MARKETING IS ALL

This is a tale of two artists. One who died before his time, in the 1930s and in straightened circumstances, and one who is still living and producing art. Both were known as painters. The latter specialises in landscape painting. The other did plenty of landscape work but was accomplished in many subjects. Both worked in the same nation of the UK.

The living painter has said that he makes a lot of money from his art-more than a million pounds a year. The dead artist-let us call him Mr A never  obtained such wealth in his lifetime, even allowing for the change in purchasing power of the pound. The other artist, let us call him Mr B is happily still with us. He seems to be  a thoughtful, not to say religious person, and is working away to promote himself.

Mr A certainly did exhibit his work and was a member of an exclusive artists' group, but as I say he never had as much financial success as  Mr B; this is despite the fact that most people in the art world would see Mr B's work as negligible in comparison with that of Mr A. I have no doubt that Mr A was a very promising art student but he has not developed in accordance with his youthful promise. Much more promising was Mr A whose talent was recognised early in life and who was encouraged by some of the finest artists of his day.

So what happened? Mr B has claimed to be earning a considerable amount (he gives some of it away too), but I have known his oil paintings to be on sale recently at a price of £6000 from his dealer and the dealer wants a substantial cut from that price. Now to earn a million pounds a year from art at this rate you would have to produce and sell- an enormous number of works; do you want to do the maths? Whatever result you get it is a lot of paintings.And Mr B has said,one might think naively, that he does two or three paintings in a day. So there must be another income somewhere, and this is where marketing comes in. If you go to a certain region of the UK and enter a gift shop or a cafe you are very likely to see greetings cards or mugs with examples of Mr B's work.In the winter Mr B has a calendar available-and pricey it is.This may  be a good additional source of income as it appears to be self-published. Mr A's work was, I am fairly certain, not reproduced on mugs and greetings cards in his lifetime. Thus a mediocre-at best-artist Mr B  is making-as he says a fortune from his art but MrA whose  art is incomparably finer than Mr B's could never be financially secure.

Mr B had an exhibition in one of the UK capitals recently and he or his dealer, in some combination  has/have hired  a gallery in the city centre (twice).It must have cost a substantial sum but Mr B will now be able to say that he has exhibited in  a prestigious quarter-though not if course at a  prestigious gallery.I cannot find any independent reviews of these exhibitions.The information that an exhibition occurred will look good on Mr B's CV and will impress the credulous.But why Mr B needs to do this when he has been painting for years with so much financial success is beyond me. It seems like a vanity project and I would not recommend the expenditure to anyone trying to establish themselves in the art world.He also donates paintings to national institutions.He seems to have a strong need for recognition. Mr A would have laughed at all this.

The moral of this story may be that artists should not put all their eggs in one basket if they want financial success. This is an old idea. Many teach and some find ways of marketing their work in less expensive formats.But financial success is not everything as Mr B seems to know in his heart of hearts.(slightly edited, June 2019.)

LIGHT SHIP SMITH'S KNOLL-A FINE WATERCOLOUR BY RICHARD HOBSON

Light Ship Smith's Knoll- Richard Hobson

This large and impressive 1975 watercolour by Richard Hobson was sold by Anderson &Garland in their Newcastle rooms on 21 March 2017. If I remember  rightly the estimate was somewhere near £1000/£1200 . The hammer price was in fact £4000- and well deserved it was.This is surely one of Hobson's finest watercolours- and for that reason is interesting-let alone the unusual subject.

I have added -with apologies to Trinity House-a photograph of the actual lightship which apparently dates from 1972. At the time they were checking out the possibility of a helicopter platform for delivering crew to the lightship.But if the photo is correctly dated 1972 and the watercolour is correctly dated 1975 then what happened to the platform shown at the after end if the vessel-but not in Richard's watercolour? In the watercolour the ship clearly has a mast and not a platform.Was the experiment a failure or is the artwork misdated to 1975when it should be 1972? And this watercolour perhaps shows the ship in dock and ready for maintenance?

Lightship "Smith's Knoll" with helicopter practising  lowering crew members.

