Edward Seago: The Play of Light

"The East Window" by Edward Seago

"A letter from an old friend had arrived inviting Edward Seago to hold a one-man show at the Castle Museum in Norwich. It seemed only a short time ago that his mother had taken him there to admire the work of Munnings and Crome, Constable and Cotman. He would make sure that, despite wartime difficulties, it would be the most comprehensive display of his work that could be assembled, and he advertised in 'The Times' for an assistant to help him prepare it. The successful applicant was nineteen-year-old Vernon Russell Smith, recently invalided out of the RAF and waiting to go up to Oxford to study architecture. On Seago's instructions he assembled oils and water-colours, portraits and landscapes, ballet and circus scenes, and wartime studies.  

As the exhibition approached, Edward had a heart turn and for twenty-four hours the terrifying sound of his pounding heart and his laboured breathing could be heard all over his tiny cottage. Vernon was completely unprepared for the frightening sight and at times had real doubts as to whether the exhibition would be anything but a posthumous one. When the attack was over Seago lay propped up in bed, while the late afternoon sunlight traced shadows of the small square panes of glass on the flimsy curtains. He was fascinated by the play of light, and his finger itched for a paint brush. 

When he was up and about again, he was haunted by the memory of the sunlight flushing the bedroom curtains to a warm pink, and he toyed with the idea of making a picture, but could think of no context in which to use the effect of the light playing on the curtains. Then, one afternoon, he noticed his assistant Vernon shaving at the kitchen sink, with the light from the kitchen window falling across his face. He saw his picture. At four o'clock in the afternoon he persuaded Vernon to change into pajamas and transfer his shaving operation to the upstairs bedroom. By the end of the day, he had completed what he considered to be one of the best pictures he ever painted.

The small oil of a young man shaving in front of a bedroom window was listed No. 1 in the exhibition and afterwards Seago gave it to the City of Norwich to commemorate the exhibition. It was called 'The East Window,' implying that morning was normally the time for shaving. A keen observer, however, might detect a soft mellow quality about the sunlight, more evocative of afternoon than morning and a visit to the cottage would prove that not one of the tiny windows there faced the east."

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: Happy Is the Artist

"Early Morning" by Edward Seago

In the foreward to his book, "Peace in War," Edward Seago wrote: "The seasons of the year still pass, but now they are regarded as factors in the tactics of war. I try not to see them so. They hold other meanings for me, and I watch them pass with a sadness I have seldom felt before. My time is filled with Army duties, and the landscape has become a background for military activity. No longer can I lie on the springy downland grass and hear the crickets chirp, or pass long hours by the wood fires of the gypsies. Sometimes I have passed their painted wagons on the road. From the Army car I have caught a glimpse of a dark-eyed child, pulling at the bridle rein. For the next few miles I've travelled on my memories.

Brief spells of leave come like milestones on this wartime road. For a few days one can try to take the old life out of pawn. I imagine whatever that old life was, it will have frayed with wear, but that which won a man's endearment I feel may still be found...

I think most people will allow that the mentality of an artist is unsuited to the Army, but there are thousands equally disinclined to leave their civilian life. Actually, I think the artist is in many ways more fortunate. He has a more keenly developed perception of beauty, which gives him consolation in surroundings where others find none. This inward happiness is a continual source of joy which cannot be taken away, but with it there is the pain of being deprived of the means to express it; the longing to put paint on canvas which has to be suppressed.

I believe that a painter does not lose by this. His perception may even become stronger, so that when he returns to his work in life, his feelings will assert themselves with greater definition. There have been so many painters whose finest work has been achieved in times of great trial; who, beset with difficulties, have somehow overcome them. And I believe that almost every artist in the Services today is finding, during his leave and leisure moments, the opportunity to express himself in the medium he loves best." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Peace in War" by Edward Seago.)  

Edward Seago: Peace in War

"The Rain Cloud" by Edward Seago

"'Author Henry Williamson saw Edward Seago (on leave from the army) on the uplands of his farm, huddled on a stool, wrapped in a rug against the east wind, painting for hour after hour. Williamson met him going home in the twilight, lamenting in his quiet voice that the sky tints changed so rapidly and each so marvellously that he could hardly bring himself to leave them. Williamson invited Seago to join him for a cup of tea in the old smallholder's barn where he wrote his books. There they smoked their pipes before the open fire, surrounded by books, farm paraphernalia and hanging bunches of dried tobacco leaves, and discussed the better England they both believed would emerge from the war.

