Author: jonathan5485

Just someone who is interested and loves art. I am neither an artist nor art historian but I am fascinated with the interpretaion and symbolism used in paintings and love to read about the life of the artists and their subjects.

William James Glackens

To look at the history of the Ashcan School one has to go back a step and look at a group of painters who became known as The Eight.  These eight artists, with Robert Henri, acknowledged as the leader of the group, were Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice B. Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan.

Ashcan School artists and friends at John French Sloan’s Philadelphia Studio, 1898

Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Shinn worked as newspaper artist/reporters and illustrator-cartoonists and maybe because of this connection, the many paintings of these artists took on a journalistic quality.  All eight artists utilised the crowded life found on the New York streets as the subject of their paintings.  Their work depicted un-idealized views of life in a big city and focused on the bars and the clientele, dark grubby-coloured tenements, pool halls, and slums. This was the epitome of urban realism.  Realism in art was described by Gustave Courbet in an open letter he wrote on December 25th 1861, now referred to as his Realist Manifesto.  He wrote:

“…To know in order to do, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter but a man as well; in short, to create living art – this is my goal…”

 At the high point of their popularity these men were seen as confronting Academia which favoured the genteel tradition of “art for art’s sake, and which had dominated the American art establishment for many decades with works from likes of John Singer Sargent and Abbott Handerson Thayer.

However, on February 3rd, 1908, the MacBeth Galleries, New York, opened an exhibition featuring The Eight artists. It caught the attention of the American art world and although the show remained on view in New York for less than a fortnight, it was taken to several cities including Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia.  These exhibitions were lauded as watershed exhibitions of 20th-century vanguard art.   It was a triumph of “American” art.

The name “Ashcan School” was a derisive criticism of The Eight and their works of art, which appeared in an article in The Masses, an American magazine of socialist politics.  The author of the article alleged that there were too many “pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street” in their paintings.  The group of artists were amused by the article and the group soon became known as the Ashcan School of painters. The Ashcan School of artists had also been known as “The Apostles of Ugliness”.

William Glackens by Robert Henri (1904)

A few blogs back I looked at the life of George Luks who was an American realist painter connected to the Ashcan School.  Today I am looking at the life and paintings of one of his contemporaries who was also one of the Ashcan School of painters.  He is William James Glackens. William Glackens was born in Philadelphia on March 3rd 1870.  He was the youngest of three children to Samuel Glackens, a cashier for the Pennsylvania Railroad and his wife Elizabeth Glackens.  William’s siblings were an older sister, Ada and an older brother Louis who would later become a cartoonist and illustrator and work on early animation films.

East River Park by William Glackens (1902)

William attended the Central High School where one of his fellow students John Sloan, who would later become a member of The Eight.  Glackens graduated from the Central High School in 1890. Throughout his school days Glackens loved to draw and paint and became a very accomplished artist and in November 1891, aged twenty-one, he and Sloan enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Glackens also worked as an artist reporter for many newspapers, starting at the Philadelphia Record.  His task was to pictorially record news events and had to work to tight deadlines.

Christmas Shoppers by William Glackens (1912)

In October 1894, having completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Art, Glackens started a job as a staff artist/reporter for the Philadelphia Press and worked alongside fellow artists Sloan, Edward Davis, George Luks, and Everett Shinn.  Around this time Glackens was introduced to Robert Henri by Sloan.  Henri was an artist five years older than the pair.  He had returned to study at the Academy for a second stint after spending time in Paris studying at the Académie Julian, under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, where he developed a love for Impressionism and later, he was admitted into the École des Beaux Arts.  Besides befriending Glackens and Sloan two more aspiring artists, George Luks and Everitt Shinn joined the informal group which met at Henri’s apartment to discuss art, philosophy, culture and more, their meetings became known as the Charcoal Club because they would spend time using that medium to produce drawings from life.  This informal group explored art genres not available at the Academy, such as nude figure drawing. They also became interested in the social philosophical writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Émile Zola, and Henry David Thoreau.  Besides meeting to draw. paint and discuss philosophy, the group led a very sociable life during which alcohol played its part !

Figures in the Park, Paris by William Glackens (1895)

In 1895, Glackens, along with several other artists, including Robert Henri travelled to Europe so that they could learn more about  European art.  The first country they visited was Holland where Glackens scrutinised the work of the Dutch masters. From there he went on to the French capital where he and Henri rented a studio apartment for a year. For Glackens, staying in Paris, exposed him to the work of the great Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.  His greatest influence was the work of Manet.

Lena (the artist’s daughter) Painting by William Glackens (1918)

Glackens returned to America in 1896 and moved to New York and spent time at Henri’s many social gatherings.  Glackens took up employment at the New York Herald as a reporter and also worked as an illustrator for various magazines.  These two lines of work provided him with a good steady income and over the next decade he produced more than a thousand illustrations.  Although many were comedic in nature, in April 1898 the Spanish-American War broke out in Cuba and the McClure’s Magazine sent him there to collate the news and produce newsworthy illustrations.  It was a difficult assignment and his living conditions were poor.  On his return to New York, he was taken ill and it was discovered that he had contracted malaria which would return time and again during his life.

Hammerstein’s Roof Garden by William Glackens (1901)

In 1901 Glackens completed a painting entitled Hammerstein’s Roof Garden.  Hammerstein’s Roof Garden was the official name of the fashionable semi-outdoor vaudeville venue that theatre magnate, Oscar Hammerstein I, built atop the Victoria Theatre and the neighbouring Theatre Republic.  During summer months theatres were often closed due to the suffocating atmosphere inside the venues and so roof garden venues were very popular.  The viewer is placed as if they are part of the audience and in front of us, we see a a colourfully dressed female tightrope walker as she tentatively navigates the rope which is strung across the stage.  In the foreground we see the audience, some of which are unaccompanied females which was something that years ago would have been unheard of.  The painting is now part of the Whitney Museum of American Art collection in New York.

The Artist’s Wife, Edith Dimock Glackens, in her Wedding Dress by William Glackens (1904)

William Glackens’ single status ended in 1904 when he married Edith Dimock.  Edith, who was six years younger than William, came from a wealthy Hartford Connecticut family which made its fortune as silk merchants.  Despite her family’s strong objections but she turned away from business as a career and instead set about becoming a professional artist.  She left home and moved to New York City when, in her early twenties, she enrolled at the Art Students League where she studied with American Impressionist William Merritt Chase.

Sweat Shop Girls in the Country by Edith Dimock (c.1913) 

She soon made a name for herself as a talented watercolourist depicting women and children of working- and middle-class backgrounds. Through his wife’s wealth, Glackens could concentrate on his art, and often Edith and later their daughters, Ira and Lenna became his models. His 1901 portrait of his wife is of a classical formal style.  Set against a dark background, Edith is depicted wearing a black coat and hat with a long brown pleated skirt.  As with many of his portraits Glackens wanted his subjects to be seen just as they were, warts and all, and refused to idealize his sitters.   In this portrait Glackens has made no attempt to either make the depiction more modern or beautify the sitter.

Portrait of Edith Dimock Glackens by Robert Henri (c.1902)

His friend Robert Henri also painted a portrait of Edith around the same time which appears more idealized and certainly adds a touch of beauty to the depiction.

At Mouquin’s by William Glackens (1905)

Artists need to sell their work and to do this their work has to be shown at exhibitions.  However it was not always easy for many artists to have their work accepted by exhibition juries and in 1907, Glackens and many of his contemporaries decided to take the matter into their own hands and split from the National Academy of Design who they felt, for some reason, stopped accepting their work  The Eight, as they had come to be known, led by Robert Henri decided to host their own exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York City and an opening date for the event was set for February 3rd 1908.

May Day in Central Park by William Glackens (1905)

Although part of the Ashcan School of Painters, Glackens preferred to use a lighter palette for his work, unlike the darker palette used by the others who liked to depict the darker and grittier side of life in the city.  For Glackens depictions of family life whilst shopping or relaxing in the park were his favourite subjects for his paintings.   Unlike his colleagues Glackens preferred to focus more on scenes of leisure and entertainment rather than concentrate on the misery of life in the slums of the Lower East Side.

The Green Car by William Glackens (1910)

The consequences of working as an artist/reporter for a number of Philadelphia and New York newspapers taught him to observe the smallest of details of a scene.  In New York Glackens had a studio on Washington Square Park and it was from here he captured a scene for his 1910 painting entitled The Green Car.  The painting depicts a green trolley car as it rounds the corner at the south side of the park and we see it is heading towards a lady who is standing by the snowy curb, waiting to alight.  She is dressed smartly in a long coat, hat, and muff, she signals to the conductor of the trolley car.  Our eyes move from the foreground and the green trolley car across the snow-covered grass, through the trees and finally alight on a row of three-storey brick tenement buildings.

Olympia by Manet (1863)

In 1910 Glackens produced what many believe is his homage to Édouard Manet’s Olympia with his painting entitled Nude with Apple. 

Nude with Apple by William Glackens (1910)

It depicts a reclining nude holding an apple which she has taken from the nearby bowl on her right.  To her left on the sofa there is a large hat and a pile of her discarded clothing including one blue shoe.  She wears a black choker around her neck which harks back to the same accoutrement warn by Manet’s reclining nude, Olympia.  Whereas Manet’s Olympia covered her pubic region with her hand, Glackens has modestly covered his model’s pubic region with a piece of discarded white lingerie.  Glackens’ depiction is another of his typical realist genre.  The model is ordinary.  She could not be termed beautiful.  The depiction alludes to her being simply one of Glackens’ models who has just arrived at his studio wearing a large flowery hat, a gown and blue shoes.  She then hurriedly undressed, abandoning her clothes on the sofa.  The scene seems to have been unscripted.    And yet…..are we to think of the apple in her hand as symbolising Eve?

Breezy Day, Tugboats New York by William Glackens (1910)

Glackens extensive knowledge of European art and artistic trends in Europe led him to be commissioned by Albert Barnes, the American chemist, businessman, art collector, writer, and educator, in January 1912 to travel to Europe and buy paintings for him which would then become the foundation for the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.  Barnes was also a High School classmate of Glackens and gave him twenty thousand dollars to be used for purchasing paintings and Glackens returned with thirty-three works of art.  That December Barnes himself travelled to Paris to buy more works of art.

Soda Fountain by William Glackens (1935)

On Feb. 17th, 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York. The Armory Show, as it came to be known, had a profound effect on American art.  William Glackens helped to organize the American section of this ground-breaking exhibition but later reflected on how the American art was somewhat inferior to the European submissions. He voiced his opinion:

“…Everything worthwhile in our art is due to the influence of French art. We have not yet arrived at a national art […] I am afraid that the American section of this exhibition will seem very tame beside the foreign section. But there is a promise of renaissance in American art…”

William Glackens in his studio (c.1915)

Although he liked the modern and much more abstract European works Glackens maintained his love of painting scenes of everyday life and always remained a realist artist. During the inter-war years Glackens made a number of trips to Europe buying European works to enhance the Barnes collection. Glackens died of a cerebral haemorrhage on May 22nd 1938 while spending a weekend visiting fellow artist Charles Prendergast in Westport, Connecticut. He was 68.

Albert Godwin

Albert Goodwin

The artist I am looking at today is the nineteenth century English painter, Albert Frederick Goodwin, best known for his watercolour landscapes.

The Artist’s Father, Samuel Goodwin by Albert Goodwin (1868)

Albert Goodwin was born at 1 Acton Place, 62 Boxley Road, Maidstone on January 17th 1845.  His father was Samuel Goodwin, a builder.  His mother was Rosetta (née Smith).  Albert was the seventh of eight children, having three older sisters, Emma, Rosetta and Mary Ann and three elder brothers, Charles, William Sidney and Henry (called Harry).  He also one younger brother, Frank Alfred.  An artistic talent weaved its way through his male siblings.  His eldest brother was known for his artistic talent as a young man before he joined the military as a member of the Royal Engineers.  Charles became a frame maker and Harry and Frank became professional painters.

Albert was brought up in a devout Baptist household and attended the Bethel Chapel in Maidstone, which his father had built along with its Sunday School in 1934.  Albert’s uncle, Thomas Goodwin often preached at the chapel and was its resident organist, which he had also constructed.  Albert attended Mr William Henry Wickstead’s School at Rocky Hill House, London Road, Maidstone.

The Old Bridge at Maidstone, Kent, Looking South by Albert Goodwin

Albert became interested in art and at the age of ten when he first exhibited one of his paintings,  This was a time at the start of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one of its founders, William Holman Hunt had a great influence on young Goodwin.  At the age of fourteen Albert Goodwin started an apprenticeship with a local draper but after six months, he realised that the drapery business was not for him as he had set his heart on becoming a professional artist.  He just needed a willing teacher.   That came by chance, as it is said that whilst painting en plein air in the local woods he was spotted by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Arthur Hughes who lived in Maidstone with his wife and children.  Arthur Hughes was impressed by Albert’s artistic skill and became his first tutor.

