Christopher 'Kit' Wood-A Life Wasted? Or An Inspiration To Others?

Christopher “Kit” Wood. Left Liverpool at the age of 19 and proclaimed that he would become the greatest painter the world had ever seen. He had £14 in his pocket.

He was born in Huyton, then in the countryside near Liverpool.

He was sent to boarding school in Malvern at an early age.

He had been interested in medicine and architecture at Liverpool University where he met the painter Augustus John who was then teaching there.

He arrived in Paris in March 1921 at the invitation of the collector Alphonse Kahn.

There he studied at the Academie Julian where he met many of the worlds soon to be famous painters.

He was bisexual.

Paris was the modern city and the capital of art.

Rules had been broken and the intellectual way of painting had arrived decades earlier. 

'Kit' got some bad habits, such as Opium which may have been introduced to him by his rich Playboy lover, Antonio de Gandarillas

His addiction would greatly hinder him.

“My brain is working too hard, he said, and I don't know where the end will come, I work so hard and produce nothing whatsoever to satisfy me”

In Feb 1927 none other than Picasso recommended that Kit design the set for Serg Dagliev's Romeo and Juliet at Theatre Du Chatelet.

It was a disaster. As Dagliev had a blazing row with him and he was sacked.

In 1927 his plans to elope and marry heiress Meraud Guinness were frustrated by her parents whereupon he required emotional support from Winifred Nicholson.

Despondent but with fresh ideas swimming around in his head he headed for Cornwall. His mother was Cornish.

 In the summer of 1928 Kit joined Ben Nicholson on Sunday 26^th August for a sketching trip to St Ives.

 He had high hopes on the English Riviera. 

They headed for Porthmeor beach and painted.

After a successful day spent painting they packed up and set for home

Then something happened that would change both their lives 

There in a small cottage with an open door they both peered in and in a room full of paintings.

 They had discovered the work of Alfred Wallis. 

The naivety was an inspiration and Kit stayed on for the autumn, renting a place closed to Wallis.

Nicholson went back to London to spread the word of the encounter as if the Messiah had arrived. 

“If I am here long enough, he said I am going to paint good things”. Kit said.

He began to paint scenes inspired by the Cornish Coast with its fresh light.

Had he finally found the inspiration he desired. Cocteau who said he was an exceptional painter, now meant nothing to him.

He started painting inspired by Wallis who he visited every day, but the hallucinogenic addiction that he had to Opium was preying on him.

He became paranoid and began to lose his mind painting some sinister scenes in what would be some of his last works.

Wallis opened up a spirit in him and his work was beginning to bear fruit. 

He felt as if he belonged to the light of the coast of St Ives.

Wallis became a cult recording the decline of the fishing industry in his own silly way that seems to have conjured up dreamlike sequences for aspiring artists who now flocked there. Wallis painted on anything he could find and he was free not having had any training. 

He was poor and in 1890 after chasing shoals of fish out in the deep sea. He painted from memory and his perspective is very strange indeed, but it was this charming naivety that the new modern artists adored.

Kits work then took on a paranoid sense of his own gloom laden opium twisted senses.

In 1929 he held a solo exhibition at Tooths Gallery in Bond Street.

 He met Lucy Wertheim there, she would become a supporter of his.

"I know that my future as a painter from now on will be bound up with your own, and I shall become great through you!" He would say to her.

In May 1930 he had a largely unsuccessful exhibition with Nicholson in Paris. In June and July he made a second trip to Brittany to create new work.

 Later in July Lucy travelled to meet Kit in Paris, to choose the paintings for a one-man show that would be the opening exhibition at her new Wertheim Gallery in October.

While discussing the exhibition over lunch the day after her arrival, Wood issued her with an ultimatum: "'I want you to promise to guarantee me twelve hundred pounds a year from the time of my exhibition, one hundred pounds a month being the least I can live on. If I can't have this sum I've made up my mind to shoot myself'".

 When she complained, he begged her forgiveness, and they went to review the paintings again.

On 21^st august 1930 Kit met his mother for Lunch in Salisbury and then through himself under a train. He was 29.

This was reported as an accident.

Following his death the show was cancelled; it was eventually staged as a memorial show at a different gallery in 1931.

He was buried in the churchyard of All Saints Church in Broad Chalke.

 His gravestone was carved by the sculptor Eric Gill.

CODA

Alfred Wallis.

An ex fisherman he retired from the sea in 1890 and opened a marine supply store.

When his wife died in the 1920's he began to paint.

 Little did he know that his melancholy would inspire a generation.

He was naïve alright and poor he painted on anything he could get his hands on.

He had no idea about perspective and his subliminal thoughts began to show through and inspire others. He would say that he painted out of his mind as it was.

Wallis was sent to a madhouse as he was chased by ghosts. He died a celebrity amongst the artists and he was entombed by Bernard Leach who erected his epitaph.

The art community came to pay its respects.

