art Society’s edition of eight further casts were
made in .
[1] Peyton Skipwith, Peter Pan and
Eros, Public and Private Sculpture
in Britain, 1880–1940, 2002,
(exhibition catalogue, The Fine Art
Society, London), p.3.
[2] Sanford Schwartz, William
Nicholson, 2004 (Yale University
Press), p.111. The play opened in
December 1904.
[3] Skipwith, 2002, p.6.

26
Bronze, Ht: 26 inches (66.2 cm)
Inscribed: ariadne at naxos /
Macgillivray 1915

james pittendrigh macgillivray 1856–1938
Ariadne at Naxos, 1915
Macgillivray always liked to depict the monumental, even when
working on a domestic scale; his preferred medium was bronze, but
for the Byron statue in Aberdeen he was forced to work in the native
granite. His first public sculpture is the Gladstone Memorial in
Edinburgh. Ariadne at Naxos is one of a small group of works, along
with Pieta and La Flandre, casts of both of which are in Aberdeen
Art Gallery, in which Macgillivray expresses a general sympathy
with those oppressed by the war. According to Greek mythology
Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Greece, was abandoned by
Theseus on the island of Naxos. Here he uses the image of Ariadne
to symbolise all the women abandoned by their husbands for the
duration of the war.

27
Oil on board, signed Herbert Gunn
lower right
18½ x 14½ inches (46.5 x 36.5 cm)
provenance: Gifted to the
husband of the previous owner by
his mother on 5 July 1946
This study, for a larger painting of
the same title (private collection)
appears to have been inspired
by William Nicholson’s still life of
James Pryde’s Hat, c.1898.

sir herbert james gunn ra 1893–1964
Interior Scene, Memories of James Pryde, c.1916
Piling up studio impedimenta into a large, jumbled still-life provided an instant test-piece for the nineteenth century painter which
Mabel Pryde’s Kit with Harlequin Clothes [no.], in essence revives.
It was a genre that might typically include an exotic costume, a sword
or piece armour, a lay figure or statuette, and maybe, a discarded hat.
The purpose of this ‘chaos décoratif ’ was to demonstrate the painter’s
abilities to prospective clients. It was a kind of badge or shop-sign.
This old convention was adopted in the present instance by the
precocious young Herbert James Gunn who, at the age of sixteen
began his training at Glasgow School of Art. After moving to
Edinburgh College of Art, Gunn went to Paris in the winter of
–, to enrol in the atelier Julian.¹ Still only nineteen, he began
to send back small, suave sketches of Parisian streets and parks to
his family in Glasgow. These reveal a painter who could pluck the
most unusual compositions from the seemingly ordinary - his eye
for placing and interval having more in common with Eugène Atget
and the young Cartier-Bresson than with the tyros of the Salon
d’Automne. During the next two years, in journeys to southern
Spain and North Africa, it seems almost as if Gunn was visiting the
well-springs of contemporary painting, quickly acquiring the skill
and experience expected of a much older artist.
Along the way the present calling card was painted. A tonal exercise, its narrative conceit is that of a painter who has been working
on a grisaille, reminiscent of Tiepolo’s commedia series. He has laid
his tools – palette, brushes and maulstick – on a pedestal table. It
is a poetic envoi to a life interrupted by the call to arms for in ;
Gunn joined the Artists’ Rifles and after training was transferred to
Northern France.
[1] See Richard Ingleby et al,
Sir James Gunn 1893–1964, 1994
(Edinburgh, Scottsih National
Gallery of Modern Art), pp.13–15.

28
Oil on canvas
60¾ x 55½ inches (154.4 x 141 cm)
provenance: Commissioned
from the artist by Annie, later 1st
Viscountess Cowdray, November
1916 and by descent at Dunecht
House, Aberdeenshire.
literature: J.B., The Spectator,
21 October 1916 (quoted in Powell,
2006, p.60
Derek Hudson, James Pryde
1866–1941, 1949 (Constable), pp.62,
64, 93, (illus pl. 00ix)
Anne Simpson, ‘James Pryde,
1866–1941’, in Richard Calvocoressi
introd, James Pryde, 1992, (exhibition catalogue, Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art), pp.28, 102,
(illus pl xviii)
Cecilia Powell, Rascals & Ruins: The
Romantic Vision of James Pryde,
(exhibition catalogue, The Fleming
Collection, 2006, p.76, no. 44,
(illus)
exhibited: London, International
Society of Sculptors, Painters
and Gravers, Autumn Exhibition,
October 1916, no. 5 (lent by Lady
Cowdray)
Brighton, Art Gallery and London,
Tate Gallery, James Pryde:
Memorial Exhibition, July – October
1949, no. 31
Bradford, Bradford Art Gallery,
Jubilee Exhibition, 1954, number
untraced.
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada,
Three Centuries of Scottish
Painting, March – April 1969, no. 45
Edinburgh, Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art, James Pryde,
1992, no. 73
London, The Fleming Collection,
Rascals & Ruins: The Romantic
Vision of James Pryde, September
2006, no. 44.

