Wednesday 3 February 2016

Enchanted Dreams: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of E.R. Hughes, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Spending one’s days studying the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, it’s sometimes none too easy to stop and think about what those artists were actually reacting against. What were most gallery-goers actually looking at and admiring when David Bomberg, for example, was painting his extraordinary abstracts in the years immediately prior to the First World War? Edward Robert Hughes – Ted Hughes to his friends – was one of them: his ‘blue phantasies’ at the Royal Watercolour Society’s annual summer shows were among the crowd pleasers – curious visions of fairyland and mystical interpretations of Victorian poems. 

E.R. Hughes, Oh, What’s That in the Hollow? (1893)
Hughes was born to be an artist. His uncle was the painter Arthur Hughes, a painter with closes link to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its earliest days, who numbered Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Ruskin among his friends. So, literally from the cradle, Hughes lived among artists and critics. He entered the Royal Academy Schools aged 16, and was something of a star pupil. Though he worked in oil, it was in watercolour that he would make his name. The early work is very different in style and technique from the later works – though it can be equally haunting. ‘Mrs Peveril Turnbull and her daughter Monica’ feels like an illustration to an M.R. James short story, even before you discover that Monica and her sister were later to die together in a house fire.


This show lines up many other artists along side Hughes, but he often comes off looking second best to the likes of Henri Fantin-Latour or Fernand Khnopff (sadly in reproduction only). Hughes is certainly the lesser painter, but nonetheless a work such as ‘Oh, What’s That in the Hollow? (1893) and ‘Night With her Train of Stars’, are really something special. I can’t imagine the Bloomsbury Group caring for any of this – and the Futurists certainly did not when they visited London: it was exactly this sort of painting that seemed to the Italians to say nothing of the ‘Workshop of the World’, let alone of London, the Futurist city 'par excellence'. Indeed, they thought paintings like this ought to be carried out into Trafalgar Square and burnt, making way for a modern art of a modern world. But Hughes's paintings carry me back to the days of my youth when I first discovered the delights of the Pre-Raphaelites. And I know - unlikely as it may seem - that it was just this sort of painting that inspired the likes of Augustus John, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer and helped set them out on the road to becoming artists. 

E.R. Hughes, Night With her Train of Stars and Her Great Gift of Sleep (1912)
And besides, in a way there's nothing wrong with fairyland, when it's taking you away from the miseries of what industrial Britain must have been like. It is quite easy to see the appeal of these medieval fantasies for a smoke-filled world, stalked by slow or sudden death and opium dreams. (Hughes' fiancee died a lingering, youthful death from tuberculosis, such a killer in that era, even among the wealthier classes; and night with her stars in tow drops poppy petals - and does the baby in her arm sleep the sleep of night, or that of death?.) The best of these Victorian artists are always worth revisiting, and even as a critic of the avant grade, I can linger profitably in a world at a cross roads, where the nineteenth century meets the twentieth.

Friday 29 January 2016

David Jones at Pallant House, Chichester

What a genius was David Jones! And what an epoch in the history of British art was the twentieth century.  Underappreciated, perhaps - or perhaps now at last starting really to revel in the recognition it deserves? From the recent success of the Ravilious exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in the summer of 2015, and thinking back to Edward Burra at Pallant House Gallery a year or two ago, or Graham Sutherland at the Museum of Art, Oxford - there have been some wonderful shows in recent years, revealing so much that was exciting about painting and drawing in this country - especially through the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. This no doubt was a combination of the reaction to Modernism, combined with the response to two devastating world wars - as well as the intervening crises of economic depression and political turmoil, all combining to produce something sublimely electric in the world of British art. (And add to this, I would suggest, the longer tradition of British art to look back at and draw upon - the Pre-Raphaelites, Samuel Palmer and William Blake, J.M.W. Turner and Constable, when art in England started to rediscover itself after the long invasion of more foreign influences that started somewhere around the time of Charles I and Anthony Van Dyck. When I go to the National Portrait Gallery or Tate Britain it's always among the Tudors that I want to linger - it all seems to start going wrong after about 1600 - the time when the continent and the High Renaissance starts to overwhelm the native, more northern European tradition; Holbein and Marcus Gheeraerts seem more cut from the same English cloth as two of my other favourite portraitists, Robert Peake and Isaac Oliver.)

This is the largest collection of David Jones work that I've seen all together in one place; an artist whose work I think I first grew to love on seeing it at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge two decades ago. Though Jones was born in Kent his heritage - as his name suggests - was Welsh, with his father originating from Flintshire. Jones studied at the Camberwell Art School in the years immediately prior to the Great War, and in 1915 enlisted with the Welch Fusiliers. Wounded on the Somme in July 1916, he finally escaped the front line in February 1918 when he came down with trench fever. Following the war he converted to Roman Catholicism, and joined Eric Gill's community of artists at Ditchling, in East Sussex, and then a Capel-y-ffin, in the Black Mountains.

Jones's oeuvre includes watercolours, wood engraving, letter work and poetry. He was poor; he struggled; he read and wrote; though engaged for a while to one of Gill's daughters, he never married; he suffered breakdowns; he made great art, and he won some of the recognition he deserved: in 1928 Ben Nicholson invited him to join the Seven & Five Society, and he exhibited alongside Henry Moore, John Piper, Kit Wood and Barbara Hepworth. In 1955 he was appointed CBE, and he lived on till 1974.

Pallant House's wonderful exhibition showcases Jones' work from a very early, magnificent drawing of a lion, made aged only seven, through to the late mythical masterworks, such as this one:


David Jones, Tristan and Isolde.


No reproduction on the web can do it justice - this is the sort of picture you want to be able to take home with you, to explore in all its infinite intricacies. Only a visit in the flesh will do, to an exhibition that really brings to life one of the less recognised greats of modern British art. I really love what Pallant House is achieving with its programme of exhibitions. (A great cafe there, too - and wonderfully helpful arts educators. If only they could move it all to Oxford, please?)

Oh, and I should add they're also showing a number of rediscovered works by Evelyn Dunbar. Everyone I've met who's been to Pallant House seems to have preferred one over the other; I'm no exception: Dunbar didn't move me at all, I'm afraid. I have always rather liked the Neo-Romanticism of A Land Girl and the Bail Bull at Tate Britain, but that was all I'd ever seen (or at least remembered); nothing else I saw lived up to that little (or should I say large) little masterpiece. It was all just a little too brown for my liking.


Evelyn Dunbar, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull (1945), Tate