Peasant Inspiration - Coloured Woodcarving of Switzerland and South Germany

I had said in a previous post that the only article Joseph King had written on the Peasant Arts movement was his book Nesting Boxes for Birds (King, J., The Gallery of Handicraft).  Then I found two articles by Joseph King on handicraft in Issue 2 and 3 of The Art Workers' Quarterly (1902) at the Victoria & Albert Museum.  The illustrations that accompany the Issue 3 article he wrote on 'The Coloured Wood Carving of Switzerland and South Germany' (p.80-84) are fascinating as they look familiar.  I am unable to find out much about Franz Paukert, but it would appear that his woodcarvings inspired Godfrey Blount's trademark intertwined vine leave patterns.

panel from Franz Paukert's "Die Zimmergotik" plate 32
from The Art Workers' Quarterly, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1902 (p.82)

illustration from Arbor Vitae, Blount, G., A.C. Fifield, 1910

King writes "Of course there are various styles and developments of this surface carving.  But one very remarkable things about it is its wide-spread traditions and distinct characteristics: the same designs and motives are seen in different centuries and in places so far apart as Northern Switzerland and eastern Tyrol. The beauty and simplicity of some of these designs is seen from the illustrations of this article.  But an hour in the Basel, Zurich, or Munich Museums, or a study of Franz Paukert's splendid work "Die Zimmergoitk in Deutsch-tirol" (Leipzig, 1897), will show at once how distinct a tradition this style of carving has established, and how it has affected the best domestic, ecclesiastical, and public architecture of South Germany and neighbouring lands."

panel from Franz Paukert's "Die Zimmergotik" plate 32
from The Art Workers' Quarterly, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1902 (p.83)

  

Illustrations by Godfrey Blount, from Arbor Vitae, Blount, G., A.C. Fifield, 1910

Katharine Tynan - The Maker

The Irish poet Katharine Tynan contributed to the Peasant Art journal, The Vineyard.  In her collection Irish Poems (Tynan, K., Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1913), Tynan dedicates a poem to Maude Egerton King, fittingly a poem about the beauty of the country.

Title page extract from
Tynan, K., Irish Poems, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1913

To Maude Egerton King

God made the country,

  Man made the town.

God clad the country 

  In a green gown.

Clad her in a kirtle

  Of the green silk.

God made the country 

  Of honey and milk.

Poor folk from Eden

  Driven away,

God made the country

  For a holiday.

God gave the country

  A flower, a bird,

To comfort His children

  For the flaming sword.

For easing and pleasing

  He made a tree,

Many a sweet rivulet,

  Dew and the bee.

God made the country,

Man made the town.

  Is not God a maker

Of great renown!

extract from
Tynan, K., Irish Poems, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1913

Are you sitting comfortably Arthur Romney Green?

I was recently talking to the Rector at St Christopher's Church, Haslemere, when I mentioned the church's Arthur Romney Green altar chair I did not anticipate her response.  Apparently the chair is extremely uncomfortable to sit in, and she refuses to sit in it for that very reason!  That knowledge has made me feel a little disappointed in the craftsmanship and it raises the question of form over function.  

I have quite a few pictures of Arthur Romney Green chairs.  It is interesting to look at these and not just admire their forms but also to wonder on how they may feel to sit in.

Sanctuary chair (oak) for St Christopher's Church, Haslemere
by Arthur Romney Green
from Art Workers' Quarterly Volume 4, Issue 13, January 1905 (p.45)

Walnut Chair convertible into Table
by Arthur Romney Green
from Art Workers' Quarterly Volume 4, Issue 13, January 1905 (p.45)

Arthur Romney Green chair which converts into a table
from Elkin, Susan, Life to the Lees:
A Biography of Arthur Romney Green, The Cromwell Press Limited, 1998

Dining Room Chairs in Spanish chestnut
by Arthur Romney Green
from Art Workers' Quarterly Volume 4, Issue 13, January 1905 (p.45)

Arthur Romney Green chair
National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum

Ceremonial chair by Arthur Romney Green,
Christchurch Priory from Elkin, Susan, Life to the Lees:
A Biography of Arthur Romney Green, The Cromwell Press Limited, 1998

Arm Chair of English Oak, with Laced Leather Seat,
designed and made by Arthur Romney Green,
Art Journal, November 1906

Arthur Romney Green chair and table
for sale at Haslam & Whiteway Ltd

Arthur Romney Green chairs
from Elkin, Susan, Life to the Lees:
A Biography of Arthur Romney Green, The Cromwell Press Limited, 1998

Arthur Romney Green chair,
photograph held at the National Art Library,
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

The National Art Library holds photographs of Arthur Romney Green works which members of the public have sent in.

Arthur Romney Green chair
National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum

Arthur Romney Green chair
National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum

Arthur Romney Green chair
National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum

Arthur Romney Green chair
National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum

The Millinery Works describe the chair below as "A rare oak Capstan armchair of exposed dowel construction, with chamfered legs and splats, profusely carved to the edges of the seat and to the splats with signature diamond motif carving, by Arthur Romney Green, circa 1925. 75.5cm (30in) high. See similar chair in The Studio 1924 p 101."
 

Arthur Romney Green chair
for sale The Millinery Works Art Gallery

The Antiques Atlas describes the stool below as: "Elm and oak stool attributed to Arthur Romney Green, of carved and joined construction, displaying great sculptural form and presence.  It shows signs of once having an upholstered seat but is now fitted with a green leatherette loose seat pad which works very well.  Of good mellow colour, circa 1920."

Arthur Romney Green stool
sold at Antiques Atlas

Arthur Romney Green stool
sold at Antiques Atlas

Set of 6 Arthur Romney Green chairs with original leather seats
for sale at Patch Rogers

Detail from set of 6 Arthur Romney Green chairs with original leather seats
for sale at Patch Rogers

Arthur Romney Green spindle back oak chair with thronged leather seat
pair for sale at the sale room

from Elkin, Susan, Life to the Lees:
A Biography of Arthur Romney Green, The Cromwell Press Limited, 1998

School oak armchair by Arthur Romney Green
for sale for £1,595 at Antiques Atlas

School oak armchair by Arthur Romney Green
for sale for £1,595 at Antiques Atlas 

Little St Cross & St Cross Weaving House - found and demolished

Sometimes the answer to a question is right under your nose.  Thank you to Sarah at the Weaving House for pointing me in the right direction.

Haslemere Educational Museum has an online archive of local photographs that you can access via a computer in their main gallery.  This has states that "Godfrey Blount's New Crusade Chapel in Weydown Road - now demolished.  The Weaving Cottage is behind".  It looks like at the time of the photograph the building was being used as a house, with a house name being displayed on the left hand side of the door and maybe a letterbox on the right side of the door.  Although taken at a very similar angle to the older Little St Cross photograph, the slight difference in angle enables us to see what is referred to as 'The Weaving Cottage' right behind the building.

Little St Cross / Godfrey Blount's New Crusade Chapel,
Weydown Road, Haslemere
Reproduced courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum

Little St Cross, Weydown Road, Haslemere
Reproduced courtesy of The Dartford Warbler

I think it is fair to conclude that these buildings were demolished when the newer houses were built in the front gardens of Wildwood and St Cross on Weydown Road, the houses occupied by Greville MacDonald and Godfrey and Ethel Blount in the early 1900s.

Plan of Weydown Road, Haslemere
with St Cross & Wildwood

St Cross Cottage, Weydown Road, Haslemere
reproduced courtesy of Haslemere Educational Museum

The Haslemere Educational Museum's archive notes that the above is  "St Cross Cottage, the Weaving Cottage in Weydown Road - now demolished ".  This building, which I was not previously aware of, explains how the weaving industry was run from St Cross when the Blounts were living there.  The industry was being run from a cottage in the grounds, whilst the Blounts lived in St Cross, the main house.  I wonder if this building is the 'studio' that Therese La Chard lived in briefly and where she made some observations of the Haslemere Peasant Arts movement.  I had thought that she had stayed in Little St Cross, but St Cross Cottage appears more likely to be used as a home than Little St Cross.

