Joseph Wright of Derby

The city of Derby is one of England’s great railway cities. Another claim to fame is the local 18th. century artist, Joseph Wright, whose name is rarely separated from the appendage “of Derby”. The city art gallery has a fine collection of his work and when I travelled to Derby in early August to visit the celebratory exhibition for the bi-centenary of railways, I found time to fit in a long held ambition with a visit to the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Wright (1734-1797) was a successful London-trained conventional portrait painter with a well connected clientele ranging from landowning baronets to the emergent industrialist class. His enduring fame arises from his mastery of extremes of light and shadow, in the service of visual drama, something he explored in some early portraits but brought to triumphant fruition in two indisputable masterpieces in his maturity - “A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery”, (1766) and “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump”, (1768), the former is in the Derby museum, the latter is in the National Gallery.

Wright was living in a place and time increasingly shaped by rapid developments in science and technology. A few miles to the north in Cromford, Richard Arkwright was pioneering industrial mass production in a water powered mill. Via his acquaintance with Erasmus Darwin, a Derby resident, Wright was connected with Birmingham’s Lunar Society where the great and good debated the philosophical challenges of the day. This fervid intellectual climate is where Wright found his own subjects celebrating the hunger for knowledge and the triumph of science over superstition. The Age of Enlightenment literally portrayed as light conquering darkness. Wright had followed his own impulse to make a major statement about the age he was living in, his sense of excitement at the pace of scientific advance, in painted form - reflecting a sensibility far ahead of his time.

The centrepiece of the Derby display is the Orrery painting. A small audience observes a demonstration of a device designed to illustrate the planetary orbits in the solar system. The authority figures - the ‘Natural Philosopher’ and his assistant strike poses at the top of the composition but our eyes are drawn into the centre where two small children in the full glare of the hidden candlelight do their best to comprehend. Opposite them is another observer, seen only as a dark silhouette, while three other figures complete the cast of characters. A secondary drama is the disposition of shadows cast by the orbital strips as they flicker from the sleeve of the note-taker to the cheek of the young man supporting his forehead with extended thumb and forefinger. The artist gives his full attention to every  visible surface and texture while conveying the earnest sobriety of his adult audience. The features of the children are tenderly expressed and there’s a certain charm in the slender female hand resting next to the chubbier hand of her young but portly companion.

Was there some latent snobbery at work in stressing Wright’s Derby origins?  We don’t get to hear about Joshua Reynolds of Exeter or Thomas Gainsborough of Sudbury. Wright tried his hand in Liverpool and Bath but it was his decision to return to Derby that came to signify his provincialism. Early in his career he spent more than a year in Italy, mostly in Naples where he fell under the spell of Mount Vesuvius, painting the spectacular lava flows and volcanic eruptions by night and day.  Landscape was a recurring interest, often favouring nocturnal subjects over the full light of day. Cultivating an air of respectability would have been vital for Wright’s portrait business but this might have concealed a restless intelligence that led him to identify with the spirit of intellectual enquiry that typified his times.

 

Paintings from Penlee House Museum, Penzance

We begin with a flatly painted image of a pint of beer in a straight glass resting on an otherwise empty table in the grip of a sturdy hand - it’s a factual exercise and nothing more.  Attached to the hand is Robert Morson Hughes, a fellow artist and associate of the painter Harold Knight - the year is 1915, the First World War is in progress and Knight, a conscientious objector, is about to be put to work as a farm labourer.  The subject, Hughes, was a Lamorna based painter of mainly topographical subjects. Here he has the air of a country landowner in a slightly oversized suit, from beneath the downturned brim of his hat he stares with suspicion out of the painting. Knight has conveyed strength of character and a sense of presence in a stolid, unemphatic manner.

Harold Knight (1873-1953), Portrait of Robert Morson Hughes (c 1915)

Robert Morson Hughes (1873-1953), Carn Boscawen (1928?)

Visits to local museums are always a pleasure and Penlee House Museum is a fine example that has the dual function of providing a lively overview of local history with a comprehensive collection of interesting paintings by locally based artists with historically national reputations.  The core of the collection is made up of painters active in the 19th. and early 20th. century, working in the Penzance - Newlyn region of Cornwall.  Aesthetically conservative, averse to experimentation and inheritors of a tradition of realism that goes back to Courbet (as diluted by Bastien-Lepage), these painters built up an impressive visual archive of the minutiae of Victorian and Edwardian daily life in West Cornwall alongside a comprehensive record of the abundant varied landscape and coastal scenery in the county. Many had worked in the art colonies of Brittany and become committed to painting en plein-air but Impressionism remained a step too far.

