The London Magazine, December/January 2017
Simon Tait
Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power by Alison Cole, published by Laurence King; 240pp; £19.95 (hardcover)
There is a perception that the Renaissance was something that happened in Florence in the first couple of decades of the 1400s, thanks to the Medici. The Renaissance actually evolved from about 1300 to 1600, a part of what was to become known as humanism that looked back to classical times for its motifs of documentary clarity and beauty. The name was inspired by Petrarch in the first half of the 14th century who used the word “rebirth” to describe what was happening.
But, as Alison Cole guides us through the complexities of inter-city politics and manners in the late Middle Ages, we see that while the Renaissance was the inspiration of artists, it was the patronage of the rulers of the city states of un-unified Italy that made it post-classical history’s most important cultural flip.
It was a supercharged era of political turmoil and thrust for fast progress, and the magnates of took their principalities through almost permanent war interspersed with filigree diplomacy in which they swapped family members through marriage and court artists like modern footballers. These city potentates were soldiers who made their fortunes as condottieri working for cities higher up the foodchain, popes and Holy Roman Emperors, from whom they won their titles.
A powerful weapon was art, but the enthusiasm for culture was not superficial. “Against a background of constant warfare, factional rivalry, popular unrest, arbitrary violence, devastating plague epidemics and a litany of everyday concerns, there were real pleasures, spiritual nourishment and consolation to be found in the arts and scholarship that the courts commissioned and consumed”, Cole tells us.
They believed in the sophistication and refinement of fashion to which they added their own dignity – Pontano’s treatise On Splendour at the end of the 15th century says the French eat for greed, the Italians with splendour, and in an earlier one, The Prince, to a devotion to Aristotle’s Ethics – not being afraid to import it from northern Europe. The virtues, according to various expositions of the time, were fortitude, prudence, temperance, magnanimity and liberalism, an ethic summed up as “Maiestate”, majesty. This clarity, order and decorum is seen in the work of the artists they chose, like Andrea Mantegna, Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti.
Most of the artists employed by the magnates were stipendari, journeymen who ranked alongside court barbers, but a few were familiaris, members of the inner circle, and they could have a more precarious existence, vulnerable to whims and to regime change. Some were associated with the particular cities – Pisanello with Naples, Mantegna with Mantua, Cosmè Tura with Ferrara, Alberti with Florence, Filarete with Rome – but, like Giotto early in the period and Leonardo later, they travelled and would be open to offers. Salaries were not commissions, they were to give the maestri space to work; they could get presents, such as parcels of land, as well (or possibly in lieu, as seems to have happened with Leonardo in Milan).
Most artists, though formatively trained as painters or stonemasons, were also expected to be designers and architects, and after the discovery of Vitruvius’s 1st century BC treatise On Architecture in 1414 there was a frenzy of enthusiasm for neo-classical building.
Winning a city state through conquest was often the easy part: victors then had to become accepted by the rest of the Italian princes. Alfonso V of Aragon took Naples in 1442 and used art as a diplomatic lingua franca. He brought Jacomart from Valencia as his court painter, attracted Jan van Eyck, Rogier Van der Weyden and the peripatetic Gentile da Fabriano. In 1449 Pisanello was behind the creation of the great monumental signature for him, a triumphal arch.
At Urbino there was Federico da Montefeltro who had been a child hostage in Mantua where he was taught at the court of the humanist Gonzagas. He hired Piero de la Francesca who had worked in Ferrara and Rimini (powerbase for Montefeltro’s great rival Sigismondo Malatesta) who painted and created architecture for him, and the Flemish colourist Justus of Ghent. The profile portrait of him and his wife Battista Sforza by Piero was used as a model for medallists and illuminators.
The Estes of Ferrara claimed descent from Alexander the Great but were actually of German stock. Pisanello made medals and naturalistic paintings for them, and only the best materials could be used. Tura’s fee for painting the religious figures in Borso d’Este’s chapel was less than the cost of the pigments.
