Joseph Pennell: Working Schedule

"Chelsea Rectory" by Joseph Pennell

"A late afternoon arrival in Liverpool; a journey by night to Chester; one day in the town to see the Cathedral in anticipation of the Cathedral Series; one evening with a group of Philadelphia artists arrived there before us - Stephen Parrish, his wife, his son Fred who was to become known as Maxfield Parrish, Miss Margaret Lesley; the day after, straight to London lodging at Number 36 Bedford Place, Bloomsbury; and, for the first time, I began to understand how Joseph Pennell worked.

His most urgent commission was the article, which expanded into two, on old Chelsea. The author was away when we got to London, but Pennell could not wait for his author, could not wait until we were settled in lodgings, but was off the next morning, discovering Chelsea for himself, bringing his first drawing back in the late afternoon. It was the same, day after day. No lingering at the breakfast table or over the morning paper. Breakfast eaten, he gather up portfolio, T-square, camp stool, and was gone, seldom to get back until the dinner hour, if then. He scorned an eight-hour day, had no patience with a time limit on any kind of labour, from art to street cleaning. 

When conditions permitted, his drawing was begun and finished on the spot, to preserve its accuracy, its freshness, its spontaneity. But the sun will not stand still for the most untiring artist. The light and effects will change and sometimes drawings, when little remained to be done, were finished at home or carried to the same spot at the same hour the following day. 

It was a good thing for my nerves that I realized only gradually the risk he ran when he worked out of doors in town. A man who draws in the street collects a crowd as surely as the man who digs a hole, and often Pennell's method of getting rid of people who bothered him was as irritating as effective. His pen, dipped into the bottle hanging from a buttonhole of his coat, could with an innocent flourish scatter the gaping crowd. He had at his command the answer that does not turn away wrath. When an Englishman, who had long looked over his shoulder asked what he was doing, received the answer 'Minding my business. Don't you think it about time for you to mind yours?' His tactics were more apt to lead to trouble on the Continent, where tempers are quicker, and in Italy, France and Spain I had reason to tremble. But he would allow nothing to interfere."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Sealing the Deal

"The Tower of London" by Joseph Pennell

"In July 1883 Joseph Pennell left Italy for Edinburgh. The contrast was bewildering, incredible. The Venetian sunlight, not yet washed out of his eyes, could not blind him to the picturesqueness of the sombre northern town with the stern castle on the hill and the thick grey mist. Wash seemed the appropriate medium for a series of commissions in this part of the world before he sailed back home. 

He was in his very best form upon his return, full of what he had seen, what he had done, what he had felt, what was to come of it. His energy was irresistible. Again, he was eager to collaborate with me in his hours of work eager to have me as a companion in his hours of play. 

Thanks to him, I became a fully accredited art critic on not only the 'American' but the 'Press.' When an important exhibition opened in New York, we would run over together. He would guide me through the gallery to such good purpose that, we could also take in the opera or theatre after lunch and, coming back on the train, I would write away for dear life, he at my elbow in case of need, and my article would get to the office in time to appear in the next morning's paper. 

Early in 1884 they asked him as a special favour to run down to Washington, another illustrator having failed them. It happened that I was called to Baltimore for a day and to Washington for another, and we planned to make the journey together as far as Baltimore and together return from Washington. In the Pullman he began at once on a favourite subject - the beauty of Italy, the absolute necessity of my spending the following summer there. He would get me articles to do that would pay my way. If prudish Philadelphia would stand our journeys to New York and Baltimore, why wouldn't they stand a journey to Italy? In his determination to take me there, he suggested a life partnership which would enable us henceforward to share not simply Italy's, but the world's beauty, at no risk of criticism or gossip. And, with his genius for success, he succeeded in settling the matter. The wedding ceremony was performed in the front parlor of Number 1110, Spruce Street, Philadelphia. 

On the last Saturday in June, with a promise of return tickets from the 'Century,' and a letter of credit for eighteen hundred dollars, we sailed on the 'Oregon' for Liverpool." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The lIfe and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

 

Joseph Pennell: Italy

"Porto Romano, Florence"
by Joseph Pennell

"The immediate outcome of the 'Century's' satisfaction with Joseph Pennell's work was another more important commission for ten etchings to illustrate a series of articles on Tuscan cities by William Dean Howells, whose fame was in its full glory. It may be worth recording that for these ten etchings Pennell was offered five hundred dollars, together with his steamer ticket going and coming, nor was he to make any use of the prints until after their publication. He accepted, because the work would take him to countries it was his desire to see, also because he knew that if he made good plates, he would be amply repaid later on in reputation, if not in money. Besides, he who found work everywhere, would find other things to do along the way. In fact the 'Century' added one additional illustration of Edinburgh and twelve of the English Cathedrals. And while in London he approached the editors of the 'Portfolio,' 'Magazine of Art' and 'Art Journal, and got them to promise at least to look at any drawings he might send from Italy.

