The Kensington Painter – gardens where we feel secure

The painters in our Kensington collection did not have a central feature like the river upon which  to focus their talents. But like many parts of London there are plenty of gardens amongst the houses, shops and churches, some of them grand, some almost hidden.This picture by Arthur Clay is a view of a late afternoon from Kensington Gardens. There’s a layer of mist on the ground, some dimly glowing street lights and a single illuminated window.

We need a view of Kensington Palace, so here is an unusual example.

The picture shows part of the Gardens under cultivation during the Great War. It looks like another cool autumn day.

The picture below is closer to the usual idea of the Gardens, a bright summer scene which could be any time between the 30s and the 50s painted by an unknown artist.

Below is another summer scene called “The Elms “by Beatrice Pedder.

It’s also set in that same indeterminate summer time.

On the border of the gardens the setting is more specific.

A rainy day in Kensington Gore in 1921 also by Arthur Clay. A pre-London Transport London General B-type bus with an open cab takes on passengers on a quiet day for traffic as perhaps they all were in those days. (I have someone who tells me this sort of thing)

On the edge of another park an artist called Kenneth Graham shows what he calls the Old Wall in Melbury Road.

A dog investigates a tantalising smell while its owner, a young woman stands by. The date unrecorded in our records might be as late as the 1960s. It’s still a quiet summer day though.

Behind the walls and fences you can find many gardens like this one:

Gledhow Gardens by Patrica Willis.

Here is a garden seen from two interiors, in a pair of paintings by Estella Canziani.

Estella Canziani lived in a house in Palace Green. She also painted watercolours and sketches, several of which are in our collection, along with family photographs. We’ll come back to the Canzianis another day.

Further north is another large private garden, painted in 1919 by Dacres Adams.

The picture of Kensington Gardens in the mist is one of my favourites from the Kensington collection but I’m also fond of this picture, not strictly a garden view but another of someone passing by the wall of a garden. In the evening a lone figure carrying a case makes his way home.

Perhaps he is heading for the shop out of which a welcoming light spills. Perhaps he is hurrying to catch the indistinct woman in the distance ( I should say it was a woman). This is Kensington Church Walk, an obscure byway if you don’t know Kensington, a little like Lord Dunsany’s Go-by Street if you remember that. The artist’s name is Walker. No relation.

Postscript

It was a long hard haul loading the post tonight. WordPress have improved the process and it took  some time to work it all out.

On another subject this Saturday we’re having an open afternoon at Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies. It will be more like Open Basement than Open House, as I will be leading a couple of tours through the archive rooms. I’ll be showing some of the actual pictures featured in the last couple of posts, along with some of the other prints and photographs featured on the blog. I know lots of you don’t live anywhere near Kensington but if you do and you fancy a look come along. Email me if you want to come so I can get some idea of numbers.

dave.walker@rbkc.gov.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Chelsea painter – on the waterfront

Earlier this year, I spent some time in our archive rooms assisting a photographer who was taking pictures of the oil paintings in our Local Studies collection. He was working for the Public Catalogue Foundation (www.thepcf.org.uk ) a registered charity which has been working to create an online catalogue of all the oil paintings in public ownership in the UK. To this end their agents have been visiting institutions all over the country, making lists and taking photographs. They have visited museums, art galleries, educational establishments, hospitals and of course libraries. They’ve been working in collaboration with the BBC’s Your Paintings project and you can see the results on the PCF website and at www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings .

But for me and you and the blog the main result of all this work is that I now have some good digital images of artworks I haven’t been able to photograph or scan myself. I’m going to do a couple of posts featuring some of the paintings. This week the paintings are all from the Chelsea collection. Just as with the Chelsea artists I’ve featured in previous posts, for the painters here the quintessential Chelsea subject is the river.

This is a picture of the riverside at Chelsea looking from the Battersea shore painted by James Webb in the 1880s.  You can see the principal landmark Chelsea Old Church, the old Battersea Bridge and just visible in the distance the towers of Albert Bridge. The painting hangs high up on a staircase chained into position and has probably been there since 1905.  Some good lighting has brought out details which I had never seen before like these:

You can just about read the name of the barge in the foreground. The number and size of the barges show you that this is a working river.