The Gonzagas’ Mantua was a buffer between the argumentative Milan and Venice, and they accordingly increased their condottieri fees accordingly to invest in the arts. In 1460 Mantegna – knighted by Francesco Gonzaga as “our dear familiari” – was lured to Mantua from Padua and stayed for over 40 years, while the city was rebuilt in classical style. He did a chapel in the church of Sant’ Andrea and bought the land beyond the window so that no other new building could interrupt the light. He created the famous Camera Picta, also called the Camera degli Sposi, the marriage chamber, with its breathtakingly real fresco portraits of the Gonazaga family, where visiting nobles could assess the eligibility of the Gonzaga ladies. Mantegna was also a collector of antiquities, a taste he passed on to Isabella d’Este, Franceso’s wife, who may have created one of the first art galleries in her studiolo where she had up to 1,500 items and where she would hold debates on their qualities – she set Praxiteles’s 4th century BC Sleeping Cupid against Michangelo’s version.
Leonardo sold himself to Milan’s Ludovico Sforza as a military engineer, but one of his most breathtaking portraits was of the duke’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, also called The Lady with an Ermine (1490). In 1498 Leonardo painted his incomparable Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie ostensibly for the Dominicans, though their patron was Ludovico who dined there twice a week. But Sforza was running out of money (he was overthrown a year later partly because he had spent so much on art he had nothing left for mercenaries), and Leonardo was given a vineyard instead.
It is a potentially confusing story Alison Cole has set herself to tell, and she does it succinctly. None of these princes is the same, there are interruptions to their lines and while fortunes could be made by artists they had to choose their patrons shrewdly, but these patrons enabled some of the most glorious demonstrations of Western creativity. Without going into the detail a volume twice the size could not satisfy, in 240 pages she gives us an image of the cities’ contradictory professional bellicosity against their humanistic sophistication – their ineffable “majesty”.
The London Magazine, Aug/Sept, 2016
Simon Tait
From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group David Buckman , Francis Boutle Publishers, 2012, 382pp, £30 (paperback)
When David Buckman’s From Bow to Biennale, Artists of the East London Group was published in 2012 it was the result of nine years of research and shone a light on an unknown group of East End painters who briefly flourished for a decade across the 1920s and 30s. They were amateurs, night school pupils of a messianic teacher called John Cooper. Their fame resounded briefly internationally, but then were forgotten. Buckman, a journalist by training and technique, ferreted out the story, curiously reminiscent of the Pitman Painters of Ashington that William Feaver wrote a book about in 2008 which became a successful Lee Hall play. But Buckman had unearthed a goldmine.
And it was an exploding goldmine because that first edition detonated a burst of new information. Buckman had thought all the participants in the story to be dead, and they weren’t. Aimee Valdez, known as Birdie, was 101 when he found her, with a vivid memory of Cooper and his work. Eunice Veitch died in 1952 when her son was six, and he had no idea his mother had been a painter until this book was first published. Lost panels made for St Pancras Town Hall by Cecil Osborne were found. One of Cooper’s best pupils was the navvy-cum-pipe inspector Archibald Hattemore who disappeared at the group’s height: his grandson came forward with the story – he had got a new job which left him no time for classes and he ceased to show, but continued to paint at his Hackney home. There was the basket-maker Henry Silk whose great niece revealed a newspaper interview in which he told the reporter: “If I tell my customers that Lady Cunard has bought one of my paintings, and that one had been over to Ohio for a permanent collection, and that I had been mentioned over the wireless as an artist – do you think they would believe me? They would think I was just spinning a yarn”.
When the East London Group had its first exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in December 1928 the influential magazine Studio described it as “little short of sensational”. The amateurs had become accomplished painters, among them the brothers Harold and Walter Steggles (respectively a solicitors’ clerk and a shipping clerk), Albert Turpin (window cleaner), Reginald Tomlinson (school inspector), Elwin Hawthorne (house decorator) and the navvy Hattemore. Some even got advertising commissions.