ART VERSUS STYLE

The Month of May in Paris-1968 by Raymond Mason

In my limited thinking about the nature of art I often find that I believe that artists are too concerned about style and not enough about content. It seems to me that the instant aesthetic of the poster and graphic art has commonly triumphed over any possible content. You can see this in amateur or semi-professional work. You can surely see it in the productions of many who exhibit at the Royal Academy. Here is a quote from Raymond Mason which just about sums up my view of the situation,

"Most artists do not seek truth,which being independent of their own person would gradually transform their art, but the perfecting of a style which will glorify their name."

This comes from a passage concerned with Bacon's late work and Mason's misgivings about it.
Whether or not there is a truth independent of the artist is a moot point but I hope that you will get my drift.There is not enough seeing, looking or loving in most landscape artists' work.

At Work in Paris, Raymond Mason on Art and Artiststs, Thames & Hudson ,2003.page 176.

For further remarks about this artist see another post here .

Samuel Palmer-a new biography

Over Christmas I read Rachel Campbell-Johnston's biography of Samuel Palmer-Mysterious Wisdom. It is a pleasant, enjoyable, sensitively written portrait of this wonderful but somewhat cranky artist. The eccentricity of his dress and the dreadful grief and possible guilt after the death of Thomas More Palmer are shown clearly enough. This is a work which would serve as an enjoyable introduction to the circle of the Ancients. The author also reminds us that Palmer was almost hysterically in love with the old ways, paranoid about civil unrest and was somewhat rabid in his political views. That he had such a father-in-law as John Linnell cannot have helped him to stand on his own two feet psychologically or artistically. Palmer had deep friendships with other artists such as Richmond who in turn was a great help and comfort to Palmer in old age.

I suppose I was hoping for a massive new work of scholarship-and this is not what we find here.Indeed by now the archives must be entirely picked bare. Ms Campbell-Johnston is heavily indebted to previous authors-in particular Raymond Lister who gets a mention as "an earlier biographer" when he more justly might be described as the doyen of modern Palmer studies. And the author only mentions Lister in the text to quote one of his dafter remarks.He is certainly mentioned in the notes/bibliography for she depends as any writer would on his edition of the letters and on Alfred Herbert Palmer's notes . Lister's two biographical works are not listed in the very brief bibliography. There are two works named on comets-both having the same author: comets do not figure largely in Palmer's life.

Old fashioned spellings such as Buccleugh for Buccleuch are not modernised. Papignia should probably be Papigno. Sir William Blake Richmond is referred to at one point as Sir William Richmond Blake. There are supposed to be editors who deal with these things. I recently reread an Oxford edition of Anna Karenina. All its 900 odd pages had been set in real type and I don't think I noticed any misprints.Here Bloomsbury give a page to witterings about the typeface used in the text. It is a fairly feeble effort which with the shoddy paper used in the book adds up to nothing special as a work of book design.

Mysterious Wisdom: the Life and Work of Samuel Palmer: by Rachel Campbell-Johnston, London 2011.

See also my earlier entry on forgeries of Palmer's work

Close Harmony in Edinburgh-Sylvia Wishart

I visited Edinburgh on Tuesday for the last day of the annual show of the Turner watercolours in the Vaughan Bequest.Also on my schedule was the Sylvia Wishart exhibition at the RSA.
Both exhibitions were very impressive.In many of the Turners the range of values was quite narrow-and yet they were rich an colourful.I am thinking of the the Swiss scenes such the lovely glowing Verrès. So too with Wishart; her colour is very pleasing and she does not insist on a high dynamic range.Nor is she interested in heavy impasto.In the work illustrated, Reflections 11 you might see something of an affinity with Bonnard in both colour and composition but really its  in the background rather than a direct influence.


Sylvia Wishart's work is the product of a subtle artistic personality.It breathes a clean,airy clarity and transparency whether in drawing or mixed media.Her delicacy and relatively close harmonies do not reproduce well. Many will know her from George Mackay Brown's Orkney Tapestry which came out  with Wishart's superb illustrations.They reveal a fine draughtsman with a strong sense of design.

This is a small show-far less than she deserved but still we must be grateful for the chance to see it.The drawings exhibited here include a group of illustrations she made of Orkney farms and coasts for a locally produced calendar.Here the artist works with a very fine pen line (Gillot 404 or whatever) framing the simplest of subjects-a farm and its outbuildings with a patience which is never laboured,is utterly clear formally and of considerable delicacy.This sort of work is too fastidious to reproduce well.Some might call it timidity but I prefer to call it simplicity.There must be a Japanese word for this quality,surely.