Sunrise over the Sea by Albert Goodwin

In 1859 Goodwin completed his painting entitled Bluebell Hill, Maidstone and in 1860 he exhibited his painting, Under the Hedge.  On March 18th 1863, Albert’s mother Rosetta died at the age of fifty-eight.  During Albert’s early twenties he was introduced to the well-known artist and art critic John Ruskin and on seeing Albert’s work, Ruskin purchased them all for £50 and Albert put the money to good use, funding his five week painting trip to the south coast resort of Hastings.  Around the mid 1860s Albert’s tutor, Arthur Hughes, introduced him to Ford Maddox Brown, a Pre-Raphaelite luminary who took Albert on as his pupil in his London studio.  Albert soon became acquainted with the other Pr-Raphaelite Brotherhood, such as Rossetti, William Morris, the Scottish artist William Bell Scott and George Price Boyce, the watercolour painter of landscapes.

The Old Bridge at Maidstone, Kent looking South by Albert Goodwin

Later, according to Albert’s daughter Olive, Albert and his brother Harry, went to work in the studio of William Morris’ company in Red Lion Square in London’s Holborn district.  In 1864 Albert set off on his first overseas trip, going to Holland where he visited the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam and that summer spent time in Jersey.  In the Autumn of 1864, he travelled north visiting Newcastle and Durham as well as the coastal town of Whitby

Whitby Abbey a watercolour by Albert Goodwin

Albert Goodwin completed a colourful watercolour of Whitby Abbey as seen from the east.  The abbey which had been founded in 657 by St Hilda was later destroyed by marauding Danes in 867.  This view is of Whitby Abbey from the east. The ruin depicted in this watercolour is as it is now after one of the towers collapsed in 1830.  Goodwin painted another version of the Abbey in 1910 but this was completed using oils and is now housed in the Victoria Gallery, Bath.  Albert Goodwin’s diary entry of July 22nd 1909 declares his love for Whitby.  He wrote:

“…Whitby once again…I am again inclined to repeat myself in the belief that one or two things in it (for colour) are as good as anything can be…”

Whitby Abbey by Albert Goodwin (1910)

Goodwin always loved to depict dramatic, poetic landscapes. In the 1910 version of Whitby Abbey the thoroughly radiant deep blue of the sky in this work is so typical of his work. Albert liked Whitby Abbey as a subject for painting because of its ruinous manifestation, but also because he was a deeply religious man, and had an interest in spiritual subjects.   Goodwin had painted many scenes featuring the abbey over the previous fourteen years.

A Prospect of Edinburgh from the East by Albert Goodwin (1909)

Albert Goodwin carried on painting in the 1860s and exhibited his work at many exhibitions including the Dudley Gallery in London.  On February 16th 1867 Albert married Mary Ann Lucas, who was the eldest daughter of George Lucas, a fruiterer from Brighton and a year later his brother Harry married Henrietta Lucas, the sister of Albert’s new wife.  Sadly, on December 13th 1869 Albert’s wife Mary Ann died, aged twenty-nine of peritonitis.  Albert and Mary Ann had no children.  Around this time Albert went to live with Arthur Hughes and his family in West Brompton, London and he was employed as Hughes’ studio assistant.

Ely Cathedral by Albert Goodwin

In 1871 Albert went on another European trip visiting Bruges.  That year he was elected Associate of the Society of Painters in Watercolours and at the time his address was given as Maltravers Street, Arundel, Sussex where he lived with his brother Harry and his wife Henrietta.  Sadly, Henrietta died that year, less than two years after her sister had passed.

The Medway at Maidstone by Albert Goodwin (1871)

Almost ten years had passed since Albert had first met John Ruskin and in Spring 1971, Ruskin offered Albert a job as his assistant and asked that he came to work with him at his home in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.  At the Royal Academy annual exhibition in 1871 Albert Goodwin exhibited his painting entitled The Medway at Maidstone.

The Drawing Room at Dixton Manor (Drawing Room at Dixton Manor with K.M.G. writing) by Harry Goodwin (1883)

In 1872 Albert’s brother Harry married for the second time following his first wife’s death.  His new wife was fellow painter, Kate Malleson. Harry depicted his wife writing at a desk in Dixton Manor.

From left to right: John Ruskin, Mrs JC Hilliard, Mrs Joan Severn, Arthur Severn, Constance Hilliard, Albert Goodwin.

Albert Goodwin’s friendship with John Ruskin continued and, along with Ruskin’s cousin Joan Severn and her husband Arthur Severn, visited Matlock Bath and the following year Albert Goodwin and Ruskin travelled to Italy and Switzerland.

  Mont Blanc from the Sèleve, near Geneva

In 1873, Albert Goodwin stayed for three months in the Swiss village of Simplon which lies close to the Italian border.

An Arabian Night, Cairo by Albert Goodwin (1876)

In 1873, like his brother the year before, Albert Goodwin a widower for four years, married his second wife, Alice Desborough at Holy Trinity Church in the West Devon village of Gidleigh.  The couple went on to have seven children, two sons and five daughters. In 1876, Albert and Alice travelled to Marseille before boarding a ship for Egypt.  They also called at Gibraltar, Naples and Crete.

Blue Water in Mounts Bay, Cornwall by Albert Goodwin (1881)

Albert Goodwin had first met the naturalist, Charles Darwin when he was introduced to him by John Ruskin. He visited Darwin at his Kent home, Down House.

Down House from the Garden by Albert Goodwin (1880)

Down House by Albert Goodwin (1880)

Whilst there he made sketches of the house and gardens and later completed two watercolour paintings of Darwin’s residence, which had been built in the early 18th century, and remained Darwin’ and his wife, Emma’s home for forty years until his death in 1882.   It was here that Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection and wrote his ground-breaking work On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Ilfracombe by Albert Goodwin (1884)

Albert and his wife and children left London and moved to Montpelier Terrace Ilfracombe in 1877.  He continued on his painting trips around Britain and further afield to France, Switzerland and the Italian Lakes often accompanied by John Ruskin and Arthur Severn, sometimes accompanied by his brother Harry.  During these trips Goodwin made a large number of annotated sketches and watercolour studies direct from nature, a method he used, alongside working from memory, throughout his career. Ruskin was fascinated by the large number of sketches, which he termed “flying sketches”, which Goodwin produced on a daily basis. Goodwin was happy with his system and in his 1917 dairy entry, he wrote:

“…To me this method of work is one of the happy things of the art that I practise, for I get the realisation of a place twice over, and often the memory makes the scene a better one than the first experience…”

Meanwhile his wife Alice was at home in Ilfracombe with their seven children, Ivy, Olive, Edytha, Albert, Christabel, Alice and Harold and their two servants, one a cook and the other a nurse.  A few doors down from them were Alice’s mother and sister Mary.

Florence, Evening by Albert Goodwin (1896)

In 1881 Goodwin was elected a member of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours. Albert Goodwin was continually influenced by John Ruskin who was constantly advising him with regards artistic techniques. Goodwin was a master of depicting topographical and landscape views.  For him, it was all about colour, and tonal values.   Ruskin was pleased and proud of his protégé and was constantly talking about the art of Turner and proudly showing off his own collection of Turner’s work.  Albert Goodwin wrote about the influence Turner had upon him in a diary entry in 1911.  He wrote:

“…I sometimes wonder if the spirit of old Turner takes over my personality. I often find (or think I find) myself doing the very same things that he seemed to do…”

Art critics of the time often likened his work to that of Turner.  In The Standard of October 1893, the art critic wrote:

“…In water-colour drawing Mr. Albert Goodwin is the legitimate successor of Turner…”

The Source of the Sacred River by Albert Goodwin (1900)

Albert Goodwin travelled to India in 1895 and one of the works from this trip was The Source of the Sacred River which he completed in 1900 and was exhibited at the Royal Academy that year.  The source in the title refers to the source of the River Ganges, which is regarded by the Hindu population of India as sacred, is at Lapthal, is in the Himalayas on the frontier between India and China. Of the painting, the art critic of The Athenaeum, a British literary magazine, in 1900 wrote:

“…Allegorical landscape, and still more allegorized landscape painting, is a difficult and particularly uncertain sort of art in which Mr Goodwin, its most accomplished practitioner amongst us, is one of the few who contrive even to approach success. The Source of the Sacred River is almost as suggestive, quite as well painted, and much more understandable. In general, it does not differ from a score of similar works by Mr Goodwin, who is not content with painting nature so admirably that few rival him and leaving to her sympathetic lovers the task of recognizing the pathos and poetry which, so to say, harmonizes itself with the spectator’s mood. There is nothing to tell us that the stream Mr Goodwin depicted so rarely is sacred in any exceptional sense, but there is much we can be grateful for in its abundant and sumptuous harmonies of colour, form, and light, and the dignity of its masses…”

Rye – The Winter’s Tale by Albert Goodwin (1920)

Albert Goodwin carried on with his painting trips around Britain and across the world, visiting South Africa, West Indies, Australia and New Zealand. His works were shown at a multitude of exhibitions and were always appreciated by critics and visitors alike. Goodwin died at his home, Ellerslie, in Bexhill-on-Sea on April 10th, 1932 aged 87.

Much of the information regarding the life and times of Albert Goodwin came from the Chris Beetles Gallery catalogue, Albert Goodwin RWS (1845-1932). The John & Mary Goodyear Collection, which I found in a charity shop in London.

and the website

The Maidstone Museum Websitre

Alethea (Thea) Mary Proctor

Alethea Proctor by George Lambert (1903)

The subject of today’s blog is the Australian painter, Alethea (Thea) Mary Proctor.  Thea was born on October 2nd 1879 at Armidale, a town in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, two hundred and fifty miles north of Sydney.  She was the elder child of William Consett Proctor, an English-born solicitor who was also a member of the Legislative Assembly and his Queensland-born wife Kathleen Janet Louisa Proctor, (née Roberts), who was a cousin of the artist John Peter Russell .  Thea’s brother Frederick William was born three years later.  She and her brother were brought up in what was considered as a financially comfortable lifestyle. During the 1880s the family lived at Hunters Hill, Sydney, and when she was ten years old, she was sent to boarding school at Armidale. Thea’s mother was determined that her children should succeed in life and arranged for them to take violin lessons from an early age.

Self portrait by Thea Proctor (1921)

In 1892, Thea’s parents separated and were finally divorced five years later. After the parent’s separation, Thea’s mother took her two children to live with her mother at Bowral, in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, about ninety minutes southwest of Sydney and it was her maternal grandmother who encouraged and inspired Thea’s love of art. In 1894, at the age of fifteen, Thea attended Lynthorpe Ladies’ College, and at the end of the first school year she won a prize at the Bowral District Amateur Art Society’s exhibition. In 1896 she enrolled at the Julian Ashton’s art school, founded by Ashton, an English-born Australian artist. Thea also worked for a short time as an illustrator at the Australian Magazine.

The Bay by Thea Proctor (1927)

Thea’s mother Katherine, who was aware of her daughter’s artistic talent also realised that she would learn much more by visiting England and see what the art institutions had to offer her daughter. Kathleen Proctor and her twenty-two year-old daughter set sail from Australia in April 1903 and arrived in the English capital in early June. Once in London Thea studied at St John’s Wood Art Schools where she and George Washington Lambert once again became fellow students.

Self portrait by George Washington Lambert

Thea would often pose for George Lambert who once proclaimed that Thea was beautiful, tall, dark-haired, languorous and dignified.  She in turn found Lambert to be intellectually stimulating and she was devoted to him and their friendship was to last a lifetime.  Amongst the artist she met whilst in London were other expatriate Australians painters, Charles Conder, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, all of who had been drawn to the opportunities London had to offer aspiring painters. 

Fan by Thea Proctor (1906)

Charles Conder’s fan designs fascinated Thea as did the Japanese prints which were circulating the English capital at the time.  Thea exhibited her decorative fans created in watercolours on silk at the Royal Academy of Arts and New English Art Club in London and they were deemed a great success.  Thea’s favourite painting medium was watercolours and she completed many works drawing and painting in watercolours.  She was also greatly interested in the costumes she saw worn by women at the Chelsea Arts Club Balls and the Ballet Russe which she went to see in 1911.

Yellow Cab, Hyde Park by Thea Proctor (1910)

Thea’s mother, Kathleen, returned to Australia during the summer of 1905 but her daughter decided to stay in England.  Thea favoured the inspiring environment of London with all its cultural riches, and it offered her the chance to learn more about art and it was here that she was able to exhibit her work. The downside for her was it was an expensive place to live but she lasted out till October 1912 when she eventually returned to Australia.  Once back home Thea exhibited her work in Sydney and Melbourne and both the National galleries of Victoria and New South Wales bought some of her works.   The sale of her paintings was not as good as she had expected and the lure of England became too great to ignore and in late 1914, she returned to London. 