Henry Tonks-The Real War Artist.

Henry Tonks was a war artist of the highest degree. He did not do landscapes.

He was a Professor. Maybe a little old fashioned.

Henry Tonks said when he taught art at the Slade “I will resign if this talk of cubism continues”

He had taught many artists such as Paul Nash at the Slade School of Art but he did not teach him enough. Paul Nash's paintings have become an important visual reference for us when thinking about the conflict, including this powerful, apocalyptic vision of nature violated by war. Nash was commissioned by a government scheme, in 1916, which initially aimed to illustrate publications with drawings to supplement the limited photographs available. Nash had served briefly in the Ypres Salient in 1917 before being invalided out. When he returned to Belgium as an artist, he was shocked by the devastation wrought by the battle of Passchendaele. All of the commissioned artists’ work had to be passed by the official censor. While depictions of dead British soldiers were unacceptable, this devastated landscape managed to pass unchallenged due to its symbolic, rather than literal, content. Nash’s startling, new, modernist vision would bring him huge acclaim in the art world.

However, Colonel A N Lee, the censor, could not foresee this. He wrote: “I cannot help thinking that Nash is having a huge joke with the British public, and lovers of ‘art’ in particular. Is he?”

http://waynecolquhoun.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/dead-mans-penny-edward-carter-preston.html

While Paul Nash was basking in glory, stylising suffering as official war artist, Henry Tonks was recording the reality of war on a very intimate scale.

Tonks too old for front line action volunteered as an orderly.

Dr Harold Gilles had helped set up a pioneering new hospital specialising in facial surgery. 

When Gilles, who was the head surgeon realised that Tonks was working there his instincts to record the remodelling or rebuilding of a face were assisted when he asked Tonks to help him.

 He needed colour and Tonks with his background as a surgeon and then as a demonstrator of anatomy understood what Gilles needed.

He was in the right place at the right time to do his bit for the war.

Reconstructive surgery at that time was largely at its infancy and mostly made up of just clinching flesh, and pulling it over to close up a wound and stitching it into a part of the face that would help it to resemble what was there before.

Tonks sat with forlorn soldiers who had given up hope, whose lives were dead inside.

Some would never recover from the wounds they had endured. 

When we say the scars of war, he recorded them in all their disfigured glory. 

They were humans who had given themselves in the cause of freedom.

With dignity Tonks made a portrait in soft pastel of Walter Ashworth of the Bradford Pals who injured on the first day of the first world war.

In the first few minutes the Pals were cut to ribbons.

He also made a diagram of where to stitch and then he painted him again after the reconstruction that gave him what was described as 'a pleasant smile'.

Art as modernism in a modern age. He had to use the skills of Leonardo Da Vinci for a new age, after all he was qualified.

He said about his portraits “These are the only works of which I am not ashamed.”

He would help in rescuing these wretched creatures lives, of abandoned luck and malicious evil.

Artistic compassion was required.

Imagine the sitter seeing his image and knowing how he looked.

 The sharing of this ordeal will have been hard.

It is so difficult today to look at these images, even in reproduction through the internet or on TV.

But look you must, because in these images we see why war is wrong and those heroic stories of heroism in the face of fire fall heavy down to earth when you witness what Henry saw. 

Fire in the face.

No matter how hard I look I turn away from the reality. I try again and still my mind wont let me focus, it is too real, I turn away again and again I try to look.

It seems as if you don't want to, so as not to defy a lifetime of watching war films made, rightly to testify to those brave sods who went over the top. But this is reality.

But, we the world turned its back on the truth and it is only now a hundred years later that we can palate the truth of Henry Tonks images of soldiers brave, those without palates, for a lot of them had been blown to smithereens.

 Those poor people who would not only be reminded, after the war, of that indiscriminate trajectory missile that scarred them.

These faces would remind every one else of the horrors of war and so they would be saddled with carrying the guilt of others lives cut short.

They say when you are staring into the abyss you find yourself, but these poor people look like lost souls, like ghostly images from the deep. I have spared the reader the full horror.

Or are they just the depths of our of our own spirit?

They make you realise that those who were lucky, were sometimes dead. They did not have to live the horrors for the rest of their life. They were free of the stigma of half a decade of mass murder on an industrial scale in those Flanders Fields.

You don't see this sort of stuff in films such as Where Eagles Dare or Force 10 from Navaronne.

We do not see the blood of war like the trench reality would have been.

You cant smell the stench of rotting flesh.

Even though we know Spielberg can do such a brilliant job of convincing us, of showing bullets flying through the air and hollowing the sounds war makes, he would never dare show this. The censors would not let him. But look we must.

When the Americans chased Saddam Hussains Iraqi army out of Kuwait and bombed the hell out of them on the road back to Basra they left many of them as charred skeletons torn of flesh. The images captured by brave war correspondents, of this stench of death, were banned from being shown to the American public.

