Edward Seago: The Circus

Sketches of the Circus by Edward Seago

"An outing to see the circus had ended with Edward Seago being so artistically inspired, that he had received permission from the owner to follow and paint it. In this he was also following in the footsteps of Alfred Munnings and also of Laura Knight. Surprisingly, his decision raised no opposition from his parents. His father had a new-found confidence in him and agreed to give him a small allowance to be repaid from the sale of pictures. His mother, eager to be involved in the venture, offered to do any washing he sent home and promised to supplement Edward's supply of food. 

However, the circus folk did not like mixing with outsiders and made no attempt to conceal their mistrust of the pale, well-spoken youth who hung around their tents and caravans. They showed no interest in his work. 'How I hated those early weeks of my circus life,' he remembered, 'hated almost everything in the circus, and still more the wretched lodgings which gave me shelter for the night.' In town after town, where the circus people ;itched their tents, he wandered about a new ground exchanging nods with unapproachable familiar faces, watched the work that went on behind the scenes and made endless sketches of circus horses which he posed by tethering to stakes in the ground. Only when a drumroll heralded it was time for the next performance did the magic under the Big Top once again confirm that, somehow, one day he would become a part of it all.

Gradually the circus folk's initial distrust gave way to genuine interest when they recognized that the intruder was a man who knew his job. One morning he was working on the painting of a mare when performer Tommy Baker invited him back to the family wagon for a meal after the show. There 'Pop' Baker, with an innate 'gift of the gab,' told takes of the hardship and struggles in Ireland with his small family circus in a trail of wagons with the name 'Baker' gilded on the sides. That night Edward wrote the tales down, to the delight of the storyteller, who although he knew the shortest route to every market town in Great Britain and Ireland, had never had a day's schooling in his life. Similarly, his sons' early success in the circus ring had been at the expense of their education. This meant that Edward had at last found companions of his own age with whom, scholastically, he was at no disadvantage, so that with them he felt neither strange nor inhibited as he often did with his contemporaries.

After he painted a picture of one of the Bakers' mounts and then from imagination, added a lady rider, he was invited to move in with the family. From then on the painter was treated as one of the Bakers by everyone in the circus. He tried to capture the magic on canvas in paintings of circus encampments, portraits of the knife-throwers; Carl Hess, the German horse trainer in the ring with his white Arab; dwarfs and clowns and acrobats, trapeze artists and Adolphe, the animal tamer. He sketched them on small panels to translate onto big canvases which, he told his parents, he thought might be suitable for the Academy. 

At the end of August his parents suggested it was time for him to come home and paint subjects other than the circus. 'I have no wish to drop painting my other stuff,' he assured them, 'but I think the two can go very well together. I can paint hunting, sporting and horse pictures during the winter, and when I come home I shall have September, October and a little bit of November to paint landscapes.' Then he described four more 'outstanding' circus subject he badly wanted to paint.

However a tragic accident made it easy for him to get away. He was working on a sketch of the German animal trainer, Adolphe Cosmeyer, when suddenly, one of the bears turned on Adolphe and killed him before Edward's eyes. In a letter to his parents, all he could say was 'It was too terrible to write about. I almost feel that I would like to come home straight away.' When Tommy Baker drove him to the station on the first stage of his journey home, he promised that he would be back with the circus before very long, and stayed away for two months."

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: Alfred Munnings

"Thorn Marsh with Cattle and Trees" by Edward Seago

"Nineteen-year-old Edward Seago had been introduced to Alfred Munnings, who, from his early painting days, had been a name to conjure with, an artist and horseman whose hard-riding life-style was legendary. Soon he was regularly driving to the painter's studio in Dedham for input. The influence of the jovial, big-hearted man, who generously dispensed practical advice to the young painter, must have been overwhelming. Its effect, consciously or subconsciously, for a time became apparent in Seago's work.

'See, he's even put in Mr. Munnings' buttercups,' was a scathing comment Edward's mother overheard about one of his paintings at an exhibition. 'Since when has Alfred Munnings had the monopoly of buttercups?' was her sharp reply. Edward, when he heard of the incident, was very concerned and mentioned it to Munnings on his next visit. 'Don't listen to such damn nonsense,' was the reaction. 'If I can't drum some of my ideas into that foolish head of yours, what on earth's the good of your coming here?' It was benevolent advice, but the donor would be sorely tried when before long, the recipient was painting portraits of some of Munnings' distinguished sitters and charging a considerably lower price.

With growing independence, Edward often joined half a dozen or so of the young 'horsey set' at the Beaufort Hotel for a pint or two of beer on Saturday evenings before moving on to the Old Café Royal for a snack and then to a Norwich dance hall where there was no shortage of girls waiting to partner the young county 'bloods,' unmistakable in their tweed sports jackets. Then in May 1930, he had the satisfaction of having a picture hung in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. It was a small oil called 'Over the Sticks' showing a country point-to-point meeting. Bertram Priestman was unimpressed, as was a critic of the 'Eastern Daily Press. 'It is not what I should call a good example,' he wrote Edward. 'However, I hope you will have something good ready for next year.' 