Summer by Thea Proctor (1930)

Thea soon produced her first lithographs which, although she continued to paint, established her reputation when exhibited by the Senefelder Club, an organization formed in London in 1909 to promote the craft of art reproduction by the process of lithography.  Later she exhibited with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers and at the Goupil Gallery.  In tandem with her love for art was her love of fashion and the theatre.  This combined love of theatre and fashion was reflected in her work.   This was brought home in an interview she gave in the March 1926 issue of The Home Magazine, a high quality Australian quarterly magazine published in Sydney.  In the article Modifying the Mode by Selecting the Suitable Century, Thea talked about women’s fashion in England and was quoted as saying:

“…In London it is different. There quite a number of people dress to express their personalities. I don’t mean fancy dress or anything startling like Isadora Duncan’s brother who used to wear a Greek tunic and sandals on Chelsea Embankment in the chilliest weather, or one London authoress who generally attends dinner parties in hunting pink – the long topcoat looped back over an evening dress. But there are so many ways – almost imperceptible ways – in which a woman can modify the existing fashion so as to make a dress express her own personality rather than the personality of the shop from which it came. And her own period – it is a mistake to think that all women belong to the twentieth century simply because they were born in it…”

The Swing by Thea Proctor (1926)

Proctor eventually returned to Australia and went to live firstly in Melbourne in 1921 where she endeavoured to raise people’s interest in lithography, but unfortunately she found little interest and so she returned to Sydney.

The White Vase by Thea Proctor

Back on Australian soil Thea still promoted her lithographs and in 1925 Thea teamed up with Margaret Rose Preston, an Australian painter and printmaker, to stage a  joint exhibition in Sydney and Melbourne. Both artists exhibited brightly coloured woodcuts in scarlet frames and despite Thea’s works being viewed in London as being comparatively conservative, many Australian critics thought them to be ‘dangerously modern’.   In 1926, Thea Proctor and her long-standing friend, George Lambert, who had also returned from England in 1921 founded the Contemporary Group in Sydney in 1926 to encourage young avant-garde artists.  Their annual exhibitions were held at various galleries including Macquarie Galleries, Farmer’s Blaxland Galleries, Grosvenor Galleries, David Jones’ Galleries.

Alethea Mary Proctor in 1964

Thea taught design at Ashton’s Sydney Art School and also took on the role of a private art tutor and in so doing, introduced many young budding artists to the world of linocut printing.  In the 1940s Thea taught drawing for the Society of Arts and Crafts.  Thea Proctor never married and died on July 29th 1966 at Potts Point, a small suburb in the inner-city of Sydney.  She was 87.  She was cremated with Anglican rites.

George Benjamin Luks

The artist I am looking at today is an American who was mainly known for his social-realist paintings and illustration.  Today’s painter supported several of his contemporaries in their philosophy of painting subjects which challenged the traditional approaches put forward at the time by the National Academy of Design and the established art circles in America.  This art renegade is George Benjamin Luks and he became a leading figure in the New York art world in the early part of the 20th century.

Bear by George Luks (1904)

George Luks was born on August 13th, 1867, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  He was the son of Emil and Bertha Luks who were both amateur painters and both encouraged their son’s inherent artistic talent by providing him with his earliest artistic tutoring.  When George was still a young child, the family moved some fifty miles south-east to Pottsville, a town in the heart of Pennsylvania’s coal region.  It was here that his father, a physician, tried to help the coal-miners and their families and was a supporter of a group known as the ‘Molly Maguires’, a secret organization of Irish-Americans that tried to improve conditions for the area’s miners.  As George grew up, he became aware of the poverty-stricken lives of the miners and their families.  This early exposure to the hard lives of the mining community had an effect on Luks and his works of art which often depicted impoverished families in naturalistic surroundings.

Portrait of Miss Ruth Breslin by George Luks (1925)

George Luks’ earliest job was in vaudeville.  He and his brother took part in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey vaudeville circuits while still in their teens.  However, even as a teenager, he was determined to become a professional artist and so his vaudeville career ended.  In 1884, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he was tutored by the painter, Thomas Anshutz, but his rebellious nature resisted the rigors of formal study, and he withdrew after a short stay.

London Bus Driver by George Luks (1889)

Luks then visited Europe and set about visiting Germany, England and France attending several of the city’s art schools.  One such school was the Kunstacademie in Dusseldorf, but his stay there as a pupil did not last long for the same reason that he departed the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts – his dislike of the high standards and inflexibility of the rules of the establishment.  This mindset would stay with him all his life.  He then headed for Paris and London.  Throughout his European sojourn he was greatly influenced by European painters such as Velazquez, Manet, Rembrandt but in particular the Dutch painter, Frans Hals.

The Little Madonna by George Luks (1907)

On his return to America in 1890 he began to earn money as a newspaper illustrator and in 1894 he started at the Philadelphia Press and Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, where he produced “at-the-scene sketches” which later became illustrations to go alongside the news stories.   This was Luks’ forte as he was both a talented draftsman and had a meticulous eye for recording details of events.

Havana by George Luks (1896)

He and fellow illustrator at the Philadelphia Press newspaper, Everett Shin, moved into a one-room flat in the city.  Whilst working at the newspaper Luks became friends with the artists John Sloan and William Glackens.  These four painters and illustrators would have weekly get-togethers at the studio of Robert Henri, a renowned artist who was several years their senior, and who emboldened his younger friends to ponder over the necessity for a new style of painting.  Henri’s vision was that this new artistic style would express the essentials of their own time and experiences and would counter the limitations imposed by the present conservative art establishment.  Henri told his friends that they should be depicting scenes of ordinary life and discard the current trends of portraying life as a genteel existence.  Robert Henri and his four new friends with their new ideas regarding the direction of American art, collectively became known as the Philadelphia Five.

In 1896, the Philadelphia Press sent Luks to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War as a newspaper correspondent/war artist.  On his return to America, he re-located to New York and joined the newspaper, New York World, under publisher Joseph Pulitzer.  Luks began at the newspaper employed to draw the comic strips, such as The Yellow Kid and Hogan’s Alley.  It was during this period that Luks began to devote more time to hone his painting skills, and six years later, in 1902, he abandoned newspaper work to concentrate all his energies to painting. 

Street Scene (Hester Street) by George Luks (1905)

One of his most famous paintings was his 1905 work entitled Street Scene (Hester Street).  The setting is a push-cart market on Hester Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area of the city which was packed with recent Jewish immigrants.  From our viewpoint looking down the street we see a crowd of shoppers, both men and women and in the foreground we see children, milling around a toy pedlar, searching for bargains.  Many art historians have judged the depiction to be a compassionate pictorial essay of Jewish life.  We see the people in profile, and Luks has paid particular attention to skin colour and the physical features of the people in the crowd, while the subject matter relates to a series of caricatures of Jewish peddlers. It is a congested depiction and we only get small glimpse of the blue sky in the middle background. In the middle-ground we see the darkly oppressive inexpensive tenement blocks, in which were apartments that were so designed to house hundreds of these people, maximising the profits of the landlords.

Allen Street by George Luks (1905)

Another of George Luks’ 1905 Lower East Side paintings was entitled Allen Street. Between 1880 and 1920, more than twenty million immigrants came to America, making it the greatest period of mass migration in American history. At the time Luks painted these Lower East Side street scenes it was home to approximately half a million Jewish immigrants, who had fled economic hardship and political violence within the Russian Empire. At the time it was the most densely populated place on earth.  Sadly, with this sudden influx of Jews into the area came a rise in nativism, the protection of the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants, and anti-semitism.

Luks had produced antisemitic caricatures, above is an example, for several publications during the 1890s, and the emphasis on racist stereotypes about Jewish physiognomy  can be seen in the painting, Hester Street.

The Spielers by George Luks (1905)

Despite the hardship of life whilst living in the overcrowded tenement block Luks also wanted to depict a modicum of joy displayed by some of the younger residents.  His 1905 painting entitled The Spielers (from the German word spielen – to play) was one of his favourites works and when, in 1907, he gave it to his dealer, William Macbeth to sell, he said he wanted $2000 for it.  His dealer was dismayed at such a high price. When it was displayed at Luks’ 1910 solo exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, critics called it an artistic masterpiece.  Luks sold it direct to a collector but it is not known whether he achieved his $2000.  In an article in the New York Times Magazine on February 6th, 1916, the art critic James Huneker praised the work in his article George Luks, Versatile Painter of Humanity wrote:

“…The east side is yet to boast its Dickens. And Dickens would have enjoyed the picture of the little tousled Irish girl with her red locks who dances with the pretty flaxen-haired German child, surely a baker’s daughter of Avenue B. Now you might suppose that this vivid art, this painting which has caught and retained the primal jolt and rhythm of the sketch, might be necessary rude and unscientific in technique. It is the reverse. This particular picture is full of delicious tonalities. The head of the blonde girl might be from an English eighteenth century masterpiece…”

This simple painting of two girls dancing together more than any other work by Luks, made his reputation.

The Wrestlers by George Luks (1905)

Some art critics had voiced an opinion on Luks’ figurative work saying that he was not good at depicting human anatomy.  It is thought that Luks’ baulked at this sleight on his ability and in 1905 produced a complex painting of two nude wrestlers, so as to counteract their criticism. The painting is now housed in the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, which described the work:

“…The artist’s perspective was radical for the time. Luks’s composition effectively presses the viewer to the edge of the wrestling pit, thereby emphasizing the down-at-heels setting. The jarring vantage point also evokes the sweaty underbelly of modern urban life, a theme for which he and fellow members of the Ashcan School would become known.  Luks’s scene of entangled human flesh under duress is reminiscent of the sporting scenes that fellow Philadelphian Thomas Eakins painted, in particular Eakins’s 1899 Wrestlers (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Whereas Eakins depicted a wrestling hold with the impassive eye of a painter rendering a studio model, Luks conveys the passion exuded by the heaving torsos. Eakins applied carefully blended strokes of pigment, building up solidly modelled forms after the manner of his studio training with the French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Luks, in contrast, enlivens his figures with energetic brushwork and thick impasto. Luks’s familiarity with the popular press, gained from his work for illustrated periodicals, may have inspired the sense of immediacy he suggested—brilliantly illuminated flesh is thrown into relief against the dark background as though caught in a reporter’s flashbulb.  The opponent at the left also recalls the terrifying visages of the early-nineteenth-century Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s so-called Black Paintings (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), in which humans are transformed into ghouls. Luks portrays a distinctive type among the multitudes in New York City, in this case an aggressive athlete. Once again, his training as a newspaper illustrator likely honed his astute sensitivity to physiognomy, and here the thickly furrowed brow, devilish eyes, and flushed complexion suggest the bellicose personality befitting a pugnacious wrestler…”

Known originally as The Five, of which Luks became a member.  Then it became collectively known as The Eight, which was made up of the original five members with the addition of Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast.  Then The Eight eventually became known as the Ashcan School.  . The name “Ashcan” was originally coined by critics of the movement to deride the surplus of refuse bins in the artists’ pictures and the perceived dirtiness of the subjects at large. Robert Henri, the leader of the movement and its spiritual father was blunt of what he wanted to achieve. He said he wanted art to be akin to journalism… he wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter. Many of this group’s works were rejected when submitted to exhibitions of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design and this motivated The Eight to form their own exhibiting group.  Their exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York in January, 1908 was a significant event in the promotion of twentieth-century American art. 

Feeding the Pigs by George Luks

Following the success of the New York exhibition John Sloan organized a traveling exhibition that brought their paintings to Chicago, Indianapolis, Toledo, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Bridgeport, and Newark.  These travelling exhibitions had people talking the new realism that the Ashcan School represented.  George Luk’s paintings Feeding the Pigs and Mammy Groody were seen as examples of this new ‘earthiness’ that many art lovers were not yet ready to accept.  The Ashcan movement threw down the gauntlet and confronted the academic art institutions, and as a result, during the 1910s the authority of the National Academy of Design as a cultural authority began to wane.  The Ashcan painters played a an essential role in developing the nation’s sense of what were to be considered suitable subjects for free artistic expression.

Gramercy Street by George Luks (1905)

As a member of The Eight, George Luks created works in vivid bravura manner that captured the spirited energy of the tenement districts of New York and their occupants. The American Art historian, Milton Brown wrote about George Luks’ works in his 1955 book, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression:

 “…In his art and in his character, he symbolized the spirit of American dynamism; as aggressive as a tycoon, as brash and boastful as a ‘drummer’. . . he was a swashbuckler in paint. This was not, of course, the cultured tradition of American life; it was rather the expression of a cruder side of America, an echo of the frontier…”

Hannaford.s Cove by George Luks (1922)

George Luks is best known for his depictions of New York City life, but he also painted many landscapes.