They might ruin the breakfasts of a nation and spoil their day.

There is no redemption for the victors of war, for they write history. And as with the Vietnamese murder zone a picture can tell a story.

PR can save a President who should be shot or be on trial for war crimes.

For these works by Henry Tonks show the side of war that I want to forget, but I must look at.

I must learn to stare and so I should challenge Presidents and Prime Ministers and Saudi Princes in pure white stainless linen with blood on their hands.

Tony Blair should be made to look at these pictures of the aftermath of war.

Those who survive who will be forever locked into a dream like sequence of recurring nightmare night after night, cast into perpetual recollection for perpetuity, waking up every night screaming need compassion.

So not only is the suffering of war written on the faces of those Tonks Tommy soldier boys they were branded with them for life, or what was left of that life.

How could these boys be taken and destroyed in the flowering of their youth.

And while I am writing this article I see an image by Francis Bacon.

It looks like one of Tonks Tommies with a twisted face, yet this is of his lover.

It seems that he is copying Henry Tonks style?.......but as a way to make himself look clever, to show his prowess as a painter. He has captured Tonks images.

It may be that he has just stumbled across a style.

Bacon grew up during the blitz it is well recorded. He saw bad times.

But did Bacon ever see these images of real despair by Henry Tonks?

Bacon was brave enough to use the twisted and tortured souls of his portraiture and turn it into modernism.

Why can we look at Bacon's work with ease?

No matter how we tell ourselves its haunting we flinch to turn away from images of poor Tommy boys crying inside, bleeding from within.

Is this because Bacon was capturing emotion and not recording the tragedy of grief?

Who could except the compassionate respectful and watchful eye of Henry Tonks?

Who was the better artist?

For to Tonks I tip my hat, to a man who cared, not for himself, because the pastels and watercolours he did was not gallery work, that would hang for all to see on pristine white walls. But show us our guilt of futile pride and slaughter.

  Tonks work has been hidden from public view for almost a hundred years. From a public who would be upset, who would not turn up if they were displayed in a gallery. Maybe they should not be displayed on public view.

They were much more important than that.  

Daum Vase-Piece of the Week

DAUM.

Founded by The Brothers Auguste and Antonin in the town of Nancy in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine.
They would create glassware of exceptional quality with varying techniques of finest workmanship that would, at times, rival the work of Galle.

The first Department of Art was created within the small family glassworks which would interpret the spirit of Art Nouveau.
They moved with the times through the Twenties and Thirties an evolution into a Art Deco style.


They would welcome in a new era in the 1950's and still make glasswares today.

100 years ago it was not just the case of expressing a new artform but aquiring the techniques to express it in glass. To imbue a feeling or a sincerity, the Daum Brothers wanted to make work that would outshine its rivals.

Works that would create an arousal, not only in the style but an understanding of the complexity of the piece, heightening the sense of achievement of the craftsman and designers collaboration.

Shape, Decoration, Colour and Material would be the four elements that would contribute to the organic processs that would be the hallmark of Art Nouveau.

Spirits of Autumn Summer and Winter would all be brought into play with hues and glows that conjure up a feeling inside each work of art.

It is as if they have been found on the floor of the forest rather than in a glasswork factory.

Its not as if you can go and get a recipe book. The artistic glassmaker would have to carry out his own experiments and write down the formula.

Lets as example think how would you obtain the exact colour, in glass for, lets say and Orchid or a Thistle head of a Cow Parsley.
 Or crisping leaves in autumnal differing grades of decay, of red and gold.

A few companies such as Appert of St Denis would supply Antonin Daum with some of his early supplies.

Often glassworkers would move companies or transfer to a different area and it was important to train the skilled workers of the future.

In 1925 Paul Daum refined and transformed the pallete.

Michel Daum would start working in lead crystal. After the Second World War the company would largely abandon glass in favour of lead crystal.

Between 1891 and 1914 3,000 different models appeared.

1920 to 1939 saw 2,000.

They won medals and honours, first prizes galore taking the official exhibitions extremely seriously in helping stimulate revenue through sales. Chicago 1893. Nancy and Lyon 1894. Brussels 1895 and 1897. There was a Legion of Honour for Auguste. In 1900 at the World Fair, like Galle, Daum were awarded a First Prize and Antonin a Legion D'Hounour.

Exhibitions at Ecole de Nancy the Pavillion de Marsan 1903 and Nancy itself in 1905 and 1908. Strasboug 1908 Paris and Brussels 1910. Then Gand 1913 and Lyon 1914. It just went on, and on. After the Great War they would show their style at the Paris Expostion des Art Decorative Et Industrial Moderne in 1925 moving into a more geometric and angular vision that would lend itseld to acid etching pattern.

This petite slimly bulbous vase is only 20cm high and is a yellowish base or pallette where the green hues of leaves blowing in the wind have been overlaid and carved back by wheel cutting. Several different colours of glass tinted by oxides can be seen to be applied to make up the overall effect. It is a painting in molton glass.