More than a century earlier Thomas Priest painted this picture:

The sky is lighter, the boats are smaller, the Battersea shore is more rural. It’s the same church. There was originally a cupola on the tower which was removed in the 1820s when the “new” church St Luke’s was built. The tower is also visible in the picture below, by an unknown painter.

Here you can see an even quieter day on the river. There really was a windmill on the south shore in the eighteenth century. I can’t say for sure what the building to the right of it is though. It looks like a warm lazy day. Before the embankment and the development on both banks the river was wider and may have flowed slower, or so it looks from our time.

This is the Chelsea bank at high tide. I think the bridge in the background is Chelsea Bridge, the old one which looked a little like Hammersmith Bridge. Just to the left of centre is the curious bent structure (a chimney?) of the Old Swan, an ancient Chelsea tavern much loved by artists.  Here it is again in a painting by Edward A Alkyns showing a barge being unloaded with raw materials for the brew house and some men swimming in the river.

The next picture of the Old Swan is by one of Chelsea’s most famous artists, Walter Greaves.

It shows a livery barge passing the Old Swan with a crowd gathered to see it go by. This may be a depiction of famous river race for barges, Doggett’s Coat and Badge. The Old Swan would have been the finishing point for the race at this time. The Greaves family had a boatyard further down the river which we’ve seen in the posts about James Hedderly and W W Burgess.

Going west past the Old Swan was the Magpie and Stump. Here the river ran close to Cheyne Walk and at high tide was only a few feet from the street.

This atmospheric  picture is by George Lambert.

Further west you came to Lindsay Wharf where the Greaves family worked and where Walter painted this picture called “Unloading the barge”. This is one of his best paintings.

It’s one of those pictures where Greaves leaves behind all the touches of the amateur painter and creates a work as good as any of the artists who have painted Chelsea. St Mary’s Church, Battersea where William Blake was married is is visible across the river.

Finally this week, my single favourite painting in the collection, another view of the river and Cheyne Walk. This one is by Henry Pether.

Pether was one of a family of painters of that name. His father Sebastian and his grandfather Abraham were all fond of night time scenes. This one, “Cheyne Walk by moonlight” captures the still evening atmosphere of old Chelsea. Two lonely figures pass the dark houses and shops and the river laps against the moored barges.  This is a hard picture to photograph. The colour of the original is hard to capture but this version comes the closest yet. With the full moon over our heads it’s a good moment to leave the Chelsea painters.

 

Thanks to the Public Catalogue Foundation and particularly to Dr Rosie Macarthur.

The mystery of the Red House

“I think it was in the autumn, early in the century that my sister and I first went to the Red House.

The house was friendly and full of light but there was an air of mystery about the place.

The gentleman who lived in the house was a professor and an explorer. He was always pleased to see us.

The rooms were comfortable. The explorer was a cultured man. He owned works of art from across the globe and many unusual objects.

Did I mention the light? There was a strange quality about it. Was it the glass? Was it the sheltered position of the house some way up the hill?

Many of the walls were painted red or had red wallpaper. In the centre of the house there was a library.

The explorer had an extensive collection of books on many esoteric subjects. If the day was cool we would sit by the fire and he would tell us stories about the far-off places he had been and strange sights he had seen.

Some afternoons I would lie on one of the day beds looking out at the garden imagining myself in some of the places the explorer had told us about, and doze off. Invariably I dreamt of exotic places.

There were many rooms in the Red House, inviting corners where you wanted to linger.

One day the explorer showed me one of the drawing rooms.

It was probably the reddest room in the Red House. Beyond it guarded by the two thin statues was the fernery.

They called the space outside the terrace room. It was the most secluded spot in the sheltered garden and though we were in the heart of the city we felt isolated there, and relaxed. Sometimes I felt as though the terrace was part of another world only tenuously connected with our own

The explorer went north that year on another expedition. A few short years later he and his family moved out of the house and we could no longer enter. All we had left were our memories.

But a lifetime later the memories are still clear. The explorer left behind a set of pictures that he had painted himself. In my imagination they took me back to the Red House. I walked in there again, sat in those rooms and dreamed again of far-off places”

There will be more next week. Some of you may know the secret of the Red House. But don’t tell the others yet.