Old Gristmill, The Berkshires by George Luks (1925)

There are several landscapes of the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts that follow the Impressionist tradition.  One such work is his painting Old Gristmill, The Berkshires which he completed in 1925.   However, Luks was far happier living a city life.  

Foggy Night by George Luks (c.1925)

Luks’ painting Foggy Night which he completed around 1925 captures his urban vision during his many walks around the city. He was fascinated by what he saw.  In this depiction of an overcast night in New York, there is an eerie stillness about the scene.  We see a lone cab driver who has stopped his horse-drawn carriage on an otherwise empty bridge.  In the distance we can just make out shadowy buildings and the spire of a church. The city has been overwhelmed by the misty atmosphere and darkened by the nocturnal setting.

Spring Morning Houston and Division Streets by George Luks (1922)

George Luks was married twice but had no children. He was as famous for his paintings as he was with his mood.  He was said to be loud, boastful of his boxing prowess but a good-humoured man, and was a notoriously heavy drinker.  On October 29th, 1933, he was found dead in a Manhattan doorway at 6th Avenue and 52nd Street, a casualty of a bar-room brawl.  He was 66.  Luks was buried at Fernwood Cemetery in Royersford, Pennsylvania.  He was dressed in an 18th-century embroidered waistcoat, which was one of his most valued possessions. His death was reported in the New York Times and the reporter wrote:

“…His canvasses were invariably virile; his versatility was astonishing, and he painted as he lived, contemptuous of conventionalities, impatient with snobbishness and full of joy of life that so many of his paintings reflected…”

Clara Klinghoffer. Part 4.

The Latter Years

Portrait of a Girl by Clara Klinghoffer

Clara’s stay close to Menton with her husband and youngest sister had proved to be a great success and their plans to return home to London had been postponed on a number of occasions.  The decision as to whether to leave their rented villa, Villa Aggradito, was taken out of their hands eventually as the owner needed the villa for a long-term rental over the coming winter, and the price for renting the villa was well beyond their means.  They eventually moved and found Villa Josephine, a small ground floor flat with a small garden in the small Nice suburb of St. Sylvestre which was run by an elderly woman, Madame Rigolier.  No sooner had the trio moved to their new home in September than Clara declared she was pregnant.  Madame Rigolier immediately took on the role of “mother” and saw to all Clara’s needs.  Clara’s husband on seeing that his wife was being well looked after decided to return to London with Clara’s youngest sister, Hilda.   Clara was not being left alone as they invited Joop’s brother, who had not been well, to come and stay and they believed he would benefit from the warmer climate during the winter months.

Portrait of a Young Girl by Clara Klinghoffer (1960)

With winter over Clara and Joop had to decide on their next move.  Clara was not happy with the medical help she received from the local doctor but could not afford the charges levied by the hospitals and doctors in Nice.  Clara and Joop left the Côte d’Azur in early March 1927 and headed to England with a two-day stopover in Paris.  They managed to rent a small ground floor flat in the London suburb of Hendon.  

Portrait of Cera Lewin by Clara Klinghoffer (1935)

On May 28th 1927 Clara gave birth to their first child, a daughter, whom they named Sonia.  The family finances were not good.  It was true that Clara was selling her work to various galleries but by the time you deducted gallery commissions and the cost of painting materials there was barely any profit.  Joop was struggling to find newspapers and magazine willing to buy his journalistic offerings and so the couple struggled financially.  He was also aware of Clara’s family’s disappointment in him for not being able to provide for his wife.  However, on a positive note, Clara’s fame as a talented young artist was spreading into Europe.  The art critic of the leading Amsterdam Handelsblad wrote:

“…Clara Klinghoffer is among the few of her generation who have succeeded in circumventing the many pitfalls adhering to the work of most younger painters in England. Her recent ‘Old Troubadour is praised by leading critics as her best work to date. And rightly so, for in spite of the forcefully realistic conception of this picture, it is free of all coarseness, while the blending of its colours may safely be described as refined…”

Such favourable comments with regards to her work appeared in newspapers in England and throughout Europe and her work was being shown in a number of major exhibitions.  Despite the continuing high praise from art critics the sale of he work was slow and her husband believed this was due to the poor publicity of the galleries were her work was on show. 

My Sister Beth by Clara Kinghoffer (1918)

At the end of 1927 the family’s luck took a turn for the better when Clara’s husband, who could speak French and German, was offered a job as secretary to an American industrialist, Ray Graham, one of the three Graham brothers, who headed up the Graham Paige Motor Car Company of Detroit. He was arriving in Europe and needed a well-travelled multi-linguist as his aide-de-camp.

Girl with Plaits by Clara Klinghoffer

Ray Graham eventually returned to America and offered Joop a position in Detroit but Clara was horrified at this offer and her husband had to turn down the job.  All was not lost however as Graham then offered to set up an agency for his car company in Paris and wanted Joop to head it up.  Clara was not averse to living in Paris so Joop accepted the job offer.  They relocated to the French capital in the Spring of 1928 and rented a small flat in the Avenue de Chatillon on the Left Bank which was an area where many artists lived.  Their home was not at all what they expected and the manageress, who seemed to be an alcoholic, was both unpleasant and unhelpful.  Clara was unhappy and wrote about their home and the surroundings:

“…High up from my window I look down upon the square, grey and desolate. The rain has not left off since last night. The immense puddles are filled with little bubbles that swim about till they burst. The square is new, and the road still unmade. To the right a house is in the making: an incomplete red structure, bricks, mortar and wood are piled up and scattered about. The workmen have not come. Factories and many-storeyed flats arise on all sides. A distant funnel gives out a grey smoke, with irritating slowness. At the end of the square a tram passes by, then a taxi. A group of people und.er umbrellas go past quickly.  Then, for at least four minutes, not another human soul is to be seen…”

Heemstede Canal behind Rudi’s House by Clara Klinghoffer (1932)

Unhappy with their present flat they were pleased to hear about an ideal house for them from a friend of Joop, a fellow journalist.   It lay some ten miles north-west of Paris in the village of Montmorency.  The house was in the rue des Berceaux, close to the railway station, and both Clara and Joop were pleased to make it their home. The little ‘villa’, as they called it had a large corridor leading from the front door, spacious living rooms, a large kitchen and a bedroom.  A wide staircase led to more bedrooms and the bathroom.  At the rear of the property there was a small, enclosed garden.  Both Clara and Joop were pleased with their new home.

Mother and Child by Clara Klinghoffer

Having had her first solo exhibition at Hampstead Gallery in 1920, she held her first solo exhibition abroad in April 1928 when fifteen of her  paintings and thirty-five sketches were displayed at the Nationale Kunsthandel in Amsterdam.  Following the success of this exhibition Clara was bombarded by galleries, such as the Imperial Gallery, The New English Art Club and the Woman’s International Art Club, for more of her work for their future exhibitions.

Untitled (One of Clara’s sisters) Chalk on paper by Clara Klinghoffer   ©the artist’s estate. photo credit: the artist’s family

Joop was still working from his Paris office for the American car company Graham-Paige and Clara was so busy painting that she had to employ an au-pair, Anne-Marie, to look after baby Sonia.  However in October 1929 life in America was rocked by the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression.  The Presidential hopeful Herbert Hoover’s phrase “two chickens in every pot and a car in every garage” in his speech the previous year, now had a hollow ring to it. Joop’s boss’s car firm was all to do with high-end cars and they were hit badly.   People were laid off and money spent on publicity, which was Joop’s area of expertise, was cut back.  Joop began to realise that his job was in jeopardy.  Fortunately, he heard that the Paris branch of the American publicity house of Erwin Wasey had advertised for a linguist to assist their executive in charge of all West-European advertising for Esso products.  He applied for the job and was taken on.  Meanwhile Clara had submitted a number of works to London’s Redfern Gallery and it had proved to be a great success even though financial problems were having an adverse effect on sales of works in both France and England.

Lakshme by Clara Klinghoffer (1918)

Life was to change in 1930 when, in July that year, Clara found herself pregnant with her second child.  Around the same time Joop was “head-hunted” for a position at Lord & Thomas & Logan, a publicity company who were looking for a Dutch-speaker with a Dutch background who, at the same time, had the necessary experience in the international publicity field.  Joop was exactly who they were looking for and he, and after speaking to Clara, agreed terms with his new employer.  Clara was not unhappy about the move to The Netherlands as she had enjoyed her previous stay there and Amsterdam to London was a short distance to travel when she needed to talk to London gallery owners.

Grandmère and Sonia by Clara Klinghoffer (c.1930)

Joop travelled ahead to set up his Amsterdam office and a month later Clara joined him.  The couple found it difficult to rent suitable accommodation in the city and eventually, in the Autumn of 1930, settled for a small house in Heemstede- Aerdenhout, just south of Haarlem.  There they waited for their household furniture to arrive from Paris. Once again Clara, who was now heavily pregnant, needed help with looking after her daughter and husband and so they hired a maid to help with the chores.  It was not a good time for Clara and she became very stressed.

Portrait of Bananas the Pedlar by Clara Klinghoffer (1923)

On the twenty-fifth of January 1931 Clara’s second child, a boy, was born. They called him Michael Jacob.  The name Michael was chosen because they simply liked the sound of it, and Jacob because that was the name of Joop’s late father. With the birth of her son, Clara’s mood and physical health improved.  They even employed a German girl, Hettie, as nurse for the baby, but as Jews, they soon became wary of her and her questions relating to them and their families.  It proved later that the nurse was feeding this information back to the German embassy.  After confronting her, she hastily left the family home.  Help did materialise when her sisters, Leah and Hilda came to live with them during the summer.  In late 1931 Clara’s mother-in-law came to live with her and her son and she remained with them until she died in 1935.

Rosie with Apple by Clara Klinghoffer (c.1929)

The start of 1932 was a very sad time for Clara as she received news that Rosie, one of her younger sister and for many years one of her favourite models, had been ill for some times. At first her illness did not seem to be a very serious one. But her pains increased and then, on being examined by a specialist, Clara had to face the awful truth: that the girl, just about thirty years old, was dying of cancer.  Clara travelled to London at once and stayed there for some time, drawing as she always did and making an exquisite painting of Rosie.   Several doctors were consulted; even a Dutch physician of Utrecht who supposedly had a cure for cancer, was persuaded to send each week a bottle of his magic medicine to London. But it was, of course, all in vain. Rosie died that summer. It was a very hard blow. From now on the magic circle of the seven Klinghoffer girls existed no longer.  For some time the loss of Rosie paralyzed Clara’s desire for work. Then, gradually, she took up her brushes again and painted.

Giuseppina by Clara Klinghoff (1934)

In 1932 Hitler came to power when the Weimar Republic collapsed.  The National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (Dutch Nazi party) led by Anton Mussert became more prominent following the rise of Hitler and grew more challenging, stressing ever stronger the anti-semitic principles of the Filhrer.   On February 27th 1933, the Reichstag in Berlin was set alight by a twenty-three-year-old Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe and, as in Germany, anti-semitic tensions in The Netherlands grew fanned by inflammatory articles appearing in Mussert’s weekly newspaper Volk en Vaderland (People and Fatherland).  Notwithstanding the political tensions Clara and Joop managed to get away and have a holiday in Taormina, Sicily where they stayed in a small hotel which had beautiful vistas across the bay.  They became friendly with the owner, Ettore Silvestri and his daughter Giuseppina who agreed to pose for Clara. She said that posing for long periods would be a problem to her and Clara and Joop discovered she had been very ill for five years, an illness that tired her. In August 1935 whilst back home Joop and Clara received a letter from Taormina informing them that sadly, Giuseppina had died.

One-eyed Mexican Farmer by Clara Klinghoffer (1962)

In 1939, the anti-semitic feelings in The Netherlands had begun to escalate and there was talk of a Nazi invasion of the country and so Clara and Joop decided to move to London.  They packed up all their furniture and Clara’s paintings and they were stored in a warehouse in Haarlem but sadly their property was plundered during Nazi occupation.  When the Second World War ended Clara divided her time between her studios in London and New York. In New York Clara held a number of exhibitions of her work but the interest in her figurative art was waning as the art world had latched on to the new abstract expressionism, by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and suddenly Clara’s work was considered unfashionable and she struggled to attain exhibition space, even in London.  In 1952 she visited Mexico and she was attracted to the colourful landscapes and had no trouble finding locals who would model for her.  Her last exhibition was in 1969 at the Mexican/North American Cultural Institute in Mexico City.  She then returned to Europe and spent time in Southern France.  Her health began to deteriorate and she returned to London where she died on April 18th, 1970 at the age of 69.  Clara is buried at the Cheshunt Cemetery near London.

