TWENTY TWENTY: LONDON

WALTER GREAVES  (1846-1930)

OLD CHELSEA, THE LAST REGATTA, C.1871

signed W Greaves, lower right, and inscribed 'Old Chelsea's Last Regatta by Walter Greaves 525 Fulham Road, Walham Green', in the margin; mounted on original board

oil and gouache over etching

26.1 x 55.2 cm    10 1/4 x 21 3/4 inches

Exhibited: The Fine Art Society, Spring, 2000 (27) London; The Fine Art Society, Chelsea Reach, 2010 (2) London

This picture shows the last iteration of the traditional river festival of the Chelsea regatta which came to an end in 1871 with the construction of the Embankment. The regatta was the event of the year in old Chelsea village. Greaves described with great excitement his impressions of the day, 'what with guns firing, flags flying, bands playing and the immense crowd of people, Chelsea was pretty lively…This regatta, like the other river races made a remarkably artistic display of colour especially as it took place on a fine summer’s day, with blue skies and white clouds.'¹

Greaves’ response to the regatta begat several versions: an oil, now in in the collection of Manchester City Art Gallery; his largest and finest etching under the tutelage of James Abbott McNeill Whistler; and a watercolour of the same view, but without the crowd. Both the oil and etching combine his charming, primitive style with the meticulous detail of Whistler’s Thames Set etchings. Unlike his earlier, untutored depiction of the boat race from the 1860s, now in the Tate collection, the result is one of Greaves’ most accomplished and complex works capturing ‘a vigorous, happy moment’.²

Greaves’ life was subsumed by the Thames, Chelsea Reach and river life. Born at number 31 Cheyne Walk, his father was a boatbuilder, waterman and boatman to the artist William Turner. Later Greaves’ connection with the industrial river-land, having trained as a shipwright and boatman, would facilitate his work and friendship with Whistler. Greaves and his brother met Whistler in 1863, together they introduced the artist to the sights of the Thames and later became his studio assistants and proteges.

1.Walter Greaves quoted in Tom Pocock, Chelsea Reach, (London 1970) p.89

2. Pocock, p.90

CHRISTOPHER DRESSER (1834-1904) (attributed designer)

HUKIN & HEATH, ENGLAND  (maker)

CLARET JUG, 1892

stamped 'jth/jhm, Birmingham', date letter 's', Reg No. 187357

sterling silver and porcelain

height 40 cm    15 ¾ inches

Christopher Dresser’s official visit to Japan in 1876 as a representative of the South Kensington Museum marked a turning point in his practice. He arrived December 1876 and stayed for four months during which time he visited 68 potteries, 100 temples, amassed more than 1000 photographs and selected objects for import by Tiffany of New York, and Londos of London. On his return to England, Dresser embarked on a frenetic period of activity. He started to design silver and electroplate for Hukin & Heath of Birmingham and, in 1879, he began designing for their rivals James Dixon and Sons of Sheffield. Most importantly, in Japan he learnt to admire simplicity and restraint and thus his design output from this point seemingly anticipates Modernism in European design. 

This small collection of Dresser’s later designs includes a previously unrecorded claret jug unusually made from Coalport porcelain yet is similar to several elongated glass and silver claret jugs he designed for Hukin & Heath in the 1880s. Alongside this is a rare sterling silver tea set designed for Elkingtons and a classic bon-bon dish.

CLARE ATWOOD (1866–1962)

DAWN BREAKING AT OLD BILLINGSGATE, 1910

signed and dated

oil on canvas

91.4 x 76.2 cm    36 x 30.5 inches

Provenance: Private collection, USA

Exhibited: Tate Britain, Queer British Art 1861-1967, London, 5 April-1 October 2017

Early one morning in 1910, from high in the rafters at London’s Billingsgate Fish Market, Clare Atwood painted the start of the working day. Atwood deftly captures the feverish movement of the fishermen and market vendors, who tussle in half-light, at close-quarters, beneath the towering industrial architecture and monumental fluted columns. The vertiginous perspective and framing of the drama below allude to the theatre. Atwood used a similar viewpoint in her painting of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree rehearsing 'Henry VIII' at His Majesty's Theatre, now in the V&A Museum, which was completed in the same year as this. The atmosphere and playful perspective also share the spirit of her contemporaries, most notably Sickert.