The base clearly displays the Daum Nancy mark and proudly proclaims the Cross of Lorraine as a symbol of defiance.

Alsace Lorraaine was lost to the Germans in 1870.during The Franco Prussian War.

Napoleon III had won Nice and Savoy in 1861 from Turin. It had been Italian.

Famous for Quiche Lorrane Alsation dogs, it was named Elsass Lothringen by the Germans. Many Road names are today still in German. There is a marker or two to the Magino line.

Bismark took it in 1871 This was one of the underlying causes of the First World War.

The first world war one charge was an attempt to take it back which they didn’t do till 1918.Germany took it again in 1940 The Germans re-uniting with the motherland of the German Reich. The French re occupation happened in 1944.

Antiques Roadshow 2016 Valuation Location Dates

There are some great venues for 2016 from a Scottish World Heritage Site to a Cornish Garden.

 2015 was a very good year with an average of six million people watching the show.

I had a great time as part of the Roadshow team in 2015.

2016 looks like being a very exciting year but we rely on the wonderful people who take the time to bring their treasured possessions along.

 Not forgetting the things that may not appear to have any value, that they may have found in a skip or that may have been in the loft for decades.







We are there to help people understand the items they bring along and hear the stories that are contained within,
 If you can get the chance to pop along to one of the beautiful historic venues you will be assured a great day out.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4BFprksgSjpvxsdCTwDFQlJ/roadshows-in-2016

PILKINGTON AND ALPHONSE MUCHA: THE 1900 PARIS EXHIBITION

Pilkington exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. 

This was probably the most influential event in its development of artistic products. 

William Burton took a small party of artists to show off products that include floor tiles, wall decorations, fireplaces with hearths both with low relief, raised outline and printed form.

Designs by Walter Crane, Frederick Shields, Lewis F. Day, C.F.A. Voysey, F.A. Steele and John Chambers made up the valuable cargo that crossed the channel.

 Wall mosaics were also shown as was pottery with glazes by William and Joseph Burton.

Its stand proudly proclaimed;

PILKINGTONS Tile and Pottery Co. Clifton Junction MANCHESTER.

The floors of the stand were tiled and the quatrafoiled columns that held up shallow Norman Arches were adorned with architectural exterior tiles. These were holding aloft corbels that were decorated with the Pilkingtons emblem proudly emblazoned in lustre, below a ceramic cornice.

The Senses, a series of panels by Walter Crane which were painted in slips by John chambers and were set, framed within architectural ceramic Ionic pilasters, and with its ceramic apron and cornice was a work of art within itself.

This enabled them not only to show their work but to compare themselves to competitors, and to get themselves acquainted with developments and trends in other parts of Europe.

The main development that came from this journey south into Europe was that they acquired the right of use for designs by Alphonse Mucha.

The Paris office of Pilkingtons revealed that they had the use of 20 designs a year but it is not clear just how many of Mucha's designs were in fact used.

At the 1901 Glasgow Exhibition four panels entitled Les Fleurs were shown.

A set of these also decorated the hall way of the Pilkington factory, they must have been highly prized until the 1940's when the factory was redesigned.

In Liverpool a massive tile panel was conceived by Pilkingtons  own artists made up of five large murals depicting pottery through the ages and photographic evidence remains at the factory and at the Walker Art gallery where it was installed. During World War II the building was badly damaged, though the tiles themselves remained intact they were destroyed when the remains of the building were demolished, no doubt to make way for a cafe.

Pilkingtons tiles were on the ill fated Titanic.

Rossetti painted maidens with eyes like pools.

He painted temptresses and beautiful damoselles, he painted beauties that he wanted to bed.

He was inspired by drugs and alcohol and he was mortified by criticism like a schoolboy would be.

He would let himself down badly by exhuming his wife corpse to retrieve a book of poetry that he had buried with her because he was so overcome with grief.

And then he was not.

His three main muse that he painted were from different backgrounds, one was a prostitute another a wife and the other a wife of one of his best friends, his forbidden love, Jane.

His father was a political radical who had to leave his home town because of his views and the failed uprising of his town in 1820.

He was born in London and took up the modern practice of the time, of being enticed into the past.

The past of Arthurian legends and great Knights doing great deeds by saving damsels in distress.

But he was the son of an exile and his father wanted to return to Italy to rejoin the revolution. He became frustrated.

He rebelled at the Royal academy lacking the patience to study and he joined, along with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais The Pre Raphaelites and they played out their Arthurian ideals. He was named after the doomed poet Dante.

With the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood the rules were simple.
To produce work, through a code of honour spelt out in their manifesto.
To have genuine ideas to express, to study nature, and to sympathise with what was heartfelt serious and direct in past art and produce good art and sculpture.