The mysterious Mrs Rush: more pictures of houses and rooms

Here is Lord Ranelagh’s house after his fall from grace and subsequent death. The owners of the Gardens used his name and his house as part of the entertainment. By 1805 nothing was left of house and Gardens but a few foundation stones, and a cellar or some kind of crypt.

Here is a house called Gough House a little way down the river. Mrs Rush and the time traveller can disembark here and make their way through the formal garden, even though it only existed in this form in the artist’s imagination. Mrs Rush tells the traveller to pay attention to open windows, glimpsed faces and distant statues.

Here is the interior as Mrs Rush pictured it. Her rooms were always tidy as though she was painting for an 18^th century estate agent’s brochure, or imagining the afterlife. The door to the north front is open.

Here is the view from the north. The lush vegetation besieges the house. But the women inside seem unconcerned.

Here is the Duchess of Monmouth’s house where Smollett lived and wrote Humphrey Clinker. His study window is open, next to one of the bricked in windows.

But when they got inside there was no trace of Mr Smollett.

Here is Sir John Cope’s house which was later turned into a madhouse. There were several of those in Chelsea. One Turlington kept a house where a man could put away his wife or any other troublesome relative under the pretense of insanity. In 1763 a judgement at the King’s Bench went against him. One husband testified that he considered the house to be nothing more than a bridewell or house of correction. That year the Lords called for a bill to regulate such houses.

The woman on her way out of the house holds an oversize key. Mrs Rush has some questions. What happened to the tree on the left? Have the peacocks escaped? Mrs Rush and the traveller cannot stay to see what happens next.

Under the house says Mrs Rush is a subterranean passage. She is drawn to underground places.

They pass another garden with lush growth of flowers and plants.Mrs Rush regards Dr Mead as a friend to herself and her husband.

But in that house she dreamed of this room.

The plants seemed to press against the windows in a rather too insistent fashion.

In more open country the two women can stop and take refreshment at Pond House. Mrs Rush is welcome in many houses.

The Pond was subsequently filled in and built over. It is commemorated in a street name.

The tour is coming to a close. Here is the church where Mr Rush officiates at religious services. This may be where Mrs Rush  met Elizabeth Gulston, the woman who kept her pictures safe for many years.

If she wishes the traveller may sit inside for a while and prepare herself.

Here is the final room from Mr Faulkner’s book where Mrs Rush introduces the traveller to her guide home. Pay no attention to the goods for sale.

The traveller and her friends are re-united back in their own clothes in their own present, remembering their adventures.

Next week we might also be back in our own reality.

The Rush pictures were acquired by Chelsea Library in 1929 having been in the Gulston family for many years. The engraving is from a special edition of Mr Faulkner’s history of Chelsea. The photograph is from a private collection.

18th Century glamour girl: searching for Miss Chudleigh

The story so far: three actresses from the Chelsea Pageant of 1908 have traveled back to the 1740s to meet celebrity bigamist Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston and / or Countess of Bristol at the Venetian Masquerade in Ranelagh Gardens. Now read on:

We caught a glimpse of Miss Chudleigh last week in the six thousand-strong crowd at the Royal Jubilee Venetian Masquerade which was held on April 26^th 1749 (when she was still only married to one man, but was keeping it a secret so she could still have an income as one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour). Her scandalous costume was of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, ready for sacrifice. According to the story Iphigenia was lured by the promise of a marriage to Achilles to the place where the Greek fleet was to set sail to Troy to become an offering to Artemis, the goddess her father had offended. At the last minute she was spirited away by magic and replaced by an animal, a deer or a stag. Miss Chudleigh’s costume was said to have been so revealing that the high priest could already see her entrails. There were many artistic renditions of the costume.

Not one of the more flattering versions, here she is accompanied by a gesticulating carnival goer, and Mr Punch, himself no stranger to human sacrifice. Here is a more pleasing version:

She wouldn’t have been Duchess of Kingston at the time of course so this must be a much later picture. The problem for both artists is that she didn’t actually wear the revealing outfit at Ranelagh. She did wear some kind of controversial costume four days later at a private Subscription Masquerade at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, a far more exclusive occasion at which she made a favourable impression on the King but outraged some of the other guests.  No accurate description of what she was wearing that night exists, although there has been sufficient speculation for the dress to be famous after two centuries.