The group’s origins had been in the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute Art Club whose librarian, A K Sabin, pompously wrote that the club was “the first serious attempt to interest the worker of the district in the executive side of art”. The institute’s first annual exhibition was in 1924 at the Bethnal Green Museum, all the exhibitors being self-taught. “My Bethnal Green gang produced good and various paintings,” said their teacher, William Finch. But by 1927 they had switched allegiance to the Bow and Bromley Evening Institute and a recent Slade graduate teaching there, John Cooper, who saw enough potential in them to launch them onto the West End gallery circuit, making a deal with the Lefevre Gallery. “Life in those days could be very new and exciting,” recalled one of the group, Cecil Osborne, “and all art very wonderful, opening new vistas to be explored”.
Born in Yorkshire in 1894 Cooper had served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and with his ex-serviceman’s grant went to the Slade where he was taught by Henry Tonks. Graduating in 1922 he underpinned his income as a painter by teaching evening classes. He created a network of powerful supporters among former fellow students, subjects and collectors, such as Henry Moore, J B Priestley, Thomas Beecham, Arnold Bennett, Aldous Huxley, Ramsay Macdonald and Osbert Sitwell.
For that first exhibition in 1928 “about 30 members drawn from Hackney, Whitechapel, East Ham, Poplar, Mile End and so on” showed, according to the Evening News. Thed groups had grown from nine to 35, and many of them wanted to do no more than paint images for greetings cards. Cooper steered them into more challenging areas. “It was his inspiration to get the members to stop painting film stars and to paint what was all about them, say, a dingy bedroom, and look at it in a new way,” said Nancy Sharp, a Slade student recruited to help by Cooper along with her fellow student and future husband William Coldstream.
As early as 1924 Cooper had been surprised by the painter-like qualities of some of the students. “They boldly tackled scenes from their everyday life, seeing beauty in most unlikely subjects and reproducing it with surprising success,” he told the Evening News. Teaching help came from his Slade friends, and Rodrigo Moynihan was another of his assistants; Sickert gave the group informal lectures, telling them that expensive excursions to find landscapes to paint were unnecessary. “There is no need to go to Bognor,” he said. “You can go into the Tube”.
The Tate responded to the 1928 Whitechapel show, buying two pictures from it and in the following year putting on its own exhibition of 24 pictures from the group, showing “what British artisans can do in their spare time”, as the gallery’s press release put it.
And so the amateur East London Art Club metamorphosed into a professionally recognised East London Group with Mayfair art dealers taking an active interest. In 1935 there was a touring exhibition of Canada and the USA, organised through the Courtauld Institute and augmented by contributions of professional London Group artists such as Paul and John Nash, Charles Ginner and CRW Nevinson. The high point, though, was the inclusion of paintings by the East London Group’s Elwin Hawthorn and Walter Steggles in the 1936 Venice Biennale.
The end of the group began when a five year Lefevre contract ended in 1937, followed by the decision of the Bromley & Bow Institute to expel the group – because other students thought it unfair that they were allowed to use the institute’s facilities to exhibit and sell their work – and Cooper left too. After some war work as an air ministry draughtsman, he died of sclerosis of the spine in 1943, aged 48. The East London Group never exhibited together again, until the ten-week 2014 exhibition at The Nunnery, Bow (and more exhibitions are scheduled for the Nunnery and Southampton City Art Gallery in 2017).
Although several of the artists continued to work and show, as well as pursuing their day jobs, they never exhibited as the East London Group again. “My efforts have been directed to stimulating the students to express something which they feel about life,” Cooper had told The Millgate magazine. “This was some of the reason for Rembrandt’s greatness”.
David Buckman has a great story to tell and despite his fastidiousness in making sure every single fact is not missed, much like his meticulous researching, the book is an easy read, written by a reporter who has fallen for his subject.
The London Magazine, August/September 2017
Simon Tait
Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art (1857-1909), by Julius Bryant, published by Lund Humphries in association with V&A Publishing, May 2017, pp. 176, £35 (Hardback)
At the end of June the Victoria & Albert Museum opened its spectacular Amanda Levete designed new £50m extension beyond the reverent arches of the Aston Webb Screen on Exhibition Road, the biggest new build since the place opened in 1909.
