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.)