He made straight for Florence and Howells, but felt far more at home there with a little English group whom he got to know almost immediately, much to his surprise. He had been hardly any time in Florence before he was on intimate terms with Mary Robinson, to whom a first volume of poems had brought fame; Vernon Lee who had begun to write her learned and flamboyant essays on art; Evelyn Pickering, re-echoing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in her paintings and another and very different set - 'the Duveneck Boys.' Duveneck was off in Venice but four or five of the 'Boys' lingered in Florence, met with Pennell of an evening in the little hole of a trattoria where, for the sake of good company and cheapness, they dined together.

The story is in his letters to me, the story of the American youth for the first time under the spell of an Italy which was not yet a hopeless prey to tourists and progress - the youth with eyes wide open to beauty, with no ambition save to capture that beauty and imprison it on paper or copper plate, with the keen journalistic instinct that made him discover articles wherever he went, with a tendency to black despair when work did not go right, to bubbling over with high spirits when it did. 

By July Pennell's illustrations for 'Century,' Howell's 'Florentine Mosaic,' were finished. In addition, he managed to send to London illustrations for three articles by Vernon Lee: 'The Youth of Raphael,' published in the 'Art Journal,' 'North Tuscan Cities' in the 'Magazine of Art,' and 'San Gimignano of Many Towers' in the 'Portfolio.' In Venice he made not only a series of etchings but drawings to illustrate three articles on 'The Artist in Venice' by Julia Cartwright. He could start north with an easy conscience. He had put his best into his etchings and he knew they were good."

 To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.) 

Joseph Pennell: Introducing Elizabeth Robins

Sketch of Elizabeth Robins Pennell
by Joseph Pennell

"'Scribner's' could not have enough of the new artist, Joseph Pennell, on its staff. Commissions tumbled over each other. But one commission of 1881 I cannot dismiss as lightly because of its influence in shaping Joseph Pennell's life and mine, though at the time we had never as much as heard of each other.

On May 3, 1881, Drake wrote: 'Will you please send me, say - eight of your very best etchings of old Historical Buildings about Philadelphia with notes of description. It is possible that a short article on them may be worked up for 'Scribner's. These were accepted and a writer sought to work up the story. My uncle Charles Leland was asked, but too busy at the time, he proposed me. My first appearance in print had been in the 'Atlantic' a few months before. They agreed and my uncle and I made an appointment to meet Pennell. 

After all these years, I still wonder which amazed me most, the artist or the studio. I knew no artists, had never been inside a studio. I am not sure what I expected but I fancy something Oidaesque. We read Ouida in those remote days, also newspaper stories of princely British and French painters working in palatial studios. What I found was a large bare room, a dusty floor without carpet, a high ceiling, a large uncurtained window. The chairs were few and either broken or littered up with odds and ends. 

The artist waiting for us was young, tall, exceedingly thin, with brown hair, brown moustache and shortish brown beard, deep-set grey-green eyes, intent and serious beyond his years, holding one's attention at once. I remember thinking him a strange combination of shyness and self-possession. He was shy in meeting Leland whose reputation as a writer was greater than it is now and who looked the prophet. And the youth who was 'afraid of girls' may have found me terrifying. But when our preliminary talk brought us to the proposed article, Pennell's shyness vanished. 

Wholly self-reliant where his art was concerned, he stood in fear of neither man nor woman. And as he talked he fired one with the flame of his enthusiasm. Even Leland, who preferred to hold the floor himself, could not resist, was forced into silence... Before we left the studio Pennell arranged to give me a list of his subjects or better, to show them to me so as the more lucidly to explain them and the impression he wished to convey in his prints, and we started on our walks within the next few days."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Illustrator

"At the Sign of the Plow"
by Joseph Pennell

"If Joseph Pennell did not grow famous over night, he came very near it. In less than two years after his reckless shaking of business from off his feet, his drawings were appearing in 'Scribner's Magazine' and, sure sign of success in the eyes of his family, he was making a good income.