Before Raphael art is self expressing they proclaimed and they wanted to return to simple art. Flemish art would also inspire them and the fresco painters of the medieval past showed them the way to the future. Rossetti would cross Van Eyk with Botticelli in 'Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord'. The paint was thinly applied and full of symbolic meaning with its claustrophobic set up.

His ideals of women would take him on his own journey, but his critics did not care for the Pre Raphaelites flatness and Rossetti hated them and gave up this style.

Not surprising when you see 'The Childhood of the Virgin' by Rossetti, it is rife for ridicule because it is so average.

Charles Dickens mocked with the idea for a Pre-Gallileo society. Rossetti was paralysed by this sort of critique. The ongoing forces of progress would not stop and all around him the Brotherhood turned away to a purple idealism of romantic Teutonic knights emblazoned with colourful tunics that they reconstructed.

Yet they said they were Pre-Raphael.

Libby Siddel would define the look and Dante found Beatrice in her.
 She worked in a hat shop and modelled for another, for the famous depiction of Ophelia, which was detrimental to her health.

Rossetti wanted her for himself and while Gothic grew up all around him they withdrew into their own style.

His intimate drawings were like sonnets and his moralising scenes like 'Blackfriars Bridge' were contradictory .

“I am thoroughly indisposed to innumerate anyone's condition by means of pictures”.

Fanny Coalforth entered his life while out walking she flicked peanuts at him and she agreed to model for him. His work became erotic and sex became to sell.

“The mouth that had been kissed loses not its freshness as it renews itself as does the moon” he wrote on the back of 'Bocca Baciata' a picture he painted based around an old Italian tale of promiscuity.

He looked to the Renaissance for inspiration and he fed Lizzie with Opium and then married her in 1860. Their daughter was stillborn this haunted him for the rest of his life. He would hear ghostly footsteps from the depths of his soul. Noises from outside the door, footsteps of his daughter.

Lizzie was destroyed by the tragedy and she never recovered from an overdose of Laudanum.
 She never woke up.

In the coffin Rossetti placed the manuscript of his poems and he moved from Blackfriars to Chelsea. He suffered from Insomnia.
 He put together a menagerie with rabbits peacocks and wombats, and other unusual creatures. They regularly escaped. He continued to paint. Fanny became housekeeper model. Her loose hair infatuated him, her hair symbolised looseness and to the Victorians his work sold.

He painted 'Beata Beatrix' showing Lizzies movement from earth to heaven as Beatrice which he ladened with drug induced images that he was not comfortable with.

He painted other versions for his private patrons.

John Ruskin said the work was as course as the prostitutes who modelled for them.

Rossetti then began to write poetry and he wrestled with the fact that he had buried his poems and he then took the disgraceful turn when hired people to dig up Lizzies body and the dirty deed was badly done. He scraped his dirty little bunch of poems clean of putrefaction and put in disinfectant for weeks to quench the stench.
 In my opinion it was sick and unforgivable act, to do this unsettling and disrespectful thing to someone he had loved.

He was then selfishly, as usual, spurned on and was now inspired by Jane Morris.

now understood desire whether it be unrequited, and his expressions opened up through his poetry.

I have to question how genuine were his loves and how much was just plain inspiration to give himself fame and immortality.

James Buchanan said there was no soul in the verse, only body. Ugly bodies of writhing foaming impure art it was said.

The critics said it was impure art from the well springs of impure life. They were right.

He was labelled an adulterer and a libertine and his self worth was hit.

In the poem 'Lost Day' he tried to sum up his paranoia and the lost souls of his mind, and he overdosed on Laudanum.

William Morris turned a blind eye to the help Jane gave him.

Was he mad, would we call him a smack head today.

He was nursed back to health by Janie Morris and William left the country after they took a joint lease on Kelmscott manor.

It was here that they enjoyed an idyllic summer together and he was recharged.

Jane was not daft, she knew what her image meant to her and she posed as 'Prosperine' for prosperity, the supermodel of her day.

She swanned around in long velvet gowns and conjured up this sense of style that would endure through the art of the many Rossetti'an Femme Fatale.

The 19^th century was a time of repressed sexuality that he was able to key into using muse to paint with titles such as 'Helen of Troy' or any other historic deity he chose that he could fit his stunning beauties into.

By now his art had nothing to do with Raphael, it was Bohemian London in Style a reinvention of the past for a modern age that now looks so old fashioned to us in the 21^st century.

Jane's children strangely called him Uncle Dante and he moved away from Kelmscott and into depression.
He tried to invigorate his art with dancers and brighter callers but a darkness had entered his work, it was where his head was at and he wanted to continue in this vein.

His many patrons, many of whom were based in the Merseyside area where not happy with this lack of cheerful work.

He lived for love and at 53 he died in a quagmire of addiction.

He left behind a legacy of nostalgia and dead end one directional work that went one way down his own street. Some remarkable work.