Laura Knight (1877-1970),  My Lady of the Rocks  ND

Although this body of work has come to be regarded as an essential component of the Cornish cultural identity it’s notable that many aspects of that identity were, for the most part, studiously ignored.  While the fishing industry was much celebrated for its pictorial values, the world of mining, heavy engineering and new technologies got little or no attention - the only exceptions being quarrying, a reliably popular landscape subject and the railways that became a regular source of income for Stanhope Forbes.  All this despite Cornwall having a strong claim to being the global birthplace of steam power. The Celtic heritage that separated Cornwall from the Anglo-Saxon territory east of the Tamar likewise went unremarked along with the great Neolithic assemblages of menhirs and stone circles, at least until the 1940s when Ithell Colquhoun turned up in Lamorna.  Most of these painters were drawn to Cornwall from elsewhere in the country and many formed strong personal links with the indigenous community, their interests didn’t encompass the profound sense of Cornish exceptionalism held by the local intelligentsia. 

Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947), Abbey Slip (1921)

Laura Knight  (1877-1970), Spring (1916)

This is not to undervalue the contribution that these artists have made to the popular image of Cornwall as a special place.  Their brushes may have been preoccupied with surface values but by virtue of sheer representational brilliance their work acquired lasting value.  Laura Knight and Stanhope Forbes stand apart in the quality and consistency of their work though Knight’s paintings have a bravura and vitality that often make Forbes look pedestrian by comparison. By the time Laura and Harold Knight moved to Newlyn in 1907, Forbes was well established as the leader of the Newlyn painters where he’d been active since 1884.  The Knights settled in Lamorna but were soon accepted into Forbes’s circle.  While Harold’s taciturn nature caused him to hold back, Laura played a full and active part in the social life of the artistic community.  For his part, Forbes was especially impressed by Laura’s paintings.  Most Newlyn painters stayed loyal to their locality a few shuttled back and forth to St. Ives where new ideas were more readily accepted.  Forbes reacted with disproportionate hostility when Whistler and Sickert spent time in St. Ives. This went both ways - Sickert especially loathed the paintings of Newlyn’s Frank Bramley whose A Hopeless Dawn was rapturously received by an audience hungry for pathos at the Royal Academy (RA) in 1888.

Norman Garstin  (1847-1926),  The Rain it Raineth Every Day (1889) 

Most of the Newlyners were reluctant to stray far from their patch - an exception was Irish born Norman Garstin whose global wanderings set him apart. His travels took him to Africa, North America and all over Europe and inspired him to lead groups of students on sketching trips to continental art centres.  In 1889 his major painting of a rainswept Penzance seafront (The Rain It Raineth Every Day), was rejected by the RA for being ‘too French’ with its subtle tonal observations.  Further humiliation lay in wait - when Garstin later presented the painting to Penzance Town Council it was hidden away for fear it would deter visitors.  Garstin’s vindication may have been a long time coming but today’s visitors have voted it their favourite painting in the museum.  A future post will look at how  local history is served in the museum 

Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch  (1869-1955),  The Quiet of our Valley (1940)

Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch  (1869-1955),  trio of landscapes, Lamorna Valley in Summer (right)

Frank Gascoigne Heath  (1873-1938),  A Game of Cut-throat Euchre  (1909)

Frank Gascoigne Heath  (1873-1938),  The Little Maid (1923)

Charles Simpson  (1885-1971),  Dying Light, Carn Barges  ND

Stanley Gardiner (1888-1952),  The Old Quay, Lamorna (Upper), Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch (1869-1955), Lamorna Cove (Lower)

Harold Harvey (1874-1941), Laura and Paul Jewill Hill  (1915)

Frank Bramley (1857-1915),  Eyes and No Eyes (1887)

 

Art of Society 1900-1945, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin

Z VIII, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy (1924)

Of all the paintings in this exhibition, this was the one that held my attention the longest.  Its connection with the exhibition theme was not immediately obvious but it was a singular point of calm in a line-up of loud and assertive paintings demanding serious scrutiny.  Looking at an abstract arrangement of related geometric forms in muted colours  makes it own demands - principally that the viewer is prepared to accept its legitimacy as a work of art and not worry about the absence of figuration.  While there’s not much of a case to be made for overlapping and intersecting semi-transparent shapes as windows into the human condition they can be a rich source of visual pleasure when choreographed with sensitivity and precision. All his career Moholy-Nagy was a restless experimenter and this is one of a series of related compositions painted in his second year of teaching at the Bauhaus where he replaced Johannes Itten who together with Paul Klee represented the spiritual tendency of the early years Bauhaus.  Moholy-Nagy had no such tendencies and took full advantage of the opportunity to button himself into his boiler suit and get to work in his studio.  This painting comes at the high point of his interest in Constructivism-inspired composition - he would continue to explore his favoured themes (transparency, asymmetry, dynamism, spatial ambiguity, transformation) in photography, collage, assemblage, typography and graphic design.  Constructivists sought to integrate their practice into state-led programmes to advance social progress and eliminate inequality which finally connects us back to the exhibition theme.

