Edward Seago: Bertram Priestman, Teacher

by Edward Seago

Edward Seago's parents thought his writing a letter and sending it to such a noteworthy artist as Bertram Priestman was inexcusably audacious. Even though Mr. Priestman had written back and invited Edward to come and visit, they felt he must apologize for bothering the artist, and they would go with him to make sure he did.

"However, Mr. Priestman had five children of his own, two of whom were about the same age as the tall, pale-faced youngster standing proud and strangely aloof as he made his token apology. Priestman might well have recalled that he himself could only have been a couple of years older than him when, contrary to his parents' wishes, he had left his school to become a full-time art student. 'Well,' he said to the boy, 'Why don't you show me some of your work?'

Before they left, Edward's mother had agreed that Bertram Priestman should make himself entirely responsible for Edward's drawing and painting tuition. She had also seen the beginning of a life-long friendship. He provided Edward with the young companionship of the Priestman family and their friends at Windy Haugh, his thatched house a mile from the sea, with glorious views of the water or marshes from every window. It was a house that was often full of students for Priestman held summer art classes to help with the family finances.

Edward never joined the classes but usually turned up unannounced carrying a batch of new paintings which he and Priestman would discuss in the wooden studio built on to the side of the house. The boy was shown how to look at his subjects, to select and compose and prepare his paints and canvases. Always he was encouraged to paint quickly.

All his life Seago admired Priestman. He wrote to a friend that, at first, when he was a boy, he considered his teacher's work was masterly but that eventually, he modified this impression and came to see Priestman as 'a sound and sincere painter whose pictures were like the man - gentle, sincere and completely honest.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)  

Edward Seago: The Lure of Art

"A Moonlit Landscape" by Alfred East

As a boy, Edward Seago had been introduced to Alfred East's "Landscape Painting," which influenced him for the rest of his life. "It was the philosophy of the painter that first caught his imagination. At last it brought reassurance to a youngster, cut off from normal activities and, perhaps, sensing potential loneliness. East wrote: 'Nature is for you, as it is for all men . . . Do not grovel before her - be a man whose attitude should be respectful, but at the same time confident. Do not go to your work as a task, but as a labour of love.' Edward eagerly set out to follow the instructions to the letter.

He drew a tree every day for a month until, lie a student of human anatomy, he knew what its limbs would do in a given set of circumstances so that he could than alter the tree's form to suit the composition of a picture without losing even one of its characteristics. The technical advice on composition, colour and form was all there but again and again it was the expression of the overall motive that excited him. 

After six months of imbibing the philosophy and practicing techniques as laid down by a master who had died a decade before, Edward wanted a professional opinion o f his efforts. His opportunity came in June 1923. The timing was perfect - as it could be over and over again - or perhaps it represented the start of a lifetime's habit of recognizing every opportunity to further the cause of his art and seizing it with no thought of compromise. 

On 27 June the morning newspapers announced that Bertram Priestman had been elected one of the youngest Royal Academicians of the time. He was fifty-five, his chief work was landscape painting and East Anglia was his favourite hunting ground. Edward read that Priestman had recently made his home at Walberswick, which meant that a mere thirty miles away was first-class professional help which never for a moment did he doubt was his for the asking. He decided to approach this great painter by writing him a letter and asking if he might visit him.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)  

Edward Seago: Early Years

"The Rise" by Edward Seago

"Edward Brian Seago's story begins in the grey stucco, three-story house where he was born on 31 March 1910, in Norwich, England. He was named Edward after the Norfolk-loving king who died that year and Brian after his father. 

Both he and his older brother were given dancing and music lessons, and attended school from the age of three. Edward also went to children's art classes because, whenever his mother took out her paintbox he insisted on being allowed to join in and, standing beside her, would daub away with his brushes, completely happy. His lessons, however, proved more costly than expected because the teacher raised his fees every term on the grounds that he worked harder and learned faster than any other pupil. 

At a young age, he began to have heart problems. The doctors were baffled by their sudden onset and alarming severity when the boy lay, nearly unconscious and in great discomfort while his respiration dropped to five breaths a minute and the sound of his heart beating at twice its normal rate could be heard outside his bedroom door. The only treatment they suggested was complete sedation until the attack ceased as abruptly and unpredictably as it had started. Then, after a few day's rest, the patient became impatient to resume the life of an apparently normal schoolboy. Famous physicians were consulted but to no avail.

The patient's interest in painting was a godsend. After an attack, as soon as he was strong enough to be propped up on pillows, he busied himself with his paints and brushes and made watercolors of skies and birds, completely absorbed while the hours slipped away. He wanted no better companion than his mother. She shared his interest in painting and her approval of his work was the only accolade he needed. 