One Saturday evening Edward and a friend visited a travelling circus. It was not the first circus that Edward had seen, but suddenly the colour and movement under the strange luminosity of the Big Top, caught his painter's eye - and prepared the way for a new and unexpected adventure."

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: One-Man Exhibit in London

"Herringbone and Other Mares in a Paddock"
by Edward Seago

"Edward Seago's patroness Lady Evelyn Jones suggested that he should have a one-man exhibition in London for which she and another would underwrite any expense. However, Edward's father insisted that the financial responsibility was his. The Arlington Gallery in Old Bond Street was chosen, and on 25 November 1929, Sir Hereward Wake performed the official opening before a distinguished gathering mustered by Lady Evelyn, for which the press turned out in force.

They saw fifty-seven paintings, priced from £4 to £150 and ranging in subject from landscape to horse paintings and equestrian portraits. Twenty-three pictures were sold on the first day, representing takings of £184 18s., which was enough to send Edward's father rushing back to their home in a fever of excitement to collect more pictures and to encourage his son, when he returned from London after the first few days of the exhibition, to produce others to replace the diminishing stock.

But the painter, exhausted by the strain of a London debut, retired to bed suffering from pains in the head and contented himself with sending a couple of scribbled cartoons to his brother, one portraying himself in his studio painting with one hand and with the other passing a finished canvas through the door to his father's outstretched hand. The second cartoon showed him in bed languishing against the pillows with a bandage round his head. It was captioned, 'He that holdeth exhibitions in London, is not only in danger of hellfire, but of Neuralgia!'

As far as the critics were concerned they commented on the nineteen-year-old's 'extraordinary promise and natural instinct as a painter' while, almost unanimously, they decried his drawing ability. He himself confessed 'Of course I must learn to draw. I have colour and technique, but my horses are all wrong. Any critic would pull them to pieces,' and 'my education has been terribly neglected.' The critic from 'The Morning Post' recognized 'most encouraging signs of future development' and, added, 'as yet he is influenced by the art of the elder men, for instance, of Mr. A.J. Munnings and Mr. Wilson Steer. He could not seek advice from better painters.'

Edward never hesitated to act where any possible benefit to his work was concerned, and it seemed but a logical step for him to approach Munnings. In the small world of East Anglian horselovers, an introduction to the popular painter presented no problem and a portrait on loan to Seago's exhibition from Richard Bullard represented the key. Bullard often entertained Mr. and Mrs. Munnings at his home at Stoke Holy Cross, and it was most probably he who arranged the introduction."

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: First Patron

"The Norfolk Point-to-Point" by Edward Seago

"It was in the guise of a new neighbour, Edward Seago at last came face to face with his first important patron. She was Lady Evelyn Jones, daughter of the 4th Earl Grey, a former Governor-General of South Africa and Canada. She was artistic and a great activist who loved people and could never resist helping the underdogs and encouraging them to achieve their potential. Edward could not have know as much, but the instinct which five years before had motivated him to write to Bertram Priestman, once again asserted itself and, with an unswerving singleness of purpose, he cycled over to Stoke Hall.

Again his instinct had been right. Lady Evelyn herself opened the door to the pale, good-looking youth with a stack of pictures under his arm. 'I'm a painter,' he said. 'I live near here and I'm trying to find someone who'll help me to earn a living because my parents refuse to give me any encouragement.' The unconventional intrusion convinced Lady Evelyn that here indeed was a painter and one worth helping. She would introduce him to people with fine horses who might well like to have their portraits painted.

She wrote to her aunts, the Countess of Antrim and the Countess of Minto, both Ladies in Waiting to Queen Mary, and also thought of local friends to whom she would introduce him. Archibald Jamieson, the City financier and Chairman of diverse companies was one. The philanthropist lived nearby and had a wife with a keen artistic sense who had studied at the Slade with Professor Tonks. He was an ideal patron. They took an immediate liking to the young painter whose pictures they considered reflected a great appreciation of living. It was a perceptive judgment of the work of a boy who had learned to live and paint with the knowledge that he might be existing on borrowed time and that each day might prove to be his last.

After a time, Edward persuaded his father to let him take over two unused loose boxes at the back of the house and, with the money he had saved from selling his paintings, converted them into a large studio with a north-facing window overlooking the farmyard. It was the stable where, less than a decade before, Munnings had loved to paint. It was completed shortly before his nineteenth birthday, and his Priestman wrote to him: 'You may be sure, I would not give my time to trying to give you any little help I do, if I did not believe in you. If not now, one day, your people will be proud of your work.' Then he reminded his pupil of God's words to Joshua: '...only be strong and of good courage.'"

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: Expressing His Gift

"Cattle on the Marsh, Ludham" by Edward Seago

"Gradually, for Edward Seago life in the country fell into a more relaxed pattern, just as the doctor had hoped. 'Suddenly, everything was at hand,' he wrote. 'All the things I so wanted to draw were within a stone's throw of the house; a farmyard with its wealth of subjects - the binder and the ploughs, the wagon shed, the stack yard, the cow-house and the stables.' He was intoxicated in his new-found happiness and probably still unaware that it was the stable where Alfred Munnings had loved to paint.