It brings to an end more than 35 years of frequent returns to the drawing board as the museum tried to find solutions to the problem of the Boiler House Yard, and as Julius Bryant’s timely new book shows it is a compliment to the original terracotta building that set a South Kensington characteristic.
How the museum ever got built in the first place is a mystery, however, and its tribulations make the Boilerhouse wranglings pale into insignificance.
The V&A owes existence primarily to Henry Cole, a bustling, liberal, extraordinarily well connected civil servant-cum-journalist. He also moonlighted as a freelance entrepreneur who did business producing household goods under the happy soubriquet of “Felix Summerly”, and commissioned the best artists to design them, – Richard Redgrave, William Dyce, J C Horsley (who designed the first Christmas card for him), Daniel Maclise and Milliam Mulready among them. Several of them were involved in the School of Design, opened in 1837, and Cole joined them. He took it over, reformed it, expanded it, created a museum in it, and public design education became his mission.
It was also Prince Albert’s and the two worked together to create the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition of 1851, out of the profits of which Cole persuaded the prince and the government to buy an estate at Brompton in which to create an educational precinct.
The first of the institutions to be planned was the museum, and to save money a Royal Engineers captain, Francis Fowke, was commissioned to design it. Cole and Albert were not patient men, however, and Fowke was asked to create a temporary structure to get the institution established, and the pre-fabricated iron building he made still stands, but now in Bethnal Green where it houses the V&A Museum of Childhood. It was unkindly dubbed “The Brompton Boilers” by those who thought it looked more like a power station than a place of culture.
But Cole’s insistence on using the building itself to teach design excellence prevailed. There were decorations by Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, Edward Poynter, G F Watts, J M Whistler, Owen Jones and William Morris – though the most famous artist of the time, John Everett Millais declined, saying “Show rooms should be made not to assert themselves” – and Bryant details how it was done in very readable style having had unique access to the V&A’s exhaustive archives, superbly illustrated.
That it did get built is testament to the determination of it progenitors, who succeeded against combinations of bad luck, political parsimony and stifling bureaucracy. Having got a temporary iron building on the site to satisfy Cole’s bustling urgency, Fowke died at 42 in 1865; two months later his chief engineer, Geoffrey Sykes, 41, also died; in 1861 Prince Albert died, then in 1873 Cole resigned over funding cuts; in 1882 Henry Scott, Fowke’s successor and designer of the Royal Albert Hall, was fired (he died a year later) and at the same time his designer, Reuben Townroe, resigned because he hadn’t been paid. And all the time the collections were growing, changing the space requirements of the museum.
But Scott kept to Fowke’s masterplan and the V&A was built in three phases: 1857-1868 when Cole’s redbrick galleries for showing paintings and giving lectures were built; 1869-1884 when Scott built the architectural courts and National Art Library; the last phase, 1899-1909, saw Aston Webb’s main building completed.
The grand screen was not only a link between the museum and the Science Schools to the north in Exhibition Road, it shielded the a boilerhouse that powered the building. The screen was eventually created by Aston Webb in the plan’s third phase.
This area’s difficulties were partly solved in 1983 when the Science Schools, which had become an outstation of the Royal College of Art, became the V&A’s Henry Cole Wing with a new entrance from Exhibition Road. Temporary offices were created where the boilerhouse stood, and the beginnings of the Design Museum was sparked beneath as the Boilerhouse Project, before it moved to Shad Thames and now Kensington High Street.
By 1996 the V&A was in dire need of expansion on a tight site and the controversial design by Daniel Libeskind for a pyramidal structure, called The Spiral, was to create new exhibition spaces, education rooms and offices, but it was controversially out of rhyme with the “South Kensington Style” established 140 years before and matched by the Royal Albert Hall and Alfred Waterhouse’s Natural History Museum. It struggled to get funding, and was eventually abandoned in 2004 with its main champion, the director Alan Borg, having moved on in 2001.
