The Unsophisticated Genius of Barbara Jones

Bateman the Opticians, Croydon, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

Since I first came across Barbara Jones' extraordinary book 'The Unsophisticated Arts' a few years ago I've been wondering when somebody would reissue it, and now independent publisher Little Toller Books has gone a step further. I asked Gracie Burnett, who co-owns and runs Little Toller with Adrian Cooper, how they came to publish this new edition, which is rather different from their previous nature classics...

We decided to re-issue because we love Barbara Jones and have always done so. It seemed we were talking more and more with friends about her and I guess we were prompted by these conversations to go for it and republish the book. Simon Costin who curated the show at the Whitechapel was key and whilst drinking tea with him at a cafe in Dalston we got to talking about the exhibition and the book. We felt confident and so the journey begun. 

It is a departure for us. But we have always said to ourselves that we should publish what we like and to take the odd detour away from the Classics.

Barbara Jones enjoying her work - what is that peculiar ornament on the bookshelf?

As with their previous titles Little Toller haven't simply reprinted the original edition but have substantially redesigned it, decluttering a spread here and updating an illustration there. Gracie again:

The design is very different. Adrian spent hours trawling through Barbara Jones’s  studio in Hampstead and discovered so much that we wanted to include in the new edition, especially as we wanted to bring more colour to the book - the original is mostly black and white. We also wanted to show her working process, hence the inclusion of sketches and early paintings. 

Her studio has remained largely untouched since her death; most of the artwork has gone, but her sketchbooks and ephemera remain.  We spent hundreds of hours cleaning up the images and making them good for publication. it was a joy to work on because you look so closely at every single image and you see each page in a new way.

The new edition is lighter, brighter and more colourful than the original, which was printed on paper made out of recycled porridge (it was 1951, after all). A little of the chiaroscuro of Jones's vision is lost - the photos of roundabout horses are not quite as black and sinister as they were previously - but all in all this is a fantastic book. Buy it now!

No detail too small... Interior of a canal boat, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

I meant to write a post on Joan Eardley last week, after reading Christopher Andreae's wonderful new book, but time got away from me. Neither Eardley nor Jones lived as long as they should have, and both had a fascination for the local and particular that went down badly with critics of the time but which now makes them - to my mind - seem doubly valuable as fine artists and chroniclers of everyday life. While Eardley became well-known for her paintings of children from now-vanished Glasgow slums, Jones is now recognised as one of the most significant arbiters of modern taste.

In a Foreword to the new edition, Peter Blake notes that 'I have no doubt that discovering Barbara Jones was one of the more important things that happened to me, and helped form the way I work.' In her books and in her almost unclassifiable 1951 exhibition 'Black Eyes and Lemonade', Jones introduced what she called 'the vernaculars' to a culture desperate for some alternative to pretentious, soulless modernism. She wasn't worried about distinctions between folk and machine-made art but stuck them altogether, choosing work that was, as she put it 'bold and fizzy.'

Never judge a book by its cover? Maybe in this case...

Her books show a similarly eclectic spirit. 'The Unsophisticated Arts' combines chapters on tattooing and the seaside, amusement arcades and taxidermy, each illustrated with a mixture of photographs, line drawings and paintings. It is disorderly, intensely personal and obsessive, but at the same time the book  hangs together perfectly.

Ravilious would have loved this, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

It helps that Jones was also an excellent writer, the kind who (I imagine) wrote down words as she would have spoken them. Like her contemporary Olive Cook she writes seriously about her subject in a way that an intelligent child could understand perfectly - and enjoy too. I love this introduction to the chapter on Roundabouts:

When the Romans left England there were a thousand dull years filled only with ballads, pipe and tabor, folk dancing and maypoles. Gradually, however, the fairs emerge from the manuscripts, the tumblers and dancing bears begin to perform, and at last there is something to look at.

from 'Recording Britain', early 1940s (V&A)

Here and there you hear echoes of earlier books like 'High Street', as in the chapter on shopkeeping, where we visit a butcher's that Ravilious would have recognised, complete with 'butcher's cat, noticeably sleek, and apparently unmoved even by the sale of liver'. It would have been fun if Jones had written the text of 'High Street', given her eye for the aesthetics of shops:

He makes beautiful patterns with carcasses and joints and festoons of sausages or, when meat is scarce, he hangs up sheets of paper by their corners, cut into patterns if he has time, and heightened with loops of black pudding.