But he did not provide us with this look into the fields which is where the impressionists took us. He had no desire to get his hands dirty, even for his filthy desecrated poems. But he gives us a glimpse into his own uneasy struggles and desires that were his dream like sequences.

He was too romantic by far he must have studied Byron and myths.

Picasso said he was influenced by Rossetti (and Cezanne!) and the Pre-Raphs.

It was like Gabriel Dante Rossetti was painting his own epitaph for us all to see.

But was it quite warts and all or a carefully selected section of his head played out with style and audacity?

I keep on seeing his work around the museums of Liverpool. There was a major exhibition of his work in 2004, maybe? It seems so long ago now.
 The Death of Beatrice was said by Paul McCartney to be his favourite painting when he exhibited there. (Or when he paid for the privilege by donation). This exhibtion was around the time of Linda's illness.

Most of his high paying patrons were in Merseyside and because Lord Leverhume was an active collector of his work the Lady lever art Gallery, named after his wife, houses many works.

No matter how exotic and sexy his paintings were.

I will never forgive him for exhuming the body of his wife even though most of the critics seem to have done so



.

Bronze Caryatid Pillasters 9ft High-Piece of the Week

These Caryatid are 9 feet High and pretty fantastic and would grace any Belgravia mansion.
The feet are clawed and they may be a depiction of Minerva the goddess but I will have to do a bit more research on that
They are 9 feet high and in the right place would make more than a statement. I think they may be eastern European.

 Not sure how they got to the North West of England.There are not many things that I can buy that would Grace the beautiful Travertine marble arcade of India Buildings but these actually outdo the architecture. The term Caryatid relates to a column or a pillar carrying the support on its head and was used in ancient Greece.

See More Here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caryatid

Antiques Roadshow Valuation Dates and Venues 2015.

Antiques Roadshow will be at the following venues for the rest of the season please see link below for more details. http://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/beonashow/antiques

Why not take that treasured heirloom along or even that old piece that has been laying unloved underneath the stairs for years. 

Whats your story? 

You may not have one but why not let an expert help you understand the item and get it appraised.

Date	Venue
Sunday 21 June	Broughton Castle, near Banbury, Oxfordshire
Thursday 25 June	Bowood House, Calne, Wiltshire
Thursday 9 July	Bolsover Castle, near Chesterfield, Derbyshire
Sunday 19 July	Walmer Castle, Deal, Kent
Thursday 30 July	Balmoral Castle, near Ballater, Aberdeenshire
Thursday 3 September	Trentham Gardens, near Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire
Thursday 10 September	Lyme Park, near Stockport, Cheshire
Sunday 20 September	Hanbury Hall, Droitwich, Worcestershire
Wednesday 28 October	The Royal Hall, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

David Bomberg-Was He A Good Artist Or, Just There?

I am not quite certain why I decided to find out more about the artist David Bomberg maybe I was just a bit intrigued by one of his paintings or his life which was different and eventful,

 Or maybe I am annoyed that he shot his toe off and escaped the war where many died.

Studying at the Slade School of Art Bomberg (1890-1957) along with several other artists of note he was part of the establishment from an early age even though he was from a poor background, he was destined to be noticed.

The end of World War One, and a generation would try to overcome the scarring by trying to build a new world. 

David Bomberg would fight in that war and his splintered life would never be the same.

He unlike some of his fellow Slade pupils, would go largely un-noticed until his death.

 He was born in Birmingham but he was moved to St Marks Street London along with his 11 siblings to a Jewish quarter. 

His father Abraham was a gambler who got annoyed at the slightest thing.

Bomberg was always drawing and he become an apprentice lithographer.

 He paid Walter Sickert for lessons and he sat for John Singer Sargent the society artist.

He then had stepped into another world and Sargent helped him to aim for fame and fortune. The Impressionists of the Continent was dismantling tradition and in 1910 Roger Fry's Impressionist exhibition was followed by another which featured Braque and Picasso.

 Henry Tonks became one of his tutors.

Bomberg was funded by the Jewish Education Aid Society after an initial rejection his education began in 1911, at a new dawn of art. Modernity had arrived.

Tonks who would say “I shall resign if this talk of cubism doesn't cease, its killing me”. 

Tonks was a stickler he had also tutored Paul Nash who he had also criticised. 

Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spenser would study while Tonk's was teaching.

 In 1912 'Island of Joy' became abstract in form, a move away from his past influence. 'Vision of Ezekiel' of 1912 the year of his mothers death paid homage to his Jewish roots. 

This piece of modernism grabbed hold of the revolution and he went geometric and avant-garde. His work was jarring and aggressive and he disturbed the other students.

 He was ousted at 23 years old. 

 'In the Hold'. You would not know this was a set of workers in the hold of a ship without being told. 

A vibrant kaleidoscope of colours violently reacting with his surroundings its an explosion of chaos. No wonder he was thought a misfit.