Clara Esther Klinghoffer (Stoppelman) 1900-1970

I end with a 1981 quote by Terrence Mullaly of The Daily Telegraph who wrote about Clara and her artistic talent:

“…If ever there was an artist who for some time has been unjustly forgotten, it is Clara Klinghoffer … While the temporary eclipse of her reputation was not, given trends in the visual arts, surprising, it is certainly lamentable. She was a portrait painter of sensitive talent and, above all, a fine draughtsman … In her work her obvious sensitivity towards her sitters is manifested, and enforced by her ability not only to suggest weight and substance of a body, but also to convey mood … When much more celebrated artists are forgotten, she will be remembered…”

Information for this blog was found in many sources but the most important ones were:

Clara Klinghoffer- 20th century English artist

Clara Klinghoffer: the girl who drew like Raphael and Leonardo

Clara Klinghoffer. Part 3.

Marriage and travels.

Lucien Pissarro by Clara Klinghoffer (1928)

Clara continued to paint and produce beautiful works of art.  She worked constantly at her easel from daybreak till sunset.  She was awarded a bursary by the Slade allowing her to attend classes three days a week for a year and receive tuition from the Slade Professors of Art, Frederick Brown, and Henry Tonks.  However, Clara only continued with this tuition for a few weeks, preferring to paint on her own at home.  In 1921, the excessive workload she had given herself and her innate perfectionism finally took a toll on her health and she suffered a breakdown and suddenly the desire to paint had left her.  She was suffering badly both mentally and physically, losing weight and becoming gaunt.  She talked to nobody about her struggle and her parents could not understand why she spent little time painting.  Clara recognised that she was ill and tried self-help but with little success.  It was almost a year later when something strange happened to arrest this decline.  At the rear of their large house, beyond their garden, there was a low border wall, on the other side of which was a set of newly constructed tennis courts.  Clara and her sisters were fascinated and loved to watch the tennis players in action.  The courts were owned by a good-looking young man in his early twenties, Julius Abrahams. A close friendship developed and Julius had strong feelings for Clara.  Clara painted a full sized portrait of him but as Julius was engaged to another woman, Clara decided that a friendship was all she could offer Julius. 

Upon Reflection by Clara Klinghoffer (1919)

Clara continued to build up a portfolio of her work and a number of her drawings were due to be exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in Central London in June 1923.  Her drawings caught the attention of a certain Mr Smith who had contacted her and asked to see more of her work.  Clara was requested to visit his house in Gordon Square in Central London’s Bloomsbury.  Despite disliking trudging across London in wintry weather to visit a possible patron, she needed to sell work to fund her artistic materials and so on January 10th 1924, a Sunday afternoon, she headed towards Gordon Square and to her meeting with Mr Smith – a meeting which would change the course of her life.

Rose with a Mortar and Pestle by Clara Klinghoffer (1919)

Unbeknown to Clara her meeting with Mr Smith was not a one-to-one meeting but she was heading to his house where he was hosting one of his artistic soiree.  One of the regulars to these “parties” was an Italian journalist who lived in Hampstead with his fellow lodger, a Dutch freelance journalist, Joseph (Joop) Stoppleman.  Joop was invited by his flatmate to come along to the party and reluctantly agreed, on the pretext that the experience might even make good copy for an article.  On entering the drawing room of the opulent house the two journalists were greeted by raucous singing led by their host, Mr Smith.  Midway through the party the doors to the Salon opened and Stoopleman in his biography, Clara Klinghoffer, The Life and Career of a Traditional Artist described what happened next:

“…the Study door was opened and a small girl with beautiful auburn hair, entered, carrying a portfolio much too large for her to hold with any comfort…”

The revellers were bemused by the sight of this small girl.  Mr Smith, who was halfway through giving his rousing speech to his guests, stopped and rushed towards Clara, taking her portfolio from her and raising it in the air, whilst acclaiming:

“…”Now my young friends you will have the privilege to see art that is on a par with the work of the great Masters. And who has created it?  This little girl–Clara Klinghoffer. Mark that name well, for one day it will be famous…”

The portfolio of Clara’s work was then placed on the large table at the centre of the Salon and Clara showed each of her paintings and drawings to the guests.  They were all amazed by what she had created.  When the party came to an end Joop Stoopleman offered to carry the heavy portfolio for Clara until she reached the trolleybus which would take her home.  He wanted to see her again and was both surprised and delighted when Clara asked if he wanted to visit her at home and see more of her work.  He avidly agreed and they exchanged telephone numbers and a date was set for the next meeting.  This was the start of a long friendship which resulted in a love affair and which would eventually result in marriage. Joop was well received by the family but as a freelance journalist he knew he could not boast a regular steady income.  As for Clara, she relied on the sale of her work so that their combined income was somewhat irregular.

Harriet Cohen by Clara Klinghoffer (1925)

The new year, 1925, was a very busy time for both Clara and Joop.  Clara worked steadily on her drawings and paintings. One of her sitters was Harriet Cohen, the celebrated British concert pianist. At the same time, she was organising her work for a large-scale exhibition in the Redfern Gallery, in Old Bond Street, which was to begin in March of 1926. Clara had collected together twenty new paintings and some thirty new drawings. By the time she had put together sufficient work for the exhibition she was both exhausted and deflated.  Her spirits were lifted when she was invited to accompany her friend Mabel Greenberg on a month-long holiday in the Pyrenees.  Clara, on her return home at the end of April, was refreshed and was filled with ideas that could be used as depictions for her future paintings.  In parallel to Clara’s busy schedule, Joop had to go on a trip to Holland visiting chief editors, to see if he could find new outlets for his writing.

Portrait of a Girl in a Fur Hat by Clara Klinghoffer

During the New year celebrations of 1926, Joop and Clara decided that they would marry once the Redfern Gallery exhibition had run its course.  The exhibition which opened on March 9th was a great success and her paintings received much praise from the art critics.  The art critic of The Times wrote:

“…It is perhaps being wise after the event to say that “work has feminine characteristics when an artist is known to be a woman. But this is certainly the case with Clara Klinghoffer’ s exhibition of paintings and dnawings at the Redfern Gallery. That is to say she has the power to imitate with great skill the manner of another painter and yet of toning it down and adapting it to her own less emphatic means of expression, as Berthe Morisot did with Manet. Her drawings and small pictures, rather than her larger oils, show that she has real talent. Her drawings are by far her best work and please at once, though, while they are reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci, they leave out his emphasis and thus their correctness becomes apparent only after close examination. As is the modern custom, they are intended to be works of art in themselves, not studies of works of art, and they do not show the curiosity of an artist who draws to find something out, not to produce a finished effect. They are sensitive, but not profoundly sensitive.  Mims Klinghoffer’s paintings are more under the influence of Renoir than of Leonardo, and in her biggest pictures she has tried to be more forcible than is in keeping with the character shown in her drawings…”

Portrait of the Artist’s Husband, aged 25 by Clara Klinghoffer

Once the Redfern Gallery Exhibition had completed, Clara felt utterly drained and Joop persuaded her to take a rest from painting and visit his homeland, Holland.  She agreed to the change of scene despite Joop not being able to accompany her from the start as he was committed to leading a tour party to Europe.  Joop arranged for her to stay with a family in the village of Voorthuizen and when, after six weeks,  Joop finally arrived,  the pair travelled north to his home town, Groningen and there she met Joop’s family.  Clara and Joop finally returned to London in June 1926 and their marriage took place on July 29th at the Duke Street Great Synagogue of London.  At the time of the wedding Clara’s youngest sister, Hilda had been very unwell.  Joop and Clara decided that as they were going to the warm weather of Southern France for their honeymoon, Hilda should accompany them so as to help restore her health.  All was agreed with the family and the three of them took the ferry to Calais and then the train south to Avignon for a short stay before arriving at their ultimate destination, the Côte d’Azur seaside town of Menton.

The Old Troubador by Clara Klinghoffer (1926)

The Menton pension they stayed in was very comfortable but quite expensive.  In fact, it was too expensive for them as they planned to stay in Menton for six or seven weeks.  Clara approached the pension owner and because they intended to stay a long time in Menton, he agreed to lease them a large house, Villa Aggridito, situated on the Boulevard de Garavan, on the outskirts of the town, and only charged them just four hundred francs a month.  They took him up on his generous offer.  One day whilst out walking they came across a man carrying a guitar.  In Joops biography of his wife he recalls the moment:

“…we saw a little man with grey hair standing in the middle of the right-hand lane. He was neatly dressed in black linen trousers and jacket and carried a large guitar on a leather strap across his shoulders. He had a long egg-shaped face, burnt a red brown by the summer sun. His straight nose had wide, sensitive nostrils; his large eyes were of a melancholy brown.   His forehead, wide and furrowed, blended into his high bald dome; and above both ears were thick tufts of snow-white hair.  On his open shirt collar a neat dress tie had somehow found a foothold. All in all, he made the impression of a musician on the way to an appointment, transporting his instrument in a somewhat unorthodox way.  As we approached, he quickly placed the guitar in position, and began to play. First a gay melody, then the popular ‘Valencia’ tune, of which he sang the words in a small, tremulous voice. We stopped and listened. There was nothing about him of the street singer. Rather, he seemed to be amusing himself and, accidentally, allowing us to share his enjoyment…”

The musician was Torquato Simoncelli and he came to their villa the next day and sat for Clara. It took half a dozen sittings for Clara to complete the portrait. On February 16th 1958, Clara wrote about that visit:

“…My husband and I spent the summer and autumn of 1926 in Menton-Garavan, close to the Italian border. It was there, at the border, that we met old Torquato Simoncelli, singing and playing on his guitar. This gentle and lovable old man came to sit for me on the terrace of our Villa, after his day’s work as a Troubadour was over (generally in the late afternoon). He sang, reminisced and played while I painted…. I did paint a second picture of him in another pose (this picture I still have)…”

………to be continued.

The information I used for this blog came from a variety of sources but the two main ones which would be of interest to you if you want a more in-depth look at Clara’s life are:

Clara Klinghoffer- 20th century English artist

and

Clara Klinghoffer: the girl who drew like Raphael and Leonardo

Clara Klinghoffer. Part 2.

The artistic road ahead.

“…I consider Clara Klinghoffer an artist of great talent, a painter of the first order…
Her understanding of form places her in the very first rank of draughtsmen in the world…”

Sir Jacob Epstein, London, March 30, 1939

Self portrait by Clara Klinghoffer

Fourteen year old Clara was just about to leave St Mark’s School and it is thought that it could have been the head teacher of the school, Mrs Sinock, who suggested that Clara should enrol at Sir John Cass Institute in Aldgate. Once there she was set the task to make sketches of statues such as Michelangelo’s David concentrating on the various facial attributes. Soon the tutors realised she had a natural aptitude for sketching. A talent which she achieved with little effort, one that amazed her tutors. Clara was happy at the Institute but that all ended when one of the young tutors acted towards her in a sexually inappropriate manner which frightened her. The pleasure she once had attending the classes vanished and she left the Institute suddenly without giving a reason for her departure. For a fourteen year old girl this must have been a shocking moment in her life.

Salman Klinghoffer -Man In A Felt Hat (‘Daddy’) by Clara Klinghoffer (1929)

Clara’s father was disappointed that his daughter had given up her art studies and one day whilst travelling home on a tram he caught sight of an advert for the Central School of Arts and Crafts which was situated in Southampton Row in the West End of London He then managed to persuade his daughter to come with him to the art school and enrol. She agreed and took with her a portfolio of her sketches. The principal took a look at her work and immediately offered her a place, starting that next Monday. On the Monday, Clara, who was still very small, arrived at her classroom carrying her huge portfolio case much to the amusement of the two tutors who were overseeing the students. One was Douglas Grant a British painter who became part of the Bloomsbury Set and the other was Bernard Meninsky, the British figurative and landscape painter who had immigrated from Ukraine with his family when he was three weeks old. On looking at Clara’s portfolio, Meninsky was astounded by the quality of her work and set her the task of sketching a cast of a hand. He was astounded by the result and likened it to that of Da Vinci drawings. Both Meninsky and Grant had witnessed such talent in a person so young as Clara and often her sketches were hung on the walls of the classroom. Also on the wall was a print of Botticelli’s Primavera which Clara said that she loved above any other work she had seen. Another of her favourite works was a black and white reproduction of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne which she had seen a few years ago in the local library. More and more, she became influenced by Italian art.

East End Girl with Dark Hair by Clara Klinghoffer

Meninsky went on to tutor Clara in life drawing and became an important influence on her work.  He also introduced her to a number of luminaries of the art world such as Walter Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore, a British artist who worked in oil and watercolour and was a founder member of the London Group, the English writer and painter, Wyndham Lewis, and the New York born sculptor, Jacob Epstein and his publicist wife, Peggy, who became her close friends.

Harry, Old London Man by Clara Klinghoff (c.1920)

Clara remained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts for two years and during this period would often spend time at her easel, sketching at the Victoria and Albert Museum and her favourite venue, the British Museum, where she became a regular and was well known to the security guards, staff and regular visitors.

