Introduction
In August 1964 Clifford Hall was in Antwerp, Belgium, working on the second series of his paintings of the city’s red light district and harbour area. On the 12th and the 19th of the month, wet weather prevented him from going out to draw and paint, so instead he sat in his hotel room and wrote a memoir of his experience of growing up before and during the First World War and his subsequent days as an art student.
This memoir covers the first 22 years of the artist’s life and is previously unpublished except for the section about studying under Walter Sickert at The Royal Academy Schools which appears almost verbatim, on pages 71 – 74, in ‘Sickert The Painter and His Circle’ by Marjorie Lilly, first published by in Great Britain by Elek Books Limited, London, in 1971.
Memoir
I was born on the 24th January 1904 in Wandsworth. I have forgotten the name of the road, it is not important, and it is said that whilst waiting for me to arrive my father ate a whole Christmas pudding, cold.
But, of course, I know nothing of those days and my first memories are of No. 26, East Sheen Avenue, where we went to live sometime before 1914, and of my grandparents’ house in Shrivenham, where I used to be taken to stay. We went, by steam train, to Swindon and there my grandfather met us with a horse and trap. I think it was called a high dog cart and to me it seemed a perilously long way from the ground. We drove through the country and at one point passed a small shed from which most of the roof had gone and inside was a thin cow. This made a great impression on me and for weeks I was asking why the shed had no roof to it and why the cow’s bones stuck out so.
In those days, my grandfather was agent to the Viscount Barrington* and had a large house and garden a few yards from the park. This was a private park but we were allowed to go in it. There were tall iron gates of which we had the key and an avenue of big trees on either side which met overhead. It was dark in there, green, dark and damp, and lords and ladies grew under the trees. My Aunt Jess told me they screamed if you pulled them out of the ground.
* Walter Barrington, 9th Viscount Barrington (20 April 1848 – 12 September 1933). GRH
A little stream ran through the park and once my aunt and I disturbed a swan sitting on its nest. The angry bird chased us all the way to the park gates, its huge wings beating, its neck stretched forward. It hissed. We ran. It was just behind us and we were terrified.
My grandfather was a very big strong man, over six feet tall, and broad, and he had a long white beard. When I sat on his knee, he used to rub his beard against my face, saying this would make my beard grow when I grew up.
He spoiled me. I always sat next to him at meal times and he would cut me the choicest bits and at tea insisted on putting so much homemade strawberry jam on thin brown bread and butter for me that it was impossible to lift the slice without it collapsing and making me very sticky.
My grandmother was tiny, only about five feet high. She wore steel rimmed spectacles. I called her Little Granny. I used to ask her to draw for me, particularly chickens, and she got very worried because she could not. She had a four-wheeled donkey cart and would take me for drives in it. The donkey was beautifully groomed, his hooves were varnished and he wore light brown harness.
Little boys were not dressed so sensibly in those days as they are now and my hair, which was of a tawny colour, fell to my shoulders. I remember how I hated being stood on the table and having it combed, and being dressed in stiffly starched linen frocks. But there were compensations, for my party dress was of black velvet with wide real lace collar and lace cuffs, and with white socks and silver buckled black patent leather shoes my vanity was greatly flattered.
In the loft there was a cat with a litter of kittens. I loved to play with them. And in the garden a huge walnut tree. The nuts lay on the ground and I was allowed to eat as many as I liked.
One day I was taken to visit a neighbour, an old lady, a Miss Wilson. Seated on a plain wooden chair, she received us in what persists in my memory as a walled-in gravelled yard. She was dressed in black and all around her jet black chickens pecked at the ground. I refused to speak to her, cried and stood awkwardly with my feet turned in. She asked my aunt if there was anything wrong with my legs. When we got home I said she frightened me. She was a witch.
I remember my uncle Ernest once came for a weekend. My father and I got up early and threw little stones at his bedroom window. The window opened, Ernest’s head appeared and he poured a glass of water over us. But he had forgotten that his false teeth were in the glass and they broke when they hit the ground.