Edward told the older man about his next book which he saw as a combination of pictures and essays describing how each illustration came to be painted. It was to be called 'Peace in War,' 'a record,' Williamson recalled, 'of his escapes into the world of colour and form and line. Which is not to say that the good artist cannot be the good soldier.' In the book Seago expressed his feelings about the English countryside:

'There is a strange grandeur . . . and a strange subtlety of constant change, which has inspired some of the greatest English landscapes. Each mood has a beauty of its own, whether in repose, or raked by a sharp east wind. In the happy painting ground of Cotman, Crome and Constable, I am making no more than a modest attempt to follow in the traditions of the English school, which they endowed with such brilliance and harmony . . . I have only a simple perception, but the country is full of simple things of real beauty, and many of them pass unnoticed by those more out of touch with a simple life.' 

Edward Seago had travelled a long way to discover that philosophy, and it took a war for him to recognize it so that at first only in rare moments did he express it through painting. 

One illustration, 'The Rain Cloud,' that represented a small but perfect example of Seago's complete awareness of a moment of visual ecstasy, was bought by John Hill for twelve and a half guineas. He saw it on a visit to Edward's cottage and took it back unframed in a large Government envelope to his room at the War Office. For him it proved a prophetic purchase for, after the war, quite unexpectedly, he bought an old water mill to convert into a home and afterwards discovered he was living not two miles from the scene in the picture."

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: A Generation Risen

"A Generation Risen,' was the third book in which twenty-four of Edward Seago's pictures were matched to poems by John Masefield. Masefield had been hard put to find time to write all the poems needed because he had committed himself to do war work. 'The composition may take longer than I supposed,' he wrote. The book was the title of the tribute in pictures and poetry to the anonymous heroes of war, and was the only instance of Seago's collaboration with Masefield in which the illustrations were rated higher than the poems.

'Seago has gone to the source for his material while Masefield has gone to Seago,' wrote the critics of the 'New York Times,' unfairly discounting the older man's experience of an earlier war. Undoubtedly there was a new strength of draughtsmanship and a stark realism in the lightning pencil drawings of groups of young soldiers and airmen preparing for battle, planes wheeling into the sky, lorries lumbering along rain-lashed roads; the relentless war march, halted for a series of brief moments by a painter who was acutely aware, because he was part of it all, and had trained and exercised his talent in the make-believe worlds of the circus and the ballet until he was completely equipped to portray the dramas of real life.

Seago did great work in the war because he was seeing it from the inside and not as an official artist. Anonymous, though the people were in the drawings many can be identified, 'The Reconnaissance Pilot' in the book was his closest friend Bernard Clegg, and Peter Hurndall, the man who taught him to fly, had sat for the 'Portrait Study of a Pilot.' One drawing in the book, 'The Bronze Soldier,' was a personal tribute to sculptor and friend Charles Jagger who had died in 1934 and whose greatest work resulted from the First World War. Seago's picture showed a group of soldiers standing in front of Jagger's colossal bronze memorial at Paddington Station, perhaps his friend's own most impressive memorial.

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: Wartime Camouflage

"Southern Highway (South County Highway)"
by Edward Seago

"When war was declared Edward Seago wished to get involved. He applied to become a camoufleur in Air Raid Precaution, volunteered for the air force and pestered his influential friends to write to even more influential people on his behalf. In late November the longed-for call-up notice arrived and he was told to report as a Camouflage Officer to the Headquarters of the School of Military Engineers at Chatham in four days' time. His relief was mixed with deep gratitude as he cleaned his paint brushes, stacked his canvases carefully away and closed up his studio. Who knew when he would use it again? Deep inside his soldier's valise went the inevitable paint-box. He could not have seen it as a key to friendships and wartime adventures beyond his wildest dreams.

He had no time to think of painting during the first weeks of army life. After a brief course on camouflage, he went to France as a Second Lieutenant with the British Expeditionary Force, then was posted back to England with the rank of Major in the newly-formed Camouflage Corps at Farnham Castle, and eventually was appointed Camouflage Officer, 5th Corps, Southern Command.

His approach to the problem of camouflage was refreshingly new. He made no attempt to paint out buildings and identifiable objects individually so that, from the air, it appeared that they did not exist, but he set out to make them converge with their background or look like completely different objects. For instance a battleship could be painted so that, from the air, it looked like a string of barges. 

He wrote a thesis on dummy shadows advocating that they should not, as in the past, be applied as flat, dark green or brown areas, but with the addition of half-tones and dark tones to reproduce the luminosity of real shadows and provide a complete camouflage even in sunlight, against both the human eye and the camera. He advocated camouflaging a large area, like an aerodrome, with groups of painted trees and four or more sets of dummy shadows to each group so that some shadows were in the right direction at any time of day.