Mother and Child by Clara Klinghoffer. Modelled by Clara’s eldest sister Fanny and her youngest sister Hilda (1918)

One of Clara’s fellow students at the Central School of Arts & Crafts was a young man called Seidenfeld, who was besotted with Clara but she alas did not return his amour.  He, like Meninsky, praised Clara’s work and would tell everybody who would listen, about Clara’s work and her extraordinary talent.  Word of this young artistic genius reached the ears of a journalist, Joseph Leftwich and he was so impressed by her artistic talent that he spoke of it to the post-Impressionist painter, Alfred Wolmark,   Wolmark had some of his work shown at the Hamstead Art Gallery in London and he persuaded Clara to put together a portfolio of her work which would be used in her “one-man” show at the gallery in May 1920.  That gave her twelve months to complete a collection which was good enough to be exhibited and this entailed a period of non-stop painting. The painting Mother and Child was one which was exhibited at Clara solo show at the Harpenden Gallery in May 1920. The show received rave reviews and of this work, The Sunday Times art critic wrote:

“…Clara Klinghoffer’s ‘ Mother and Child’ will appeal to ‘many as having more sheer beauty than any work in the exhibition. While exceedingly able in point of drawing, this moving painting of a mother just lifting her child “out of the bath delights one by the piquancy of its colour, the shimmer of light on the bare flesh being rendered with the tenderness of a Renoir and the dexterity of a Besnard. In its dazzling radiance it is a joy of pure colour…”

Portrait of a girl in a fur hat, with red background by Clara Klinghoffer

Portrait of Woman Plaiting her Hair by Clara Klinghoffer

In the end Clara submitted twenty-one paintings and thirty-two framed and glazed drawings. On May 3rd 1920 the solo exhibition opened. The London Evening Standard stressed the brilliant future this 19-year-old painter is destined to have. and it continued:

“…One of the most encouraging things about her work is that it gives frank and full expression to what may be supposed to be her racial instincts and interests. She likes exuberant forms and bright colours and says so when painting with commendable frankness. Her strongest point at present is the ease with which she can fill her canvas. Evidently, she has studied the Old Masters, particularly Leonardo da Vinci, to good purpose…”

In 1920, an edition of the The Jewish Chronicle sang the praises of Clara’s work at the exhibition writing:

“…Clara Klinghoffer, in her exhibition at the Hampstead Art Gallery, has clearly proved to be a truly great artist. Her drawings are very beautiful and quite remarkable for an artist scarcely out of her teens. One feels how very much she has been influenced by the Great Masters–by Raphael and by Leonardo for example. And yet, her outlook is entirely modern; she has absorbed the past and expresses herself freely, inspired but never enslaved thereby. Her paintings are always well composed and this is so whether a single portrait or a group is considered. She has a peculiar sense of colour and makes no attempt to get the correct tone, which fact accounts for the unreal appearance of all save one or two portraits. She apparently paints without much effort, and the spontaneity of her work is charming……. There is nothing shallow in Miss Klinghoffer’s genius. She is perfectly sincere and employs her extraordinary gifts for a definite artistic purpose, simply and beautifully, without the slightest trace of affectation…”

The painting Mother and Child was then put on display at the New English Art Club that summer and the press was full of praise for the work

Portrait of a Man (on Red) by Clara Klinghoffer

Meanwhile, her father’s “mill end” business was flourishing, so too was her mother’s clothes shop, so much so, the family moved to a large Victorian House in King Edward Road, Hackney.  Compared to their previous London homes, this was paradise.  It was large with a basement kitchen, large first floor living rooms and several bedrooms on the upper floors.  The increase in the size of their home was fortuitous as Clara’s mother gave birth to a three further children, all daughters, which meant the house was home to mother, father and seven daughters !  Business success for her father meant that he could afford to buy Clara all the materials she needed for her paintings.  He and his wife were convinced their daughter would one day become a famous painter.

Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Rachel (Rachel in a Red Dress) by Clara Klinghoffer

Clara would complete small paintings of the neighbourhood children but realised that for her own exhibition at the Hampstead Gallery she would need to complete larger works and so she turned to her sisters, (Fanny, Rose, Rachel, Bertha, Leah, and Hilda), whose ages ranged from four to twenty-one, to act as models, but most frequently Rose (who also sat as a model for the sculptor Jacob Epstein), and Rachel. This shimmering portrait of Rachel is made from delicate brushstrokes and this was a recognisable style of Clara’s portraits and establish her renowned warmth and understanding in the way she depicts her sitters.

Girl in the Green Sari by Clara Klinghoffer (1926)

This portrait, Girl in the Green Sari, by Klinghoffer was that of the Bengali artist Pratima Devi, the  daughter-in-law of the famous Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.  Pratima often travelled abroad with him and they often visited Klinghoffer in her London studio. In all, she completed at least three portraits of Pratima: the first, in oils, around 1919-20; the second, a pencil head, which The Times, in 1924, considered it remarkable for the sensitive drawing and the suggestion of light. This later full-length painting was carried out in 1926, which was the year Clara married and her husband remembers Pratima’s visit and sitting for her portrait.  She wore the blue sari and was adorned with dazzling jewellery.  Clara had Pratima remove all the jewellery, maybe as she believed it would detract from the woman’s depiction.  We observe Pratima as a demure, maybe shy, woman with her eyes downcast, dressed in a translucent sari standing in front of a glistening backdrop.

Portrait of Orovida Pissarro by Clara Klinghoffer

Clara’s arresting portrait of her friend and fellow artist Orovida Pissarro was completed in 1962.  Orovida was born in Epping, Essex, in 1893, and was the only child of Lucien and Esther Pissarro. Her father, Lucien Pissarro was an acclaimed artist and graphic illustrator, while Lucien’s father, Orovida’s grandfather, was the renowned Danish-French painter Camille Pissarro who was a founder of the Impressionist movement.  Much to her father’s horror, Orovida turned her back on Impressionism – and even dropped her famous surname, wanting to be simply known as ‘Orovida’. Her reason for this was not because she wanted to cut herself off from her family ties but because she wanted to make her own way in life, on her own terms.  Clara has depicted the form of her sitter including her rounded belly and full face framed by her cropped hairstyle, which is copied in the curves of the chair.  Behind her we see a collection of inanimate objects which probably referred to items which often appeared in Orovida’s portraiture.

……to be continued.

Information for this blog was found in many sources but the most important ones were:

Clara Klinghoffer- 20th century English artist

Clara Klinghoffer: the girl who drew like Raphael and Leonardo

 

Clara Klinghoffer. Part 1.

Early childhood and teenage years

Self portrait by Clara Klinghoffer (1937)

“…Now universally recognized as one of the greatest English woman painters, she was a poor and utterly unknown young girl from the East End when her first exhibition took the artistic world by storm in 1919. Hailed everywhere as the girl who could draw like Raphael, her superb technique has always been compared with the Old Masters, but at the time of her first show she had never seen any of the great Old Masters pictures…”    

–Women of Today, 1932

My blog today looks at the rise of one of the great female artists. For Clara Klinghoffer’s life story, I want to go back to her paternal grandparents, Abel and Witie Stark who lived in in Szerzezec, a village some forty minutes by train away from the large town of Lemberg, known to us now as the Ukranian city of Lviv, but at the time of Clara’s birth in 1900 it was part of the contested region that was once Polish Galicia, but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Since Galicia had split from Poland and came under Austrian control, life had been good.  The majority of the population of the small town of Szerzezec were Jewish but they had a good working and social relationship with their fellow Christian citizens.  It was an easy-going and liberal place to live where both Jews and Christians realised they needed each other.  Abel Stark ran a grain business and had achieved lucrative contracts with the Austrian military.

 Portrait of Annie Salomans with her book by Clara Klinghoffer (1918)

In 1898 Abel and Witie had one major problem to solve.  Their eldest daughter, Chana Riza (Hannah), was twenty four years old and despite her father and mother’s attempts to find her a husband and that of the local shadchan (matchmaker), she remained unwed !  If it was a problem for them, it was also a problem for her two younger sisters, Sarah and Leah, as according to ancient custom, they were not allowed to marry until the eldest sister married first.  Eventually a “marriage candidate” arrived who was acceptable to both parents and Chana Riza.  He was Salman Klinghoffer.  To Chana’s father, Salman was ideal and would be able to work in the family business whilst to Chana herself he had all the physical attributes she found pleasing. 

Self portrait by Clara Klinghoffer (1955)

Chana Riza and Salman Klinghoffer were married on March 1st 1898 at a large ceremony attended by most of the townsfolk and the merriment lasted for many days.  The newly-weds moved into her parents home and Salaman began working for his father in law but Salman and his father-in-law did not get on well.  They were two totally different characters.  Abel Stark was shrewd, dynamic and very determined which was the reason for his success in business.  On the other hand, Salaman was a quiet and contemplative man and somebody who shied away from confrontations.  Chalk and cheese !  Abel soon became aware that Salman would not eventually be able to take over the family grain business in a partnership with Abel’s son Ephraim and Salman riled at being treated like a lackey by his father in law..

Untitled (Young Woman) by Clara Klinghoffer

Salman and Chana Rizi had their first child, Fegele, in early 1899 and later that year Chana became pregnant once more.  Her second child was born on May 18th 1900.  This second daughter was named Chaje Esther after her late maternal grandmother.  A third child, another daughter, Reisel, was born on April 4th 1902.  Although the grandparents were happy with the grandchildren, their happiness, at least in the eyes of Axel, was tempered by the fact that Chana Rizi had not given birth to any male offsprings.

Portrait of a Girl Reading by Clara Klinghoffer (1946)

Salman was fed up with life and working for Abel and soon on hearing many stories about the golden land of America decided that his future lay there and he would head there alone, get a job and then send for his wife and children.  Sadly Salman was a dreamer.    He broached the subject with Abel and Witie who did not oppose his dream and seemed to be pleased to be rid of him.  His wife viewed it differently but because she knew her husband was very unhappy, she believed he should grasp the chance to better his life and any way, soon she would join him.

Giuseppina by Clara Klinghoffer (1934)

Salman left Szerzezec but instead of going to America arrived in England in the city of Manchester and took a job as a presser in a tailor’s shop.  Nobody knows why he changed his plans of fulfilling his American Dream but maybe he had contacts in the northern English city.   At first he corresponded with his wife back home telling her what he was doing but there was never an invite for her and his three children to join him.  The arrival of letters from her husband soon became infrequent and eventually stopped altogether.  What had happened to him?  Had he taken up with another woman?  Had he become seriously ill?  Had he decided to journey on to America?  All were questions that Chana Rizi contemplated.  So in 1903, she took the momentous decision to go to Manchester with their two children Fegele and Chaje and look for her husband. Her youngest daughter, Reisel, was left with her grandparents.  Chana Rizi was just thirty years old and solo travel was hazardous and she would be arriving in a country whose language she could neither speak nor understand.  However, she did arrive in Manchester after a long boat trip during which time she was violently seasick and she eventually located her husband, much to his surprise.

Pastel portrait of Lucien Pissarro by Clara Klinghoffer (1928)

Salman was paid a pittance as a presser but Chana Rizi was determined to stay by his side so they could build a life together even if they all had to endure poverty.  It was also at this time that they changed the children’s first names.  Fegele became Fanny and Chaje Esther became Clara – Clara Klinghoffer.  The family could not make ends meet and so they moved to the Staffordshire town of Hanley.  Salman’s wages were better and Clara enjoyed the peace of the small rural town which compared favourably with the noisy and polluted city of Manchester but all was not well with the family dynamics and there was a rumour that Salman was having an affair with a local woman.  Chana Rizi, who was pregnant with her fourth child, packed their bags and demanded they returned to Manchester.

Harriet Cohen (pianist) by Clara Klinghoffer (1925)

The family arrived back in the city and rented a property at 18 Irwell Street in the Cheetham Hill district of the city and it was here in late June 1904 that Chana Rizi’s fourth child, another daughter, Rachel, was born.  Many years later, Chana went to visit a friend in London and when she returned to Manchester she announced to her family that they were going to move to the English capital and there would be a job waiting for her husband as manager of a drapery shop in Poplar in the East End of London, which would suit him better as the physical strain on him as a presser was proving too much for him and was affecting his health.  Salman went first to London to secure somewhere for the family to live.  He managed to rent a small East End flat in Puma Court, a tenement block off Whitechapel Road, close to Spitalfields fruit market.  Very little good could be said about their accommodation in their Puma Court flat or the neighbourhood and the smell of rotting fruit and veg coming from the market.

Clara’s early schooldays were ones she would rather forget.  Ferocious teachers who often meted out corporal punishment with a birch and unfriendly fellow pupils were things she had to put up with.  Added to that, her mother fell down the steps of their flat and broke her leg in a number of places which meant she had to rest up in bed with her leg in a heavy cast.

