ELY STAINED GLASS MUSEUM

Made by an unknown artist c.1220-1250. From Burgundy, France.

Ely has the only stained glass museum in Britain, located in the cathedral, with a comprehensive display, fuller than that in the V&A, who show only part of their collection. If you drive to Ely on market day (Thursdays 8.30 – 3.30), my advice to you is to arrive early, as all the carparks are full by ten, otherwise you’ll have to go a mile out of town to the country park, though there’s a pleasant walk back to the cathedral along the Great Ouse. Ely is a compact market town with a full range of shops, plus a few supermarkets, an enormous bric-a-brac emporium and a dismayingly large quantity of charity shops. The museum displays glass from 1200 to the present with a good narrative explaining its technical and artistic development. Here are a few that I liked.

Mary Magdalene and a holy woman visiting the tomb of Christ, by George Hedgeland, 1856. Hedgeland designed the large west window of Norwich Cathedral. His career was cut short by ill-health.

Henry Holiday, ‘Suffer the Little Children’, 1907. Holiday was a prolific stained-glass artist. He was associated with William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites early in his career and worked many years for James Powell and Sons.

Francis Spear, ‘Eve’, 1958, a replica of part of his ‘Creation’ in Glasgow Cathedral. Spear was required to make many changes to his design, and even this final image was controversial because of its depiction of nudity. (Eve in situ here.)

Moira Forsyth, Arms of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers, 1973. The panel is made from applique glass, a collage of pieces stuck one over the other.

‘St Adelaide’, by Kehinde Wiley, 2017, one of his series of stained glass panels with portraits of young black residents of Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by a stained glass designed by Ingres and manufactured in the Czech Republic.

ANDRÉ DERAIN

André Derain, ‘Madame Matisse in a Kimono’, from the National Gallery’s ‘After Impressionism’ exhibition in 2023.

Derain spent the summer of 1905 in the small fishing village of Collioure on the Mediterranean together with Matisse and his family. This portrait of Matisse’s wife Amélie depicts her in a patterned Japanese kimono. Around her, the sunlight becomes an intense red and the shadows vivid greens and blues, illustrating the two artists’ pursuit of the application of deliberately exaggerated colour. The bold works resulting from the artists’ time together were shown later that year at the Salon d’Automne.

Derain is one of the less well-known of the Post-impressionists, though I particularly like his paintings (and I particularly like Collioure). I wonder if his relegation to the second rank derives from the extraordinary fluency and ease with which he painted? Matisse, who is much more highly regarded, lacked that fluency. Perhaps there’s always some suspicion of such artists, who can become glib if they’re not careful. Others I’d include in this class are Joaquín Sorolla, Augustus John, Salvador Dalì and John Singer Sargeant.

206 – ‘The cat will mew…’

Agnes Miller Parker, The Uncivilised Cat, 1930. The Fleming Collection. My visit to Glasgow is rapidly drawing to a close, but my Scottish September still has one last blast: an introduction to the Fleming Collection’s rich and rewarding exhibition Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception, which you can catch at Dovecot Studios in […]
206 – ‘The cat will mew…’

AGNES MILLER PARKER

Wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980), a Scottish artist who studied and taught at the Glasgow School of Art. She married William McCance, an artist and critic, who was an early advocate of the new pottery of Bernard Leach. After an early foray into Vorticism, she concentrated on wood engravings, often accompanying printed text, some for the Gregynog Press, which McCance directed. She was celebrated for her illustrations of Aesop’s Fables, Gray’s Elegy and Thomas Hardy novels. These engravings were for A. E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad, a selection from over fifty in the book.

Drawing of Agnes Miller Parker by William McCance (1919) (National Galleries Scotland)

WEDGWOOD AND SLAVERY

This dramatic linen banner, about three metres high, belonging to Anti-Slavery International, hangs in the Museum of London’s exhibition about the Transatlantic slave trade. I noticed it on International Women’s Day. It dates from the early 19th century, when slave owners were trying to find ways round abolition. It adapts Josiah Wedgwood’s famous medallion (below) showing a kneeling male slave. The design was adopted by the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787:

“On the second and sixteenth of October two sittings took place; at the latter of which a sub-committee, which had been appointed for the purpose, brought in a design for a seal. An African was seen, in chains in a supplicating posture, kneeling with one knee upon the ground, and with both his hands lifted up to Heaven, and round the seal was observed the following motto, as if he was uttering the words himself ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ The design having been approved of, a seal was ordered to be engraved from it. I may mention here, that this seal, simple as the design was, was made to contribute largely… towards turning the attention of our countrymen to the case of the injured Africans, and of procuring a warm interest in their favour.”

Wedgwood distributed thousands of these medallions free, which were worn so widely as to become fashion accessories. But the English economy was so enmeshed with slavery that, despite his liberal sentiments, Wedgwood could not extricate himself from it completely. He sold pottery to the plantation owners in England and the colonies; he even took an order from a slave trader for a bath “to please the fancy of a black king of Africa to wash himself out of”.¹

Now the images of the kneeling man and woman are thought to portray African people as without agency, obliged to abase themselves before sympathetic Europeans. Visitors to the museum have been invited to reinterpret the Wedgwood medallion in a modern egalitarian way.

Quoted in Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter, New York: Metropolitan Books, p.223 ↩︎

THE BAUHAUS TEAPOT

For a long time it seemed to me that Marianne Brandt’s iconic Bauhaus teapot was really a beautiful picture of a teapot, and I saw a connection with the Russian Constructivist art of the period, but having come across this artwork (above) by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Circle Segments (1921), I now see what its inspiration was.

In 1923, Moholy-Nagy took over from Johannes Itten as as leader of the Bauhaus metalwork studio, where Brandt trained, and which she took over on Moholy-Nagy’s departure. Both Itten and Moholy-Nagy based design on a vocabulary of simple forms and primary colours and in Brandt’s work we can see how brilliantly she interpreted her projects. At about the same time as she made the famous teapot, she made a similar ashtray in brass and nickel-plated brass (below).

The ashtray works because there are few ergonomic demands on it, while a teapot is one of the most difficult objects to design satisfactorily: despite great advances in technology, no-one has ever managed to make a teapot that doesn’t drip. Fellow-students Carl Jakob Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfield designed lamps on the same principles, which also have few ergonomic demands, and these have gone through many iterations (below), unlike Brandt’s teapot, which is a museum piece.

It’s only fair to add that Brandt went on to a long and brilliant career as a designer and teacher.

THE GEORGE IV, BRIXTON HILL

When in 2012 Tesco proposed to put a supermarket on the site of the George IV pub on Brixton Hill, which had been a popular music venue for many decades, there was an outcry and a big campaign (above). Eventually the supermarket was built, but the Victorian exterior was preserved, Lambeth council listing it as an Asset of Community Value, the first to be designated in the borough.

I discovered that my neighbour had a personal interest in the George IV — her grandfather was the licensee and she lived there as a girl in the 1930s. She showed me an old photo (below) and pointed to the top window in the turret: “I was born there,” she said. Her grandfather, Frank M. Nilen, took it over in 1925.

The George IV in about 1930.

A hundred years earlier it had been a coaching inn on the London to Brighton road, and later the focus of south London’s musical life in. The Brixton Hill Musical Society was inaugurated there in 1889, welcomed by its music-loving proprietor, Mr Woodward. According to the South London Press, some nice little social evenings were spent in Mr Woodward’s cosy room. “Mr. Charles Taplin, vice-president of the Kennington Pilgrims’ Musical Society, occupied the chair, besides contributing a couple of fine songs, Good Company and The Message from the King. Mr. Hopkins, who accompanied, gave an overture from Madame Angot; Mr. Notter sang I Never Can Forget and The Red Cross Banner. The recitation, The Women of Mumbles Head, was finely declaimed by Mr. Brown, as was an amusing incident about Paddy and the Butter, by Mr. Stewart.”

Frank M. Nilen.

In 1925 Mr Nilen immediately upgraded the pub, redecorating it and putting in electric light and central heating. He replaced the rather vulgar billiard room with a Palm Court room for musical entertainments. Everything was to be elegant and proper in the George IV. “A good class trade has been established and the progressive policy has been amply rewarded,” reported the Brixton Free Press. Mr Nilen was a grandee publican, presiding in a black coat and striped trousers, never stooping to pull a pint.

The Palm Court.

He was a governor of the Licensed Victuallers’ Society and of the Licensed Victuallers’ School in Slough. Naturally, my neighbour was educated at Slough. “You always knew when the governors were visiting,” she told me, “The place reeked of cigar smoke.”

The Saloon Bar.

Mr Nilen had been managing pubs for many years before he came to the George IV, but it was the memory of his early career that inspired him to open the Palm Court room, for he’d previously been in the music halls. At ten he was a chorus boy in the Drury Lane pantomime. He’d performed at the Opera Comique and appeared at the Crystal Palace, the Alexandra Palace and The Alhambra. At 17 he began a 12-year association with Collins’ Music Hall in Islington, supervising its rebuilding — “on modern principles” — in 1897. Collins’ had such a reputation for sobriety among the profession that they called it “The Chapel on the Hill”, but among investors it was known as “The Goldmine on the Hill”.

Collins’ Music Hall, Islington, after its rebuilding in 1897 “on modern principles”. Now occupied by Waterstones.

The south London musical tradition continued at the George IV until the 21st century, from the Brixton Musical Society’s Message from the King and Red Cross Banner in 1889 to Northern Soul in the 1980s and Basement Jaxx in the 1990s.

In a sad irony, the Licenced Victuallers’ School in Slough was also replaced by a Tesco supermarket and moved to Ascot.

RECO CAPEY

Reco Capey in Yardley’s design studio. (Design Council Archives)

Reco Capey (1895-1961) had one foot in industry and the other in the crafts and his career illustrates the emergence of the design profession out of the applied arts. He was born in North Staffordshire and, as was usual for young people with artistic talent, he was apprenticed to the pottery industry. He produced intelligent designs at Burslem art school and did similar work for Doulton. He went to the Royal College of Art in about 1921, where he studied under Dora Billington, another artist from North Staffordshire.

Glazed tiles made at Burslem art school, 1916.

Ceramics for Doulton, 1920s.

After he graduated from the RCA, William Rothenstein asked him to set up a new textiles course. He was one of a group of young teachers and students – including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden – who introduced advanced ideas to what was still a fairly conservative college.

From ‘The Printing of Textiles’.

Capey’s course concentrated on printing and covered hand-block and machine printing, contributing to the advance of both craft-based and industrial textile design. The course content, with its solid grounding in materials and methods, is recorded in his book The Printing of Textiles (1930). His students included Lucienne Day and Astrid Sampe, who became a leading textile designer in Sweden and adopted his teaching methods.

Rothenstein’s principal ambition was to elevate the teaching of painting and sculpture at the RCA and, although there were more design students at the college than fine artists, commercial art was rather looked down on. When Rothenstein took up his position in the early ‘twenties he made a tour of continental art schools but omitted the Bauhaus. Capey was one of the few tutors to introduce Bauhaus ideas to the RCA and the only one to call himself an industrial designer.

At the same time as he was teaching, Capey was chief designer for Yardley Cosmetics. He spent a couple of years as an adviser to the Rural Industries Bureau and he was an active member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. In 1928 he showed lacquered boxes and printed fabrics at the Society’s exhibtion alongside textiles by Phyllis Barron, Enid Marx and Ethel Mairet.

Filigree metal doors to Yardley’s Bond Street Shop, 1933. (Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collection)

In 1933 Yardley moved its retail operation to a new building at 33 Bond Street, to which Capey had made significant contributions, notably its doors and a frieze above the fourth storey. He is credited with designing the company trade mark, the Yardley bee, but his ex-wife, Katherine Bertram, who also worked for Yardley, said it was her design and that Capey failed to acknowledge her contribution.

Katherine Bertram’s bee design for Yardley, for which Reco Capey took credit.

Capey became involved with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at the time when it was struggling to find an identity for itself and when there was strife between modernisers, who thought it had to adapt itself to modern industry, and conservatives, who wanted it to serve craftsmen working by hand and to have nothing to do with machinery. He became its president in 1940 when the dispute was at its height, and it’s significant that at that moment it was thought that an industrial designer was an appropriate person for the post. But he was unable to contribute to the debate because he was immediately transferred to Yardley’s New York office.

His view of craftsmanship was actually fairly similar to that of other members on the modernising wing: machine production was unavoidable but civilisation couldn’t exist without craftmanship; the manufacturer depends on the craftsman and it’s not possible to create anything of value without a thorough knowledge of materials. But he also believed, unlike many members, that in contemporary society it was no longer possible for the designer to be a maker. In Capey’s absence, John Farleigh took the chair of the Society, but although he was also a moderniser he wasn’t prepared to confront the traditionalists. It’s interesting to speculate what Capey, who was much more engaged with commerce than Farleigh was, would have done if he’d remained in England.

The Road to Uppsala, 1937

Containers in epoxy resin, exhibited in 1935.

As a result of his experience in desiging packaging for Yardley, Capey became interested in new materials and in the Royal Society of Arts’ 1935 exhibition, British Art in Industry, he showed containers made in the newly-invented epoxy resin. He showed them again at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1938, when it had finally been decided to include designs for industry, the boldest contributions to the exhibition that year. He was an early Royal Designer for Industry.

Stoneware jar and cover, made by Doulton c. 1935 (Victoria & Albert Museum).

Although most of his work was in the USA after 1940, he remained a UK resident and maintained his association with the RCA until 1953 as an external examiner. He made many visits to Sweden, whose design culture he had a high regard for. But his own contribution appears to have fallen off after the war, and at the end of his career he was designing some truly awful things for Yardley.

“A collector’s piece by Reco Capey, well known English designer.”
An advert in ‘The Philadephia Inquirer’, 14 December 1953.

The best source of information about the RCA in this period is Hilary Cunliffe-Charlesworth’s unpublished PhD The Royal College of Art: It’s Influence on Education, Art and Design 1900-1950. The information about Katherine Bertram is from Isabella Stone, who maintains a website about her and kindly answered my questions. Christine Dove, of the Society of Designer Craftsmen, did some very helpful background research. I tried to find out if Yardley had an archive but they do not answer questions about the company.

THE TREE OF LOVE

For Valentine’s Day and Leap Year, here’s a picture of women shaking down men from a tree. They’re tempting the men with gifts and the inscription reads, “The charming Isabelle presents him with a hat. In an agreeable manner, receive this snuffbox.” In case these blandishments fail, two of the charming and agreeable ladies are cutting down the tree. Cupid observes. The dish was made in 1775.

The Tree of Love was a popular image in late 18^th and early 19^th century France, appearing in prints and on ceramic dishes like the ones above.

The prints sometimes include The Dialogue of Wine and Water along the bottom, which seems to be unconnected with the ladies and the tree. There were cheap prints on all sorts of subjects and the women chasing men were one version of The World Turned Upside Down. It’s tempting to see the inversion of sexual roles as a part of the contemporary revolutionary ferment but it doesn’t seem to be connected. It’s part of another world, more like a joke than a feminist manifesto.

THE ENGLISH HOME, 1935

In the 1930s Nikolaus Pevsner reported on the extent – not very great – to which manufacturers of consumer products were employing professional designers, based on a series of visits he had made to English factories. He made passing reference to a similar survey by Henry G. Dowling, A Survey of British Industrial Arts, which he didn’t think very much of because Dowling had only recorded what was being made without judging between the good and the bad. But Dowling’s non-judgemental approach is what makes his book so interesting and informative.

The book is illustrated with a hundred photos of what manufacturers and interior designers were doing and what people were buying – a mixture of traditional and reproduction designs, moderne designs and designs by artists like Graham Sutherland, Laura Knight and Vanessa Bell.

Dowling was artistic adviser to a wallpaper manufacturer, John Line & Sons, a company with a history of commissioning work by designers, including Christopher Dresser, the Silver Studio and C. F. A. Voysey. He’d taught at Portsmouth and Bournemouth art schools, was a member of the Society of Industrial Artists, a body recently set up to professionalise design practice, sat on the Gorell Committee and was active in the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). The RSA’s exhibition of British Art in Industry, which Dowling’s Survey accompanied, had focused on high-end luxury goods and Pevsner had highlighted the best in modern design, but Dowling recorded what was actually being made and used in 1935. This is a selection.