Moreover, alongside the technique of the artist he brought the imagination of the showman to the business of camouflage as when he requisitioned a London film studio to produce hundreds of life-size models of Neville Chamberlain wearing battle-dress and a tin hat.  Every model had a rifle fixed at a different angle and was mounted on an individual turntable and used to man dummy anti-aircraft sites, strategically placed around the south coast to deter the invaders. They were remotely controlled so that they rotated and changed positions to give a most realistic effect when photographed from the air. Nothing delighted Seago's humour more than to think of the model Neville Chamberlains he had created defending the country."

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: From Ballet to Equestrian Paintings

"Le Carnaval" from 'Tribute to Ballet' by Edward Seago

"At the end of the summer of 1938, the Ballet Company was booked to dance in New York, and it was suggested to Edward Seago that he should go there, too, and show his ballet pictures. An exhibition of his work was arranged at the Carroll Carstairs Gallery in New York to coincide with both the ballet's opening and the publication of Seago's 'Tribute to Ballet.' 

Hardly a newspaper failed to notice the exhibition, but the serious art critics largely dismissed it as 'Not very deep stuff' and 'A lot of cleverness but very little design or substance in his work.'  With not one picture sold, he and his friend went with Mimi Cushing, a New York socialite, to stay at the attractive stone house of horse-loving Mrs. Mary Stevens Baird. His hostess recalled the name 'Seago' from a reproduction on a Christmas card of a painting showing two of her riding friends. This resulted in an introduction to a friend who had been painted on horseback by Munnings, and she offered Edward a fee of a thousand dollars to do a companion portrait of her husband. It proved the first of a series of similar commissions from hunt country people eager to be portrayed on their favourite horses.

So although most of the exhibition pictures remained unsold, these commissions proved to be the start of a steady stream of requests for equestrian portraits. It reached a crescendo when Edward made a chance remark to a reporter from a newspaper syndicate that was blown up into a story which made full-page spreads: 

"Ballet Dancers are Same Animals as Race-Horses, says Noted Artist'  

'A fine dancer and a great horse are, literally, the same in their bodies and in their temperament,' the painter explained. 'A dancer's feet and legs must develop the same terrific suppleness that a horse's delicate little legs have. If you watch slow motion pictures of a horse taking a jump and a dancer leaping into the air, you realized that the movement of the two bodies is identical...' 'The better a dancer is, the more nearly his feet grow to resemble an animal rather than a human foot. Nijinsky's feet were so far developed in this way that X-rays of his strange bone formation were recorded by the medical profession.'

Most reports  included a neat little pen-portrait of the painter who had expounded the entertaining theory, and one commented, 'Mr. Seago's only two hobbies in life; sitting on a fence watching horses and sitting in the gallery watching the ballet.'"

To be continued

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

Edward Seago: The World of Dance

Edward Seago painting Alicia Markova

"Through his excursions into print, royalties from reproductions of his paintings, portraits and illustrations for magazines and books, Edward Seago hoped to be able to manage without the commissions for equestrian paintings and was heard to vow that he would never paint another horse. At this point he turned more to Degas than to any of the painters to which the critics had compared him. He went to the ballet and discussed it with John Masefield in terms of poems and pictures as a possible subject for a book Masefield, a staunch balletomane, was enthusiastic.

Ballet offered all the colour, light, movement and world of make-believe as had the circus world. Off-stage it provided an antidote to loneliness in the opportunity of belonging to an unconventional élite - a substitute family to which it was by no means as difficult to gain admittance as it had been to his less sophisticated but closer-knit family of the circus. 

He rented a room in London and nearly every night went to the ballet at Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden. He saw the performances from the front of the house, well to the right, which afforded him a three-quarter view of the theatre taking in part of the wings and orchestra as well as the stage and giving the fullest dimension to the light and movement he longed to portray. During the day he watched rehearsals from the wings and sketched at the regular morning classes attended by even the leading dancers. Within a few weeks many of the principal dancers were his friends. Once again, through painting, Edward found himself in a new and exciting world. 

He painted for most of the day. His studio, over a pastry shop, had a large window with a balcony and a view of an old wall covered with wisteria in full bloom and a distant glimpse of the sea. In the evening he was at the theatre to see the ballet,  and afterwards joined some of the dancers for supper. Once again his talent had precipitated him into an intoxicating social life which, nevertheless, was not necessarily conducive to paint and he was increasingly dissatisfied about his work.

Even so, in 1938, 'Tribute to Ballet' made its impact and was recognized by the public and the critics as a handsome recognition by two arts of a third one, rather than as an example of poetry and paintings. At the same time it represented the beginning and the end of Edward's short-lived ballet period. He had watched and painted the worlds of make-believe for long enough and was at last persuaded to concentrate his talent on portraying life's realities."

To be continued

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