I am not sure whether the photograph below of St Cross spinners and weavers is taken from the front right hand side of St Cross Cottage, or not.

Group of spinners and weavers at St Cross, Haslemere, 
The Studio, XLIII, 1908
(from Haslam, Arts and Crafts Carpets, David Black, London, 1991)

All in all, whilst it is not a surprise to see that these buildings have been described as demolished, it is sad to read that they are definitely no longer standing.  Another piece of Haslemere's history lost to garden grabbing.

A Strange Visit by Arthur Romney Green

I have been away from the blog for a while, and now Summer has truly arrived.

I came across this lovely hand drawn poem by Arthur Romney Green when I was at the National Art Library earlier this year.  I hope it does not break any copyright by showing some of it here.  There are very faint parallels with my rescue of a blackbird from our raspberry netting in Foundry Meadow a few days ago(!).

A Strange Visit, Arthur Romney Green, Pear Tree Press, 1930

A Strange Visit, Arthur Romney Green, Pear Tree Press, 1930

A Strange Visit, Arthur Romney Green, Pear Tree Press, 1930

Once in the year - I wonder why
But once? - with his sweet bitter cry.
This runner upon earth mounts high
In zigzags black against the sky

Round seaward-looking chimney-tops
Whence, even as we gaze, he drops
Unseen to neighbouring field or copse -,
This runner through the standing crops.

And one year - why but one alone? -
One early morning - why but one? -
A scuffling in the hollow stone,
The wonder-walking of a drone,

As down our bedroom chimney thus
The feathery scuffle and the fuss,
Birth from the stone so beauteous
Of this strange visit! - why to us?

Neither a wounded thing to shame
The soul, and neither sick nor tame,
But freely, this untutored flame
Of wild life, whence or how it came

Into my hand I know not, J,
My only care to let it fly
Ere in my hand it bruise or die
This live thing with the lustrous eye

As of a frighten'd deer! - our guest,
God knows on what fantastic quest,
In silks and satins of the best,
Brown mantle, buff and tawny vest,

His wings so delicately sown
With black upon their velvet brown,
And, blindly quivering to be flown,
His pulses beating to my own,

As, dainty feet and silver thighs
All gather'd with smooth wings, he lies
Breast upward and bewilder'd eyes
A moment in my hand - and flies.

So seldom seen, so often heard,
Your name a long familiar word,
This meeting, why so long deferr'd,
Or why at all, mysterious bird?

Ah, how I longed, but did not dare
Gaze till I laid the secret bare! -
What secret of the earth and air
With their liege delegate to share?

A Strange Visit, Arthur Romney Green, Pear Tree Press, 1930

All useful things are made by machines - The Rustic Renaissance continued

Following on from my last post on this subject, in the chapter 'Town or Country', Godfrey Blount (Blount, G., Rustic Renaissance, The Simple Life Series No. 21, A.C. Fifield, London, 1905) went on to further set out his argument for the return to handicraft and the need to return to the country:

"But people say, and say with some reason that it (Handicraft) neither makes useful things nor makes them particularly attractive; and this, they say, is because all useful things are made by machines and all pretty things by professional artists.  This is a disheartening criticism more often inferred than expressed, and is the more dangerous because, in a way, it has almost become a truth.  The things we use are, as a matter of fact, almost invariably made by machines; the things we admire, pictures, poems, plays, are the work of a profession of artists.  We have come to believe that this is a satisfactory, or at any rate an inevitable, state of things.  It has a scientifically complete look about it, as if we had struck the bed-rock and arrived at a workable hypothesis about these matters; and yet it is just this complacent formula, this glib hypothesis, that we must deny and reject, for it has never yet been entirely true and, pray God, may never become so.