james ferrier pryde 1866–1941
The Red Ruin, 1916
Describing The Red Ruin in , Pryde’s biographer concluded
that it was ‘authentic Edgar Allan Poe’.¹ The allusion to the great
American romantic is perceptive. The inspiration for Baudelaire,
Legros and Manet, Poe’s ballads and short stories were revived for
the decadent generation of the eighteen nineties – painters and
poets who dressed in black and even adopted the stove-hats of fifty
years earlier, and James Pryde, as is clear from Joseph Simpson’s
etching [fig.], led the way with this theatrical garb.
To the mêlée he also brought his own rich store of childhood
memories of tall Edinburgh tenements, Palladian porticoes and
classical monuments lit by moonlight. Beneath their dark silhouettes, was an anonymous chorus, waiting for a recitative which never
begins. Far from the fashionable Impressionist fanfare of his contemporaries, Pryde was inventing a new visual syntax that was only
truly acknowledged by Haldane MacFall in . ‘He broods upon
the motive’, wrote MacFall,
… until he creates, revealed as out of an intense effort, a picture that
holds the imagination, haunts it – never to leave it. A picture of
Pryde’s once seen can never be forgotten …²
Intensity of experience emerged directly from the essential abstractness of Pryde’s work. His pictorial architecture is reduced to broad,
monochrome stage flats erected on a featureless terrain like the bold
designs of Edward Gordon Craig.
Pryde inherited his theatrical flair from his parents, both of
whom were admirers of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Although he
spent three months at the atelier Julian in , he was essentially
self-taught. He showed at the first exhibition of the International
Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers () in  with two
of his own pastels and a painting jointly worked by his brother-inlaw, William Nicholson.³ Thereafter he forsook his artistic collaboration with Nicholson and his paintings became a regular feature
of the Society’s exhibitions. By , he had secured the patronage of Annie Pearson, st Viscountess Cowdray.⁴ In , after
Lady Cowdray had purchased her first three Prydes, the painter
was invited for the first of a series of visits to Dunecht House in
Aberdeenshire, the family’s Scottish home. Commissions to grace
the great library at Dunecht followed for which the present version of The Red Ruin was created and Lady Cowdray agreed to its
being exhibited in the autumn of .⁵ At the time, Pryde’s ruined
buildings were seen as synonyms for the destruction of Belgium and
Northern France – a reading that had been anticipated at least ten
years before.
[1] Derek Hudson, James Pryde
1866–1941, 1949 (Constable), p.62;
see also, Jan Gordon, ‘The Edgar
Allan Poe of Painting: James Pryde,
1866–1941’, in Country Life, 15 March
1941, pp.238–9
[2] Haldane MacFall, ‘The Work of
James Pryde’, The Magazine of Fine
Arts, vol.1, 1906, p.234.
[3] After he returned to London in
1890, Pryde acted as a chaperone
for his sister Mabel, then studying
at the Bushey School of Art under
Hubert von Herkomer. Mabel
married her fellow student, William
Nicholson in 1893 and Pryde and
Nicholson formed the Beggarstaff
Brothers partnership, which lasted
until about 1900, developing
woodcuts in particular in innovative
poster design.
[4] C. Powell, Rascals and Ruins:
The Romantic Vision of James
Pryde, London, 2006, pp.31–33. It is
possible that their paths crossed in
1910 when her portrait by Nicholson
was shown at the isspg.
[5] A second, smaller version of the
subject exists in a private collection.
Dunecht, a neo-gothic house, was
designed by George Edmund Street
in 1867. The library scheme was only
completed in the 1920s when Pryde
supplied a large lunette entitled The
Madonna of the Ruins.
Fig.1: Joseph Simpson, James
Pryde, c.1925, Private Collection