And although Amanda Levete’s design is quintessentially of our time, it takes its inspirations from the Victorian museum and from some of the plans that were never realised. The Sackler Courtyard, for instance, has been porcelain tiled, with examples of 19th century decorative ceramics. The Italian mosaics in the entrance lobby echo the restored floors around the museum – made by female prisoners – and the support structure for the balustrade to the staircase leading down to the Sainsbury Gallery also takes its cue from the century-old staircases in the museum.
The Aston Webb Screen encountered on Exhibition Road is back after conservation. Originally envisioned by Cole it was only realised many years after his death, and the helter-skelter like tower he wanted at the screen’s centre was never built, nor was the bridge he wanted to connect the museum with the rest of the estate across the road. Levete’s design completes Cole’s vision, she believes.
Before, in her last public act, Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the finished building she had been determined that the South Kensington Museum should emerge as the Albert Museum, but she was persuaded to change her mind so that on May 17, 1899, she declared “that in future this institution shall by styled the Victoria and Albert Museum”.
by Simon Tait The London Magazine, September 2017
Shetland is a quiet, self-possessed nation of 22,000 whose population still considers itself to be more Norse than British. They like celebrations, foys they call them, but the big one comes on the last Tuesday of January, a midwinter relief when male Shetlanders dress up as Vikings, process through the capital, Lerwick – or Lerook in the vernacular – with torches and set fire to a galley. The day after is the public holiday to allow the revellers to recover.
The name of Up Helly Aa, according to John Jamieson’s 1818 Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, is from the Old Norse word uppi meaning “the end of”, helly is “holy” – the end of Christmas – and aa is “all”. So, given the abandon the festivities are consigned to at the depths of the near-Arctic climate, “the end of all that’s holy” would be about right.
Thousands descend on Up Helly Aa in their vast tourist cruise ships, and welcoming as Shetlanders are, much of their chatter will be alien to even the English speaking visitors. Half of Shetland’s residents can still speak their ancestors’ tongue, once forbidden by the ruling Scots but still alive, unique and charming, in which the biggest insult is to call someone a “soothmoother’, one whose speech comes from beyond the islands. Our “ith” has been largely lost to dialect, so that “they” is “day”, “then” is “dan”. “Their” and “there” have both become “dare”, but “you” is “du” – the “y” form having once been runic for “ith” so that “du” comes from “thou”. “Wat du daan da day, dan?” is “What are you doing today, then?”
Shetland dialect has German, Old Scots, elements of Latin, even discernible traces of French, but at its base is their own Norn which reclines on Old Norse.
Norn, or Norrøna, is essentially a street language. Much as Shetlanders love their sagas and blood curdling yarns of whaling disasters and family tragedy it’s largely an oral tradition, though I have a volume of dialect poetry that takes much from Norn. Despite its Old Norse base Norn relies heavily on onomatopoeia and where there isn’t a word to fit a particular situation, a new one emerges from the idiom. And there is its great charm.
Life is hard in this land where the sun only shines for half the year, when the men traditionally fished for whale in the winter months and worked the land where no trees can grow in the long hours of the seasons of “simmerdim”, while the women were spinning and weaving, plucking wool from the gorse bushes and cutting peat all year round. So it is not surprising that the dialect has, for instance, 12 different words for exhausted: you could emerge from the daily grind daddit, debaetless, depooperit, disjasket, forfochen, hurless, maegered, mankit, moyenless, ootmaagit, pooskered or even pyaagit, largely depending on which of the islands you hail from.
To help rescue this beguiling language Alistair Christie-Johnston and his wife Adaline, who live on the island of Yell, published a dictionary, Shetland Words, with the Shetland Times, compiled because he and his editor, Neil Anderson, feared that many of the intrinsic words were falling out of use and will be lost for ever. At the end of the 19th century there were thought to be about 10,000 Shetland dialect words extant, by 1970 only about 15% of them were found; through ground knowledge and detective work Shetland Words has recorded about 4,000. The book, published in 2010, sold out and a second edition has just been published with 300 more words gleaned from the outer islands, difficult because the accents change from island to island so that the same word might sound quite different at Skerries to the north east, say, than it will at Foula in the west.