One last recollection of Shrivenham. Of a warm summer evening when I had been put to bed a little earlier, protestingly, than usual because the grown ups wanted to play tennis. I could not sleep and got up, climbed on a seat by the open window and watched the game. I leaned out too far, there was a shriek and I was grabbed from behind. My aunt had just come into the room to see if I was asleep and had literally caught me as I was falling.
This was my second escape from disaster, for as a tiny baby my mother accidently poured a cup of hot tea over my face when I was in bed with her, they took a baby into bed with them in those days, and for years my face was pitted and only gradually the tiny holes filled up.
East Sheen avenue is still where it was, a turning off the Upper Richmond Road running a little uphill in the direction of Richmond Park. It is a tree lined road of small semi-detached suburban houses but when we lived there building on our side had stopped and there was a field next to our house. At the top of the road there were more fields, on the left-hand side, stretching down to market gardens, which bordered the main Upper Richmond Road, and up to Sheen Common, through which one could walk to the Roehampton Gate of Richmond Park. There was a farm there too, and in summer, haymaking in the fields, riding in the hay carts, drinks of warm milk straight from the udder when we went to the farm and once, a vivid glimpse of a bull covering a cow whilst two men beat the bull with sticks, to encourage it, I suppose. We came on this unawares and our nurse, suddenly confused, turned our faces away and hurried off. I think my brother was there too. We had no idea what was going on and were given no explanation.
It was on the road leading to the Common that I learned to ride my first bicycle and fell off into a huge bed of nettles.
The Common was wonderful, wild and uncared for, as commons should be. Just inside the gate, on the left, was a pond covered with green duck weed and at the right season full of newts and tadpoles, and close by the pond was a well with a round base of stone and a U-shaped arch of black iron above it. Its water was said to be particularly good for the eyes and old women sometimes let down bottles on strings, and pulling them up, corked them and carried them away. Beverley Brook bordered on the Common, which in the spring was a mass of white May blossom. It was here I once saw some boys and girls bathing without any clothes on. The little girls, they must have been ten or twelve, fascinated me and they did not mind being looked at.
These were still the days of horses and a motor car was a rarity. Omnibuses and trams, tradesmen’s carts and vans were horse drawn and on Derby Day huge brakes pulled by four horses could be seen full of shouting and laughing men and women. Some of the women wore ostrich feathers in their hats and some exchanged their hats with the men. They waved sticks with streamers of pink or blue coloured paper and when the brakes pulled up at the Derby Arms for beer the horses had their half pint poured down their throats.
From our bedroom, my brother’s and mine, we could look towards the fields. On Saturday evenings we always watched the horses go by, and there were a great many of them, running free except for a few ridden bareback by boys who kept the loose ones together. Huge carthorses with long manes and tails and hair partly covering their great hooves, the smart little cobs, their tails docked, that during the week pulled the butchers’ carts, and the horses used by the milkmen in their chariots that held a big churn and clanking milk tins. A whole troupe of horses now free of carts and harness, off to their Sunday rest. They passed quickly in a cloud of dust, their hooves made a lot of noise and some neighed. How we envied the boys in charge of them. And very early on Monday mornings they would awaken us as they were driven back to begin another week of work.
The fields are all built over now and the buildings are commonplace. The horses long since dead and the petrol engine has taken their place. What was Sheen Common remains, that is to say the space it occupied remains. The pond has been cleaned and I am sure no newts or tadpoles could live there. The Common has asphalt paths. It is tidy and cared for. It is a planned Borough Council, Welfare State wilderness. I never want to see it again. I expect the farm has gone too, it must have; but after seeing, some years ago, what had been done to the Common I did not dare to look.
We went to our first school, kept by two middle-aged ladies, sisters, the Misses Doughty. It was in Elm Road and not far from home. One Miss Doughty was tall and kind, her sister was smaller, thinner and stricter but both were patient. They taught me to read and write, to do addition and subtraction, multiplication and long and short division. I was very slow to learn, bad at arithmetic, I still am, and particularly slow at reading but when at last I did learn to read I read anything I could get hold of. I only remember two of my fellow pupils at Elm House School. There was Nancy, a bank manager’s daughter, I always quarrelled with her, and Edward Reynell who is still my friend. A few years older than myself, he was high spirited always and used to try to make me join him in snatching an apple as we passed a fruit stall on the way home from school. I was never bold enough but he sometimes succeeded and we ran.