By the time he was ten, Edward had decided that he could never be anything but a painter. When, at the age of twelve, quite fortuitously, he came upon his first 'real artist' holding a large palette on his arm and working at a canvas, he had no hesitation in bombarding him with questions.  Ernest Chance did more than just explain his technique. The Christmas after that first meeting he lent his young friend a copy "Landscape Painting" by Sir Alfred East. In it, written simply in student's language, were the guidelines for a receptive young boy eager to learn. Edward absorbed them avidly and, like an imprint at the moment of birth, they were with him for the rest of his life."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)  

Edward Seago: Prelude to a Portrait

"The Piazzetta, Venice" by Edward Seago

"It was a bleak winter's day, with the east wind whipping in over the marshes from the North Sea, when I sat for my portrait in a small Tudor house in the heart of Norfolk. I left my car in the narrow lane near a small iron gate and went in. As it clanged behind me there was a sense of entering a private world of enchantment. Edward Seago's secretary, a young man with a puckish face and laughing eyes, let me in to the small square hall where a conglomeration of personal treasures jostled for attention. There stood a sculpture of a bronze horse and winged rider, the model for the wartime insignia of the Airborne Forces, an Orpen self-portrait, some Augustus John drawings and, through the open doorway into the drawing room, a glimpse of an ancient clavichord, elegant silk curtains and velvet and damask-covered chairs. 

Inside Seago's studio a giant Parliament clock on the wall ticked solemnly and the crackling of a log fire mingled with the soft wail of the wind. There were well-worn armchairs, rug-covered settees, shelves of books and souvenirs of working holidays spent abroad. It was a homely place. I found myself enthroned on the sheeted armchair on a raised dais in the centre of his studio. He ignored me and busied himself mixing the paints. It seemed as if he would never stop. I studied him, a tall lean man in his early forties. He had long, beautiful hands but on the middle finger of the left hand an ornate gold ring which seemed as out of place as his bow tie. Coolly his eyes met mine, appraising and enquiring, but without emotion. I sensed that already he knew all he needed to know about me, and with an occasional look, was transferring it to canvas. In less than three hours it was caught forever, as large as life.

'It's like,' he said, even before I had been invited to see the portrait, and I detected the relief and satisfaction in his voice. So he too had been apprehensive about the result! It was 'like.' As I studied the mirror-image of a slightly windswept girl in a faded red shirt, my hand automatically went up to straighten my hair. 'I shall paint a picture,' he had said, 'not just a likeness.' But how had he sensed that, given different opportunities, I could have been the outdoor type?

Over the years I acquired other Seago paintings: ships and scenes of faraway places, oils and watercolours and little pen-and-ink sketches. But always, the portrait held pride of place in the sitting room; or it did until recently. Last year it was supplanted and moved over to make way for one of his last canvases. It is a picture of a place where we once walked together, a near-secret place at the bottom of his garden where a little wood gives way to a dyke leading to a secluded stretch of water where he kept the blue-hulled boat that bore him on painting trips, across the seas. To study it was, for me, to know I should write about him again. But this time it would be a portrait in depth of the painter I had once studied from the other side of a canvas." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)

Joseph Pennell: Final Resting Place

Joseph Pennell Etching the 
Washington Episcopal Cathedral [directly on the plate], 1923

"On Monday, April 26, 1926, Joseph Pennell made his last journey to Philadelphia over the familiar route - with him friends, who appreciated him as man and artist both, and were more than willing to pay him their last tribute as his pallbearers: Robert Underwood Johnson, his first editor and Secretary of the Academy of Arts and Letters; Burton J. Hendrick, Secretary of the Institute of Arts and Letters; William Henry Fox, Director of the Brooklyn Museum; J.B. Bishop, Secretary of the Panama Commission; Gari Melchers, President of the New Society; Gifford Beal, President of the Art Students' League; Edward Larocque Tinker, author whose friendship and work he prized; Edward Robins, my brother. 

Friends waited at the old familiar Quaker Meetinghouse in Germantown. The students from the League came in a body. Philadelphia societies and clubs were represented. The services in the small austere room were more impressive in their simplicity, more solemn than any elaborate rites held in a great Romanesque or Gothic church. In that tranquil place where Friends had given testimony for long years, even those who were not Friends, seemed compelled by some power within to speak what they knew of Joseph Pennell, champion of truth, one who fought a brave fight for the freedom of art and artists.

He was buried close to his mother and to Aunt Martha who had been dear to him, in the cemetery which is just outside the Meetinghouse. It was a pale blue April day, the feeling of spring in the air, the grass fresh in its first green, a suggestion of blossoms here and there, one touch of brilliant colour in the bank of flowers by the open grave, they, no less than the spoken words, bearing their testimony that a few understood the artist who never sacrificed eternal truth to the popularity that passes.