On the one hand Atwood’s training and artistic career is a familiar success story, albeit exceptional for a woman artist. She studied at the Slade under Professor Frederick Brown and Henry Tonks, on leaving she exhibited regularly with the New English Art Club where she became a member in 1912. Atwood’s work was also accepted by the RA, where she exhibited in 1907, 1908 and 1909. She was one of the few women artists to receive official commissions during the First World War, including a commission from the Imperial War Museum of Victoria Station and Devonshire House. In her personal life she was more radical for the time. After the war she cohabited in a same-sex ménage à trois with the actress and theatre director Edith ‘Edy’ Craig and Christabel Marshall, the suffragette, playwright and author, who took the name ‘Chris St. John’. Living in the heart of the West End theatre scene, Atwood, Craig and Marshall were highly social and culturally engaged. They hosted the first gatherings of The Pioneer Players, a Suffragist theatre troop and socialised with the literary Bloomsbury Group, especially Vita Sackville-West. Despite being highly regarded by her peers, her shy character, gender and unconventional social life as a queer, polyamorous woman perhaps cost her the critical acclaim she deserves.

WALTER RICHARD SICKERT  (1860–1942)

TIPPERARY, 1914

signed and dated

oil on canvas

51 x 40.5 cm    20 x 16 inches

Provenance: Martin Oliphant; Sotheby’s 26 November 1969 (346); Rutland Gallery; Mrs Dudley Samuel; Her sale Christie’s 27.3.97 (36); Private collection, UK

Literature: Wendy Baron, Sickert, (Phaidon 1973) no.352, g.248; Wendy Baron & Richard Shone, Sickert Paintings, (Yale1992) p.244, pg.169; Wendy Baron, Sickert Paintings & Drawings, (Yale 2006) pp.427–28, no.447

Sickert made a number of paintings and drawings of a young model, Emily Powell, playing the grand piano in his studio during the first winter of World War I. They are informally and loosely painted in thin washes of oil. His model was the daughter of his studio landlord and a chorus girl at the Royal Opera House who he nick-named ‘Chicken’. He titled several of these paintings, including an example in the Tate collection, after the popular marching song 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary'.

As Baron suggests, this could be the painting Sickert referred to in a letter to his close friend Miss Ethel Sands saying 'Chicken has been playing the Contes d’Hoffman while I have been painting her reflection at the piano'. Where other studies show only the pianist, this work employs a highly inventive composition which depicts the actual and reflected worlds side by side. These parallel realities divide gendered roles and spaces in wartime: the female figure is at leisure, in the interior, whilst the male figure is a soldier in uniform looking out to the public arena.

From the 1850s improvements in technology enhanced mirror glass’ clarity and quality and lowered production costs. Consequently, its presence in everyday urban life is more pervasive. By the late nineteenth century, the mirror motif permeates avant-garde art starting most notably with Edouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Few artists, however, use the mirror as a pictorial trope as frequently as Sickert. Like Manet’s famous example, Sickert employs the use of a mirror to create truth-bending compositional effects that verge on the uncanny. Examples include Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall, The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery and The P.S. Wings in an O.P. Mirror. They splice through the canvas offering up two worlds: the viewer and the performer, the subject and the object, reality and the reflected world. On top of this is Sickert the artist, once removed, as the ultimate observer.

JOSEPH EDWARD SOUTHALL (1861-1944)

BRIGS ON THE FOWEY ESTUARY, C.1919

oil on panel

35.5 x 20 cm    14 x 8 inches

Provenance: Lady Head; The Fine Art Society, London; Mr and Mrs Alan Fortunoff; The Fine Art Society, London, 2005; 

Private collection, UK

Exhibited: The Fine Art Society, Spring, London, 1989 (41); The Fine Art Society and Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, Sixty Works by Joseph Southall from the Fortunoff Collection, London, 2005 (25)

The painting of Mixtow, a hamlet on the Fowey Estuary upstream of the town of Fowey, is where Joseph Southall frequently stayed over several decades. Though always stylised in his approach, Southall here pushes his artistic license to the full in respect of the Cornish landscape and the scale of the china-clay carrying sailing ships. The effect is whimsical and verging on surreal. Some of the artist’s most celebrated works were painted around the Estuary, many now to be found in public collections including The Old Seaport in Manchester Art Gallery.

The work is a rare painting in oil by the artist, who dedicated himself to the use of tempera inspired by early Italian renaissance art. In 1901 Southall was a founder member of the Society of Painters in Tempera, whose members also included Walter Crane and Roger Fry. As well as aiming to restore morality to art, the group yearned for a ‘purity of vision and form’ that was lacking in the more popular Impressionist movement.¹ In spite of painting being in oil rather than tempera, the picture retains the crisp delicacy and chalky quality so familiar in Southall’s work.