She would have been at Ranelagh though, perhaps in conventional dress, perhaps masked in a fanciful costume so our trio of actresses could encounter her in the throng, either outside by the Chinese Pavilion and canal:

Or watching one of the stranger performances in the Gardens:

It might be safer to look inside the Rotunda amongst the dancers, as in this Cruickshank print.

She might have been dressed more like this later portrait:

In any case with music, dancing and fireworks, it was a spectacular celebration.

Iphigenia also provided the inspiration for a song performed at Ranelagh:

The story of Iphigenia and Cymon comes from Boccaccio’s Decameron rather than Greek myth (hence the modern dress?)

Lord Leighton later rendered the subject more artistically:

The celebrations went on till a late hour. Maybe our actresses found Miss Chudleigh, maybe they didn’t but once the Masquerade is finished the Rotunda lies empty.

The fire in the former orchestra stalls is burning down.

It was said that at night with the light still burning the Rotunda looked like an enormous lantern.

The Misses Jourdain and Moberly reported that at the end of their strange experience at Versailles the world seemed to flatten out and drain of colour and sound when they were about to return to their own time. Perhaps our time travelers are now experiencing something similar. Attentive readers will already have realized that our three actresses have entered the world not only of Elizabeth Chudleigh but of a woman we already know the mysterious Marianne Rush. The empty interior is one of her pictures. Look at this detail from the night picture:

Two women walk off into the night. For one of our travelers the journey is not yet over. She is about to enter the mysterious world of Marianne Rush. See you next week.

The secret world of Marianne Rush

Marianne Rush died in 1814. She was interred in a burial ground which has been cleared of all its tombstones. I think she painted these pictures, although they have been attributed to another lady at times in their history. She created a place which is half real and half imagined, a special country made out of her imagination. The places she painted all existed but it is not certain whether she had seen them all. You can identify most of them and research them but you can’t quite pin them down. You could call her a naive painter, or an amateur. But her vision is clear. This is the secret world of Marianne Rush.

Let me tell you a story. Here is an old half fallen wall. The gate is open.

Follow the path through the banks of flowers to Lady Walpole’s grotto.

You can pass under the arches without being seen from the house.

Take note of the pattern on the floor. Do not look out of the window. You cannot be sure what you will see. The trees ahead have formed a passage through which you must go quietly. Cross the lawn and enter the greenhouse.

But don’t step into the shadow of the gate.

You can collect some fruit but only one from each tree. Keep them in separate pockets. Hold one in your left hand. At the end of the gallery you will find a staircase. Ascend and wait in the upper room.

It has a curious ceiling. Colonel Despard held his meetings here. There was a miniature guillotine on the mantelpiece but Dr Mead cleared the room. Most of the rooms here are empty. The current inhabitants don’t need furniture. Try the fireplace. There may be something worth keeping in the ashes. Squeeze the juice from one of the fruits into the ash. Does the smell disturb you? Close your eyes. Do you remember this place?

Did you select the middle passage?

Who is this who is coming?

Open your eyes. There is a key in your hand. Slip out of the window. You can climb down the ivy. Follow the river path to the summer house.

You can use the key. Enter.

Is there writing on base of the bust? Or is there a set of pages torn from the Gentleman’s Magazine? Pick them up. You need to leave quickly. Go through the trees. Stay close to the river. As the trees thin out can you see a building?

Remember this place. We will come back soon when it’s safe. But there is somewhere else to go first. Back to the machine, before it gets dark.

I’ll tell you more about what I know of Marianne Rush another time.

But you can always tell your own stories about her.

The sky’s on fire – William Ascroft

Last week you saw some of William Acroft’s Chelsea pictures, some finished pieces and some sketches. I told you how the Royal Society commissioned him to record the skies over London after the Krakatoa explosion. Before the distant apocalypse this is what he saw.

A bend in the river west of Chelsea, deep into the suburbs, by moonlight and below a view of Putney by day.

In 1880 a shooting star provides an omen of future events.