29
Oil on panel, 11¾ x 29½ inches
(30 x 75 cm)
Signed Sims, lower right
literature: Charles Sims ra,
Picture Making, Technique and
Inspiration …with Critical Survey
of his Work and Life by Alan Sims,
n.d. [1935] (New Art Library, Second
Series, Seeley, Service and Co),
p.123
[1] The formation of the British
War Memorials Committee was
one of Lord Beaverbrook’s first
acts as Minister of Information in
1918. In the previouis year he had
been instrumental in setting up the
Canadian War Memorials Fund,
and employing artists to record
scenes of daily life in the trenches.
The central idea for the Canadian
Scheme, a Hall of Remembrance,
was adopted for Britain and the
commissions for standard 76 x
125 inch canvases to be let into
niches in the building were placed.
The canvases were known as
‘Uccellos’ – this being the size of
his Rout of San Romano in the
National Gallery. In the event, the
Hall of Remembrance was never
constructed and the canvases,
displayed at the Royal Academy
in 1919 with other War art, were
consigned to the Imperial War
Museum.
[2] The Fountain was purchased by
the Chantrey Trustees in 1908 and
The Wood beyond the World in 1913
(both Tate Britain).
[3] He had been appointed
Associate in 1908 and was elected
full Academician at the end of 1915.
[4] Harold Speed, ‘Charles Sims
ra, 1873–1928’, Old Watercolour
Society’s Club, 1928–1929,
Sixth Annual Volume, 1929 (Old
Watercolour Society), p.56.
[5] This originally represented
a confident classical goddess
passing on the wisdom of history
to the younger generation. Now,

charles sims ra 1873–1928
The Old German Front Line, Arras, 1916
It seems slightly incongruous that the painter of symbolist allegories should be sent to record the captured German trenches by the
British War Memorials Committee in .¹ Yet while Charles Sims
was not an obvious choice for the task, his work was highly regarded.
Prior to the declaration of war he had two canvases purchased by the
Chantrey Bequest for the Tate Gallery and several others, for the
new colonial galleries.² The signals were clear that, at the first opportunity, the painter would be elected as a full Royal Academician.³
Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, Sims had been sketching near
Lodsworth in the company of Harold Speed – days that were fondly
recalled.⁴ Then, three months into the war his eldest son, a midshipman, was killed when an explosion wrecked  Bulwark off the
coast of Sheerness. Although it was not the result of enemy action
the loss was no less great and the artist never fully recovered. He
returned to London to repaint what was to be his Diploma picture,
Clio and the Children submitted to the Academy in .⁵ This provides an essential clue to the basis of Sims’ work. The goddess of
history bows her head in shame as she addresses a group of children.
The setting, the rolling fields of west Sussex, reveals an artist who
was essentially an acute observer of landscape. Speed held the view
that ‘early morning sunlight gave Sims the inspiration for most of
his pictures’ and he quoted from the artist’s notebook,
Worship the spirit of the earth, be one with her intentions, trust her
plan … to be absorbed by the colour of a forest, at once to fugitive and
eternal; is lo loosen the ties of time and condition …⁶
Sadly this belief in the spiritual power of nature was shattered when
Sims visited the Western Front. His younger son, Alan, recalled,
… it was an altered man who returned from observing the physical
horrors of the War. His devotional sensitiveness to the beauty of
human form quite unfitted him to survive the spectacle of its millionfold mutilation. His spirit had been dealt the wound from which it
died ten years later.⁷
Colonel Lee, the Chief Censor and responsible for Sims’ requirements at Arras was predictably more prosaic, recalling the painter as
‘nice, quiet, and rather strange’. In his letters to Alfred Yockney, Sims
complained about working in the open air in the snows of November
and December and he fussed about the fact that his chauffeur had
run out of wash-leathers.⁸
Faced with the devastated dugouts at Arras, Sims produced a
number of tiny panel on-the-spot sketches of the scene before commencing on the present work. The confusion of these small scenes
achieves crystal clarity in the ‘powerful realism’ of the shell-torn
faced with the daily deathtoll on
the Somme, Sims felt there was no
wisdom in history. The figure’s head
must be bowed and blood stain
the scroll from which she has been
reading. See MaryAnne Stevens,
ed., The Edwardians and After, The
Royal Academy 1900–1950, 1988
(Weidenfeld and Nicholson), p.146
(entry by Helen Valentine).
[6] Speed, 1929, p.56.
[7] Alan Sims, ‘The Mind and Work
of Charles Sims’, in Charles Sims
ra, Picture Making, Technique and
Inspiration …with Critical Survey
of his Work and Life by Alan Sims,
n.d. [1935] (New Art Library, Second
Series, Seeley, Service and Co),
p.123.
[8] Quoted from Imperial War
Museum, First World War Artists,
File no.286/7, in Meirion and
Susie Harries, The War Artists,
foreground of the ‘sketch for Arras: the Old German Front Line, ,
the largest and most finely observed of all his landscapes’.⁹ The picture was slightly compressed to fit a ‘Uccello’ canvas, and painted in
tempera – effectively altering the overall colour harmonies.
Sims nonetheless declared that ‘painting from nature in tempera
is less satisfactory than painting in oil … direct oil painting for a
direct translation shows the medium at its best’ and ‘Tempera is a
medium for reverie’.¹⁰ In this case, the present oil version, ‘direct oil
painting’, catches what he referred to as the ‘emotional moment’, for,
Nature’s finest moments are fleeting … clearing up after rain, dawn,
twilight, cloud shadows over landscape – these are things to watch
and note rapidly. They are the emotional moments of nature, and are
not repeated …¹¹
1983 (Michael Joseph), p.102. The
Harries also indicate that an early
plan for the War Memorial building
that was never executed, placed
dy Cameron’s and Sims’ deserted
battlefield pictures on either side of
Sargent’s Gassed.
[9] Sims, 1935, p.123.
[10] Charles Sims, n.d., p.37.
[11] Ibid, p.36. For this reason the
illustration of the picture (opp. p.36)
contains the subtitle, ‘All landscape
is weather’.
Over the chalky craters, leafless stumps and rusting iron hangs a
storm-filled sky. Cloud shadows will indeed stroke the mutilated
terrain. Fields, forests and meadow farms would never be the same.
It is the landscape of Hieronymous Bosch.