I forget a great deal but I can remember too. There is no connection between the sights and happenings I remember except the connection of period, the time before 1914. Standing between my father’s knees when we went in a hansom cab. The four-wheeler piled high with luggage when we set off to the station en route for the seaside and the fascination of horses drinking dirty water from horse troughs – there were many – and of seeing a cabbie dip a brush in the trough, shake it and give his battered top hat a polish. My awe when we passed a street thickly covered with straw because in one of the houses someone lay ill. The wheels and hooves went so softly. The sight of a funeral procession with the glass sided coach and slow pacing black horses, long tailed and maned, the closed carriages following – all in black. I wanted a funeral like that, I decided, and with the blackest horses that could be found, each with the longest mane, perfectly brushed, and tails that touched the ground. I don’t mind a bit now.
The early motorbuses frequently broke down and one of the first cars to appear in East Sheen belonged to Dr Hovenden, and was driven by steam. It was silent and might leave a trail of red hot cinders behind it.
The change must have been fairly gradual but, looking back, it seems that the horse disappeared suddenly from my life and there were motors. We can hardly move for them now.
We, my brother Brian and myself, belonged to an organization called the League of Pity which existed to raise money for poor children. It was run by wealthy sisters (the Misses Keller) who lived in a big house on the Upper Richmond Road. Once a year, in the summer, there was a fête in the grounds of the house, a stage was built and we acted a play. Our mothers made the costumes and a man from London came to make us up for our parts with real grease paint. We had a great many rehearsals and I loved them and was always to be found among the girls who made a fuss of me. I could not keep away from them in their bright dresses and I wanted to stoke their long hair, like horses’ mains, tied with big shiny satin bows.
We did Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I was one of the thieves. There were only ten of us but we passed through the makeshift cave made of bamboo and brown paper, four times and were so counted up to the required number.
It was on my way to one of these fêtes that I saw a woman whose long skirt touched the dusty pavement. I must have been used to seeing long skirts but I think I remember this one because of the dirt on the hem.
At the end of July 1914 I was with my father, mother and brother at Littlehampton. German string bands wearing dark military uniform played in the streets. On August 4th Brian and I were sailing our toy boats in a pond near the sea. A British destroyer appeared off the harbour and a boatload of sailors landed. For us the war had started and we never saw the German bands again. I was then ten years old.
I hated my school days. I was by then, 1914, at Richmond Hill School, from which I was nearly expelled for going home after wiping the board clean of the impositions set me and others. I had been kept in after school hours for over two hours for several days running and had had enough of it. I loathed the masters with one exception, Arthur Noding, who took great interest in my drawing and even showed me two pictures he had painted in oil colour. I will always remember him with gratitude.
Edward Reynell was there too but he left to go to Eastbourne College and soon after my brother and I went to King’s College, Wimbledon.
School days during the 1914-18 War were probably a good deal worse than they are now. Many of the masters were old, dragged out of retirement, the young ones had, many of them, gone to fight. The food was horrid and not plentiful and the classrooms bitterly cold in winter. We had a long journey to and from Wimbledon in unheated trains. My hands and feet were covered in chilblains, often broken ones; I even had them on my ears. I learned almost nothing and was always at the bottom of the class whilst the master, at the far end of the room stood with his back to the meagre fire, his gown held up, trying to warm his behind. One sadist I will not forget, a Mr Stevenson, an old man. His method of punishment was to hit you hard on the head with the edge of a penny. He kept a worn thin Victorian penny in his waistcoat pocket for the purpose and it hurt abominably. Eventually we heard he had been killed in an accident on the railway and we were not sorry.
The war went on and we were now living in Richmond, Mount Ararat Road, and had three soldiers billeted on us and liked them. There were privates Cook and Leapman, and another whose name I have lost. Trenches were dug in Richmond Park and they trained there. In due course they went to France and all survived.