You need to look at a Wishart especially when she takes up her favourite theme of the interpenetration of reflections and views from a window.This theme appears in works big and small.Here are the birds, the ship in a bottle and the studio easel.

She does not fit the Scottish cliche image of the Scottish painter as hell-bent on rich, expressive colour.The other side-the draughtsmanship is most certainly there.She was lucky enough to live at a time when Scottish art-schools were still so old-fashioned as to insist on a concern for drawing. It is incredible in one sense that she was not RSA until near the end of her life. But then again I have a hunch that she was her own person and maybe wasn't much bothered. She was content to live,study and work in the north.Lucky Sylvia I say!

Her obituary can be read here. And the RSA site accessed with this link. I first heard of her when she had an exhibition in Alnwick in 1969.The amount asked for the cheapest item would at that time have bought you a reasonable,low-end 35mm camera.But I doubt if the camera would be working now. I think the moral is that decent art is always cheap and a good investment.You can read my review of a new book about Sylvia Wishart here.

Charles Keene a Victorian artist with "Punch"

One of my favourite artist biographies is George Layard's  Life and Letters of Charles Keene of Punch.
It came out in 1892-the year after the artist's death. This portrays the artist as an obsessive collector: of old music,  antiquities and so on. Keene played the bagpipes and the smaller, sweeter, Northumbrian pipes. His correspondence with the remarkable Joseph Crawhall II of Newcastle is most enjoyable. Crawhall was an interesting artist in his own right and loaned  his ideas book to Keene, thus helping furnish him with ideas for cartoons. Keene incidentally was a fervent Tory but was always uneasy about doing political cartoons. His illustrations deal with social and artistic situations.

As an artist Keene was appreciated by artists such as Pissarro and Menzel. High praise indeed, especially when coming from Menzel who was one of the most brilliant and prolific draughtsmen of the C19.

 In Keene we value his, literally, keen observation of gesture and pose and of the fall of light on clothing.

A father remonstrates with his son and comes of worst.

He drew on any scraps of paper which came to hand and sometimes with improvised, home-made implements. Here are two of his gently satirical drawings from Tate Britain.The first shows what is probably a variation on the perennial theme of the landscape painter who has to deal with naive or irritating observers. Daumier did many drawings on this theme and Keene like Daumier did not make up his own captions.

In the second drawing we have what could be described  as "the superior servant theme". The scene is a railway station or ferry terminal and the gent leaning on the post perhaps the coachman- is so impressed with his own importance that he doesn't want to get involved with dealing with the luggage-the lower servants can do that.He most certainly doesn't want to soil his uniform. His mistress on the left seems slightly agitated or concerned but he isn't bothered.

Imagine Keene's  studio full of props and costumes and also including mirrors used to study a pose or expression-for he used himself as a model. There would usually be a fug of pipe tobacco, smoked and resmoked. (He also collected old-clay pipes). By now, if you did not already know, you may have guessed that he remained a bachelor throughout his life. His after-work amusements included membership of choirs and glee-clubs. Keene loved to sing.  

Palmer forged

This illustration shows a gross forgery of a Shoreham period work by Samuel Palmer. It was made by Keating and appeared with two others in the catalogue of an exhibition presented by a prestigious London gallery in 1970. The forgeries were accompanied by quality works by English watercolourists. The gallery had no intention to deceive but was itself deceived. Once again the forger of the painting had provided a  forged provenance for the works.A provenance is nothing more than a history of where and with whom the work has spent its time since its creation.   This helps to give persuade the buyer that reputable, perhaps very reputable people, have been custodians of the work. Where the provenance is genuine one can learn something about the history of collecting.

This forgery was the work of prolific but incompetent British forger, now dead.His action was despicable. No, I dont have much sympathy for dealers and art historians, and anyone can make a mistake. In this case some doubts were raised early on. 

What concerns me is that  the forger is a traitor to any sense of solidarity which might exist among artists. He-and it is usually a he, knows that his forgery is not in the same league as  the work on which he parasitises. The forger is usually found out eventually but  meanwhile he smears the reputation of a fellow artist. Compare the fake Palmer with the real thing and you can see how crude the forgery is. It may be argued that this Palmer forgery is in the style of the artist, but it is only a crude approximation. It is a garish travesty of an artistic moment when a burgeoning sensibility (Palmer's) made a creative leap such as our forger could never have manifested.