He deserved to succeed. His crowning pleasure never ceased to be work. With that nothing could interfere. He never wavered in his determination to become an illustrator nor in his belief in his own ability. He had the advantage of being at the dawn of 'The Golden Age of Illustration in America.' Artists were appearing among the illustrators of the younger generation - Abbey, Pyle, Rogers, Reinhart in 'Harper's.' Farney, Blum, Brennan, Lungren in 'Scribner's.' Joseph Pennell, his portfolio under his arm, began his siege of the publishers' offices. 

It was largely to chance he owed his first commission. F.D. Stone, librarian of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, had for a few years been the Pennells' neighbour. He was a fairly keen collector of prints and in his house the boy had spent many evenings poring over his portfolios. Among Stone's other visitors was Townsend Ward, who was adding a record of Germantown Road for the Pennsylvania Historical Society's 'Magazine of History and Biography. He asked Pennell to illustrate the articles. The result was Pennell's first series of etchings, small plates of places he either knew or could copy from old prints. In all the rendering was sincere, the picturesqueness of his subjects was expressed picturesquely, and already he revealed his never-failing sense of the right point of view. 

Before the plates were all bitten, he was planning, scheming, besieging editors. He ran to fires. He wrote and illustrated accounts of cycling tours, he suggested the illustration of Edgar Allen Poe's works, and explored a marshy stretch of ground in South Philadelphia called 'The Mash' and induced a writer he knew to outline the text of an article which he then submitted to 'Scribner's' with his work. The drawings were liked and Pennell was sent home to finish the series. When Pennell made his second journey to New York, it was with finished drawings. They were accepted and paid for on the spot. They were even sent to the next exhibition of the Salmagundi Club. The supreme moment was when he went straight to his mother's room, took his pay out of his pocket and threw it, note by note, on her bed. It was his vindication - and after this, work streamed in of itself."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

 

 

Joseph Pennell: A Life-long Regret

"The 'L' and Trinity Building"
by Joseph Pennell

Joseph Pennell was not entirely happy at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art. "He objected to some of the teachers as 'too much mechanical and too little industrial art,' and stayed away from their classes. His fellow students began to follow suit, he was unwittingly inciting rebellion, and when the secretary wrote asking an excuse for his non-attendance, he neglected to answer. After a reasonable interval a second letter from the secretary informed him that 'his name was stricken from the roll of scholars.' 

One of the staff promptly induced the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to look again at Pennell's drawings. This time he was not rejected, and at last convinced that selling coal was a sheer waste of his talent, he threw business to the winds and settled down to hard work in the Academy School. Hardly had he left the office, as if in justification of his new adventure, he received his first serious commission - and then another, and another! Great was the amazement of Pennell's family and friends to find that he could earn more from art in two days than in two weeks from business. 

At the Academy he started in the night Antique Class, which was in charge of the type of master who dispenses criticism with a sneer. For Pennell, ultra-sensitive, a sneer was no stimulant. He shrank from it, escaped by absenting himself from the classroom at the hour of the master's visit, and as his time was at last entirely his own, joined the day Antique Class under one of the best professors who ever taught at the Academy. 

Thomas Eakins was interested in him and soon promoted him to Life Class. Eakins did not sneer but he could be brutal. Pennell was determined to work in his own way for the end he had set himself. He did the unheard of and drew the model on a large scale in pen and ink. Eakins was indignant, would not stand that sort of originality and said so brutally. The student once more dispensed with the master's criticism. He gave Eakins no chance to be brutal again, a mistake he regretted as the years went on. 

His months of study taught him at least that art knows no short cut, that technique cannot be mastered save by diligent application, and it was good for him just to breathe the atmosphere of the Academy, to make friends with artists, to talk of the things he cared for with those who also cared. Pennell got out of the Academy not all it might have given had he been less sensitive, but enough to repay him, even if he did deprive himself of the criticism supposed to be the chief advantage of study in an art school. When commissions quickly multiplied for the work it was his ambition to do, he left the Academy and took a studio, sharing it with his friend Harry Poore, and having for neighbours Cecilia Beaux and Stephen Parrish. By the end of 1880 he was well launched.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters fo Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Influencers

"The Bridge Across Market Street from 
Broad Street Station" by Joseph Pennell

"Joseph Pennell made friends among the students at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, the friendship lasting through life with H.F. Stratton, in his turn a master at the school, and G. Dinsmore Gideon, who exchanged art for publishing. They and other students, who were in earnest, formed a class within the class, wandered all over town in search of subjects to sketch, with Pennell the coal clerk somehow managing to get days off to go along. On Sunday, they would have a model or carry their sketchbooks down by the river. They drew illustrations, one of the group suggesting the subject each week. 

