ALAN SORRELL- AN ENGLISH NEO-ROMANTIC ARTIST

A last there is a modern book on the English Neo-Romantic artist Alan Sorrell. It was published to coincide with the exhibition of Sorrell's work at the Soane Museum. Another  book Alan Sorrell: Early Wales Re-created,which I have discussed elsewhere was  an excellent production and that is where I discuss his archaeological work.This one  is in a larger format with several contributors from  various disciplines.There is a useful chronology. So when I refer to "the writer" I am speaking about the author of a particular section of the work.

 They don't make artists like this any more. If you wanted to find someone to do  similar tasks in archaeological reconstruction nowadays you might be looking at an animation studio. Perspectives and fly throughs in a trice! But Sorrell could do perspective and lettering, anything you wanted really. He is a designer/ illustrator most definitely.And a complete professional in his field.

His  Rome scholarship did not really lead too far artistically but meeting archaeologists at the school certainly did. Some simplification of the figure-coming from an enthusiasm for Piero was long lasting. His early subject paintings  do not merit much enthusiasm to my mind. But they are a young man's work. The monochrome illustration of the Annunciation looks heavy and despondent. There is no joy in it. The painting  Summer Scene Triptych with it's disturbing reds and greens is rather repellent. But then recent English artists have struggled with colour and I find no evidence in this book of  an admiration for French work.

The book cover shows his watercolour The Artist in the Campagna. It is a curious item. It certainly doesn't  resemble the work of those artists who a 100 years earlier flocked to portray the transcendental emptiness of this region strewn with ruins. My first thought was that the artist was portraying an English scene; not Italy.The Appian Way of 1932 is more striking and here we have Italy through a full blown, slightly incoherent, theatrical and very English Neo-Romanticism. Ruins and statues abound, a courting couple strolls into the painting.

I do think that Sorrell will be remembered most for his archaeological reconstruction work and for his book and guide book illustrations.As an archaeological illustrator his work is bold,dramatic, rich and generous. The writer does not state this  and I think she should have done so.The aerial views which are such a consistent feature of his archaeological reconstructions seem to have developed from his war work with the RAF. The section on his war service has has some excellent work-again very dark-of camp life, parades etc.

Harrow's Scar Milecastle:Hadrian's Wall

His "sombre colour" was evident early on and noted by the Director of the British School.
Nevertheless his project Working Boats from Around the British Coast for the Festival of Britain certainly succeeds in a slightly jaunty and elaborate manner.It was the background to the bar on the ship which brought the Festival to  ports in the UK.

Take for example The Seasons a school mural for Warwick. No one could do anything of such competence nowadays but the colour is very low key. The writer is surely correct in seeing some inspiration from Brueghel here but everything is really rather grey. This gives coherence, unity, and a kind of impact. But to eschew the riotous colours of an English Spring, the richness of Autumn and so on...... Well, unity and impact were obviously important.

Sorrell made a visit  to Iceland in the thirties. The chronology in the book says it was in 1934, with his exhibition of resulting work occurring in 1935. The text says that the visit was in 1935 but an apparently signed drawing, illustration 118 is said to bear the date 1934. (He also met the writer Haldor Laxness). The works were on show in October of 1935*  and so just might  have  influenced   the  Auden/Isherwood visit of 1936-though Sorrell was not the only artist showing Icelandic subjects in London at this time. Was there some interest in the Sagas on Sorrell's part?  William Morris had also visited and Auden and perhaps Sorrell would have known about that trip. Or was it something specific to the Thirties? The products of this trip were-strong and bold designs with something of the clarity and hardness of contemporary wood engravings .

Sorrell's own autobiographical writings sound interesting.They are apparently pseudonomous. To me this suggests reticence rather than vanity. In this  present  book we don't get much sense of his personal character. That he was extremely hardworking and professional comes across clearly.His refusal to work on projects which might lead to the bombing of artistic centres is highly commendable.

But he had written of one of his early works ,"I always find it necessary to have information about every detail and incident in a work, and it is not by any means a source of pride but often of keen regret that I cannot improvise. Thus every individual leaf and all the curious bends of the tree trunks required as much study as the figures themselves." In his archaeological work this was something of an advantage and curiously enough he could let himself go once the structure was established and produce reconstruction work which has not been equalled.


*Oct 1935 per Times Digital Archive.

Alan Sorrell:The Life and Works of an English Neo-Romantic Artist, Edited by Sacha Llewellyn and Richard Sorell, Sansom & Co,2013

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.  

Alan Sorell's Archaeological Illustrations

Not long ago my local Oxfam yielded up a copy of Alan Sorrell: Early Wales Re-Created which was published in 1980 by the National Museum of Wales. The name of Alan Sorrell is certainly well known to anyone over the age of fifty who has more than a passing interest in British archaeology; for it was he who was the illustrator of choice for all those Ministry of Works guidebooks which my generation brought home from visits to ancient sites. Sorrell's dramatic images showed high quality reconstructions of places as they might have looked during the time when they were inhabited. When I was young I did not appreciate these drawings but I have a different opinion now.

When I studied the book I found a postcard inserted beside Sorrell's drawing of the Roman villa at Llantwit Major.It showed another artist's reconstruction of the same site. What a contrast! Perhaps the previous owner had thought so too. Sorrell's drawing is richness itself compared to the work of the unnamed postcardist. He adopts a very high viewpoint so that you see over the villa and the surrounding countryside; lines of vision shoot off into the far distance-to vanishing points outside the image itself. High viewpoints are common with Sorrell: he deploys his perspective with panache-and of course he came from a period when art students were likely to learn it in a serious manner. His drawing is filled with incident: humans, animals and nature enrich the scene . The miserable art of the postcardist is timidity personified when compared to that of Sorell who uses as all his painterly skills to produce a living work of art. Sometimes I have thought that his work looks a little harsh but just as often I remember that he had to explain what was happening and consider how work would look when reproduced. He was also a muralist and muralists look for clarity. I would say that since Sorrell there has been something of a decline in this type of work. The illustrated leaflet for the mesolithic house at Howick was a case in point. There the drawings were more akin to something from a very rudimentary comic.It is good to see that there is a website commemorating Sorrell here . His wife, Elizabeth Tanner was also an artist of quality. Both were fortunate to study at a time when the ability to draw was valued.