War broke out and the likes of Wyndham Lewis would BLAST in a manifesto for the avant garde. It was meant to be a clarion call to the nations Vorticist tendencies. Blomberg would not joint the club he was a maverick of one. These visionaries of desire would strip detail away and throw it all up in the chaos of experimentation. Bomberg's expo in the Chenil Gallery saw him proclaiming his ow manifesto.

 I reject everything in painting that is not pure form” he said.

 He titled one painting 'Ju Jitsu'. One work was hung in the street “The Mud-bath” inspired by Brick lane baths it was framed with bunting, but this was an all singing all dancing Union Jack. The three colours of red white and blur was framed within a beige and unceremoniously split by a central black column. It must have looked bizarre in the time of 1914 just as war was declared between Austrian Hungary and Serbia after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

He enlisted in The Royal Engineers and married Alice and then went to fight at The Somme. He got a lesson in double quick step to carnage. His snatched sketches show him studying the conflict but he also wrote poems, that sum up his thoughts in prose.

War is a leveller to art, art is stripped back to raw emotion. To those who fought and those who didn't, but also those that can convey the emotion of death.

I have not read his war poetry but it is well documented how he talks about fattened maggots feeding on the lost. His monochrome sketches done in the boredom before the bomb, he shot himself in the foot. He was withdrawn from the front. He escaped the death that many had, but he gained the title of a coward who would leave his fellows to fight for him.

'Sappers at Work' was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials fund, that made up for the rejection of his poetry by all the publishers. His breakdown seems to show through the brushstrokes. He uses Caravaggio's Martyrdom of St Peter as a metaphor to the 'Death of Peter by Crucifixion' and uses the memorial to show the strife the sappers had in carrying out their deadly death dig below ground, tunnelling away below they laid their deathly mines and blew all to kingdom come.

In 1923 he went to Jerusalem in Palestine where a tenth of the population were Jewish. He was still traumatised and he painted 'Rooftops' in geometric form. These quiet pictures gave way to depictions of Zionist pioneer camps. And just like those world war crater scars the quarrymen build their new developments in the sunshine. In Bomberg's mind.

He was shocked by the Armenian Genocide and he painted the inside of the church that he was smuggled into.

He paints shapes in quick succession and when the earthquake struck chaos ensued, the painting he was doing in a house was shattered moments after he left.

These pictures were never accepted by the art establishment.

His work is housed in the Borough Road Gallery and it houses Sarah Rose's collection.

In 1928 back in London he met Lillian Holt again and they wed. He went to Spain to follow the footsteps of El Greco. His work becomes fast and huddled in the way he paint landscape in contrast to his Palestine pictures. Does he finally leave his shell shock behind. In Ronda children were born and so was a new style where the past and the present was indistinguishable. He paints a bridge over and over again, maybe a metaphor. He was not to know the deaths that would come from civil war on that bridge, people would be tossed over to their death.

He returned to London. And his self portraits continue.

 His double headed portrait of 1937 seems to echo in Francis Bacon. He has two faces are his own reflective past showing his awkwardness and his unsettled thoughts. He would not paint much longer, and London would be under siege. 'Evening in the City of London' is an energetic and quickly charcoaled study from the top of St Brides across from St Paul Cathedral the symbol of the defiance of the blitz. He would not give in.

Bomberg started a art class after the war where he taught two nights a week. His Borough Group were fed his philosophy for the spirit in the man. Miles Richmond would be part of this group but it fell apart soon after its formation in 1947.

Holocaust survivors would daub their emotions in structured chaos of the inner self. The thoughts of crucifixion of Bomberg as the Messiah. Gustav Metzger who arrived as a Kinder transport refugee would make 'Auto-Destructive Art' a film of 1965 using his declaration of an alternative to painting by spraying acid on to canvas.

In 1965 a set up. These burning acid canvas would give way to images of St Paul's. Metzger recently said about Bomberg who taught him “he was poetic and prophetic if nothing he had charisma”.

Bomberg was sacked from his teaching position in 1953 and went to teach in Spain. It never worked out. He always wanted to paint with an economy of means. While the Vorticists held retrospectives his health faltered. Distance does not exist he said as he closed his eyes. He was taken back to London where he died. The arts council held a survey of his career bringing together 72 works. His last self portrait is a tragedy of doom laden rejection. Holding his brushes he did not look in the mirror.

He told his students that great paintings could change the world.

Vienna Bronze Lizard-Piece of the Week.

This bronze reptile is so lifelike I could swear it just went to bite me.

The bronze is mounted on a real shell, that only adds to the realism of the piece.

It is not signed, but it has to be by the famous Bergman foundry it is so realistic. Though there were many other foundries that employed similar skill in and around Vienna Bergman is the most well known for cold painted bronzes.

 It looks like it is going to launch itself off that shell anytime. 

Bergman always tunes his cold painted bronzes to perfection. This is more than likely late 19th century.

 Though this piece is not cold painted but has a light patination this mirrors the scaly cold blooded skin of a lizard to perfection.