30
Oil on canvas
25 x 30 inches (63.5 x 76.2 cm)
Signed G Clausen, lower right
provenance: With the Fine Art
Society, March 1978
exhibited: London, Royal
Academy of Arts, 1920, no. 64
literature: Royal Academy
Illustrated, 1920, p.52 (illus)
The Times, 13 May 1920, p.20

sir george clausen ra rws 1852–1944
The Turn of the Road, Sunrise, 1920
During the third year of the Great War, as he was pushing his
bicycle up Duton Hill near Dunmow in Essex, George Clausen
noticed that a cottage, then called Hillside, was up for sale. Further
enquiries eventually led to its purchase and the longed-for return
to the countryside, albeit for weekend retreats, seemed possible. For
twelve years the sixty-five year old painter had lived in St John’s
Wood and only short sojourns staying at farms around Widdington,
his former home, had been possible. Now, with a permanent base
among the country lanes he loved, his work could recommence with
renewed vigour.
The results of his purchase were however, slow to materialize. In
, armed with an Official War Artist’s permit, Clausen was commuting to the gun factory at Woolwich Arsenal. A full sketchbook
was devoted to pencil studies and notes of a huge radial crane used
in the process of manufacturing massive guns for battleships. The
subject, ‘as fine a one as I could wish to do’, was nonetheless difficult,
because ‘my point of view is rather cramped – close to a steam pipe
and hot floor’, he wrote.¹ The commission from the War Memorials
Committee, for a large ‘Uccello’ canvas,  x  inches, took much of
the following year to execute (Imperial War Museum). Then, when
it was completed he was offered a Canadian War Memorials commission to paint a further large work showing refugees ‘returning to
the re-conquered land’ and again he was off, this time to the snowcovered battlefields of Northern France in February  (Canadian
War Museum) – with the result that initial forays to Hillside were
curtailed.²
Although on a much smaller scale, Clausen’s new Essex canvases
were no less monumental and in essence they anticipate a striking
post-war phenomenon. Younger painters such as Stanley Spencer,
John and Paul Nash, and others returning from the trenches,
instinctively sought the seclusion and consolation which only the
English countryside could provide. The new dawn would rise over
fields and hedgerows; swords would be converted to plough-shares
and the peaceful rhythms of country life would return. Modernist
and metropolitan critics such as John Middleton Murry rounded
on this tendency, seeing Clausen’s work as formulaic.³ However The
Times was more supportive – finding ‘the bloom of nature’ in all the
works of , and concluding that, ‘… Mr Clausen always makes a
fresh effort … and without which the work of a master even, is dull’.
Nothing captures the prevailing mood of renewal with greater
intensity than Turn of the Road, Sunrise, shown at the Royal Academy
in .⁴ Here, a labourer astride a white farm-horse turns to speak
to a shepherd/wayfarer he has met under the canopy of a spreading
tree. Beyond them, in the morning mist, are the rounded forms of