The basis remains, and the survival of Norn is remarkable. It began to die as long ago as the 16th century when rule reverted from Norway to Scotland and Scots law was imposed with the indigenous language proscribed, but many beautiful words of Norn remain in the argot. Bonnhoga, for instance – from the Old Norse barn (child) and hagi (pasture) – which means spiritual home. Gauvenliss is the word for feeble or clumsy; a mouse is a bohonnin, which by some old irony comes from the Norse for watchdog; a pig is a pottisidna; a clergyman is a prestengolva (“the one in the cassock”). A swee is a strong dram, an organic word, and a clock midder is a hen with chicks, but a hansel is a commemorative gift, from the Old Norse for the transference of a right; a cangle is a quarrel.
Modern life has made its incursions, but in a curious way that leaves a helpful distinction. The shower in your bathroom is pronounced “shower”, but a quick downfall of rain is still a shooer. Shetland also has its own, not always appealing, cuisine and words to go with it. It may not be a surprise to know that a dish of fish livers mixed with oatmeal, stuffed in a herring’s head and boiled is called “krappit” and is rarely eaten any more.
The etymology of some words is mysterious until you know more of the island life. Wild thyme is taegirse, which translates as “toe grass” and makes no sense until you know that thyme here is used as a treatment for athlete’s foot. But Alistair Christie-Johnston and Neil Anderson were not content – “tae” after all is Scots and plants in Shetland tend to keep their Norn traces. They tracked the real derivation down to the Old Norse word for root fibre tág, plural taeger, which fits the tight network of the Shetland variety of creeping thyme. You have to be there.
It is an ancient language full of social history, and a glimpse into a lost age, Neil Anderson told me. He is a Shetlander of the old school who can give you the family name of a man he has never met simply because of the way he walks; in the same way, he can tell from which island a person comes from the words he uses. And he had an affirming experience in the Lerwick shop he runs when he offered a young man a foodbag. He didn’t know what he meant, but he did know the Shetland word, maetpockie.
https://www.shetlandheritageshop.com/Shetland-Words-A-Dictionary-of-the-Shetland-Dialect.html
by Simon Tait The London Magazine, December/January, 2019
Philip Sutton celebrated his 90th birthday on October 20 with two exhibitions, in what has become his home town of Bridport in Dorset. One of them was of charcoal drawings, the other was a retrospective of the last seven decades, including some new canvases, “my whole life”. Painting still is his life, and although his eyes are not good any more and the sight is gone in one eye he paints constantly and walks the West Bay beach three times every day.
Less conspicuously, there was also a small exhibition at the Red House, the Britten-Peers Library at their home in Aldburgh, Suffolk, of the seven Suttons the library owns, including his portrait of Peter Pears and the picture that changed his life.
Sutton he says he owes his profession to chance – that he was able to make use of the ex-serviceman’s grant scheme for higher education in 1949, that the Slade saw something in his evening class drawings of car badges, that William Coldstream was the Slade professor, that the dealers Henry Roland and Gustave Delbanco went to the Slade’s 1953 degree show on Coldstream’s recommendation and saw Sutton’s melancholy portrait of a fellow student. And that the singer Peter Pears happened to pass the Roland, Browse & Delbanco gallery in Cork Street.
The ex-aircraftman arrived at the Slade, as did Coldstream, in 1949 with an intake that included Ewan Uglow, Craigie Aitchison and Michael Andrews whose different kinds of genius were recognised and nurtured by the avuncular, taciturn Coldstream – not least Phil Sutton’s. His friend Derry Irvine – Lord Irvine of Lairgs – recalls Coldstream telling him: “Phil can never be written off. His work can go through bad phases, but he is and always will be capable of producing something that is really good because he is a gifted, intuitive painter”.
The college career – at the Slade he met the film-maker Heather Cooke, his wife of 64 years, who died last year – was auspicious by any standards, but graduation reality in austerity London was hard. He and Heather escaped to Europe for a while on bursaries he’d won, and at one point Uglow found them living in Menton on a diet of potatoes. Heather became pregnant and they returned to London penniless with baby Jake in a woven straw carrycot.