Stadt, Otto Moller (1921)

Elsewhere in the exhibition, which was drawn from the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie, artists could be seen engaging with major themes - Weimar-era decadence, Prussian militarism, socialist utopianism, horrors of modern warfare, dehumanising labour. This is a personal selection of paintings that caught my eye - Expressionist paintings are given short shrift, ships, trams and trains keep turning up and there’s a bias towards unfamiliar (on my part) material.  It was interesting to see so many disturbing visions of the not so distant past, a period whose first hand witnesses are almost all deceased.  And a comfort in the sense that the visions of the artists who shared in the collective experience of the chain of catastrophes that stains the period under review, still have a part to play in the avoidance of a reprise.

Walter Spies, The Carousel, 1937

Natalia Goncharova, The Clock

Upper is Leger, lower is Edmund Kesting, Rote Sichel, 1927

Otto Dix

Heinrich Vogeler

Heinrich Vogeler

Heinrich Vogeler

Paul Fuhrmann, Am Bahnhof (1930)

Oskar Nerlinger, The Early Train (1928)

Franz Radziwill, Der Hafen II (1930) 

Christian Schad

Franz Radziwill,  Flandern (Wohin in dieser Welt?), 1940-50

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Field Grey Creates Dividends (1931/1961)

Lyonel Feininger

 Carlo Mense, Double Portrait (Rabbi with Young Woman) 1926

Great Railway Stations No. 21, Penzance

The westward rails run out at Penzance, there’s nowhere else to go except back.  After 326 miles from Paddington it’s the end of the line. A first station opened in 1852 and in 1859 it was connected to London with the opening of the Royal Albert Bridge across the River Tamar. In 1876 a new and larger station was built and for a century or so, the Cornish Main Line was the first choice of travellers and holiday makers heading for the resorts of the far South West. When traffic declined sharply as passengers piled into family cars for the journey west, rail managers responded by cutting services and track work to balance the books.  Today’s station is substantially the layout built by the GWR in 1937 but despite all the rebuilds and extensions nobody ever thought it worth providing the sort of grand entrance its importance might have merited.  The single modest entrance to the cramped concourse is via the side of the building.  Only the overall roof offers any sense of occasion.  If the Thatcher government had implemented the recommendations of the Serpell Report in 1983 there would now be no railway lines in Cornwall (or Devon and Somerset for that matter).

The overview below of Penzance Station approximates the vantage point of Stanhope Forbes when he painted "A Terminus in the West" in 1925 when it was a 2 platform station. The GWR commissioned Forbes to make paintings of Cornish subjects for publicity purposes and the Penzance station painting is now in the collection of the National Railway Museum. Forbes was born in Dublin where his father was manager of the Midland Great Western Railway of Ireland suggesting an affinity with railway subjects. He also produced poster designs for the LMS in his characteristically robust realism style, all of which brought some relief from the pilchards and fisherfolk.  Penzance is a station to be valued for its remoteness, its individuality - the only overnight sleeper train to run in England terminates here - and the blunt fact that there’s no further to go.

 

Tom Phillips (1937-2022)

 I can’t let the death of Tom Phillips pass without a tribute to his magnum opus, The Postcard Century, published in 2000 and still widely available.  More than any other anthologiser of postcards, Tom Phillips dived deep into the mysteries of his subject. This survey is like a geologist’s core sample retrieved from a century’s accumulation of ephemera. The Postcard Century is a heroic compilation of all the finest qualities that postcards possess and evidence of a massive commitment in terms of time and resources, put together by a collector with a passion for postcards that extended beyond periods and subjects. The book displays a year-by-year selection that crosses virtually all genres and categories and is enriched by the correspondence that the author has transcribed from the reverse, thus adding greatly to the social documentary feel of the enterprise.  It is quite simply a humane and fascinating book that can be opened at any page, instantly immersing the reader in a chronicle of lost voices and lost times.  The visual images and the transcribed text are mutually enhancing and add up to a lot more than the sum of their parts.  If he had produced nothing else in his life this book would remain a great achievement. As it is, Tom Phillips had a long and industrious career across a great variety of visual media in the course of which he never settled for second best. The range of his activities made him difficult to categorise which goes a long way to explain his absence from the Great Narrative of Artists of Substance. All the better for that, I would say.

Tristram Hillier in Taunton

On my first ever visit to the Tate (aged 14 and a juvenile admirer of Dali and Magritte) my uneducated eye was drawn to a Tristram Hillier landscape, La Route des Alpes (1937) where a proliferation of pylons, transmitters and roadside signage with distant ruins seemed to resemble exactly what I would like to be painting myself. Only the addition of a train on a viaduct could improve it. Last week I saw the painting again in Taunton in the exhibition Landscapes of the Mind - The Art of Tristram Hillier and its grip on the imagination was as strong as ever. It’s a painting that doesn’t immediately disclose much about its meaning and there’s no great message to transmit. This curious assemblage must be accepted on its own terms as an unsettling mystery that doesn’t demand to be decoded. In Hillier’s paintings there’s a sense of detachment enhanced by the meticulously finished surface values, beneath which we sense the work of a complex and often troubled individual. 