The only flaw in his happiness concerned the gift of a talent that had become his very reason for living. He noticed that although his mother never failed to encourage him to paint, neither she nor his father commented - favourably or otherwise - on his finished pictures. Always he waited in perplexed disappointment for the criticism or approval that never came.

But not for a moment was his irresistible urge to paint diminished. His persistence demonstrated courage, a great strength of character and the overriding determination to follow what he had long recognized as a profound calling. The clarity with which he saw his purpose is underlined by a boyhood essay in which he visualized himself as an old, white-bearded gentleman, sitting in an armchair looking through the window at a country scene. He called it 'When I Am Old.' 

'I shall,' he wrote, 'perhaps, have painted such a scene, for God gave me this way of expressing Nature and I have done my best to be worthy of that gift. I have taken from her that which I love best. I have chosen simple landscape and, of landscape, I have also chosen that which I love best. If I have failed in my purpose, I am sorry, and I may not do better were I to try again. But all I ask is that my work shall not be forgotten. I shall be forgotten and I would wish to be. But my work stays behind me...' The essay was, eventually, included in an unpublished set of illuminated manuscripts entitled 'Sketches from Nature - Written for my Mother - July 1926.'"

To be continued

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

 

Edward Seago: Clouds

"A Windy Day" by Edward Seago

"By the first summer at Brooke Lodge, Edward Seago's heart turns occurred at least once a fortnight and only on warm days was he allowed to leave his bed and lie on the long wicker chair which his mother arranged under the elm tree. There, however, he was far from idle. In his book, Sir Alfred East had advised that a student should paint a sky every morning at the same time, and date the sketches with the hour and the direction and the strength of the wind, so that at the end of a few weeks he would have learned more of the sky than he could have by reading the latest scientific books.

Edward did better than that. Lying flat on his back, the sky was the one thing he could really see, and he painted it day in and day out, on small wooden panels. Often he painted as many as six panels in one day and on the back of each, just as East had prescribed, he noted the weather and atmospheric conditions so that by the end of a day he had a complete weather picture from morning to sunset. Years afterwards he learned that over a century before another East Anglian painter, John Constable, had at the age of thirty on the advice of Ipswich painter George Frost, annotated his sketches in a similar way.

Gradually, the boy found that to observe and paint what he saw was not enough to make his clouds 'float with the luminosity of that wondrous ocean overhead.' He studied books on cloud formations and combinations and, like the scientist-painter Leonardo da Vinci, he learned that clouds were composed of minute particles of water or ice and that the answer to their colours lay in the refraction of light by atmosphere. 'Then the real fun began,' he recalled. 'Each day taught me more and each day I saw something of reality in what I had been reading.' Slowly, frustration at the enforced physical restriction gave way to a positive enjoyment of life."

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: Brooke Lodge

"Study of HRH Queen Elizabeth II on horseback,
at her birthday parade in 1953" by Edward Seago

"At thirteen years old, the experience of working with a fine painter and absorbing his ideas was a tremendously exciting experience, and by that time the boy had an understanding companion with whom to share his new horizons. She was his governess, Miss Dora Daniels, who lived nearby and who over the years became his devoted support and a staunch friend to his mother on whom she was a calming influence.

Miss Daniels was small, neat and unfailingly cheerful. She was Edward's ageless ally on all the adventures he could cope with and on fine days, when he was well enough, she would shoulder his easel, take their lunch and they would tramp miles out into the country for a day's painting. There were days when he was too ill to see her, but afterwards, when he lay resting in bed she would take turns with his mother in reading to him, often from the book by Sir Alfred East of which he never tired, and also poetry including the works of Byron and Shelley and, time and again, the poems of John Masefield. She told him, 'No doubt, before you have finished, kings will be sending for you and, one day, one of them will say, 'Arise, Sir Edward, Knight of the Paint Brush!'

The doctor suggested that Edward's health might benefit from living permanently in the country. His father, a countryman at heart, was delighted with the idea and raised the money for the country house of his dreams. Brooke Lodge was a handsome, red-brick Elizabethan-style house about six miles from Norwich. Previously it had been the home of the great Jack Cooke, the legendary Master of the Norwich Staghounds of which Alfred Munnings was an enthusiastic member when he lived five miles away at Church Farm, Swainsthorpe. 

Munnings was a friend of Cooke's and had often visited Brooke Lodge and painted the horses in the sweet, warm atmosphere of the stables. So for Edward the new home represented an intangible link with the famous painter. Even if Edward did not know that Munnings had painted at Brooke, he too would find his vision sharpened by 'bright winter sunlight on clipped horses and scarlet coats; bare trees; stacks, on farmhouse gables, the riding out after a slight frost, the riding home with a frost beginning and a young moon in the sky; puddles already crisping over...'" 

To be continued

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