Sutton got low-paid teaching shifts at the Slade and another college friend, Harold Cohen – later to be the pioneer of computer art in the United States where he developed the “cybernetic artist “, AARON – found the family a room in the house where he had a flat. Toilet, kitchen and bathroom were shared, Jake slept in a cardboard box, and it was a fairly squalid environment from which to launch a career, a career Sutton was not sure was there to be had.
It was at about this time that Peter Pears happened to pass the gallery window and had his eye caught by Sutton’s sombre, expressionistic portrait of a fellow student, Tony Tice, who was later to commit suicide. Struck by the vibrant colour use he bought it on an impulse – the first Philip Sutton picture to be sold through a commercial gallery – got into conversation with Delbanco and heard of the poverty the family were subsisting in, got Sutton’s address and asked him to lunch with Benjamin Britten at their favourite Covent Garden restaurant, Bertorelli’s. “All I can remember of it was that I was starving hungry but so nervous I couldn’t eat anything”, he says.
Britten and Pears thought the family were in need of a holiday and offered them the use of a cottage in Snape, Suffolk, for a fortnight. It was called Joy Cottage and they stayed for three years, during which two more children were born, and Sutton commuted three days a week to the Slade.
He arrived at Joy Cottage at a crossroads in his painting. He was aware of developments in St Ives, saw the American Expressionists’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, and was agonising on whether abstractism was the way he should go. Several canvases were destroyed in his frustration, before he finally rejected it. “At periods in your life when something’s floating in the air you pick it up, almost like a virus”, he says. Instead he felt the power of the landscape outside his windows. “All I can do is respond to how things fall. But I was a different painter when I left Snape than the one that went there”.
The invitation was a life-changing, career-making, act of kindness. Britten and Pears used to take the family off in their car on fine days for beach picnics, and it was at the cottage that Pears’s portrait was painted. The family lived a spartan life and when Delbanco visited he found “a most disorderly household… the piss-pot stood in the kitchen and so on” and he found it “amusing to have to sleep in my overcoat because it was so cold”.
But Delbanco liked what he saw. Sutton’s style matured and coalesced at Joy Cottage, the colours became less hectic and less mordant, the paint thinner on the canvas, the strokes more lyrical; there were pale seascapes, dreamy landscapes from the open country that had inspired Constable and Gainsborough, and many happy depictions of his growing family. “As an extrovert colourist – because there are introvert colourists – this complete lack of hesitation with the handling of paint, this instinctive understanding of the nature of colour, is a thing so rare in the English school, and it’s Sutton’s greatest asset”, Delbanco said. The art began to sell.
In 1958 the family left Suffolk for affordable Battersea, transported by their friend Jeffrey Camp, for a phase in which Philip Sutton became popular, and then in the 60s and 70s fashionable. Their house, bought thanks to a loan from Heather’s father, became a salon, the work was collected by the Tate, the Government Art Collection, Harrison Birtwistle, Albert Finney, Penelope Wilton, Arnold Wesker, Nell Dunn, Irvine, Carl Davis and Lord Snowdon, who did an elegiac photographic feature of the Sutton household for the Sunday Times Magazine. In the 70s Sutton was elected an RA and never misses showing and selling in the Summer Exhibition.
It was in the Suffolk years that Sutton became assured that he was a painter by profession, not a teacher that paints. He arrived at Battersea with confidence and ease in the depiction of form and colour that he found within himself, thanks to the tranquility of Joy Cottage.
“I was looking for a target, what I should be painting, and realised it was in myself”, he says now, “and I found it by chance. Chance has been so important.
“As long as you bump into something you don’t know is there and can take it on, that’s being creative, but if you bump into something you know is there and look no further, that is not a creative act. The essence of a spirit of adventure is that you don’t know the result, and for that you need courage.”
Philip Sutton at 90 is at Bridport Arts Centre until October 6
Philip Sutton RA is at the Literary and Scientific Institute Bridport until October 6
Early Philip Sutton is at The Red House, Snape, until October 28