And so I left him, in that Friends' Graveyard at Germantown where two of his family and more than one of his schoolmates were already at rest, only their names and dates on the little gravestones. I remembered his written words: 'And I want to lie there too.'" 

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

Joseph Pennell: A Full Life

"Entrance to Vatican" by Joseph Pennell

"Joseph Pennell was fast reaching his allotted threescore years and ten. To him, however, idleness was a fatiguing occupation and his age, when he remembered it, was a goad to redoubled effort, so much remained to be done in so short a time. Dealers besieged him for prints. Engagements for lectures could not be overlooked. His printing was never better, his watercolors grew in power and beauty. He was as quixotic as of old in his fight for truth, his hatred of shams, and he looked forward eagerly to his labours on the Sesquicentennial Committee for the great glory of the graphic arts. Even I, living with him, working with him day by day, had no warning that the end was near.

And yet, there were signs. With the New Year he began to shorten his hours. Instead of being alarmed, I was pleased that at last he was willing to consider himself and not overtax his strength in finishing today what might be put off till tomorrow. Another sign was his willingness, after a hard day at the press or a long day in the class, to take a taxi home - instead of the subway. The first days of April provided pleasures that were to him a stimulant - old friends over for dinner, looking at prints with his class in the Met Print Room, afternoon teas. 

But on Saturday, April seventeenth, the doctor was telling me 'Your husband is a very sick man,' and within an hour a day nurse was at his side, and a night nurse engaged. A virulent form of influenza had struck which developed into pneumonia. By Wednesday I knew there was no hope, short of a miracle. He knew it himself, though he admitted it to me only once. 'Stay with me as much as you can,' he said, 'This is our last week together.' 

He, who was thought the most impatient of men, was throughout this cruel week patience itself. He did as the doctors bade him, was more concerned for his nurses' comfort than his own, for himself asked nothing, save that his bed might be moved into the front room where he would have before him by day and by night his Unbelievable City, his City Beautiful, New York that he loved. When the doctor decided it was better not, Pennell accepted the decision without a protest, though I realized how bitter was the disappointment. 

He talked little, but I knew his mind was wandering through the past. 'It has been a full life,' he told me after a long silence. 'A beautiful life,' I added 'Yes, a beautiful life,' he repeated. By Friday morning, April twenty-third, his physical strength was fast ebbing, but his mind had lost nothing of its vigour. He asked me to write an overlong delayed answer to a letter from his publisher, told me exactly what he would have me say, listened to my answer, approved, mentioned other letters that should not wait. But before half-past three that afternoon, the end came. He, who had never time to rest, was at rest forever more."

To be continued

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

  

Joseph Pennell: More Than a Teacher

Joseph Pennell Working at a 
Printing Press in 1922

"In the beginning of teaching at the Art Students' League, Joseph Pennell was handicapped by the poorly equipped classroom. He knew that students were no less, or perhaps rather more dependent, than artists upon proper technical equipment. He overhauled the studio properties and added to them. One copper-plate press awaited him at the start. Before his second term, he had seven presses. He had asked his friends in Philadelphia and New York for aid in obtaining the right presses and tools. They knew him, knew this thoroughness as craftsman, knew the unselfishness of his enthusiasm, and they had responded generously.

From the first he foresaw the impossibility of managing alone both etching and lithography classes, of hurrying from the student drawing with a needle on a copper plate to the student drawing with chalk on a lithographic stone. The mediums were too distinct, each called for the master's undivided attention. So he applied to the Mechanics' Ohio Institute in Cincinnati, the one American school visited on his travels where he thought lithography was intelligently taught, and in answer to his request Mr. Charles Locke came to the League, first as his assistant, then taking entire charge of the lithographers. Pennell could not have found a more congenial man to work with. Locke, besides being an accomplished technician, shared his enthusiasms, understood his aims and objectives.

As the school prospered with the passing of the months and years, he was full of fresh schemes to perfect it. It was not sufficient to supply proper tools. They must be used in proper surroundings. He had the two classrooms painted black on floor and high dado, white on the upper walls and ceiling, not solely for decorative effect but for concentration of the light. On the black dado he hung enlarged photographs of Rembrandts and Whistlers. In his rooms the greatest masters of the greatest periods must prevail, theirs the tradition it was the duty of his students to carry on. 

No fine exhibition of prints could open at the Met or the Grolier Club that he did not visit it with his class, talking to them in free and easy fashion of the work, its merit, its shortcomings. 'There were heated debates,' Miss Reinthaler says, 'violent discussions as to how this artist got his effect or how he probably did that, which continued on the street cars and sidewalks.' He brought his students to the rooftop of our hotel that they might share his joy in the beauty of New York, and regaled them with chicken salad and ice cream before they went home. He sought and obtained commissions for them, introduced them to museum directors and to art dealers. He himself bought many of their prints without their knowing who was their patron."

To be continued

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