Interior of saddler's shop, Croydon, from 'Recording Britain' (V&A)
I wonder if this was her Dad's place, as he was a successful Croydon saddler.

Born in 1912 a decade later than Ravilious, Bawden, Peggy Angus and Enid Marx, Barbara Jones trained at the RCA in the 1930s and cut her teeth on the 'Recording Britain' project during the early part of World War Two. Among the myriad pictures of old houses, pubs and quintessentially English scenes, Jones's work stands out. She was clearly much more than a topographical painter, imbuing her subjects with personality. A light touch and a sure eye were hers from the start.

St Mary's Homes and Chapel, Godstone, 'Recording Britain' (V&A)

Fairground litho, 1946 (V&A) - there's a detailed chapter on this subject in 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

I suspect that many artists besides Peter Blake owe a debt to Barbara Jones; she looked about her with keen eyes, found subjects no-one had bothered with before and took her discoveries seriously - but never too seriously. One of her more extraordinary achievements was the book 'Design for Death', in which she expanded on the final chapter of 'The Unsophisticated Arts', exploring all the 'beautiful, vulgar, frightening and propitiatory things that people make when confronted by that shocking and unwelcome reminder, the death of another'. The cover alone is remarkable, both beautiful and grotesque; I hope that her own death in 1978 was commemorated in suitable style.

An extraordinary cover for an extraordinary book...

On a lighter note... an illustration from 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

Recently, Barbara Jones has become known to a wider public, thanks in part to the tireless Ruth Artmonsky and her 2008 tribute 'A Snapper Up of Unconsidered Trifles'. Gracie adds:

She's become popular I think because of a new audience today, and because of the revival in artists of that time and the influence they have today. There's a new breed of artist who are deeply inspired by people like her, Bawden and Ravilious. etc etc.

At the moment The Whitechapel Gallery are hosting an exhibition about 'Black Eyes and Lemonade', and in June there's going to be a selling show of work from Jones's own collection at Burgh House in Hampstead. The pieces below will be featured. Meanwhile, if you want to know a bit more about her books, there's a nice page at Ash Rare Books.

Original artwork for 'Gift Book', on display at Burgh House, Hampstead, June 2013 

Original artwork from 'The Unsophisticated Arts' - also at Burgh House

Stook Duck Houses, Calbourne Water Mill, Isle of Wight

She was the author of three important books that significantly affected the taste and perception of her contemporaries in ways that more famous artists have never succeeded in doing. The first, The Unsophisticated Arts (1951), opened people’s eyes to the art in everyday life … and that the enjoyment of art was not restricted to an educated few, but was available for the enjoyment of all. It is difficult to over-emphasise her work in this area, but one can see the effects in the displays in almost every museum and gallery throughout the country today. The second, Follies and Grottoes, developed an entirely new field for architectural and building historians, and led to the founding of an international society … The third, Design for Death (1967), sparked a similar fashion for the study of funeral customs, cemeteries, and artifacts associated with death … How many other artists and writers can boast of having achieved so much in changing the perception and temper of succeeding generations? … The roll-call of English artists in the twentieth century is not so lengthy that we can afford to overlook such a distinctive figure.  (BC Bloomfield – The Life and Work of Barbara Jones [1912-1978] via Ash Rare Books)

All work shown is the copyright of Barbara Jones's estate.