 The modelling and the way the bronze is mounted just heightens the anticipation in the lizard, its claws are in fact balancing the whole sculpture along with the tail. 

Very cleverly done and a joy to see the skill of manufacture being put to an effect of realism.
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Lusitania Medal.

Lusitania Medal

This Friday 1st May is the anniversary and a tragic date in Maritime history. It is 100 years after the Lusitania set sail for Liverpool.

 It would not reach its destination. 

On May 7th it would be torpedoed and sunk by a German Submarine.

I offered this medal for a competition in the Liverpool Echo some time ago and it is no longer available but I do feel emotional every year when the date comes about and I start to think of the tragedy.........................................................................  

 It’s a small medal in a box that was struck nearly a hundred years ago.


Despite its size and at first glance, it is quite innocent looking,  this piece of history tells us fathoms about the era in which it was made and the tragedy that it represents.

I recently visited Cobh on the Irish coast near Cork, were passengers had once boarded the Titanic for its maiden voyage where there is a memorial to those that died on the Lusitania.

The medal was struck by the British and "copied" from the original, that was made after the deplorable act of the sinking of The Lusitania on 7th May 1915 by a German U-Boat, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 people aboard, leaving 761 survivors.


It is said that it is an exact replica of the one that was struck by Karl Goetz for the Germans to commemorate the atrocity.
It was made in 1916 some time later than the original which was made privately in August 1915.
It was said that 500 German medals were struck and a limited circulation took place.


British copies were of die cast iron and were of poorer quality than the original. The original Goetz medals were sand-cast bronze. Belatedly realising his mistake, Goetz got the date wrong and the original German medal was dated ‘5 Mai’ Goetz quickly issued a corrected medal with the date of "7. Mai".

The Bavarian government suppressed the medal and ordered their confiscation in April 1917.

The original German medals can be identified from the English copies because the date is in German, the English version was altered to read 'May' rather than 'Mai'. After the war Goetz expressed his regret that his work had been the cause of increasing anti-German feelings.

One side of the medal showed the sinking of the Luitania laden with guns with the motto "KEINE BANNWARE!" ("NO CONTRABAND!"), the other side showed a skeleton selling tickets with the motto "Geschäft Über Alles" ("Business Above All").The replica medals were produced in an attractive case claiming to be an exact copy of the German medal, and were sold for a shilling apiece.

On the cases it was stated that the medals had been distributed in Germany "to commemorate the sinking of the Lusitania" and they came with a propaganda leaflet which strongly denounced the Germans and used the medal's incorrect date to claim that the sinking of the Lusitania was premeditated.
The head of the Lusitania Souvenir Medal Committee later estimated that 250,000 were sold, proceeds being given to the Red Cross and St. Dunstan's Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Hostel.

There had been an advertisement placed in an American paper warning of the risk to passengers travelling on Cunard Line.

U-Boats were the new threat to shipping.

U-20 sank the 6,000 ton steamer Candidate. It then failed to get off a shot at the 16,000 ton liner Arabic, because although she kept a straight course the liner was too fast, but then sank another 6,000 ton British cargo ship flying no flag, Centurion, all in the region of the Coningbeg light ship.

The specific mention of a submarine was dropped from the midnight broadcast on 6–7 May as news of the new sinking's had not yet reached the navy at Queenstown, and it was correctly assumed that there was no longer a submarine at Fastnet.

Captain Turner of Lusitania was given a warning message twice on the evening of 6 May, and took what he felt were prudent precautions.

There can be n excuse for this barbaric act in the early days of the First World War before new style Naval warfare, and the new U-Boat threat had been understoo.

But it is also a fact that Britain wanted America in the First World War and this unholy act is cited as one of the main reasons that America entered the war on the side of the Allies.

Churchill then Lord of the Admiralty knew of the threats to the Lusitania and it was said he was away playing golf, it has been rumoured he ignored the threats. 

Posters were also produced. It says a lot about the cruel nature at the time where both side splayed with propaganda that cost peoples lives.

The RMS Lusitania was funded by the British Government and had a contract that it could be commissioned by the Navy.

It was estimated that it took 16 minutes to sink 11 miles off the Old Head of Kinsale.

The contemporary investigations both in Britain and in the United States into the precise causes of the ship's loss were obstructed by the needs of wartime secrecy and a propaganda campaign to ensure all blame fell upon Germany.

The reason why we the British would strike a medal and distribute it, is, a sinister act itself. 

Argument over whether the ship was a legitimate military target raged back and forth throughout the war as both sides made claims about the ship and whether it was a legitimate target.

At the time she was sunk, she was carrying a large quantity of rifle ammunition and other supplies necessary for war, as well as civilian passengers.

Several attempts have been made over the years since the sinking to dive to the wreck seeking information about exactly how the ship sank.

It was on its way to Liverpool and one of its bronze propellers is on display near Liverpools Albert Dock.