Pen & Ink fashion sketch from Clara’s childhood sketchbook (1913)

Salman was not happy working as manager at his cousin’s drapery shop.  He wanted to be answerable just to himself and so he looked to become self-employed.  He wanted to be his own boss.  He travelled back to Manchester where he set himself up as a “mill end” trader and arranged for bags of “end of roll” materials to be sent to his London home where they were stored in one of their rooms.  He and Clara’s mother then sorted them and Salman took them around various tailors selling the cloth.  The tailors in those days partly made their livelihood from repairing clothes and so needed various pieces of material.  Salman’s business prospered and he was soon able to lease his own shop in Grove Street, off Mile End Road in London’s East End, from where he would run his business and there would be accommodation above for the family.  Throughout the day, tailors would call at the shop looking for material.  Thanks to the support and ambition of his wife Chana, Salman had become a merchant – a profit-making businessman.  Around the early part of 1910 the family moved to another East End property, a roomier three-storey house at 148 Cannon Street Road where Clara’s mother had a dress shop and in April 1914 Salman Klinghoffer applied for naturalisation, probably due to the prospect of war in his homeland .

Photograph of Clara (c.1913)

Clara enrolled at St Mark’s School, a parish school serving poor and largely immigrant children, in nearby Cable Street and despite her sense of foreboding, she found she enjoyed school life and her favourite subjects were history drawing.  After school, Clara would return home and spend time in her mother’s dress shop and began to sketch some of the clients.  She would also spend time in the large attic which ran the whole width of their house and was used as a room to store her father’s mill ends. However there was a table in the attic at which she sat and sketched. This was her first “studio”.

Girl in Green Sari by Clara Klinghoffer

One of her mother’s clients, a young man, who saw Clara’s sketches told Clara’s mother that her daughter was very talented and she should take art lessons.  Clara’s mother was intrigued by the suggestion and she and her husband decided to do something to help their daughter. Studying art at an art school was very expensive but her father and mother managed to raise enough for her to enrol at the John Cass Institute, in Jewry Street, Aldgate. 

………….to be continued

Information for this blog was found in many sources but the most important ones were:

Clara Klinghoffer – 20th century English Artist

Clara Klinghoffer: the girl who drew like Raphael and Leonardo

Evelyn Dunbar

Detail from Self portrait by Evelyn Dunbar (1930)

Evelyn Dunbar was born in Reading on December 18th, 1906.  She was the fifth and youngest child of William Dunbar and Florence Dunbar (née Murgatroyd). William Dunbar was a Scotsman who originally came from Cromdale, Morayshire.  In 1913, when Evelyn was seven-years-old the family moved to Rochester in Kent where her father established himself as a draper and bespoke tailor.  Evelyn’s mother Florence was a keen gardener and amateur still-life artist and a Christian Scientist and soon Evelyn became one and remained one throughout her life.

Portrait of the artists mother, Florence, on a bentwood rocking chair, by Evelyn Dunbar (c.1930)

Evelyn Dunbar won a scholarship to attend the Rochester Grammar School for Girls.  From there she enrolled on a two-year art course at the Rochester School of Art, in 1925 and in 1927 attended the Chelsea School of Art remaining there until 1929.  That year, she won a scholarship to attend  the Royal College of Art where she studied until 1933 at which time she graduated as an ARCA (Associate of the Royal College of Art). Students at the Royal College of Art were encouraged by Sir William Rothenstein, College Principal and Professor of Painting, to find commissions for their work and engage socially with influential art world figures. 

Compositional Study for The Pleasures of Life at Morley College by Charles Mahoney (1930)

Cyril Mahoney, known as Charles Mahoney, had been Visiting Painting Tutor at the RCA since 1928 and had carried out a commission to paint a thirty-foot long mural, entitled The Pleasures of Life, at the Morley College for Working Men which he and colleagues completed two years later.  In his memoir Since 50, Men & Memories 1922-1938, the first two names that appear on William Rothenstein list of top Royal College of Art students were Henry Moore and Charles Mahoney – the list continues with the names of other leading lights such as Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman Edward Le Bas, and Evelyn Dunbar.

Mural by Evelyn Dunbar at Brockley County School for Boys

In 1932, Mahoney was offered a commission to decorate Brockley County School for Boys (which is now the Prendergast School for Girls) in South London, and following an appeal from Rothenstein for students to experiment further with mural painting, Mahoney chose three of his senior students to assist in the project, Evelyn Dunbar, Mildred Eldridge and Violet Martin. The subjects of these proposed five arched-top panel murals were to illustrate tales from Aesop’s Fables.  The painting of this set of murals was not completed until 1936. 

An English Calendar by Evelyn Dunbar (1938)

During Mahoney’s work with Evelyn on the mural their relationship intensified and he became her lover.   Mahoney and Evelyn shared a studio in South End Road, at the southern end of Hampstead Heath.  Besides painting and sketching,  they had another shared interest, that of plants and horticulture.  Mahoney’s love of horticulture resulted in an amusing warning from Evelyn who wrote to him:

“…Don’t ever have too big a garden, or with your avidity for making the names in the catalogue come true, you’ll never touch a brush or a pencil…”

Whilst working on the Brockley murals Evelyn accepted another commission.  Near neighbours to Evelyn Dunbar and Charles Mahoney were Catherine and Donald Carswell, authors and journalists.  Donald Carswell had put together a series of short travel stories, to be published by Routledge & Sons, under the title, The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer and needed an illustrator to produce accompanying illustrations. 

Evelyn Dunbar: Pen and ink vignettes from The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (1936)

They approached Charles Mahoney who recommended Evelyn.  She agreed to the commission and produced twenty-five pen and ink vignettes, the frontispiece and dust jacket for the miscellany. 

Evelyn Dunbar: Pen and Ink frontispiece to The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (1936)

For Evelyn, it was not a labour of love and she wrote to Mahoney about her struggle to complete the commission asking for some moral support:

“…can you tell me why it is that whenever I get going on these blooming Scotch illustrations with vigour and spontaneity all my spontaneous and lively feelings completely desert me, and I am left clutching an unwilling, unwieldy pen, scratching at laborious and second-rate expressions of stereotyped and 5th rate (so it seems to me) ideas? I’m trying my best and I mean to get over it, but jobs of that kind seem to mesmerise me into a kind of stupidity and inability. Write me a few comforting and inspiring lines…”

With the success of the travel book more commissions came from the Routledge publishing house.  One of them was for the book, Gardeners’ Choice which comprised of the history, characteristics and cultivation advice for forty garden plants.  The book was illustrated in pen and ink, and was jointly written and illustrated by Dunbar and Mahoney.

Design for June for the Country Life 1938 Gardeners Diary by Evelyn Dunbar

More work came their way when the magazine, Country Life, commissioned Dunbar to compose their Gardener’s Diary 1938, a monthly journal and appointments book which contained literary texts chosen by Evelyn and illustrated with her pen and ink drawings.

In 1941 Dunbar collaborated with author, Michael Greenhill by providing pen-and-ink illustrations for his book, A Book of Farmcraft.  It was a basic primer of husbandry for those who had little or no knowledge of farming. Michael Greenhill was an instructor of recruits to the Women’s Land Army at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester, Hampshire. Many of Evelyn’s illustrations, differentiated between the right way of undertaking some agricultural task and the wrong way.  For the illustrations, Evelyn used Sparsholt recruits as her models.

Putting on Anti-gas Protective Clothing by Evelyn Dunbar (1940) Composite image of a woman being assisted into an anti-gas suit by another woman

Having looked at Evelyn Dunbar’s mural work and her interest in horticulture, floral paintings and illustrations, one has to remember that she is best known for her depictions of the activities of the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War.  In April 1940 Evelyn was appointed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, (WAAC), as an official war artist and later was the only woman artist to receive successive and continuous salaried commissions throughout the war.  The WAAC tasked her with pictorially documenting civilian contributions to the war effort on the home front.

Milking Practice with Artificial Udders by Evelyn Dunbar 

Land Army Girls going to Bed by Evelyn Dunbar

One of the most important tasks for women besides working in munitions factory was tending the land as so many male farm workers had gone to fight in the war.  The first harvest which the Women’s Land Army was largely responsible for bringing in during the summer/autumn of 1940 led to Evelyn’s painting entitled Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook.

Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook by Evelyn Dunbar (1940)

One of Evelyn’s paintings, A Canning Demonstration,  depicted some members of the Women’s Voluntary Service learning how to can and preserve the fruit which had been harvested that summer.

A Canning Demonstration by Evelyn Dunbar

A Knitting Party by Evelyn Dunbar (1940)

Another important task for the women, who volunteered their services, was to organise knitting “gatherings” at which the women would make blankets and comforters which could be sent to the troops.  In her 1940 work entitled, A Knitting Party we see one such gathering.  The setting is the drawing room of the Dunbar family home in Rochester, Kent, and it depicts some fifteen women, one of whom is Evelyn’s mother,  Florence.

Portrait of Flying Officer Roger Folley in Flying Kit by Evelyn Dunbar

Whilst working for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee she encountered Roger Folley, who came from Lancashire and who had graduated from Leeds University.  Roger was an “outdoor person” and spent his holidays and time after university working on farms and enjoying life outdoors hiking around the countryside.  Having gained some experience working on farms combined with his two university degrees (B.Sc and B.Comm.) it qualified him to work as an agricultural economist and his first job was as Costing Officer at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester, where he first met Evelyn who had been posted there in 1940 to paint Women’s Land Army recruits at work.

Winter Garden by Evelyn Dunbar (1929-37)

Roger was a Royal Auxiliary Air Force volunteer and at the outbreak of war, was called up to serve in the RAF.  He received his Flying Officer commission in 1941 and transferred from the Voluntary Reserve and became Flight Lieutenant Roger Folley RAF, serving as a navigator with 488 (NZ) Squadron.  Friendship between Evelyn and Roger blossomed into love and the couple were engaged in February 1942 and married the following August  

Pastoral, Land Girls Pruning at East Malling by Evelyn Dunbar (1944)

One of Evelyn’s and Roger’s great mutual loves was their commitment to the land and the careful management of its productivity.  For Evelyn this premise was in line with her Christian Science beliefs which she continued to follow.  She believed in the texts of the Old Testament that talked about a covenant between God and encompassed a covenant, frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, between God the Creator and mankind whereby the creator guaranteed the means of subsistence to mankind in return for mankind’s undertaking to cherish the land with love, intelligence and industry.

Potato Sorting, Berwick by Evelyn Dunbar

Evelyn often followed her husband when he was transferred to another military base and once he was stationed at RAF Charter Hall in Berwick. Whilst staying at the Scottish Borders, Evelyn made a sketch of women from the Women’s Land Army sorting newly dug-up potatoes.

Sprout Picking by Evelyn Dunbar

Much of the Land Girls’ work on the farm was back-breaking as can be seen by Evelyn’s painting entitled Sprout Picking.

Singling Turnips by Evelyn Dunbar

Turnip seeds are minute and they are scattered in ridges by seed-drill.  However a few weeks after the seeds have been “mechanically” sowed, the seedlings will shoot up in their masses along with a profusion of weeds.   To avoid the turnip shoots being choked by the weeds they have to be thinned out by hand and re-planted, known as “singling” – hence the title of the painting.

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

One of the last paintings Evelyn completed for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, depicting the Land Girls was entitled A Land Girl and the Bail Bull.  It is a depiction of a Land Girl’s work with an outdoor dairy herd on the Hampshire Downs.  The name “bail” in the painting’s title refers to the moveable shed, which can be seen in the centre of the middle-ground and is where the milking is done.  The girl has to catch and tether the bull and we see her enticing the animal with a bucket of fodder whilst she hides the chain behind her, ready to snap on to the ring in its nose as soon as it is within her reach. The girl in the painting is modelled by Evelyn’s sister, Jessie .

The Cerebrant by Evelyn Dunbar

Once the Second World War had ended Evelyn and her husband went to live in Long Compton, Warwickshire, and they remained there for fifteen months.  In 1946 The Oxford School of Art welcomed Evelyn as a part-time tutor and she combined this with her role as a visiting teacher at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. Having these two teaching posts in Oxford and with her husband, Roger Folley, obtaining a position in the nearby University Agricultural Economics Research Institute, the couple decided to move home from Long Compton and re-locate to Enstone, Oxfordshire, in the spring of 1947. They made the  Manor House at Enstone their home for next three years. In 1948, whilst living at Enstone, Evelyn completed a portrait of her thirty-five year-old husband Roger, entitled The Cerebrant.  The setting for the work was his study on the top floor of The Manor House.  It is a peaceful and relaxed portrait of her husband. He is depicted sitting  down at a small table, which has various coloured books on it. One of the books is open and he is holding one of the pages in his right hand. He is looking towards his right, which is the direction the light is coming from. Folley is dressed casually in a green, short-sleeved, collared shirt. The painting was given that title by Roger Folley some fifty-seven years later when he presented it to Manchester Art Gallery in 2005.  He had told one of his wife’s biographers that It was a celebration of Thinking.

Bailing Hay by Evelyn Dunbar (1943)

Roger Folley changed jobs in 1950 when he was appointed to the Department of Economics at Wye College, Kent. The new position meant Folley and Eveleyn had to move home and they  leased an isolated house, The Elms, four miles from the Kent village of Wye, nestled in the hills of the Kent Downs.  Dunbar would run informal art classes but still managed to travel once a year to Oxford to give an annual lecture at the Ruskin School. In 1953 a solo exhibition of her paintings was held at Withersdane Hall on the Wye campus.

Women’s Land Army Hostel by Evelyn Dunbar

Roger Folley was away in the Caribbean working for the government whilst Evelyn remained at The Elms.   However their lease on the property was coming to an end and she had to organise a new home for her and her husband.   Evelyn chose a more modern property in the village of Wye, which had once been a vicarage. She named it Tan House.  It did not prove a good move and the couple were never happy there.  It was smaller than they were used to and did not have a studio space for Evelyn. In 1958 Roger and Evelyn, could no longer endure the limitations of Tan House and moved to a farmhouse called Staple Farm, close to the village of Etchinghill, on the North Downs and in this home Evelyn had her own studio.

August and the Poet by Evelyn Dunbar (1960)

On the evening of May 12th 1960, whilst out walking in the woods around Staple Farm, Dunbar suddenly collapsed and died. One of Evelyn’s last paintings was Autumn and the Poet which she had started to paint ten years earlier and was still on one of her easels when she died.  The figure of the poet, half-seated on the ground, was modelled by her husband.  Unfortunately the painting was slightly smoke-damaged in a house fire in 2004, but was restored in time for the 2006 exhibition marking the centenary of Dunbar’s birth.

Roadworks by Evelyn Dunbar (Thought to have been produced while studying at Rochester School of Art in c.1926) sold in 2018 for £19,000.

Her main works were her oil paintings but she also left behind many portfolios of watercolours, drawings, pastels, sketches and other secondary work, most of which were not seen for many years after disappearing shortly after her death.   The Times newspaper in its obituary of Evelyn Dunbar wrote:

“…Living a retired life in Kent, absorbed in country pursuits, Miss Dunbar did not often come before the public in mixed exhibitions, but her mural paintings and illustrations, with their peculiar authenticity of work inspired by the ruling passion, appealed strongly to those who knew it…”

Roger Folley remarried in 1961, and Evelyn’s works of art were distributed among family and friends.

I have only scratched the surface of Evelyn Dunbar’s life and the majority of the information was gleaned from a beautifully written series of blogs regarding this wonderful artist written by her nephew, Christopher Campbell-Howes, who has also published a book on her life an art work.

Southport’s Atkinson Gallery

The Atkinson Gallery, Southport

Art galleries or Museums of Art come in various shapes and sizes from the gigantic multi-room edifices such as London’s National Gallery, Paris’ Louvre and Madrid’s Prado, to small one-room private galleries.  The former is awash with works which would take you days to properly study them all, whilst the latter often contain less than fifty paintings and you are sometimes hard-pressed to see a work you like. 

A couple of days ago I visited Southport on the Merseyside coast, a seaside resort which is close to where I was born and lived for most of my life and yet I had never visited the town’s art gallery.  There was something about the site’s publicity I found off-putting.  You see, it was a multi-faceted building; part museum, part library, part café, part children’s playroom, part theatre, part bar, part locals selling their art and crafts etc etc., and yet there was only a small shop/theatre ticket office which had no literature on the permanent collection and as I feared, the room set aside for works of fine art was small.  However the works of art in the permanent collection, numbering about fifty, were excellent and for that reason I can recommend you visit their permanent collection.  Today’s blog is about some of these fine works. There were a number of paintings, presumably on loan, which belonged to the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in the nearby town, Preston, which had been closed whilst undergoing renovations.

A Golden Dream by Thomas Cooper Gotch (1895)

Thomas Cooper Gotch was an English painter and book illustrator.  He studied art in London and Antwerp before he married and studied in Paris with his wife, Caroline, a fellow artist, and when they returned to England, initially his works depicted the lives of Newlyn fisherfolk but after a visit to Italy his style changed and he began painting Symbolist images conjuring up dreamlike idylls of Arcadian innocence, in a Pre-Raphaelite romantic style.  Gotch exhibited A Golden Dream for the 1895 opening of the Newlyn Art Gallery.

Cordelia Disinherited - John Rogers Herbert als Kunstdruck oder Gemälde.

Cordelia Disinherited by John Rogers Herbert (1850)

The subject of John Rogers Herbert’s painting is Cordelia, a fictional character in William Shakespeare’s tragic play King Lear. Cordelia, along with her sisters, Goneril and Regen are the three daughters of King Lear. After her elderly father offers her the opportunity to profess her love for him in return for one-third of the land in his kingdom, she, unlike her two sisters, refuses.  Lear banishes Cordelia from the kingdom and disinherits her.  Cordelia is depicted as a saintly figure.  She looks impassive and wears blue and white clothes which remind us of depictions of the Virgin Mary.  Herbert painting is a detail from a large fresco commissioned for the Houses of Parliament.

The Orphan of the Temple by Edward Matthew Ward (1875)

On the face of it, we are simply looking at an elegant young lady painting en plein air.  The title of the painting does not offer us a clue as to what is going on in the depiction !  However, if I tell you that the young lady painting is Marie Thérèse Charlotte, the eldest daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette you will realise that this painting depicts a little piece of French history.  In a brief synopsis of Marie Thérèse Charlotte  life : she was the daughter of Louis XVI, king of France and Marie Antoinette.  She was educated at French was imprisoned with her family in the Temple, originally a fortified monastery of the Templars and later a royal prison, in 1792.  Her mother and father were guillotined in 1793 although she was unaware of their fate at the time.  She was released from prison in 1795 and four years later married the Duke of Angoulême.  Later she lived in exile with her uncle Louis XVIII in various European countries.  The painting clearly contrasts the innocence of the young woman, dressed in white, with her gaoler who stands in the background.

On the Bridge by Stanhope Forbes (1925)

Stanhope Alexander Forbes was a British artist and a founding member of the influential Newlyn School of painters. He was often referred to as the father of the Newlyn School. This is the second time Stanhope Forbes painted this scene. The first was in 1888. The old bridge we see in the painting is in the Cornish village of Street-an-Nowan, in the lower part of the fishing town of Newlyn.

The Fish Fag by William Banks Fortescue (1888)

Fortescue was also one of the Newlyn School’s many Birmingham-born artists.  He began his career as an engineering designer but later trained as an artist. He studied art in Paris, and later travelled around Europe, reaching Venice in 1884.  On his return he exhibited many of his works depicting Venetian scenes at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. Fortescue went to live in the Cornish fishing town of Newlyn around 1885 and took lodgings in a house which also included Stanhope Forbes as another lodger.  This work by Fortescue was painted in the style of Stanhope Forbes and as is the case with this work, he used local people to model for his paintings.  The painting’s title Fish Fag is the term used for “Fishwife” and she would be in charge of cleaning the fish prior to them being sold.  Prior to the men setting sail in their boats the Fish Fags would also be tasked with baiting the hooks.  The little boy holding the toy boat and walking alongside the woman has probably been added by the artist implying that one day he will experience life as a fisherman.

Welcome, Bonny Boat! The Fisherman’s Return (Scene at Clovelly, North Devon) by James Clark Hook (1856)

The life of a fisherman is a precarious one, even in the present day but more so in the nineteenth century. Catching fish to feed the family was a necessity and sometimes the fisherfolk heading out to sea to bring home food and to eke out a living sometimes meant taking risks which often resulted in dire consequences. James Clarke Hook RA., an English painter and etcher of marine, genre, historical scenes, and landscapes, was born in London in November 1819.   Initially his favoured painting genre was history painting but then he turned his attention to genre depictions in rural landscapes.   He made several trips to Devon and the fishing village of Clovelly which in Devon stimulated him to adopt coastal scenes as his main motif but it was more than just depictions of the sea and boats as he incorporated figures into his paintings in order to highlight the hardship and rewards of life by the sea. He completed so many of this type of depiction that his coastal paintings were soon dubbed “Hookscapes”.  In this painting we see a returning fisherman being greeted by his family, all of who are relieved to see him back safely.

Katy’s Letter by Haynes King (1875)

Haynes King was an English genre painter, who was born in Barbados in December 1831. He came to London when he was twenty-three and became a student at Leigh’s later known as Heatherley’s Academy in Newman Street, London. In 1857 he exhibited some of his paintings for the first time at the Society of British Artists, of which he was elected a member in 1864 ; many of his works appeared at its exhibitions, and forty-eight were shown at the Royal Academy between 1860 and 1904.  He painted interiors, landscapes, and coastal scenes with figures. The motif in this painting centres around the letter which the young woman is reading.  The action of reading a letter was depicted in many paintings and became very popular.  The popularity of such a motif is probably because we are subconsciously being asked to imagine what was in the letter.  Good news or bad news?  We then put together in our minds a cover story both past and future for this young woman due to what she is reading !

The Argument by Tristram Hillier (1943)

Tristram Paul Hillier was an English surrealist painter and a member of the Unit One group led by Paul Nash . He was born on April 11th 1905 in Beijing, China, and was the youngest of the four children of Edward Guy Hillier, a banker and diplomat, and Ada Everett.  He attended Downside, an independent boarding school.  He later went to Christ’s College, Cambridge and later in 1926, the Slade, where his tutors included Henry Tonks.  From the Slade he travelled to Paris and studied for two years under André Lhote, and also at the Atelier Colarossi.  Whilst in Paris he mixed with many members of the Surrealist movement and was particularly influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst. He lived in France until 1940, but travelled extensively; he remained a surrealist painter throughout his life. His painting style is unique to him and if you look at some of his other paintings you will recognise similar characteristics.

The Children’s Prayer by Arthur Hacker (1888)

There were a number of paintings on show with religious connotations.  One such work was Children’s Prayer by the English painter Arthur Hacker.  Hacker was born in St. Pancras, Middlesex in September 1858.  In 1876, aged eighteen, he enrolled on a four-year course at the Royal Academy.  From there he went to Paris where he studied at the atelier of Léon Bonnat.  He became a member of the Royal Society of Portrait painters in 1894.  His paintings were shown at the Royal Academy on two occasions, in 1878 and 1910.  It was also in 1910 that he was elected as a Royal Academician.  He travelled to France, Italy, Spain and Morocco., and of the RA in 1910.  Hacker was most known for painting religious scenes and portraits.

La Prière du Matin (Morning Prayer) by André-Henri Dargelas (c.1860)

André Henri Dargelas, a French painter of the realist movement, was born in Bordeaux on October 11th 1828.  In his twenties, his paintings became very popular in England due to the positive assessment of his work made by the English art critic, John Ruskin, who liked Dargelas’ sentimental vision as seen in many of his paintings.  In 1857 he began to exhibit his work at the Paris Salon and the motifs of his paintings were influenced by the very popular eighteenth century French artist, Jean Siméon Chardin.

The Word by Keith Henderson (1931)

The above painting is more modern in comparison to those I have showcased earlier and some would say a more realistic view on religious trends and differing views of the old and young on the subject of religious worship. The Word was completed by Keith Henderson in 1931. Keith Henderson was a Scottish painter born in Aberdeenshire in April 1883.  He was one of three children born to George MacDonald Henderson, a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, and Constance Helen, née Keith.  He attended Orme Square School in London before being admitted to Marlborough College, a prestigious Wiltshire public school. He then studied at the Slade School of Art before moving to Paris and studying art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.  During the First World War he served as a Captain with the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry where he spent time in the trenches acting as a war artist.  He recorded his time on the Western Front in a book, Letters to Helen: Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front, which included several of his illustrations.  During the 1930s Henderson returned to Scotland to live on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides where his paintings at the time depicted village life.  He was forty-eight when he completed The Word which depicts an old lady seen distributing free bibles coming across a group of young revellers who have just come out of the local pub.  They seem to be little interested in her offer. The depiction harks back to Victorian moralistic paintings.

By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept by William Etty (1832)

“…By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. 

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. 

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?…”

My final painting in this blog also has religious associations as it illustrates a passage from the tragic 137th psalm of the Book of Psalms in the Tanakh, the Jewish bible. The painting by William Etty, By the Waters of Babylon depicts the biblical story of the Israelites’ captivity in Babylon.  The psalm is a communal lament about remembering Zion, and yearning for Jerusalem while dwelling in exile during the Babylonian captivity.  The psalm reflects the yearning of the exiles for Jerusalem as well as hatred for the Holy City’s enemies.  In Etty’s painting the lyre can be seen hanging from the tree.   William Etty was an English artist best known for his history paintings containing nude figures. He was the first significant British painter of nudes and still lifes and in this “religious” painting the three women depicted are in a state of undress.