I spent my holidays with a bicycle in Richmond Park. The Horse Guards Blue used to come there, hundreds of them on horseback in blue uniforms. A vet accompanied them but he took no part in their manoeuvres. I made friends with him and he would let me ride his horse. Sitting in the saddle was like sitting in an armchair, it was so comfortable.
When off duty, every soldier had his girl and they took them to the Park and lay down in the bracken. We boys played in the bracken, for it was very high, and we often found money there doubtless fallen from a warrior’s trouser pocket, unheeded in the game of love. I found a French letter too and kept it, wondering what it was for. I was rather innocent still, but when I showed my prize to an older boy he was most interested, explained crudely its purpose and offered me sixpence for it, which I took. Rafferty was his name.
Then once, in Sidmouth Plantation*, I saw the act in progress and was reminded of the cow and the bull. I was interested to see that the man, a civilian as it happened, was able to keep his glasses on all the time, and they were the pince-nez variety, never seen now.
* ‘Sidmouth Plantation’, e.g. the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park which was first established by Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth in the early 19th century. GRH
Meanwhile at school I continued to learn very little. I disliked organized games and a s a result of pressure brought by masters and others had joined the O.T.C.*, which was said to be voluntary. The khaki smelled beastly and made me itch. I had a pair of my mother’s silk stockings under my puttees and even those only took the edge off my discomfort.
* O.T.C.: Officers’ Training Corps, a militaristic feature of private education in the Britain of that period, and indeed much later. JH
We spent a great deal of time in uniform. No one knew how long the war would last and we were being got ready. There were parades, route marches and field days with regular soldiers on the Surrey hills. One of these field days put an end to my membership of the O.T.C. Loaded with equipment and a rifle, we had been at it for hours. The rain came down and soaked us and I can still see the cloud of steam, and smell it, that rose when the hot sun came out and began to dry us. We were told to halt. I felt tired and thirsty and without thinking took a drink from my water bottle. A sixth-form sergeant, a certain Finlayson, dashed up and told me no order had been given to drink, which was true, but he made the mistake of knocking the bottle from my mouth, cutting my lip. I hit him, hard.
Consternation! Captain Oglethorpe appeared. I would be court-martialed when we got back to school. I was. They went through the whole thing in what I assume was the correct army style. Prisoner, remove your cap, take one step back, or forward, or two or three steps. I was charged with disobeying orders and with striking a superior officer. I pleaded guilty to the first charge, not guilty to the second. The superior officer had laid hands on me first and I considered him in the wrong. Overruled – I was sentenced to sweep out the gymnasium every evening for, I think, a month.
I said I would not do it and they were playing at soldiers. To my surprise they let me go. The following Monday, Mondays were always O.T.C. days, I did not go on parade. I spent the afternoon in the library, reading. I never put on khaki again, I never went on parade again and every Monday afternoon until I left King’s I read in the library. Nothing was said. I was left alone and I began to learn something there after all.
The only lessons I enjoyed at King’s were those in English, for we had a master who loved Shakespeare and was able to give some of his love to us, and the classes taken by the Rev. Kingsford. I cannot remember what subject he took, it was not the Bible, but he had a colourful personality and he talked to us about Greece and Rome and fired my imagination. The art classes were not much good. The master, a gentle soul named Hulme, was mercilessly ragged. When he left George Rhead took his place. Rhead was ragged too, but not so badly. He was no teacher and not much of an artist but his father, Woolliscroft Rhead* had been a pupil of Ford Maddox Brown. George Rhead thought I had ability. He got some Dürer engravings and some cartoons for stained glass by Ford Maddox Brown from the V&A and set me to copy them. He told me I must count the number of lines Dürer had used in each passage. Pre-Raphaelite methods, no doubt.
* George Woolliscroft-Rhead junior (1855-1920). GRH
When Woolliscroft Rhead died a big memorial exhibition was arranged by his son in the Great Hall. There were paintings in oil and watercolour, drawings and etchings. The Rossetti-like women in these pictures greatly appealed to my romantic desires. I had already decided I wanted to be an artist and this wish had not made my parents happy and understandably so, for there was no widespread system of grants for students then, and they were not well off. Finally, and largely due to my mother’s influence, it was agreed to let me go to an art school but only on condition I did Design. There was more money in it they said. It was the thin edge of the wedge and I agreed. After some evenings drawing the Antique at Richmond Art School – Charles Wheeler taught there – I went full time to Putney School of Art and for a year I studied Design. Gradually and deliberately I got away from my Design classes and into Life Drawing and Painting and after some years I was able to gain entrance to the Royal Academy Schools.
I have said I hated my schooldays. I did, but I loved my time as an art student. Compared with most of the students I have to teach I was a hard worker, but I had plenty of fun too. Almost without exception I thought highly of my masters and was grateful for what they had to teach me. They were, unlike most present-day teachers, concerned with teaching the craft. They wanted us to learn the job thoroughly. Temperament was not popular with them and ideas were of little use without the knowledge with which to express them. Now, every student in his teens wants to run before he can walk and they are encouraged to try, even told they have succeeded, when in reality they have scarcely begun.
Perhaps it was a method which made me over cautious, for a while, but I am grateful for it and I think it suited me at the time. At Putney, what an eye Toddy Swain had for values and how he kept us at getting them right even if his training was academic and weak academic at that. The Principal, John Bowyer, was a sensitive artist with immense knowledge, George Morrow a great draughtsman – I still have some of the sketches he did for me – and Stanley Anderson before he became an RA and gave up serious work was a teacher with immense vitality, full of ideas and he drew brilliantly.
I did some modelling there under Charles Doman, an amazing technician who helped me and sometimes made me wish to be a sculptor and not a painter.
Charles Sims, who I was really afraid of when I first went to the RA Schools, I came to admire very much. I had made an unfortunate start with a thoroughly bad painting and Sims had first looked at my painting, then at me, again at my painting and again at me without saying a word. Then he said, and I will never forget it: ‘You will agree that when one is called upon to criticize there should be something to criticize.’ I mumbled ‘Yes.’ He then said he could see absolutely nothing there and he left me alone for months. Quite a long time after, I was painting a half- length nude of a model called Marie Noble. Sims, on his way round the class, stopped and looked at it and praised it highly. That same evening, I saw him in the corridor and he said he hoped I had not spoiled the painting. I told him I had done nothing more to it but had begun another. He looked at me through the big horn-rimmed glasses he always wore, ‘It was very good, very good, although,’ he added, ‘it could have been better, but do you know, I have been painting that girl and you got something I couldn’t get.’ He turned and walked quickly away.
Some years after, when I had a studio in Jubilee Place, I met Marie in the Commercial and invited her back for a drink. She began to talk of when she sat at the Schools and how she had sat for Sims too. ‘One day he threw himself at my feet and said he loved me. Wasn’t he a funny man!’
Before Sickert’s visit to the Royal Academy Schools, sometime in 1926 or 7, Charles Sims called the students together. He told us Sickert would be the next visitor, that he was not only one of the greatest painters we had but also one of the greatest teachers. He proposed to give him an absolutely free hand and we were to co-operate in every way.
Sickert arrived the following morning at 10 o’clock. He asked a few pointed questions about methods of work, posing of models and so on and then he proceeded to reorganize everything. It was done quickly and efficiently and his way worked smoothly from the very first day.
He had great authority and great charm. The three models, who normally would have posed singly in three separate studios, were posed together in a group. This group was placed in the centre of the studio. We had been used to having the model placed against a drapery background; now we were told we must relate this group of three to whatever happened to come near and behind them; other students or a corner of the studio, maybe.
The insistence was on drawing, and still more drawing. Drawings were to be considered as ‘documents’. They must contain as much information as possible.
Colour sketches, in oil colour, were to be made, painted in one sitting, on canvas or board ‘primed the colour of a cigar box’. These colour sketches to be as coloured as was consistent with fine tonal values, and they were for use in conjunction with our drawings when we were ready to paint the finished picture – away from nature.
Because one of the girls in the group found her pose too difficult, a man was engaged in her place. He was made to wear a woman’s dress and Sickert bought a wig of long black hair for him.
This model I remember was Mario Mancini, a brother of Alf Mancini the boxer.