other trees. Clausen was fond of quoting Manet’s favourite dictum
that light ‘was the principal person in a painting’.⁵ However by the
beginning of the twenties, the flicker of sunshine falling through
leaves has been replaced by a more concentrated morning glow.
Subject matter and technique were matched with an elegiac quality
that was quintessentially English. As James Laver noted,
The Essex country, which the artist made his own, is peculiarly
English, and may very appropriately be made the background for
a presentation of the typical English countryman … few parts
of the world are more suitable for a long and careful study of the
various beauties of filtered sunshine … some of Clausen’s most
recent canvases, painted very dryly, as is his manner, have all the
shimmering iridescence of mother o’ pearl.
Clausen had painted wayside conversations before in works such as
The Road to Tilty, (Leeds City Art Galleries and Museums) while
farm-horses ploughing or plodding country roads had been a favourite motif since before the turn of the century. Yet now these ingredients seemed all the more compelling. The fragmentary imagery and
swift sketching of the Impressionist years have receded in favour
of a carefully premeditated composition. Clausen was approaching
his task in the spirit of Vermeer, an artist whose work had come to
express ‘atmospheric truth’. In his Charlton lecture of  he wrote,
He is master of his method; his perception controls it, and is not, as in
the case of so many artists, controlled by or subordinated to it.
When the pattern of Clausen’s work in the s had become clear,
and the central motif of the present wayside conversation had been
echoed in works such as Gossip on the Road, (unlocated) and Sunrise
in September,  (Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull), 
Konody summed up the sequence inaugurated by the canvases of
, hailing Clausen as a ‘great poet’ who ‘knows how to stir one’s
imagination,
His pictures of rural England make the town dweller dream of
the dewy meadows at sunrise, of shady lanes in the midday heat of
a summer day, of the solemn grandeur of sunset, the blitheness of
spring and the melancholy of a misty autumn morning – of every
mood of nature … – of everything except the knowledge, the experience, the supreme skill that went into the making of these pictures.⁸

1] Clausen letter file, Imperial
War Museum, London, quoted in
Kenneth McConkey, Sir George
Clausen ra, 1852–1944, 1980
(exhibition catalogue, Tyne and
Wear Museums and Bradford
Museums), p.126.
[2] Ibid
[3] John Middleton Murry, ‘The
Academy’, The Nation, 15 May
1920, p.200. Murry’s view that ‘Mr
Clausen has gone over bag and
baggage to a formula’ was shared
by The Athenaeum (21 May 1920,
p.677), a journal which had been
hostile to Clausen since his earliest
days.
[4] Clausen dispatched the picture
to the Royal Academy on 6 April
1920, noting in his account book
that it was reserved for a Mr Harry
Ives. The sale was completed on
13 June 1920 when he received Mr
Ives’ cheque £262.10shillings.
[5] jm Gibbon, ‘Painters of Light,
An interview with George Clausen
ara’, Black and White, 8 July 1905,
p.42.
[6] James Laver, Portraits in Oil
and Vinegar, 1925 (John Castle),
p.89.
[7] George Clausen ra, ‘Vermeer
of Deft and Modern Painting (1920)’,
in Charlton Lectures on Art, 1923
(Oxford, Clarendon Press), p.67.
[8] pg Konody, ‘Art and Artists –
Sir George Clausen’s Paintings’, The
Observer, undated press cutting,
1928.