1.Hannah Spooner, Pure painting: Joseph Southall, Christiana Herringham and the Tempera Revival, The British Art Journal , (Summer 2003) Vol.4, No.2 p.49

BERTRAM NICHOLLS (1883-1974)

A COTTAGE IN TUSCANY, 1924

signed and dated

oil on canvas

38.5 x 32.8 cm    15 ¼ x 12 7/8 inches

As a student, Bertram Nicholls excelled academically, however, upon leaving school he showed no inclination to do anything except 'mess about with paints'. He enrolled at The Slade in 1908, where he learnt the discipline of drawing but found that he couldn’t relate to most of the fashionable ideas that were being taught. During the war, Nicholls served in the Royal Flying Corps, but lost no time getting back to his painting following the Armistice. He began an exhaustive study of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ technical methods and experiments and when, in 1920, Brighton Art Gallery hosted a Richard Wilson exhibition, Nicholls travelled there almost every day.

His early works are a demonstration of these classical techniques, and he was soon recognised at the Royal Academy in London. His first solo success came at Barbizon House in 1924. The exhibition of twenty-seven oils sold out before the opening night. The pictures of the exhibition were split evenly between England and Italy. The Italian subjects were mostly produced in Volterra, a mountaintop town in Tuscany, which Nicholls had visited in the spring prior to the exhibition. Frank Rutter observed that ‘in these the artist revealed his deep feeling for the beauty of ruins and Italian architecture as well as that sense of style which dignified all his work.’ He would go on to have three further exhibitions at Barbizon House, as well as exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy and the Manchester Academy of Fine Art.

JULIAN TREVELYAN  (1910-1988)

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, ITALY, 1930

signed

oil on board

32 x 40.5 cm    12 5/8 x 16 inches

Gregarious by nature, painting for Julien Trevelyan was as much about the experience of people and places as it was about artistic accomplishment and financial success. After completing his studies at Cambridge, he travelled widely throughout Europe visiting Holland and much of northern Germany before heading south to discover the Mediterranean and country familiar to him only through the work of Italian masters such as Piero della Francesca, Sassetta, and Giovanni di Paolo.

Trevelyan recalled the experience of the time he had spent at the Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy, with his father and his friend the art historian, Bernard Berenson: ‘I remember still the excitement of my first arrival in a Mediterranean landscape; I had dreamt about it and seen it already to some extent through the eyes of Cezanne and Van Gogh, but the reality exceeded all my expectations. In contrast to the fir covered wastes of Holland and North Germany, which were all that I had so far experienced of foreign travel, here was a land where one could feel the very bones and structure. A stream was a real thing that could be seen rising in a cleft in the rocks, and on the rolling plains the red earth receded in vistas of little rounded hummock.’¹

Berenson was a friend but as a connoisseur and scholar of early Italian Renaissance painting he became a vital mentor to Trevelyan. He taught him to appreciate the landscape and introduced him into a new way of seeing the world through fresh eyes.

1. Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days, (Macgibbon & Kee, 1957) p.33

LILL TSCHUDI  (1911-2004)

IN THE CIRCUS, conceived 1932

signed and titled in pencil; numbered 20/50, from the USA edition 1950

linocut

24 x 26 cm    9 7/16 x 10 1/4 inches

Reference: Coppel lt23

Exhibited: The Fine Art Society, The Best Shop in London Part II, London, 2001 (134)

In late 1929, at the age of eighteen, the Swiss born Lill Tschudi moved to London to enrol at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Her spell there was short, lasting little more than six months, however she was tenacious in her studies and prolific in her output, producing over 350 linocuts during her lifetime. She studied linocutting under Claude Flight, who had run the school with Iain Macnab since 1925. Flights formal and abstract visual language was an important influence on Tschudi’s printing practice, which she had first seen in the work of the Austrian born Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, whose energetic studies of animals in motion had a clear impact on her own work.

Like Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power, her contemporaries at the Grosvenor, Tschudi’s lino cuts typically depict vibrant scenes of sporting events, busy London street scenes, circuses and gymnasts.  These works capture the dynamism and movement that is associated with the Vorticists. Although the Vorticist movement had grown in Britain during the interwar period, it had by that point diffused its more radical doctrinal approach to modern art, owing to the First World War, but its aesthetic influences were still largely appreciated well into the 1930s. Tschudi left for Paris after leaving the school, but maintained a constant connection with Britain throughout her life, exhibiting and selling most of her work with the help of Flight, who remained her close friend throughout. 