‘I am not,’ said Sickert, ‘going to stumble in and out between easels whilst you are working.’ He told us how he wanted us to work and at the end of the week, the models not being present, he expected us to show him all we had done. Each student then received an individual criticism. He was told what applied to his particular needs, yet the criticism was full of advice that was needed by all of us and one gained immensely from listening to all the criticisms; indeed, Sickert expected us to do so.
We were also told to write down what he told us and post our notes to him.
This method, the master posing the models, giving the students a talk on the various possibilities of the motif, leaving them to get on with it and at the end of the week’s work giving each a searching and constructive criticism of their efforts is, of course, not the English method of teaching; at least as I have found it in our Art Schools.
Later, when I studied under André Lhote in Paris, his procedure was the same as Sickert’s.
In our Art Schools the students used to be given far too much attention all the time, and tended to rely on the masters whenever any difficulty arose. In recent years, however, the climate has changed and the majority seem to prefer to be left alone ‘to express themselves’.
Commencing a drawing. We could begin with whichever portion interested us most. We must proceed to relate the shapes immediately next to the one we had started with and so on, constantly relating shape to shape, ‘with no jumps’, until the drawing ‘bumped up against the four edges of the paper’.
This, he said, had been told him by Whistler, who described it as the secret of drawing. Sickert remembered writing it all down on his cuff.
The drawing must be commenced with a faint ‘tentative line’. Next, the values were put in, starting with the darkest, ‘to give the map solidity’, and finally, a firmer, more searching ‘line of definition’ was added.
These were the three main stages, although naturally they could and did overlap according to the ability of the student.
Pencil or black chalk, not too soft and with a good point had to be used and India rubber was not allowed.
Corrections, that is to say several outlines in search of the true one, could be made and when the corrections became confusing, as they often did in the pencil stage, further corrections were put in with ink.
A number of drawings from the same viewpoint was advised for each could contain some extra scrap of information and might play its part in the final building up of the picture.
When it came to deciding the design of the picture, Sickert advised which drawing would work out best. Design was not a word he used, but like Degas, he was a master of the cut. ‘Add a piece here, take off some there’, and the result was usually a piece of good placing, even of good design, in spite of this somewhat chancy procedure.
The drawing was then squared up and a full-size cartoon made, in clear outline. A tracing was taken of this, a thin film of Indian Red being then rubbed over the lines as they showed on the reverse side. The tracing was laid face up on the prepared canvas and the lines gone over carefully with the blunt end of a thin brush handle.
Sickert carried an agate mounted on a wooden handle and he used this for working through.
Now the picture was underpainted in three tones of Indian Red and Flake White, on a white canvas. The surface grease had been removed from this by sponging gently with warm water and Castile soap and sponged again with warm water (to remove any soap) before being carefully dried. The underpainting was very high in key. No medium was used.
Sometimes the underpainting was in Cobalt Blue and White or the cool parts might be painted in Indian Red and White, whilst the warm parts were underpainted with Cobalt Blue and White. This underpainting must be put away to dry, for 12 months if possible, before it was ready for colouring. We must ‘continually prepare and lay down underpaintings ‘as some people laid down wine’, taking them out to work on as they became mature.
The date of preparation was to be written on the back of each.
Sickert painted a colour sketch from the model as a demonstration. Before touching the panel he mixed up all the main values on his palette.
He worked vigorously and quickly, rubbing the paint well into the surface and finishing with slightly more gentle touches made with a fuller brush. He borrowed my brushes and when he had done with them, after an hour or so, they looked like miniature chimney sweep’s brushes, the bristles standing out at right angles to the ferules. He said he was sorry but he always treated brushes roughly.
And talking of right angles, his definition of drawing was ‘the relation of all the angles that occur within the 180 degrees of 2 right angles’. And according to him, if one did this correctly the problems of perspective were automatically solved.
Some time later he chose a drawing I had made which agreed with his demonstration colour sketch and told me to square it up, enlarging it about 2½ times, and underpaint it. This I did and at another demonstration he coloured my underpainting using his colour sketch and my drawing. He also painted a monochrome from a Daily Mail photo of a wedding which he had previously squared up. The brush strokes were crisp and went across the form. He often said that all he told us could be found in William Hunt’s Talks On Art long out of print, and this is largely true.
