Edward Seago: Lucy Kemp-Welch's Criticism

"The Grand Parade, The Bertram Mills Circus"
by Edward Seago

"That winter Edward Seago finished eight circus pictures and in a letter to his brother said he was 'rather bucked with one' and thought it was the best thing he had done. However if, as seems likely, it was the large canvas he submitted to the Society of Animal Painters when he applied for membership the following year, he was over-optimistic. He was not elected to the Society for reasons explained in a personal letter from the President, Lucy Kemp-Welch, the animal painter. Her hard-hitting home truths carried more than an echo of Munnings' opinion. She wrote:

'Of course, it would be easy for me to make one of the usual excuses by which one gets out of explanations, but I am so sure that one day you will do big things - if you keep your face in the right direction - that I am going to tell you the truth about the large circus picture of yours, which was seen by myself and the Committee...'

'My dear boy, that is not art! It might possibly be an advertisement - but it is vulgar because it tries to say too much and see too much and there is no restraint or reticence, or interest of tone or lighting or mass or any of the things which might make it tolerable and perhaps admirable.'

You have been so carried away by the passing show that you have overlooked what made you feel the impulse to paint it - not the facts, not the commonplaces of clowns and Red Indians, etc. But a fine effect of light on a massive design with all the component parts and little masses lost or half seen in the group mass; everything secondary to some big idea or mass of colour or light - or all three with one thing - perhaps, such as the lady in feathers and such details lost in the mysterious blue haze, which is one of the strongest points in the circus as a painting ground.

Well now I have had my say, and I hope you will take it as it is meant from a painter of long experience, who is very interested in your career.'

Lucy Kemp-Welch, of all painters, recognized the true magic of the circus. For months at a time she had attached herself to Lord John Sanger's Travelling Circus and lived in a motor-drawn caravan and painted. Seago was grateful for her criticism. They kept in touch with one another, but he did not again apply for membership of her Society because rejection of any kind, since his parents' apparent rejection of his talent when he was a boy, was to be avoided at all costs. 

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1931, his painting was interrupted by an invitation which any ambitious young painter would have envied."

To be continued

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