JESSICA DISMORR (1885-1939)

MOTHER AND CHILD, c.1932

oil on gesso board

61 x 47 cm    24 x 18 ½ inches

Jessica Dismorr came from a large and wealthy family that was also rich in artistic ability. As a result, she and her four sisters, were given the freedom to develop their creative talents like few people of her time; studying at the Slade School of Art and going on to study at the private Académie de La Palette, Paris. Amongst the many influential teachers there at the time were the artists Jean Metzinger, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and J.D. Fergusson. Despite none of them belonging to a movement at the time, their practice was definitively post-impressionist, and undoubtedly impacted on the young Dismorr.

Dismorr enjoyed an active social life and had no desire to settle down: from an early age she decided against having children. In later years, Dismorr came to feel that she had 'taken the good things, security, good food, clothes, the absence of daily bread-winning, without sufficient thought, without giving an adequate return'. This perspective makes the present work all the more poignant, as an updated depiction of the embrace between mother and child that extends beyond the traditional iconography of the Madonna and child. Here the mother with her firm jaw and physical power is almost a precursor to the ‘We Can Do It’ pin ups which would later follow the outbreak of the Second World War. It is a portrait of female individuality and strength, brought about from a life of independence.

MARCEL LAJOS BREUER (1902-1981) (designer)

ISOKON FURNITURE COMPANY  (manufacturer)

ISOKON DINING CHAIR, 1936

birch ply with Queensland walnut laminate

75 x 41.4 x 51.5 cm    29 7/8 x 16 1/4 x 20 1/4 inches

Literature: David Joel, The Adventure of British Furniture 1851-1951, (Ernest Benn Limited 1953), illus. p.210; Derek Ostergard, Bent Wood and Metal Furniture 1850-1946, (University of Washington Press 1953); Dunn / Mantz, Gerald Summers: Furniture For the Concrete Age, (Assembly books 2012); Leyla Daybelge & Magnus Englund, Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, (Pavilion Books 2019); Alistair Ian Grieve, Isokon For Ease, For ever, (Isokon Books 2004) p.35

This chair was one of the first commissions Marcel Breuer received after emigrating from Germany in 1936. Having studied and taught at the Bauhaus school of art, Breuer won the commission through the school’s founder Walter Gropius, by then head of design for Isokon owned by British furniture entrepreneur, Jack Pritchard. Breuer was asked to translate some of his earlier designs in metal into plywood, the soft forms and warm colour of which suited the British Modernist taste. The plywood version of his aluminium chaise, the Isokon Long Chair, went on to become an icon of twentieth-century furniture design.

The Isokon dining chair, however, has no precedent in Breuer’s earlier work. It was born out of a desire to construct the ultimate minimalist chair but due to the difficulty of manufacturing eventually required nine separate elements. Despite this, the chair remained very fragile and thus few survived the test of time. The chairs were said to be used in the bar and restaurant, Isobar, of Jack Pritchard’s Isokon Building, Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, Britain’s first modernist building designed by architect Wells Coates. The chair can be found in several international museums, including two examples in the V&A collection.

GERALD SUMMERS (1899-1967) (designer)

MAKERS OF SIMPLE FURNITURE (manufacturer)

BATHROOM MIRROR, c.1939

plywood, sycamore, mirror glass

85 x 74 x 13 cm    33 ½ x 29 1/8 x 5 1/8 inches

Literature: Dunn / Mantz, Gerald Summers: Furniture for the Concrete Age, (Assembly books, Reprint 2020) p.367; Martha Deese, Shaped for Purpose, (Graham Foundation 2020)

What is singular and differentiating about Summers' output, is how he constantly ennobled the ordinary. He saw beauty in the everyday, creating many ingenious re-interpretations of mirrors, cake trays, towel rails, stationery boxes, sewing baskets, bookends, magazine stands and even coal scuttles. This recently discovered plywood mirror is another example of the marriage between sculpture and utility in Summers’ work.