He came into the Evening Drawing Class only once and looked at the drawings. This was on his first day at the schools.
Ernest Jackson, the Professor of Drawing, asked him what he thought of the work. Sickert was not enthusiastic. At last he told Jackson he liked best my drawing and one by Morland Lewis. These were not, he hastened to add, particularly good drawings but we two had at least drawn the whole figure, whilst the other students only appeared to be interested in highly finished portions – shoulders and arms without hands, legs minus the feet and bodies lacking heads. Jackson never looked at Lewis and myself again. We had not been particular favourites of his and we did not mind.
The drawing class contained, in those days, a number of little figure studies by Thomas Stothard, some in pencil, some in ink, many highly finished. Sickert admired these greatly and sometimes went in, when Jackson had no class, to take another look at them.
Jackson always professed a very low opinion of Stothard.
Sickert had no time for students who did not work and his remark to a girl student who brought her pet dog to the Schools was withering.
He told a student* who showed him drawings in bright blue chalk that he was ‘playing with loaded dice’. Black on white was what was wanted and he would make large crosses on empty spaces where he knew something had been omitted, demanding: ‘What happens here?’
* The student was P. F. Millard. CH.
He divided pictures into two sorts. The ones in which something was going on and the pictures of ‘yearning’ in which nothing happened.
‘Let us have people doing something. Working, making love, misconducting themselves but doing something.’ And figures or groups of figures must not be shown as in a vacuum, always they must exist in relation to their surroundings. One could build up a picture by starting with a table or a chair or a bed.
He had little use for studies as such.* From the start we were encouraged to paint pictures and to make drawings to be used for that purpose.
* Brown’s (Leicester Gallery) story of Sickert in his studio painting from his drawings laid out on the floor and walking over them, wearing hobnailed boots. Brown’s horror – Sickert’s drawings! CH.
I still have some of the drawings I did under Sickert, at least one of my colour sketches and a painting I worked out from these studies.
Sickert’s insistence on good craftsmanship is a thing one seldom comes across now. The methods, or rather lack of method, encouraged in our art schools and made necessary by the Board of Education’s examinations would horrify him as they do all painters trained in a sound tradition.
I have never known a master who gave so much, who was so inspiring to his students. As time goes on I realize that most of his teaching was so basically right it could be applied to almost any point of view – even the Abstract Boys could find something in it, and for all I know perhaps some of them have.
Of course all he taught was absolutely traditional and he would have been the first to admit it.
* * * * *
I have not yet said anything about my other grandmother*, whose husband died before I was born, and this is because I do not associate her so much with my early childhood but with later, when I was a student and my teens. She was born in County Wexford, at Enniscorthy and had a charming accent and very definite opinions. She was a tough old lady and lived almost to her hundredth year eating well to the end and never a day without her whiskey. As a girl she had been to Dickens’ Penny Readings** and when my brother and I were little she sometimes read parts of his books to us. She read with great expression and possibly allowing for the natural talent for mimicry most women possess, she was able to give us a flavour of the great author’s delivery.
*Annie Beatty, née Bishop, her husband’s name was Martin Beatty; he died before Clifford was born and thereafter the family took to calling her Granny Bishop, possibly because of her strong religious convictions. GRH
**Charles Dickens used to give public readings of his works priced at a penny so that as many people as possible could attend. GRH
She had a maid, brought up by Dr Banardo’s Homes, almost a dwarf with a face like a monkey and a heart of gold. ‘Poor little Emily’. My grandmother was most exacting. I painted a small full length of Emily when I was a student and I still have it.
It has long been on my mind that I never loved my father and mother as they deserved. As I grew up, I found I had little in common with my father. He loved old china, furniture, glass and other antiques and had fine taste except in painting, but modern work meant nothing to him. He was good and generous, but I could never in my heart quite forgive him for the occasional thrashings he gave me when I was a child, because, I think, I early guessed he lost his temper when he gave them; but I admired him immensely, for he was a courageous man. Neither of my parents could understand the work I was doing, or trying to do. They were proud of me but only when it could be shown I had accomplished something, like getting into the Academy Schools or winning a Landseer Scholarship, but without their help I should never have been able to survive as an artist. My father would have been truly proud had I succeeded in some form of athletics and that I could never have done.
