Timeless verities
Andrew Lambirth
Clear Skies and Storm Clouds: Visions of Buckinghamshire between the Wars Buckinghamshire County Museum, Aylesbury, until 2 June The Flower Paintings: Ivon Hitchens Jonathan Clark, 18 Park Walk, SW10, until 18 May Marylebone is the pleasant departurepoint if you’re taking the train to Aylesbury from London, and what better way to spend a spring day than an outing to the gentle Buckinghamshire countryside to see a celebration of its merits by fine artists. Upstairs at the Bucking-hamshire County Museum, near St Mary’s Church, is an excellent small exhibition of pictures and sculptures by artists who lived and worked locally in the 1920s and 30s. The principal exhibitors are John and Paul Nash, Clare Leighton, Eric Gill and David Jones. Their work offers a richly textured display of art and craftsmanship, a deeply heartening affirmation of the still considerable glories of our countryside. Well worth seeing, in sunlight or in rain.
The exhibition’s timeframe is bracketed by two world wars, and it thus seems just about appropriate for carnage to be the introduction to pastoral benevolence. The visitor is greeted by John Nash’s immensely striking war painting and early masterpiece, ‘Over the Top’, a depiction by one of its participants of the 1st Artists’ Rifles going into action at Marcoing on 30 December 1917, trudging desperately through the snow. (Ever after, snow scenes were to exert a particularly poignant attraction for him.) Next to it is hung a reproduction of what is perhaps John Nash’s most famous painting, ‘The Cornfield’ (1918), now in the Tate, and familiar from its exposure in the recent exhibition there (and accompanying TV series) celebrating British landscape. If you feel slightly cheated by having to look at a reproduction and not the real thing (presumably because the Tate wouldn’t lend it), turn to the opposite wall for a lovely watercolour of the same subject, done from a slightly different angle. Thus the devastation of war is contrasted immediately with a strongly affirmative image of the plenitude of the land, and our spirits are lifted.
Only to be challenged once again, however, by a couple of Paul Nash’s war pictures — the oil painting entitled ‘The Mule Track’ (1918) and a watercolour study for it, all blue and black angularity — and a particularly powerful ink-and-chalk drawing, ‘Sunset: Ruin of the Hospice, Wytschaete’. At once, Paul shows his greater feeling for drama, for the explosively telling image, in contrast to John’s more understated vision. Nearby hangs a tough but oddly lyrical drawing by John called ‘Fallen Tree’, which he gave to his betrothed, Christine Kuhlenthal, before he left to fight, and which she kept until her death. The enduring strength of that kind of drawing, and the response it inspires, is what marks out John Nash from the runof-the-mill landscapist. In a succession of his paintings — from ‘The Monk’s Field’ (c.1915) and ‘The Edge of the Orchard’ (1919) to ‘The Grove’ (1936) and ‘Snow Scene, Meadle’ (1938) — his particular qualities of line and colour are rehearsed in parallel to his brother Paul’s work, as seen here in the sophisticated watercolour ‘Chiltern Hills’ (1919).
John Nash suffers, to a certain extent, from Younger Brother Syndrome. Like his friend Gilbert Spencer, Stanley’s younger sibling, John Nash had to live with the greater public acclaim accorded his brother. Paul Nash was a very considerable artist, original and inventive, and was additionally skilled in the strategies of self-promotion. He was also self-consciously ‘modern’ in a way that John would never be. John dealt in the timeless verities of landscape painting untouched by the discordant siren voices of surrealism or abstraction. He simply wanted to paint landscape as he saw it, and to give voice to his great love for the natural world.
One of the ways he did this was through the neglected art of wood engraving. Both Nash brothers tried their hand at the medium, and there are excellent examples here by both. Also by Clare Leighton, one of the finest wood engravers of the period, and the first woman to publish a book on the technique, who celebrated the Bucks landscape in engravings and London Transport posters, before emigrating to America in 1939. Here, too, are are a couple of evocative Thomas Hennell pen-andink drawings, of country craftsmen at work, as well as more fascinating Nash material, including actual woodblocks, hand-coloured engravings and a rare early lithograph. This last is entitled ‘Trees and Bracken’, consisting of open and closed patterns like hands clenched or waving.
The exhibition continues into a section devoted to Eric Gill and his famous studio at Pigotts Farm, featuring lots of printed material (what a superb letterer Gill was) and a couple of sculptures — ‘Christ the King’ in Portland stone, and ‘Ariel Hearing Celestial Music’ in Bath stone, a model for the BBC’s carving, a third of its actual size. There are also two lovely watercolour landscapes by David Jones, Gill’s friend and colleague, together with type specimens and rubbings of inscriptions. At this point the two halves of the exhibition over lap: hanging on one screen are Gill’s wood engraving ‘Virgin and Child’ and John Nash’s ‘Threshing Scene’. Personal preference leads me back to the Nash exhibits, but the show wouldn’t be complete without a couple of Gill’s female nudes — an engraving and a drawing — but nothing too distractingly lubricious. One artist not included here is Cecil Collins. Richard Morphet, that encyclopedia of 20th-century British art, reminded me that Cecil and Elisabeth Collins had lived in a rented cottage near their friends the Gills at Speen in the early 1930s. Collins was a visionary in the Blakean mould, but he also painted the landscape. His work would have made an apt link between the two aspects of this show, the Nash and the Gill, which otherwise only really meet in the revival of wood engraving.
Sadly, there isn’t a substantial catalogue for this enjoyable exhibition, but a largeformat pamphlet entitled ‘John Nash in Meadle (1922–39)’ by Venetia Lascelles is available from the gallery bookshop priced £6. It focuses on his Buckinghamshire period and offers a welcome introduction to the subject. There are one or two small books on John Nash in existence, mostly out-ofprint, but nothing like the extensive bibliography that exists on Paul. If there are still any enterprising publishers out there, I volunteer my services to write the big book on John — he certainly deserves it.
Meanwhile in Fulham, the flower paintings of another great landscapist, Ivon Hitchens (1893–1979), are being given a rather splendid airing. Jonathan Clark specialises in handling artists’ estates, and in recent years has been assiduously contributing to the thunder surrounding Hitchens. In 2005 Clark showed a judicious selection of Hitchens’s nudes, including an absolute gem which was bought by an American collector. Now he brings together a largely unseen group of flower pictures which are stunning in their loveliness.
The natural dispersal of colour in a stilllife of flowers through the disposition of the petals and florets suited Hitchens’s urge to abstraction, and led to paintings of quite radical pictorial organisation. In the best of these gorgeous paintings the structured spontaneity is matched and assisted by an effective variety of brush mark, from the vivid splash to the cursory outline, through all manner of brushily exact and liquid delights. An exhibition of Hitchens’s flower paintings is unusual enough, but to view a group of this quality is a rare event indeed. It is worth a visit for the magnificent poetry of ‘Garden Conservatory’ (c.1935) alone. Both this and the Buckinghamshire show are highly recommended.
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