50 50: Barbara Jones

Barbara Jones, The Resort, 1950

A time traveller visiting mid-20th-century Britain would discover a painted world. Restaurants, department stores, schools and hospitals were filled with murals painted by the best artists of the day. Aside from a few celebrated examples (think Rex Whistler at Tate Britain) the most of these have disappeared, and in many cases not even a photograph survives. This is true of the numerous murals painted by Barbara Jones, but occasionally we find a treasure that has escaped the general destruction, whether a mural itself or a study, as this seems to be. The painting of The Resort may have been related to Jones’s preparations for the Festival of Britain in 1951, but almost seventy years later it stands by itself as a work of great individuality and charm. Jones was taught by Eric Ravilious, and there are hints here of her teacher’s preoccupations with nautical design, improbably delicate structures and idiosyncratic wheeled vehicles. Her imaginative world has its own style, however, and its own distinctive palette. As so often with Jones we see perspective and scale treated with a child-like playfulness, but it is clear that a sophisticated visual intelligence is at work. There’s a constant back and forth of dark against light, light against dark, and a beguiling clarity of vision. We sense that the scene, though in no sense realistic, is real, and we share the curiosity and awe of the children admiring the deep sea diver as the ice cream seller looks on.

I wrote this for the exhibition catalogue 'Fifty Works by Fifty British Women Artists, 1900-1950' (ed Sacha Llewellyn). The exhibition runs until March at The Mercers' Company, London EC2R 8AB. Info here

A Lost World Rediscovered: 20th Century Murals at the Fine Art Society

Colin Gill, Allegro, 1921 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

Around 90% of the murals painted in Britain in the last century have been lost; the work of some artists, notably Eric Ravilious, has suffered so badly from neglect, bomb damage and what have you that only photographs and studies survive. The remaining murals, meanwhile, languish in obscurity. I had no idea, despite living in Bristol, that there's a fabulous painted ceiling by Thomas Monnington in our post-war Council House. Murals tend, by their very nature, to be fixed to a particular place, and if you never visit that place you're unlikely to see the painting.

So how, I wondered when I heard about the Fine Art Society's new exhibition of 20th century British Murals and Decorative Painting (in association with Liss Fine Art), do you go about putting on a mural show? In 1969 the Hayward Gallery held an exhibition of frescoes rescued from damp and crumbling buildings in Florence; these pictures were removed in ingenious ways from the walls on which Renaissance artists had painted them and transported around the world. Would something similar happen here?

Mary Adshead, An English Holiday: The Village Inn (detail), 1928 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

The short answer, judging from the exuberant catalogue, is no. The works on display are either studies for wall paintings - which vary from small watercolours to large-scale oil paintings - or murals painted on canvas or wooden panels. So, for example, we have two beautiful pictures painted by Mary Adshead in 1928 for Lord Beaverbrook, part of a series called 'An English Holiday'; these large-scale oils were designed to fill the walls of the press tycoon's dining room, but in the end he cancelled the commission, supposedly because a friend persuaded him that he was bound to fall out with the various grandees who had modelled for the paintings, and then be stuck with them every night at dinner.

There are some well known pieces here, including John Piper's 42-panel epic 'An Englishman's Home', which he painted for the 1951 Festival of Britain, and Edward Bawden's 'The English Pub' (1949-50), which spent a quarter century adorning the First Class Lounge of the SS Oronsay. But you'll also find plenty of delightful surprises. I'm looking forward to seeing John Armstrong's design for the Telecinema Mural (also painted for the Festival) and Barbara Jones' astonishing 3-panel picture 'Out in the Hall', which features a giant bear standing in a hallway the walls of which are bright yellow with a design of large white polka dots.

Alan Sorrell, Working Boats, 1951 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

This is one of the murals discussed in depth in a new book published by Sansom & Company to coincide with the exhibition: 'British Murals and Decorative Painting, 1920-1970'. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds wonderful, with an array of experts each focusing on a particular piece: Ruth Artmonsky on Barbara Jones, David Fraser Jenkins on Piper and so on. I'm interested to read what Alan Powers has to say about Alan Sorrell's delightful mural 'Working Boats from Around the British Coast' (1951), which includes the Norfolk Wherry but not, I was sad to see, the Severn Trow. With Stanley Spencer and Rex Whistler also featured, this book sounds like a must-have.