Mr. Stratton remembers that Pennell's first etching, on glass, of 'Dingman's Ferry' was shown at the Academy, the year 1879. It was banished to the top line. 'Never mind,' said Pennell, 'my things will be hung lower next year.' 'And,' Mr. Stratton adds, 'they were.'

About this period it was Pennell's good fortune to run across young Gerome Ferris, through whom he got to know Stephen Ferris the father, an important factor in Pennell's development. Ferris helped to found the New York Etching Club and the Philadelphia Society of Etchers. He was an accomplished technician, and always willing to admit intelligent students into the studio and let them watch him at work. It was he who inspired Pennell to substitute copper for glass, and he was also responsible for the first phase of Pennell's style as illustrator. 

Ferris had discovered modern Spanish art, been thrilled by the discovery, owned Fortuny etchings and reproductions of Rico, Casanova, and Fabrès. It was a pleasure to show prints to so responsive a youth and to take him to see the paintings by Fortuny and Rico in the Gibson and Johnson collections. Through Ferris, the Spanish was the strongest influence revealed not merely in Pennell's early drawings by in American illustration at its best. Blum, Brennan and Lungren, who had studied in the Pennsylvania Academy, also met Ferris, were invited to his studio, and profited by their visits."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

 

Joseph Pennell: If At First...

"Rainy Night, Charing Cross Shops"
by Joseph Pennell

"Joseph Pennell's goal was admission into the Pennsylvania Academy School. Tuition there was free, and it was probably as good as any other in the country. For the country, having no art, naturally had no art schools of the least pretension. Students went abroad for their training. William Morris Hunt and John La Farge studied in Paris. In the spring of the Centennial year, a landmark in the history of American art, William Merritt Chase, Frank Duveneck, John Twachtman, McLure Hamilton, and Henry Muhrman, back from Munich and Antwerp schools, exhibited in the Pennsylvania Academy: the first group of American artists, though foreign-trained, to lay the foundation of whatever we have in the way of American art today.

Pennell submitted his summer's work and after months of waiting was requested to send for it. He was rejected, and again when he tried his luck at the first exhibition in the Academy's new building. He could not live indefinitely on his parents, who, if they said nothing, he knew were ashamed of having to keep a grown-up son. Various schemes were suggested. Nothing offered itself except a clerkship in the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company's office and, despairing, he accepted it and settled down to his distasteful duties as clerk.

He was conscientious, and did it to the best of his ability. He gave his employers a fair return for his salary - seven dollars a week to start with - and refused to allow the office to exhaust his energy or stifle his ambition. To the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, an outcome of the Centennial, he submitted the pen and chalk drawings, the studies of casts and marines rejected by the Academy. The new school saw something in them. He was entered as a student. And now, he said, his life began. The only classes he could attend were in the evening. From seven in the morning until six in the afternoon, he was at his clerk's desk. At six he rushed home, bolted his supper, and was off to the school in an old tumbled-down building at Broad and Race Streets.  

Pennell never had any use for 'genius work,' as it is known in the studios. He believed in the genius of industry. Like all artists who have succeeded, he worked unceasingly. In the office when business was slack, the foreman, with a curious likeness to Lincoln, would pose for him. He sketched everything in sight, usually on brown paper in black and white. After work he etched on glass. He drew his beautiful old Great-aunt Beulah and the other aunts in their Quaker dress. On vacation with the entire day at his disposal, his work was his recreation."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Determined

"Broad Street, Philadelphia" by Joseph Pennell

"The third of Joseph's Pennell's drawing teachers at school was Joseph Ropes, long since forgotten. He was original neither in his teaching nor in his work which was mannered, a fact he apparently realized. He had written to one pupil on the need of close contact with Nature to save the artist from mannerisms, but he kept on falling into them himself, and they were inevitably appropriated by the pupil. Ropes sole recommendation was his enthusiasm and to Pennell it meant a great deal to find at last a master to whom enthusiasm was not a crime. Master and student sometimes worked together in the master's studio, the student's father paying for lessons in watercolor. Sometimes they sketched out of doors. They shared the same subjects and motifs, tried the same methods. This experience more than made up for the mannerisms which by the youth were as quickly dropped as borrowed. 