The exceptionally tight curve of the cabinet was made possible due to the development of a new plywood variant ‘aeroplane ply’. Specifically developed in the aircraft industry and advanced in its thinness and flexibility. The seemingly impossibly curved end of the mirror highlights the use of aeroplane ply. The scale of the mirror is unusually large for its modest function and each element is carefully considered down to the screws and the use of sycamore. The mirror will be included in the revised catalogue raisonne Gerald Summers: Furniture for the Concrete Age by Dunn / Mantz - a comprehensive, annotated listing of all known pieces of furniture by Gerald Summers and Makers of Simple Furniture.

JOHN MINTON (1917-1957)

PORTRAIT OF ERIC VERRICO, 1947-8

signed, inscribed 'John Minton Italian Boy, Oil 1947-8', verso

oil on canvas

107 x 82 cm    42 x 32 inches

Provenance: The Lefevre Galleries, London; Collection of Muriel Belcher; Collection of Basil Wright Esq;  Christie’s, London, 13 December 1961, as Portrait of Eric Verigo (lot 238);  Christie’s, London, 26 May 1995 (lot 8); Private collection UK; The Fine Art Society, London, 2007; Where bought by current owner

Exhibited: New Burlington Galleries, London, Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, Arts Council Festival of Britain, British Painting 1925-1950: First Anthology, May-July 1951, as The Italian Boy (45); Tate Gallery, London; travelled to Towner Art Gallery and Museum, Eastbourne; Blackburn Art Gallery, Blackbur; Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham; Bristol City Art Gallery, Bristol; Victoria Street Art Gallery, Nottingham, Arts Council commemorative exhibition, John Minton 1917-1957, An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations, October 1958-April 1959 (12)

Portrait of Eric Verrico is a major work from a series of portraits of the sitter executed by John Minton between 1945-48. This portrait has rarely been exhibited in the last five decades since the artist’s Commemorative Exhibition in 1958, when it was in the possession of the notorious Soho club owner, Muriel Belcher. The work is concerned with the transience of youth and beauty, a significant theme of Minton’s oeuvre. This piece is comparable in scale and quality to some of the artist’s best portraits now held in museums, and is a particularly fine example of Minton’s output in years following the end of the Second World War including Portrait Group, 1945 (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel); Cornish Boy at a Window, 1948 (Government Art Collection, London); Boy in a Landscape (Eric Verrico), 1948 (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter) and Robert Hunt, 1947 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).

Minton’s portraits were always of people he was close to and often of those he was attracted to. In a 1952 lecture, the artist explained: ‘I do not believe you can paint any old thing…It will only happen if it is really done with love.’ Eric Verrico was one amongst a group of young people in Minton’s expansive and diverse social circle, known as ‘Johnny’s Circus’, who were painted by him in the post-war years. He became close to a number of his students whilst teaching and through his paintings of them he struggles with his legitimacy as a figurative artist and his desire to remain relevant to a younger generation. The portraits he produced from 1946 to 1949 are a potent demonstration of portraiture as anxious expression. The self-reflection of the sitters and the ‘touching and melancholy impermanence of all physical beauty’ can be read as autobiographical. In this work he has even manipulated Verrico’s facial features to look closer to his own.

WILLIAM SCOTT (1913-1989)

FISH ON A PLATE (ALSO KNOWN AS 'FISH'), 1951

initialled 'WS' in the stone; printed by Millers Press, privately published in an edition of

lithograph

38 x 49.7 cm    15 x 19 ½ inches

sheet 48.4 x 57.3 cm    19 1/8 x 22 5/8 inches

Provenance: Reba and Dave Williams, 2004

Literature: British Council, Out of Print, British Printmaking 1946-76, (London 1994) illus. p.26, (26)

William Scott is an artist with a trademark: the black iron skillet. Other culinary motifs associated with the artist were fish and pears. In 1959 aware of his indelible connection with the frying pan he dismissed their importance. 'I think these things are completely uninteresting. That's why I paint them. They convey nothing. There is no meaning to them at all, but they are a means to making a picture.’ Much later he admitted a more intimate relationship with them describing them as ‘the symbols of the life I knew best’. Both the skillet and the fish that they cooked were images of his home and childhood in Enniskillen, where every household possessed such a pan to eat locally caught fish.¹

Scott was a master at depicting the simplicity of objects. His work from the 1950s tantalisingly treads the line between figuration and abstraction, eventually veering off into total abstraction. In this lithograph, even more so than the painting of the same subject, he has satisfyingly simplified the forms of the still life to the bear minimum. Only printed in an unsigned edition of 20 and published privately, this print is very rare.

1.Sarah Whitfield, Beyond the frying pan, in Irish Arts Review, (September - November 2013) p. 98