I had forgotten until now the arrival of refugees from Belgium in 1914. A great number, men, women and children came to Twickenham, just the other side of Richmond Bridge, and some were given work in a munitions factory (the Peladon Works, by the river). A great many of the men were young and looked able bodied and the locals thought these young men should have stayed in their country to fight the Germans. The arrival of the Belgians had one effect on me for it gave me a glimpse of another kind of life. Some shops in the Petersham Road, near the bridge, were turned into cafés. There was sawdust on the floor, bright signs with foreign words, the fronts were open, and the customers sang and sometimes danced whilst a man played a piano. I do not know if they sold alcohol without a licence but they made quite a scandal and were soon closed. I was sorry for I used to like to stand outside and look in, surprised to see people so gay and happy.
The unutterable dreariness of so much of the life in England was beginning to have its effect on me but the almost stunning impact was yet to come, that is years later, after I had achieved one of my greatest wishes – to get away from England to a country where people were not so sad. Inevitably I chose France and the happiness of the year I lived there was, for a time, almost quenched by the misery of being back again in a suburban town surrounded by dull people who never did anything I thought worth the doing, for such was my youthful intolerance.
I first went to Paris in 1925 for a week. My godmother, Aunt Ada, had given me some money (£25) for my 21st birthday present and I insisted on going to Paris with it. I had a tiny dark room in a hotel facing the Gare St Lazare and the noise of the traffic was unending.
There can be no repetition of the excitement one feels on first being in a city and amongst a people one has thought about, and read about for years. Before going I had become so familiar with a large map of the town that, once there, I seldom lost my way. I went to the Louvre, the Luxembourg, Versailles, Malmaison and the tomb of Napoleon and the Folies Bergère, all the places most tourists visit. I was disappointed with the Mona Lisa, thrilled by the Velasquez portraits, and the Rembrandt Bathsheba and the Boeuf Engorgé and among the paintings of battles at Versailles I thought the Delacroix the only great one. The Venus de Milo was not so wonderful as I had expected but the Victory of Samothrace standing at the top of the wide flight of stairs in the Louvre was magnificent. The interior of Notre Dame frightened me and I felt all the cruelty and superstition and ignorance of the Dark Ages. The gloom and sadness reminded me of England. But the view over Paris from the tower, the wind blowing through my hair and the gargoyle inscrutable and fierce was worth an even higher climb.
I painted a little sketch of the rue Bonaparte which I have made, for years, vain attempts to get back from W*, who bought it, and a tiny painting of two women in a box at the theatre which I did in my hotel room from a note made in the theatre.
* W is Winifred Reynell née Bretton, the wife of Clifford’s life-long friend Edward Reynell and my godmother. GRH
One evening a friend, a Norwegian whom I had known in London, took me to Montmartre.
The Place du Tertre was grim and almost deserted, the narrow streets leading to it dark and not so changed as they are now and we saw two large rats. I never saw Montmartre like it again. In 1928, the 30s and even in the 40s, it still had the character of a place apart, a village, but in the 50s it had become impossible, a mere tourist attraction, much of it demolished and daily filled with tourists brought there by charabanc, imagining maybe they were seeing the Montmartre of legend. We had passed a fair in the Boulevard Clichy but my friend, a somewhat sober fellow, had not wanted to visit it. I was determined to, so on the night before I had to leave I paid what I owed at the hotel and went up the rue d’Amsterdam with what money I had left in my pocket.
The fair began at the Place Clichy and extended down the centre of the Boulevard as far as the Place Pigalle. I began at the top and visited every sideshow. I saw dancers, menageries, performing animals. The noise was all around me. The shouts of the barkers could be heard in spite of the unceasing noise of the traffic and the music from the various steam organs. These men had lungs of iron; it was before the days of microphones. Most of them had a towel round their necks with which, from time to time, they wiped the perspiration from their faces.