So the school years went on. Pennell kept up with his class, passed examinations, wrote papers and read them, and when the time came, graduated with honours, the first boy to graduate in the Germantown Friends' School. This was in 1876, the year of the Centennial, and his plans for the shaping of his life were definite and decided. He never doubted that he was created to be an artist, an illustrator, and his energy was devoted to fulfilling his destiny. 

That his friends were shocked and his relations unwilling, was natural. The duty of the American youth of his generation, who had not the means to go to college, was to begin at once to make money. In the America of those days art was thought, if thought of at all, a pleasant pastime, never a lucrative occupation. This was not because Americans were indifferent to art. They simply had no time to think of it, no leisure to spare from the essentials of life for its luxuries. Not until the Centennial which came as a revelation, did Americans realize that art was worthwhile and that they, almost alone among civilized people, were without it.

That summer of 1876 must have been an anxious one in the Pennell household. But the youth wanted his time for the study and practice impossible during his school years. He could repay his family in the years to come, as he did, lavishly, providing comforts and luxuries. He speculated in Cochin China fowls and their eggs brought him enough money to invest in a few casts of hands and feet. Among his other purchases were Ruskin's 'Modern Painter,' pencils, pens, inks, chalks, and paper. In a hot upstairs room under the roof, he drew from the casts, carried out the sketches brought home from long prowls, studied the illustrators whose work most appealed to him and made was he called 'imaginative marines.' He was indefatigable."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: First Success

"On the River" by Joseph Pennell

"In the years before standardized education for everybody was invented, a boy like Joseph Pennell, so preoccupied with drawing, would have been apprenticed to an artist, received a practical training in a practical studio - a workshop - and left to pick up as best he could whatever further education he felt was needed. In the eighteen-seventies Pennell's parents would have reproached themselves had they not given him the schooling considered necessary for all boys and as they were Friends [Quakers], sent him to the Germantown Friends' Select school. 

Happily a drawing class had just been started, an innovation. Drawing teachers in day schools are not art to be eminent artists or inspiring master, but three in the school were above average. One was W.H. Goodyear, eventually the curator of art in the Brooklyn Museum. He lectured on art when practical lessons were what one at least of his pupils wanted. 

His successor, James R. Lambdin, who succeeded him, was a painter of some repute in Philadelphia during his lifetime, and for one thing he should be remembered. Whether or not he studied in Paris under De Boisbaudran, I cannot say, but, like the great French master, he insisted on the necessity to the artist of a trained memory. 

De Boisbaudran would bid his students look at a selected subject until they had memorized it, take no notes or memoranda, and afterwards in the studio put down what they could remember upon paper or canvas. In like fashion Lambdin taught the student to use eyes, brain and memory, a sound foundation for an illustrator. Another of his merits as a teacher was his genuine interest in his students. He showed it one year by offering a prize for the best drawing brought back from the summer holidays. When Pennell's careful study of an ugly house across the street was chosen instead of a rich rival's drawing of Yosemite, and the prize, a silver crayon holder in a leather case, was placed in his hands, he was stunned. He has described how he sat in the schoolroom, bewildered, staring at it, while the class trooped out into the schoolyard and said unkind things, and when he joined them let him know how they felt about it - a heavy price to pay for his first success." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

Joseph Pennell: Beginnings

"Upsala, Germantown" by Joseph Pennell

Elizabeth Robins Pennell wrote: "Joseph Pennell's father was a sad, silent man. His wife had died before we were married, nor could I ever get the impression of the woman she was from Joseph. He rarely spoke of her, though he could not say enough of the sympathetic, practical help his father gave him when he was young. All the same, father and son were poles apart. 

From the start Joseph was sufficient unto himself, happiest when no one shared his games, finding his own amusements, inventing stories, making drawings to illustrate them. I have sheets of these early drawings, in pencil, in watercolor, in colored chalks, on odd scraps of paper, bits of old letters, envelopes, books of unused cheques his father brought home - on anything he could find. The greater number of early drawings in my possession are of war. And it is amazing how full of character, life, movement they are. Soldiers march, horses prance. That they are the work of a child is unmistakable. He was not the infant phenomenon picked up in the schools or on the roadside by patrons of art who patronize and praise until promise vanishes like smoke. But an enthusiasm for his subject and a power of observation that were Joseph Pennell's through his working life are unmistakable in these childish illustrations of childish war stories.

After his family had moved from Philadelphia out to Germantown, an open green suburb, he found himself taking walks alone. He drew the old houses, the old mills, and the woods and streams. Untrained, untaught, he knew the right things, seeing beauty in the beautiful. 'Once, he wrote, 'I went away up Germantown Avenue to Cresheim Creek, winding then through open fields, till I came to the glen and then the gorge which carries it to the Wissahickon. It was so beautiful that I sat down, all alone, and cried for the beauty of it. And then I tried to draw it.' In this incident you see Joseph Pennell, the illustrator, as he was through life. I, who later went on so many of his journeys with him, know how, when he came to the place where he was to work, there was the long wandering in search of his subject; when he found it, the pleasure that is akin to pain in its beauty, and then the oblivion to everything save the endeavour to express its beauty in terms of art."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell" by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.)  

David Davies: Final Years

"Untitled" by David Davies

"Between painters there can be made no proper comparison, but of the great painters of landscape of this generation David Davies is one, both on account of his great technical proficiency and his spiritual attitude. In this latter respect he is unique among Australian artists, and in a way difficult to describe; but if it is permissible to think of Arthur Streeton's work as Hellenic, it would seem that the term Gothic would be reasonable to apply to Davies'. His pictures are always beautiful in themselves, but more than their actual beauty is the beauty that lies in their significance, for they hint of imperishable things."

And it is here that "The Art & Life of David Davies" ends, though the artist had nine more years to live. From the scant information that is available online, it seems that he ended these years with his wife in Looe, a picturesque, coastal town in the southeast of Cornwall. He died just five days before her, on March 29, 1939, at the age of seventy-five.

(Excerpts from "The Art & Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald.) 

David Davies: Process

"St. Ives" by David Davies

"Ordinary sized pictures David Davies generally painted on the spot, but when he had a large canvas in mind he would first make a small painting, on which, as he worked, he mentally, as well as by brush stroke, registered the points which he reckoned it would be necessary in the bigger picture contemplated, to stress. Nocturnes, or fleeting impressions, he would memorize, supplying any deficiency of memory from his store of accumulated knowledge. His practice, in such cases, was to gaze hard at his subject and deliberately concentrate on its graphic features with reference to the practical handling and perpetuation of them. He never troubled with the artistic outcome, but let his subconscious deal with that side of the question.

His taste governed his choice in selecting a motif; therefore, his subjects were always those brief states in which nature chants the gloria and exalts us momentarily to a disregard of the restraints of time and space. The reception of such brief intimations is vouchsafed to all men, but the man who can recapture these disclosures and record them is a rare man - one of the rarest of men - and David Davies is that kind of man.

Fine as his pictures may be as presentments of certain terrestrial aspects of nature, they are yet finer as symbols of the larger nature of which our earth and sea and sky are but a part; nature immanent,* limitless, everlasting...

*Immanent (adjective): Something that is naturally present, inherent, or existing within something else (often used in philosophy to describe something that remains completely within the mind). 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art & Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald.)  

David Davies: A Man of Principle

"Cottages (Late Afternoon)" by David Davies

"Artists continued to buy David Davies' pictures at artists' prices, and his reputation remained where it was. Wrapped up in his work, he went on painting his dark seas, with their tumbling waves, a-frill with pearly foam, seen under a dying sky of sullen rose, in which two ash gray cloud-ships sail; or white-walled and sable-roofed, the tiny village standing in starlight, vague but palpable. 

As a by-outlet for his spiritual activity, he carved frames of restrained but rich design, and he liked to improvise at the piano, for, though not a trained musician, he was well versed in the works of the great composers, and had original views and theories on the subject of music and musical instruments. He, seemingly, was not a great reader, but on occasions would bring to light much knowledge of literary men and their performances. A disinclination to pose as an erudite man usually inhibited him from displaying any historical knowledge of the plastic arts, but among friends he threw this off and disclosed such scholarship as would be a rebuke to the ordinary painter.

The vice of painting for approbation - that easy snare of so many otherwise gifted painters - could never be attributed to him. His artistic conscience prescribed the scope and range of his attempts, and if ever he secretly had any desire to impress others by a cheap display of dexterity, with which, had he so chosen, he could have astonished them, he never did so, but always resisted the deluding temptation and subordinated even the legitimate accomplishments he owned, so that the unity and harmony of his picture might be effected, the sum of his pictorial units consolidated, and their full weight and strength ranged on the side of truth, beauty and sincerity. 

Where he differed from the bulk of painters was that he was scrupulous, that he never prostituted his faculties; and without doubt this is true of all great painters who, with a fixed and high purpose always before them, scorn the devices of the conscienceless; for conscienceless they are, well knowing that their brother brushes know of their sharp practices, but will not, for the sake of the craft's reputation, betray them."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art & Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald.) 

David Davies: Every Kind of Scene

"Moonrise" by David Davies

"David Davies not only painted every kind of scene, but he painted those scenes under many skies and at different times of day. The sea in storm, at sunset, or flushed with the dawn; mid-day, deep-blue, snowy-ruffled seas; swelling, green seas after storms; silver seas and pallid skies with dark boats and their dark reflections silhouetted against them; cornfields in golden noonday light; stooks like miniature copper castles in the horizontal glow of the last shaft of the setting sun; warm farm houses nestling in clustered trees, against the smouldering after-glow clouds; silvery full moons; golden crescent moons; rising or setting at no matter what hour of the day or night, for Davies' clock was set by his artistic wants; old cottages or backyards full of stocks and phlox and wallflowers, by day or night - it was all one to him. Uplands, bare but for patches of heather and mossy outcropping rocks; moorland pools, 'paved with bits of the sky;' hamlets in the dusky valley with their house lamps lit; moonlit gardens, or the part of the landowner; the curve of a beach at twilight; the farmer with his men carrying lanterns on their last rounds of the horses and cows; the poppy fields - a wonderful variety.

He exhibited some of these at local and London picture shows, and had his pictures well hung, and, in a few cases, had examples bought by municipal galleries of provincial cities. His main customers, however, were either artists or private means, or those who had become successful by good work or clever business methods. Many of them swapped canvases with him, and in most such cases the advantage lay with the one who got the Davies canvas. His own country never bothered about him, for he was never press-agented, and neglected to pay for cablegrams announcing the interesting fact that he was exhibiting at the Royal Kilburn Limners Society's annual exhibition, or that he had earned the right to put distinguishing letters after his name."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art & Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald.) 

David Davies: Practice in Lelant

"Nocturne, Templestowe" by David Davies

"The writer put in eight months of the year 1901 working under Davies. In the earlier portion of this period the latter was living at Lelant, a leafy little village at the extreme head of St. Ives Bay, and across the narrow strip of water from the little town of Hayle. At this spot the land rises abruptly from the sea, and for as far as St. Ives itself is varied and picturesque. 

Settled in or near St. Ives were a number of notable painters: Arnesby Brown, Moffat Lindner, Adrian Stokes, Millie-Dow, Louis Grier, Algernon Talmage, Julius Olsson, and others. All these knew and had a high opinion of Davies, but from bashfulness he kept aloof from them and worked at Lelant, in a little studio which had been an apple loft, and which, before Davies' occupation of it, had been rented by the late Alfred East. Here Davies pondered over methods of painting, and evolved one which he employed with great success. 

Briefly, it was based on the theory of the transparency of paint with which varnish is used as a medium, and I think was arrived at in the following way: Davies was in the habit of slipping a small box of pastels into his pocket and taking a couple of white canvases under his arm and setting out to sketch whatever he might find that he particularly liked. On one occasion he came back with two sketches which he fixed by spraying, and then, as an experiment, varnished. He found that the varnishing gave these pastels a resemblance to oil colour, and that in those places where the canvas was untouched the white ground gave a luminosity to the whole that was unattainable by other means. He deduced from this that a canvas primed with a mixture of hard drying, copal varnish, zinc white and china clay, superimposed on a Russian size base, would have a pure white surface of dull porcelain texture; and that painting thinly on this with pale copal varnish would permit the light to shine through from the white ground and give a value to the colour which otherwise it could never possess. He put his theory into practice with great success, and for a long while had many emulators. Owing to the quick drying of the varnish medium, this method called for rapidity of execution, and this Davies could manage with great sureness and felicity. 

His early, close study of form, textures, colour, and tones now constituted a faculty which enabled him without effort instinctively and quickly to put down what he saw through a temperament sensitive to every artistically telling point, and he produced an abundance of pictures of great merit and individual style." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art & Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald.)  

David Davies: On to Cornwall

 

"St. Ives, Cornwall" by David Davies

"During the latter part of David Daviews' sojourn in Australia, he moved from Templestowe to Cheltenham, and there, for the time being, he painted full daylight subjects, mostly concerned with sky and clouds, carried according to the prevailing weather, and indifferently poised above land or sea. Initially a recorder of inland scenes, he now turned his attention to the water and its capricious behaviour when influenced by wind, sky and the time of day; and this eventually became his main interest.

In 1896 he left for England, and arriving there went to live in Cornwall, where he stayed for twelve years. Cornwall was then becoming known as a working ground for artists, and the Newlyn school was already well founded. Davies, however, settled on the northern side of the peninsula, and lived successively at St. Ives, Lelant, Carbis Bay, Newquay and Tintagel.

In those days Cornwall was not so visitor ridden. As in the case of many other famous holiday places, it was discovered to the world by artists, whose proclamation of its beauties made invasion by the Philistines a foregone conclusion, and in this way they actually, though innocently, were the spearhead of penetration of this quiet and lovely duchy, and the natives, with righteous, indiscriminate resentment, did their best to make things uncomfortable for those who raised for them the rent of net lofts (which were turned into studios), the rent of houses, and the prices of all things. On the beach, on more than one occasion, painters were attacked by fishermen, who used their catch as missiles, in some cases doing considerable damage to their victims' faces. However, by the time this century had arrived not much of this animosity,  the accompaniment of an irksome transitional period, was left."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art and Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald.)  

David Davies: The Evanescence of Form

"Moonrise, Templestowe" by David Davies

"After his sojourn in Europe, David Davies painted a kindlier earth and season, where brown ploughed fields and green or matured crops welcomed the rain or awaited the harvester. Late afternoon or evening effects at this time gave incentive to the painter's powers... Low toned and fused edged motifs were chosen by him in spite of the difficulties that required a sincere thrashing out of their dim and wavering contours and uncertain depths. 

Sincerity such as his required rather that the daily miracle of the evanescence of forms must be intently studied to ensure the representation it deserved. The fugitive effects last but a few minutes, and the varying days, each with a mind of its own, do their best to frustrate the painter in his desire to catch the appearance and mood of the fleeting hour. He must lie in wait, at the same time every day, in the hope that at that hour the scene will approximate to the one he has begun. It never does more than that, but from the study of a number of such effects the painter learns the anatomy of twilight; and to memorable after-glows and dusks he applies the principles of treatment common to the transient hour whose volatility he tries to fix. To attain anything like satisfactory results in it calls for great gifts and great knowledge.

David Davies had both, and from 1893 to 1896, he turned out a number of pictures in which were admirably caught the tremulous sense of gloaming and all that that magical hour holds. With one exception, these pictures were bought by private individuals, and only one was acquired by the national Gallery of the capital city of his native State. This is a 'Moonrise,' unique in the beauty of its presentation of all those difficult, elusive components that make up the theme. Why other other works of a man who, in this picture, so plainly showed his great ability to paint and interpret the rare moods of nature were not purchased by the official guardians and fosterers of Australian art is a genuine puzzle to painters. They know what his difficulties were, how he tackled them and how he surmounted them, but bigotry or stupidity stood in the way of acquiring more works of like quality from the same source."  

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art and Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald.)  

David Davies: Beginnings

"Under the Burden and Heat of the Day" by David Davies

"David Davies was born in Ballarat, central Victoria, Australia, on the Yarrowee River, about 1862, of Welsh parents. Perhaps his Welsh parentage may be taken to account for his persistent endeavour to get at the inner meaning of nature, and so to present it, that in his work, apparent, matter of fact statements of reality always have, inherent in them, the mystery that pervades life.

In character he was dreamy and retiring, but industrious, and while a youth, went to Melbourne to study under the late G.F. Folingsby, who at that time also had under him Langstaff, Abbey Altson, E.P. Fox, and others who subsequently did good work. Davies settled down to hard work and learned to draw. He became so good a draughtsman that, many years later, after long abstinence from figure work, he was able, without straining his artistic powers, very creditably to execute portrait commissions.

He won no travelling scholarship, but about 1890 he went to Paris, where he studied at Julian's and, incidentally, married a fellow student. In 1893, two years after his marriage, he returned to Australia, and took up his residence at Templestowe, and there he produced a large number of pictures which, for their portrayal of an unfamiliar aspect of Australia, were altogether original.

No one before had shown on canvas that he saw the country just as this man saw it. Before he first left Australia he had painted a picture called 'The Burden and Heat of the Day,' showing two men, under a tree, behind whose shadow, in the blinding pallid glare of noon, the sun beats down on a parched and bleaching landscape, aquiver with grilling heat. Though tight of drawing, and hard as to textures and modelling, paramount in it is the feeling of relentless, steely, midsummer and its effect on the two prostrated men." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Art and Life of David Davies" by James MacDonald, 1930.)