In 1883 the greatest explosion in modern times occurred. Although it was thousands of miles away the effects were global. World temperatures dropped by 1.2 degrees C. Ash and sulphur dioxide gas were flung up into the upper atmosphere to drift down across the world. Effects on weather and temperature lasted until 1888. Before colour photography the effects could only be recorded by an artist frantically scratching on paper catching what he saw before it disappeared.

A sunset in June. Imagine William Ascroft who would have been fifty in 1883 stumbling through fields  and country lanes carrying sketch pads and paints, working by moonlight to catch those fleeting colours in the sky.

“Riverside walk number 3″ according to Ascroft’s notes.

“Later. Sunset after a rainy day. No wind.”

August 23rd “Sky study”

Sky study 24

“Mortlake. Walk up riverside.”  Mortlake was some way out of London in the 1880s almost as isolated as it was when John Dee lived there.

This sky study is from 1886. It must have seemed like the sky would go on burning forever. A Victorian apocalypse.

A gloomy sunrise. But in contrast to that, and the shooting star before the explosion a rainbow.

In time the weather returned to normal and the skies became calmer. Ascroft still walked along the river, now nearer sixty than fifty.

The sky studies were the unexpected culmination of his artistic career, and his main claim to a place in  the wider history of art and geography. But I think that all his work is worth remembering.

Author’s message

Just like a genuine blogger I am guest blogging this week at the London City Read blog on the marriage of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth. Here is the link:

http://t.co/VU8KsHxQ

or the actual URL:

 http://blog.cityreadlondon.org.uk

Kensington and Chelsea’s Dickens celebrations begin in April and I’ll be writing about Victorian topics for the whole month. You can expect the Library Time Machine to go back to Cremorne Gardens and Brompton Cemetery and a couple of other destinations.

What were the skies like when you were young? – William Ascroft

They’re just sketches in pastel by William Ascroft. Coloured lines on paper. Some of them are recognizable as riverside Chelsea. Others just suggest the familiar landmarks of the Old Church or the Old Swan Inn. But in all of them the skies are just as important as anything else in the picture. Sometimes  the setting sun bores through the image right at you.

The sky remains bright as the gloom envelopes the far shore. I get a sense of motion in the water, of the barges bobbing up and down.

In this picture the sky seems alight. Can you still see skies like this over London?

Here is a high tide, the river swollen. Pre-embankment Chelsea, Battersea Bridge just visible on the left.

It’s harder to see Chelsea in this one unless that’s St Luke’s on the right. It doesn’t matter so much. The subject of the picture is the light in the sky reflected on the surface of the river. Just as in the one below.

It doesn’t quite look like Chelsea.

I think this is further west – Putney or Chiswick. Ascroft roamed up and down the river banks. Not always at dusk.

This is in the morning at low tide near the Old Swan.

A closer view of the same scene. It looks a little like the point where Royal Hospital road diverges from Cheyne Walk. (You can see a photograph in the Hedderly post Tales of the Riverbank) Somewhere behind those buildings is the Physic Garden. Here’s the river gate of the Garden:

There’s that cedar tree you’ve already seen in the post on William Walter Burgess. Boatmen are working or possibly even playing a ball game by the gate and the Old Swan. There are many views of the Old Swan and hardly any of its successor the new Swan which must have been far less picturesque.

William Ascroft was a talented professional painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy but if he’s remembered at all today it’s for a particular job.

In 1883 the island of Krakatoa exploded. They heard the explosion thousands of miles away. The loudest sound in modern history it is said. Volcanic ash was flung high into the atmosphere and drifted around the world. Weather patterns did not return to normal for about five years. The Royal Society commissioned William Ascroft to paint the skies, particularly the vivid sunsets. A few of his pictures are in the official report.

The pictures in this post show Ascroft’s skills as a painter. He’s my favourite of all the artists in our collection. You can see how good he was at painting the sky. But If you look closely some of these pictures are dated 1872. They show “normal” sunsets, years before the Krakatoa explosion. I wanted to show you those first because I think the Royal Society picked their man well. I think Ascroft already had the right kind of vision, the right kind of obsession with sunlight at the end of the day.

The fire in the sky was already in him.

The sunset sketches are like this one – hurried, violent almost abstract. Have I whetted your appetite for more? I may do more of them next week.