FFI: www.faslondon.com
www.lissfineart.com
www.sansomandcompany.co.uk

What links... Kenneth Clark, British Folk Art & Peggy Angus?

How's that for Folk Art? Lady Godiva Clock, Coventry, with tile mural by Peggy Angus

Hooray for Tate B. Not just one but TWO inspiring exhibitions on at the same time. I thought a show devoted to an art historian and cultural bigwig might be a bit dry, but far from it. Fascinating to see the work Kenneth Clark collected, all those delicate Cezanne drawings for example, and the pictures he was looking at during his formative years.

Here was a portrait of an art lover whose watchwords seemed to be refinement and modesty - a patron whose genteel good taste and position in the art establishment greatly assisted the careers of Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and other artists of equally rare sensibility.

A bit of a shock, then, to go from the world of 'Civilisation' to the multifarious oddities of British Folk Art, an exhibition which is probably more popular than its debonair rival but which must have been fairly nightmarish to curate. I mean where do you begin? What do you include? The curators seem to have taken a similar approach to Barbara Jones in her wonderful book 'The Unsophisticated Arts', in that they have gathered together work that shares certain characteristics but without trying to define it too closely or to include everything.

Buy the new edition from Little Toller!

Like the book, it's an eclectic, individual survey of figureheads and shop signs, textiles and amateur paintings - a display put together (it seems) by enthusiasts with a good eye for an object, rather than academics with a point to make. In the same way some of the artists championed by Kenneth Clark picked up on interesting or quirky objects or designs. Eric Ravilious loved weathervanes, shop emblems and junk of all kinds - you could put together a mini-folk art show from his prints and paintings. Edward Bawden too.

Eric Ravilious, 'Saddler' from High Street

And his model... white horse outside a Sudbury pub

But many of the most passionate artist-enthusiasts of the 20th century were women, notably Barbara Jones, Margaret Lambert and Enid Marx (authors of 'English Popular Art'), Olive Cook and Peggy Angus. Each no doubt had their own reasons for admiring folk art, but Peggy for one saw in it much more than quirky or original design. She believed that the beautifully decorated Romany caravans she saw in her youth represented the most authentic kind of art - art made not by specialists to be enjoyed by others, but by people for whom it was an integral part of life.

A work of art in itself... check out more wonderful illustrations here

Peggy taught art for more than forty years, gradually developing a curriculum that combined art history and practical training in a bewildering range of disciplines, and which took her pupils from the most primitive art forms, via the medieval and Renaissance periods, to the experiments of Modernism. Throughout she stressed the vital importance of patronage (which had been impressed on her when she visited the Hermitage Museum on a 1932 trip to Soviet Russia).

Great art, she would argue, requires both great artists and great patrons - people with taste, vision and money. At different periods and in different places patronage has been provided by monarchs, aristocrats, religious organisations and the state. Kenneth Clark pushed the British government into state patronage of the arts when he set up the War Artists Advisory Committee in 1939; Piper, Moore and Sutherland prospered.

Peggy's tile mural in the foyer of Lansbury Lawrence School, Poplar

These artists were employed for a purpose - to record the war in their own way (and provide propaganda images into the bargain) - and you could argue that the relationship between patron and artist is always like this. The artist has certain skills, and the patron a use for them. Whether we're talking about an anonymous carpenter creating a figurehead for a naval ship, or a famous painter depicting a bombed cathedral - or, as in Peggy's case, a designer creating a tile mural for a new school - this is the very opposite of 'art for art's sake'. 

Paintings & wallpaper by Mark Hearld, hung Peggy Angus-style at Towner

As far as Peggy Angus was concerned, art needed to serve a purpose. If you come along to the exhibition devoted to her life and work, which begins at Towner, Eastbourne, next weekend, you'll see the extraordinary things she achieved in her lifelong desire to be useful, from her unique art curriculum to tile designs for Heathrow Airport... And look out for hand-printed wallpaper, hung floor to ceiling in the gallery - much of it based on folk art designs. For a preview of what to expect, have a look at Rachel Cooke's feature in The Observer.

And when you've had a good look round her exhibition, head downstairs to Nathaniel Hepburn's elegant show 'Designing the Everyday', which brings together the work of numerous talented artist-designers. There are Ravilious ceramics that seem, on first sight, to be hovering against the wall with no visible means of support, some striking Shell posters, and, to bring us up to date, a room devoted to the talented designers of St Judes. Highlights include chairs upholstered in printed fabrics and Mark Hearld's wallpaper - the latter proof that, twenty years after Peggy's death, her spirit permeates British art and design.

FFI: Peggy Angus: Designer, Teacher, Painter at Towner, Eastbourne, July 12 - Sept 21
'Peggy Angus: Designer Teacher, Painter' by James Russell, Antique Collectors Club.
Designing the Everyday at Towner, until 31 August
Kenneth Clark at Tate Britain, until 10 August
British Folk Art at Tate Britain, until 31 August

Postcard from the Isle of Wight

Finally had a full week away and am now able to string a sentence together again. Must have been quite tired after putting on Ravilious show, but a week on Wight has set me straight. I can't believe it's taken me this long to cross the Solent, especially as we went to Poole every summer for years when I was a kid, but I think I know why I failed to discover the island before now: it's because of the Beatles.

Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight
If it's not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck & Dave

In my mind these lyrics got scrambled perhaps, so that I imagined an island entirely populated by people with cheery old-fashioned names, all scrimping away. Not a very glamourous picture.

At first sight the island didn't seem any different to 'the mainland' (ie the rest of Britain). Red brick houses, mini-roundabouts, Waitrose, lots of trees. Driving on the left seemed disappointing, as did the excessively regimented, hedge-bound campsite we had booked. Rather more startling was the nearby town of Shanklin, which ought to be made a World Heritage Site for its concentration of thatched tea shops.

The fabulous Compton Bay

It took a day or two, but we gradually discovered another Wight, away from the yachts and caravans, the tea shops and bizarrely named amusement parks - fancy a day at Blackgang Chine anyone? Ventnor, a town that sounds as though it belongs in a Terry Pratchett story, offered impressive Victorian buildings and family-owned shops - a feature of the island generally. Saturday afternoon everything seemed to be shut by 4 (except for the inevitable Tesco Express). We had fish and chips on the Esplanade, looking out over the sea with a simultaneous sunset/moonrise for atmosphere and about a million less people than you would find in, say, Lyme Regis.

Barbara Jones was a fan of the island

My favourite region of this surprisingly magical island was the south west coast. We did try to see the Needles but were stymied by thick fog. Instead we went bodyboarding in the rain in Compton Bay, which ought to be in a Top Fifty British Beaches, and probably is. There's a campsite above it which seemed impressively bleak in the generally grim weather; behind a farm which should be used as the set next time someone films 'Cold Comfort Farm'. Geese guarded the approach, while a turkey glared out from an open shed. Fabulous.


Having taken the tent down in an outrageous downpour we sought shelter in the lovely Piano Cafe in Freshwater Bay, surely a building dating from the island's late Victorian heyday, then walked up onto the downs to visit the Tennyson Memorial, put up to commemorate his years living in Freshwater.

I studied the gloomy laureate for A Level but could only remember:

She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said,
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

This was deemed too miserable for a (now) sunny day. To which I ought to have responded with this...

Break, break, break, 
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me.
 
O, well for the fisherman's boy, 
That he shouts with his sister at play! 
O, well for the sailor lad, 
 That he sings in his boat on the bay! 

And the stately ships go on 
 To their haven under the hill; 
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still!
 
Break, break, break 
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me.
 
Back in Bristol the drizzle is a-drizzling and it doesn't look like we will ever be able to get through the inevitable mountain of post-camping laundry. Meanwhile, the Ravilious show is about to end, and we're putting the finishing touches to 'The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden'. More about that soon.

Ten Printmakers: St Jude's in Auld Reekie

The Night Sorter, by Jonny Hannah

An unexpected treat came yesterday in the form of a printed catalogue for the latest St Judes exhibition, which is being held at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. Fittingly the prints each have a Scottish theme, and a particularly nice touch is the inclusion of a brief comment by the artists on how they came up with their particular subject.

So we learn that Jonny Hannah was 'inspired by a little known song of the same name, by an obscure Edinburgh band' he played guitar with, while Michael Kirkman recalled a favourite Edinburgh pub, and that Christopher Brown drew inspiration from the wood engravings made in 1934 by Douglas Percy Bliss for the book 'Devil in Scotland'.

Bliss was a great friend of Bawden and Ravilious and the spirit of their time infuses much of the work of these ten very different printmakers; Bawden would have particularly enjoyed Angie Lewin's print, with its centrepiece of a Staffordshire Highland couple. Visitors to the exhibition will have the chance to see the work of the St Judes artists in relation to their illustrious forebears, as prints by Barbara Jones, John Piper, Edward Wadsworth, Bawden, Ravilious and others are also included. As if Edinburgh people weren't spoiled enough!

Christopher Brown, Weel Done, Cutty-sark!

Ed Kluz, The Dunmore Pineapple

Chloe Cheese, Passing Through Parliament Square, Edinburgh

Mark Hearld, Spey Salmon

Emily Sutton, The Fishing Lodge

Angie Lewin, A Highland Gathering

Michael Kirkman, The Canny Man's

Linda Green, Jencks - Landform, Edinburgh

Peter Green, Gehry - Maggie's Centre, Dundee

Ten Printmakers is at the Scottish Gallery until July 23.

If you'd like to know more about the design work of Eric Ravilious, I'm giving a talk at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol this Saturday, 6 July, at 11am.

Wanted: Good Home for John Piper Mural

John Piper, An Englishman's Home (section), 1951 (Liss Fine Art)

 

Before street art there were murals, and in 20th century Britain numerous public and corporate buildings were decorated inside and out. From Rex Whistler's wall paintings in the dining room at Tate Britain to the Gordon Cullen mural at Greenside Primary School in Hammersmith, murals were a significant feature of our everyday cultural life; there's an evocative piece by Ben Pentreath on the subject here.

At the more humdrum end of the scale we have a mural at the end of our road in Bristol, a massive picture of a balloon floating over the landscape; it's painted on the side of a pub overlooking a green and, like murals everywhere, it is gradually fading. The Twentieth Century Society is currently campaigning to preserve what it can of the thousand-plus murals painted in the decades after World War Two.

An Englishman's Home fills one wall of the gallery at 22 Old Bond St

Given our climate and the upheavals of the past century it isn't surprising that so many murals have disappeared, but some have survived. Among the stunning pictures on show at the Fine Art Society are several large works commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain and painted on panels rather than directly onto walls. There were no doubt good practical reasons for this, but one perhaps unforeseen result is that the murals have been preserved.

There are dramatic pieces by Peter Lanyon, Edward Bawden, Barbara Jones and Alan Sorrell, but the mural that really steals the show is John Piper's epic architectural painting, 'An Englishman's Home'. As you can see from my rather poor photos, this is a fabulously huge picture, painted in oils on 42 panels. Exhibited in 1951 it subsequently languished in an Essex barn for years before being displayed for the Festival of Britain anniversary in 2011.

Right hand end with Brighton-Aquatints-style rooftops, chair included for scale

As the archetypal Romantic Modern, Piper has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity in recent years. But although good paintings from the first half of his career are hard to come by and expensive, no institution has yet come forward to buy 'An Englishman's Home'. This seems rather odd to me. Given the quality of the mural, its historical significance, its beauty and the standing of the artist who made it, I'd have imagined that art museums would be desperate to get their hands on those 42 panels.

Why has nobody come running, chequebook in hand? And how, if no major institution gets behind modern British murals, are the rest of us to be persuaded that it's worth preserving those pictures that still adorn the walls of schools, hospitals, restaurants and village halls around the country?

FFI: Fine Art Society
Twentieth Century Society

Small is Beautiful: Kettle's Yard and the Fry

'Von Ribbentrop in St Ives' at Kettle's Yard

Thank you to everyone who came to my Ravilious talk in Saffron Walden on Wednesday, and to the organisers - Nigel and Iris Weaver and staff at the Fry Art Gallery. I was just reading a post by Jonathan Jones about cuts at Tate Liverpool and it made me appreciate all the more the virtues of small, quirky galleries. I feel the same about bookshops, but we'll come back to them another day...

I had to go to Cambridge en route to Essex and, while there, braved the bikes and crowds of French schoolkids muddling about in the road to visit Kettle's Yard. I hadn't been for years and had completely forgotten that the permanent collection lives not in the gallery but in the house itself, the former home of Tate curator and collector Jim Ede and his wife Helen.

Having worked at the Tate during the 1920s and 1930s, Jim amassed a diverse collection of British art from the period, and in 1966 he donated house and contents to Cambridge University. His vision was to create not 'an art gallery or museum, nor ... simply a collection of works of art reflecting my taste or the taste of a given period.'

HS 'Jim' Ede at Kettle's Yard

Christopher Wood, Jean Bourgoint, 1926

Instead he sought to preserve 'a continuing way of life from these last fifty years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability.'

At a time when exhibitions tend to be dominated by great walls of explanatory text, it is a pleasure indeed to wander around this eccentric dwelling, looking at paintings in a domestic context and, quite naturally, unlabelled. With interest in 20th century British art on the rise, I can think of few better places to see work by Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Winifred Nicholson, David Jones, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Christopher Wood and others, alongside work by modern European artists. The selection is eclectic, reflecting not the depth of Ede's wallet but the warmth of his friendships. The paintings, sculptures and other objects BELONG in the house and are all the more enjoyable for that.

Kettle's Yard interior

The strangeness of the experience is heightened by the fact that you have to ring a doorbell for admission, much as if you were popping round to visit a friend; the staff are helpful but you can't get hold of a guidebook (which has a numbered plan of all the art) until you've been all the way round. When I was there a woman was trying to buy a guidebook but had given up her handbag, as requested, at the front door. You'll have to go and get it, she was told firmly - NOT the handbag, JUST the purse.

From there it's a half-hour drive to Saffron Walden and the Fry Art Gallery, where 'Ravilious in Essex' is entering its final month - 4000 visitors and counting. The Fry was also established by public-minded collectors, a succession of them in fact, going back more than a century - it takes its name from a scion of the Bristol family of chocolate makers who owned it in the 19th century. Nigel and Iris Weaver discovered the place in a ruinous condition when they moved to Saffron Walden in the 1980s, restored it and in 1987 opened the building to the public once again. Like Tate Britain in miniature, it is a gorgeous building with a fascinating permanent collection.

With a focus on the artists of Great Bardfield (John Aldridge, Edward Bawden, Tirzah Garwood/Ravilious, Kenneth Rowntree...), the Fry has become the principal port of call for admirers of Eric Ravilious, who lived in north-west Essex for the last eleven years of his life. Paintings, lithographs, Wedgwood china and wood engravings are beautifully presented, with a collection of the artist's wood blocks a particular treat.

David Oelman at the Fry... now those books look familiar!

Both Kettle's Yard and the Fry have mildly eccentric opening hours, so do check before you set out. I was just too early for the Kettle's Yard show 'Von Ribbentrop in St Ives', which opens on July 16th. 'Ravilious in Essex' runs until August 14.

NEWSFLASH!! 'Reflection' at Ferens Art Gallery opens August!