Hillier was a rootless English colonial, born in Beijing in 1905 where his father was manager of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, he was 9 years old before he saw England. Family relationships were cool and distant and much of his childhood was outsourced to a Catholic public school. The decision that he should study Economics at Cambridge was dictated by his father. After his father’s death, he was able to find his way to the Slade where he fell foul of the doctrinaire inflexibility of Henry Tonks and later to Paris to study painting in the studio of André Lhôte. As an artist, Lhôte had been quick to spot the decorative potential of Cubism which he presented in a rich and vibrant colour palette and this formed the basis of his teaching and attracted a large number of students. For a few years, Hillier experimented with Cubism, Fauvism and a polite form of Surrealism and on a brief return to London in 1933-34, he participated in the Unit One movement, one of the few concerted efforts to inject some avant-garde vigour into the torpid English art world. Hillier lived well and painted in Europe from 1935 to the early days of the war, mostly in France and Spain. Back in England he did 3 years of war service in the RNVR before settling in Somerset in 1943 where he remained for 40 years until his death in 1983. The wandering days were not entirely over as he made regular painting trips to Spain and Portugal, almost every year. 

There's a Paul Nash (above right) and a Ben Nicholson (extreme right) included for context.

The Paris years (1927-30) were the most formative influence on Hillier’s identity as an artist. By his own account, he shifted from one direction to another as he was exposed to the full range of competing ideologies but it was the contacts he made with the Surrealists that made the most lasting impression. Max Ernst rented him a studio and he painted alongside André Masson on a Spanish journey. Roland Penrose became a friend and he made the acquaintance of Picasso and André Breton. Echoes of de Chirico can be seen in his preference for minimally inhabited spaces, albeit described with a meticulous realism that de Chirico never aspired to. Coherent themes emerged in the 1930s - first among them being a fascination for coastal harbour scenes and maritime detritus. Like his friend Edward Wadsworth, he was well aware of the power of oversized items of marine engineering to disconcert the viewer with their formal incongruities. Lighthouses, breakwaters, jetties, flagpoles and cranes formed the compositional elements of his most intriguing paintings. Landscape reframed as still-life. 

When Hillier published his autobiography, Leda and the Goose in 1954, he was well established in his Somerset home with almost 30 years of painting ahead of him. He is sparing on the subject of his artistic career and there’s even less about his ideas and motivation, being most comfortable describing his hectic social life, his travels and passion for sailing. The backward glance seems to confirm the increasingly conservative drift of his values and opinions even though he was not yet 50. His former allegiance to the Roman Catholic faith had been renewed and the art of the still-life was claiming much of his attention. There’s a passage in the book where he acknowledges the unique genius of Picasso but he is at pains to add that it is “an evil genius as I have come to know”. 

The retreat into deepest Somerset was not a retreat into the comforts of the English Pastoral. It’s striking the extent to which Hillier repudiated the bucolic vision of the green and pleasant land. The stark outlines of winter trees and the harsh geometry of agricultural buildings surrounded by broken, unrepaired fences and collapsing drystone walls populate the rural scenes. Everywhere dead and dying trees, anguished in form and devoid of foliage offer reminders of decay and dissolution. Where figures appear, their relationship lacks warmth and sometimes suggests hostility - all of which hints at the darker side of country life. The winter months of incessant rains and days of gloom were not to Hillier’s liking and his journeys south to Portugal and Spain brought essential relief. Here, vernacular architecture and townscapes marked by the dazzling contrast of sunlight and shadow vied for his attention with the lure of the coast, the boat builder’s yard and the ensembles of fishing boats drawn up on the beach. Human forms were banished and the resulting paintings often deeply unsettling in their sense of desertion. In the most subtle way possible, it all suggests a life of undemonstrative discontent and low level depression. Achievements seemed outnumbered by disappointments and the glamorous days of dizzy socialising at endless parties and the Mediterranean sailing expeditions were impossibly distant. More than enough to turn a conservative disposition toward the consolations of alcohol, tobacco and the endless fury of the opinion pages of The Daily Telegraph. 

The Taunton exhibition is exemplary in its choice of work and its presentation. A compact and intense exhibition can be more rewarding than a sprawling survey and this is perfect in both size and scope. As a long term admirer I needed no convincing of the quality of Hillier’s work but there’s every chance that this show may persuade those new to his work that Tristram Hillier was an artist of consequence who, at his best can stand alongside many of his contemporaries who enjoy more substantial reputations.