Beatrix Potter's ink and watercolour

The Art Of Beatrix Potter: Sketches, Paintings, and Illustrations (Chronicle Books, 2016)

I never read Beatrix Potter (I read Ladybird books, A. A. Milne’s poems, and The Wind In The Willows), but like everyone else, I grew up knowing her name. A recent book on the author-illustrator’s work has given me a grown-up appreciation of her talents as an artist. She got her start in greeting cards, which necessarily reward the capacity to work small. I get the sense that, had I known her, we would have got on: she is fascinated by the smaller wildlife, including fungi, which she often painted; no animal is too small or unglamorous to be of interest; the countryside in different seasons inspired her to paint; and she also has some lovely interior scenes. I love her handling of colour, her unfussy yet instantly legible forms, her ability to unify a scene with colour and proportion (nothing too dominant when it shouldn’t be). Her work is like a cake well done: just the right balance of elements, not too rich, not too sweet — but with plenty of flavour. Her use of ink with watercolours is perhaps the icing on that cake — or shall we say, more essential, like the almonds on a Dundee?

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Pictures from the book, left to right: the country above Sidmouth, a study for The Tales of Pig Robinson; an unfinished painting of Melford Hall (1903), and an earlier painting of guinea pigs for an unpublished greeting card.

The charm of Eric Ravilious

At the end of his rather short life, Eric Ravilious was a war artist and a victim of WWII, being lost over Iceland in an airplane. But before then — apart from endless sermons in church which his theologian father made the family sit through — Ravilious led a charmed life. He loved the countryside, which he depicted in exquisite wood engravings, where rendering the texture of objects and landscapes was just as rewarding as it was challenging. This love of texture was transferred to painting when he took up drawing and tinted them with watercolours (he called his paintings ‘drawings’). His colours are often muted, but I’m not sure the evidence is there that he didn’t like green, as one author claims: Ravilious may have preferred to show the Sussex Downs, for instance, in moodier lights than broad daylight, but he seems not to shun green, only to want a soft rather than a strident look. He had great skill but also a loving innocence of vision that would inspire any modern illustrator. The simplicity of line and canny modelling belie the technical difficulty of the work he often did, as for the lithographic illustrations for High Street, reproduced in a facsimile edition by the Victoria & Albert Museum (the original plates were destroyed during the war). That book also has the virtue of reminding us how much things have changed since his lifetime (a hot water bottle, for instance, was made of ceramic and bought at the hardware store, and the newfangled rubber job that we are so used to was only beginning to supplant it). Ravilious had a winning and recognizable style, but he was also a searching and innovative artist whose aesthetic path might have taken other turns, had he lived. After a period of neglect it seems that he was rediscovered — and his stock, as they say, should only go up from here.

Spray, a 'realist' painting by Harold Williamson

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I like this painting: I have it on the back of a small mirror that is a 'souvenir' of the 2017 British realism exhibit in Edinburgh. The painting is from 1939, so the woman is wearing a Lastex two-piece bathing suit (we are told in the catalogue) -- a stretchy fabric made from latex threads with a genuine textile wrapped around them. Beats wool for swimming, anyway, which is what they wore in the previous decade. There is something delightful about the woman's athletic, even muscularly defined, body -- not simply posing for the viewer but just enjoying life, responding to nature, her back turned to us. She almost looks like a sea-creature in her own right! The problem is that her response doesn't seem justified by her context. The spray, surely, could hardly reach her. Those rocks she's on: they look awfully high. To my eyes, she's on a high cliff, not at the water's edge. Try as I might even to see it as a tidal pool, I just can't. Unless she has the bravery -- or folly -- to dive into the sea from a great height, the whole thing seems odd. She is a bather, but where's the beach? Which goes to show that realists might be convincing but they are not necessarily truthful.

'Realist' paintings at the National Galleries of Scotland

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By The Hills, Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, 1939

I quite enjoyed the National Galleries of Scotland companion to an exhibit called True To Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s. I'm interested in the period, architecturally, culturally, and politically, not to mention the tiles and domestic decorations of the time, so this book helps to round that out. I'm also someone for whom the farther edges of both realism (e.g. any serious botanical or bird artist) and abstraction (e.g. Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock) have little or no appeal. So-called photorealism raises the question of why not just take a photo -- and the answer is that all art as art selects and distorts, in a different way than the camera does. But the visual effect of photorealism, in which the virtuosity of the illusion is the point, impresses up to that point and then rarely goes farther. On the other hand, an artist whose book is devoted to loose gestural painting, speed of rendering, and vivacity failed entirely to convince me: I preferred the 'before' picture where the round floats on the boats he painted were truly round, and solid like cherries, and had a pleasing density both of colour and form. To my eyes, his looser, more washy version (he works in watercolours) had moved in the wrong direction. To me, there is a sweet spot between too tight and too loose, too precise and too vague. It depends what one is trying to achieve, of course. The economical suggestiveness of Marcia Brown's 'Cinderella' illustrations is admirable. There are as many or more ways to find that sweet spot, and to give it new expression, as there are artists.

To return to the True To Life exhibit: the cover of the book features a striking oil portrait, called 'By The Hills', which was painted by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst and is dated 1939. It features the head of a successful model, actress, and minor aristocrat, and, we are told, the arms of the painter's lover-made-second-wife. Apparently he judged the aristo to be too thin, though given the slimness of the existing arms, and the fact that the aristo was a healthy woman -- she lived till 2002 -- this seems rather unlikely. Anyway, the man was an artist: if her arms lacked sufficient fullness or shape, why not just paint them as he wished them?

Moving on. The face is captivatingly beautiful (even if her eyebrows are too pencil-thin for contemporary taste), but eventually you do look at the head hair rather than just allow it to contribute to the overall impression. And when you do look at the hair, you realize (or I did) that the hair is far less 'realistic' than the face. It looks like a kind of shiny chocolate ganache. In the large and sharp reproduction of the cover photo, the hair looks like something squeezed from an icing bag.

Berthe Morisot

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In The Dining Room, 1880, Private Collection

The Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot is a new discovery for me, and I find her work often very delightful. What I like about her art is exemplified by the painting In The Dining Room. It is the opposite of a ‘posed’ scene, rather like a snapshot taken by mistake with a digital camera. The view is a glimpse of life as it goes about its business otherwise unobserved — a fleeting moment that just happened to be captured. But of course, in reality the little scene is beautifully composed, with four basic shapes and colours that draw the eye into the picture and around it: the glowing vase object, the mantelpiece, the woman drying or polishing dishes (?), the fine wood table. And even though everything has a swish, as if swirling through space at speed, the shine and texture, smoothness and hardness of the objects strike you immediately: that vase is glassy, that dress is silky. The modelling is gorgeous: you sense the warm body within that dress, you feel you could tap her on the shoulder. The intricacy of the plaited bun is conveyed with a few economical strokes — and we completely believe in that hair, just as we believe that the table has high polish and the mantelpiece is polished stone. The whole effect is unlaboured, almost dashed-off, without in any way seeming slapdash or insufficiently observed. It is a masterpiece of pictorial poetry, and the fact that it is a domestic scene, about which poetry so rarely if ever concerns itself, is just a bonus.