Eric Ravilious, Rye Harbour, 1938 (Ingram Collection)

Can art help with the national identity crisis in the time of Brexit? Opening in August at Ferens Art Gallery, Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change explores over a century of creative achievement by a diverse body of artists whose loves and fears, doubts and dreams mirror our own.

Featuring more than 130 works drawn from the Ingram Collection of Modern British Art and the permanent collection of the Ferens Art Gallery, Reflection presents a dynamic and diverse vision of Britain and British art which asks questions about identity and belonging. What does it mean to be British? How do we define British art? How do we present ourselves to the world?

As well as paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints, curator James Russell has selected works created over the last century that employ collage, photography and video – from Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s charcoal on paper Standing male nude (1913) to Victoria Sin’s film Part Three / Cthulhu Through The Looking Glass (2017).

He says “It isn’t the medium or the date of the work that matters, it’s what the artist is saying about the world and their place in it. Works that are by turns troubling and funny, serene and dystopian, straightforward and strange – reflecting the very different views and experiences of the artists.”

Some of the most famous names of modern British art are included; from Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, John Piper and David Hockney to Bridget Riley, Barbara Hepworth and Elizabeth Frink. Frink’s Walking Madonna (1981) is one of several rarely-seen large-scale sculptures, which also includes Meat Porters by Ralph Brown (1959). Alongside exquisite watercolours by Eric Ravilious (Channel Fishers, undated, and Rye Harbour, 1938) and Paul Nash (Elm Trees in Garden Landscape, c.1930), visitors will experience the powerful vision of Peter Howson (such as Resurrection (1999) and Mr Great Heart (1996).

Portraiture is a particular strength of both collections and is well represented in the exhibition, with works by artists such as Wyndham Lewis (Self Portrait, 1932), John Bratby (Self portrait with yellow background, not dated), Bridget Riley (Woman at Tea-table, not dated) and Lucy Jones (Wheelie, 2012).

The seriousness of some works is leavened with humour elsewhere, with light-hearted paintings and drawings by Leonard Rosoman (Fattipufs and Thinnifers, not dated), Edward Ardizzone (General staff of the 3rd Grade, 1944) and Edgar Ainsworth (Blackpool, 1945).

Reflection also includes contemporary artists who address the subjects of identity and belonging in intriguing ways, among them Victoria Sin (Fun Bag, 2015) and Gillian Wearing (Self Portrait as my Uncle, Bryan Gregory, 2003). The inclusion of recent work demonstrates the remarkable vitality of art in Britain, but the exhibition as a whole reminds us that we have endured tough times before. 

James Russell again “Artists have always played a valuable role in expressing feelings and exploring doubts shared – but not necessarily articulated – by the rest of us. Many of the featured artists have found joy in our world, but a few have battled with despair. Some were born in Britain and travelled elsewhere through choice or necessity; others were born elsewhere and travelled here. Some worked a hundred years ago; others are just starting on their careers. Whether working in oils, bronze, pencil, collage, watercolour, printmaking or film, each of these artists has the capacity to help us look at the world afresh or to address difficult feelings – to reflect.”

Ingram Collection Curator Jo Baring said “The Ingram Collection is committed to showcasing our museum quality art collection around the UK, increasing public access to and engagement with art. It is a privilege to work with the Ferens, whose permanent collection is of such high quality, and I’m really excited about the show that James is creating. It promises to be both a visual treat and a timely reminder that the issues artists were grappling with in the last century are once again relevant to contemporary audiences.”

Kirsten Simister, Curator of Art, Ferens Art Gallery “The Ingram Collection provides a wonderfully rich window into British modern and contemporary art that creates a natural foil for the Ferens holdings. We’re honoured to work with the Ingram team and freelance curator James Russell to celebrate our joint strengths and aim to bring visitors fresh insight into many of our less familiar and more rarely seen works as part of the exhibition.”

Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change opens at Ferens Art Gallery on August 17.