31
Charcoal on paper, 22 x 16½ inches
(56 x 42 cm)
Signed and dated, John S Sargent
1923
provenance: Gift of Lady Nancy
Astor to Robert Shaw’s partner,
Alfred Edward Goodey; thence by
descent to his brother Jack Goodey
john singer sargent ra 1856–1925
Robert Gould Shaw III in uniform, 1923
In , following his famous announcement that he was giving up
portrait painting, and would henceforth only offer charcoal drawings
to prospective sitters, John Singer Sargent’s popularity remained
undimmed. In the last fifteen years of his life, it is estimated that
the painter produced over  portrait drawings, capturing the most
distinguished personalities of his day.¹
Unlike his rivals J.J. Shannon and John Lavery, who only sketched
with oil paint on small canvases, Sargent made separate preparatory
drawings for larger compositions throughout his career, enabling us
to catch something of the immediacy of his thought.² Fusains, swift
charcoal drawings, had been a consistent feature of his work since the
portrait of Edwin Austin Abbey was used to illustrate an article by
Henry James in Harper’s Monthly.³ Other celebrated sitters followed
between  and  – Dame Ethel Smyth, Gertrude Kingston,
 Yeats, and the Russian dancers, Karsavina and Nijinsky among
them. By this time the format and style of what Sargent referred to
as ‘mug shots’, was well established. As James Lomax observed,
The bravura which distinguishes his oil portraits is no less evident in
the drawings. The speed and vitality of his technique, the seizing and
intensifying of essential characteristics, the immediate translation of
the thing seen, are common to both.⁴
In  Viscountess Astor who had posed for one of Sargent’s most
distinguished Edwardian portraits returned to his studio for one
of the fashionable ‘charcoals’ (National Portrait Gallery, London).⁵
It is likely that she commissioned the portrait of her son, Robert
Gould Shaw , at the same time. Gould Shaw (–) was
the son from her first marriage to Robert Gould Shaw , the
wealthy Bostonian offspring of an American Civil War hero. Part
of a benighted generation which saw its fathers in arms and swiftly
consigned to the Western Front, Gould Shaw was brought up in the
opulent Astor household. A handsome alcoholic who in  was
convicted of homosexuality, he may have been indirectly responsible
for the crusading role adopted by his step-father, as proprietor of
The Observer.
In  Gould Shaw  was serving in the Household Cavalry.
His uniform, thought to be that of the Blues and Royals, provided
Sargent with rigorous geometric patterns that complement the crisp
features of the young man’s face. No dramatization was necessary to
express the troubled soul behind the military mask.

[1] Trevor Fairbrother, ‘Introduction’,
in Sargent Portrait Drawings, 42
Works by John Singer Sargent,
1983, (New York, Dover Publications
Inc), n.p.
[2] See for instance, Edward
J Nygren, introd., John Singer
Sargent Drawings from the
Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1983
(exhibition catalogue, Washington
dc, Smithsonian Institution
Travelling Exhibition Service).
[3] Abbey’s portrait (Yale
University Art Gallery), was drawn in
1888 and reproduced the following
year in Henry James, ‘Our Artists
in Europe’, Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine, vol.79, June 1889, p.55.
[4] James Lomax and Richard
Ormond, John Singer Sargent and
the Edwardian Age, 1979 (exhibition
catalogue, Leeds, London and
Detroit), p.71.
[5] For further reference see
Richard Ormond and Elaine
Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, The
Later Portraits, Complete Paintings
Volume iii, 2003 (Yale University
Press), pp.208–11, for Mrs Waldorf
Astor, 1908–9, National Trust,
Cliveden, (no.554).

index
References are to catalogue numbers
William Gordon Burn Murdoch 
The Fine Art Society would like to thank
Professor Kenneth McConkey for writing this catalogue
and Robert Dalrymple for the design.
Frederick Cayley Robinson 
Sir George Clausen 
Stanhope Alexander Forbes 
George James Frampton 
Spencer Frederick Gore 
Sir Herbert James Gunn 
Edward Atkinson Hornel 
Augustus Edwin John , 
Sir Gerald Festus Kelly 
Laura Knight 
Sir John Lavery 
James Pittendrigh Macgillivray 
Paul Nash 
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson 
Sir William Nicholson 
Published by The Fine Art Society
for the exhibition The Edwardians: The Golden Years
before the War held at 148 New Bond Street, London w1
from 7 to 23 December 2011
Designed & typeset in Caslon and Sweet Sans by Dalrymple
Printed in Northern Ireland by Nicholson & Bass
Front cover: detail from Sir William Nicholson
The Downs, Rottingdean, 1909 [no.17]
Frontispiece: detail from Sir William Orpen
Miss Dorothy Stiles [no.20]
Back cover: detail from Sir James Jebusa Shannon
Christabel Frampton and her son Meredith, 1901 [no.1]
the fine art society
Dealers since 1876
148 New Bond Street · London w1s 2jt
+44 (0)20 7629 5116 · [email protected]
www.faslondon.com
Sir William Orpen 
James Ferrier Pryde 
Mabel Pryde –
John Singer Sargent 
Charles Sims 
Sir James Jebusa Shannon 
Walter Richard Sickert 
William Strang 
Algernon Talmage 
Henry Tonks 
Henry Scott Tuke 

the fine art society
Dealers since 1876
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