Godfrey Blount
from W.R.Trotter, The Hilltop Writers, The Book Guild Ltd, 2003

"Useful things never used to be made by machines till machines were invented to make them; pretty things were never made for the public by a profession solely devoted to aesthetics, till the ordinary artisan had given up making them instinctively himself.  The flaw that lies at the bottom of this formula, however, and which contaminates and retards the revival of Handicraft, is that useful things and pretty things have nothing necessarily to do with each other; and the first law of any real revival and lasting renaissance of Handwork, as opposed to machine work, is that such a distinction should cease to exist, and that a really useful thing must be considered a pretty one, and a thing which has no real use must be considered an ugly one.

"Those of us who are in earnest, including perhaps a few politicians, are beginning to see that this country can only be saved, physically, mentally, and spiritually, by cultivating it.  Soon we shall also realise that if a return to the land is the correct cure for overcrowding in the towns, the object of cultivating the land will not be the feeding of towns but starving them, and the feeding of the new peasantry; and that only so far as the towns are making useful things, useful, that is to say, to the countryman, will the countryman consent to support the towns.

Surrey Landscape by Godfrey Blount
Bushey Museum & Art Gallery

"It is a question entirely of where you will have your population, in the country or in the town.  You cannot have it in both, healthily, at the same tie, and the mistake people make is, that when they talk and think about the future, they don't seem able to see that these huge festers of manufacturing cities are quite unnecessary to the nation's true welfare or happiness, and persist in imagining that the agricultural revival will be perpetual saddled with the weight of them.

"A return to the country must imply the decay of the town.  If it does not imply this it can be no true return.  A return to the country with the corresponding decline of the town, must also mean a return to simplicity and Handicraft, because, when the town ceases to be a burden on the countryman's back, he will have to make what he wants by hand in the country instead of having them made by machinery in the town.

"But, above all, a return to the country means the determination to be thorough-bred peasants and not mongrel ones.  What we are most of us secretly hoping may happen is to be able to play at peasants, like Marie Antoinette, and live in garden cities that will combine all the advantages of town and country life, with the disadvantages of neither.  Garden cities may be capital investments and convenient suburbs for people with hobbies and for week-end visitors; but no solution for the danger that has us by the throat, and which is eating our heart out.  The rural depopulation is our punishment, call it misfortune if you like, the city is our sin.  No national revival or revivification is possible, till we repent of our sin and return with some sort of conviction to the manners, if not to the faith, of our forefathers."

Sunset over the Downs by Godfrey Blount
Bushey Museum & Art Gallery

Arthur Romney Green, Sir Robert Hunter & Godfrey Blount

Following on from my post Arthur Romney Green and the Peasant Arts People, I have gone back to the source of Susan Elkin's description (Life to the Lees, Cromwell Press, 1998) of Arthur Romney Green's move to Haslemere to see Green's explanation.  Green calls himself 'Artifer' in his autobiography.

In his unpublished memoirs Work and Play (held at the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum), Green states "My father's greatest friend at London University was Robert Hunter, afterwards Sir Robert and Solicitor General to the Post Office; and his second wife was another of my Father's beautiful friends.  They had three daughters rather younger than ourselves, their charming home at Haslemere which, with those of our grandparents at Alton and at Saffron Walden, we regarded as amongst the most ideal of holiday resorts.  O, the holiday delights of those three homes - the intelligent friendliness of our hosts, the love of gardens, the pony-riding and the picnics and the good eating." (Chapter 2, page 8).

Work and Play,
autobiography of Arthur Romney Green,
National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum

As a footnote to page 8 Green adds "It was mainly owing to my introduction to Haslemere by the Hunters that I set up there my first real workshop.  On leaving Haslemere I saw little of them for many years; but not it pleases my to know, as I revise this chapter, that amongst my own are the daughters of my father's greatest friends."

Later Green writes "We chose Haslemere because hand-weaving and other small industries were already there, inspired or attracted by the genius of Godfrey Blount.  Also because my Father's old friends Sir Robert and Lady Hunter were still there, and were very able and willing to give us introductions to many of the rather cultured and wealthy people who abound in that beautiful neighbourhood."

Work and Play,
autobiography of Arthur Romney Green,
National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum