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~ History, Decorative Arts, Buildings

COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH

Tag Archives: Norwich School of Art

Noël Spencer’s Norwich

15 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich history

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Norwich buildings, Norwich School of Art, vanished Norwich

We’ve already encountered the artist Noël Spencer, most recently when his book on Sculptured Monuments provided inspiration for two posts [1, 2]. He came to Norwich in 1946 as Headmaster of the Art School (then still a department of City College) and retired in 1964 as Principal after the Art School had become a separate institution [3]. Arriving from Huddersfield, Spencer was able to see his adopted home with a stranger’s eye. He seemed more interested in buildings than landscape, making pencil drawings on the spot, recording things that would soon be lost in the post-war period. His name cropped up again when I was introduced to Margaret Pearce who went to the Art School as a 16-year-old student in 1943. She was befriended by Spencer and his wife Vera who lived in Upton Close, Eaton, and who, for many years, sent Christmas cards based on Noël’s drawings of Norwich buildings. Margaret generously passed on these records of lost Norwich, which form the basis of this post.

Plaster casts of antique statues in the School of Art. By Margaret Pearce, mid 1940s

Margaret’s painting of antique figures was made in the School of Art in the ‘new’ (1899) Technical Institute site on St George’s Street. Her work is reminiscent of young Alfred Munnings’ painting made in the last years of the old School of Art when it occupied the top floor of the Free Library at the corner of St Andrew’s and Duke Streets. For much of their occupancy of the Free Library, students drew figures, not from life but from plaster casts. Note the illumination from above; we’ll see this again.

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The Painting Room at the Norwich School of Art, by Alfred Munnings (1897). Courtesy of Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery NWHCM: L2001.4.1

This ink drawing on one of Noël Spencer’s greeting cards is labelled ‘The Norwich Technical Institute. Now the City College and Art School, built beside the Wensum in 1899. Sir John Soane’s Blackfriars Bridge in the foreground.’ Soane built the bridge of Portland stone in 1783-4.

© Estate of Noël Spencer

This was the building that replaced the overcrowded Art School housed on the top floor of the Free Library [4]. But before leaving the Free Library we should acknowledge its place in the history of public libraries. The Libraries Act of 1850 revolutionised access to books, allowing ordinary citizens to borrow items without paying for a subscription. The Norwich Free Library (below) was the first in the country to be constructed under the Act, recovering costs by adding up to a halfpenny to the rates.

The Norwich Free Library at the corner of St Andrew’s Street and Duke Street. Demolished for road widening and replaced by a telephone exchange. © Estate of Noël Spencer

Accommodation for the School of Art on the smaller upper floor proved unsatisfactory from the start. Students were warned not to move about unnecessarily because the floor had dropped away so much that adjacent rooms could seen beneath the partition walls. Cracks in the chimney let the rain in, water closets were condemned, foul air pervaded the building but the problems with the WCs weren’t helped by students flushing modelling clay down the pan [3]. Access to the School of Art on the upper floor was awkward, leading to a demand for a separate entrance and staircase to the top floor [3]. This appears to have been granted for Noël Spencer drew a gate that led up to the School of Art [5].

Newspaper clipping of linocut print by Noël Spencer of the gate leading to the old School. Courtesy of Norwich University of the Arts NUAAR00034

On the Christmas card below, based on a drawing dated 6th of February 1966, we glimpse the western end of the old Free Library/Art School with its roof lantern illuminating the Antique Room. Number 11 St Andrew’s Street was constructed in the 1830s as the Norfolk and Norwich Literary Institute but later housed a variety of municipal offices. Spencer labels it ‘The Old Baths’, the municipal ‘slipper baths’ so named because the towel draped across the bath for modesty made it look, well, like a slipper. The sign on the gable end wall refers to the Deaf Welfare Centre while the building also contained the Guardians of the Poor (later the Public Assistance Department). Other signs on the gable end point to Clarke’s Billiard Club at the rear in what had been the Catholic chapel – the last vestige of the Duke of Norfolk’s Palace. All of this was to be swept away in the 1960s to accommodate the new telephone exchange and the entranceway to the St Andrew’s Street car park [4].

© Estate of Noël Spencer

In 1938 the City Council announced they would be building a new library on compulsorily purchased land centred around St Peter’s Wesleyan Chapel on Lady Lane, not far from St Peter Mancroft. But war intervened and it wasn’t until 1962 that much of what we see on the 1884 OS map was demolished to make way for David Percival’s modernist library, which would be destroyed by fire in 1994. Now, the site is occupied by The Forum, which houses the Millennium Library. What had been Lady Lane became Esperanto Way and is now called Will Kemp Way, which lies behind The Forum.

The building site for the new Central Library was situated between Bethel Street and Theatre Street. St Peter’s Wesleyan Chapel (blue star). Lady Lane (yellow line). St Peter Mancroft (red star). 1884 OS map, courtesy of norwich-heritage.co.uk

In 1960 Noël Spencer recorded the Lady Lane Chapel with his pen as George Plunkett had done with his camera in 1949. This chapel had been designed by John T Patience in 1824 in the same period that he designed the Friends’ Meeting House in Upper Goat Lane (1824) and the Roman Catholic Chapel in Willow Lane (1828) [6].

St Peter’s Chapel, Lady Lane (demolished). Left, Noël Spencer © Estate of Noël Spencer; right, © georgeplunkett.co.uk

Tumblers clicked when I realised that St Peter’s Chapel at the junction of Park Lane and Avenue Road was built as the direct successor to St Peter’s Chapel in Lady Lane. In 1939, as the latter was being marked for destruction, Boardman & Son were supervising its replacement in the Golden Triangle [7]. Currently, the ‘new’ St Peter’s is being converted to apartments. It was built adjacent to a smaller Wesleyan Methodist chapel of 1894 that was evidently stripped of its neo-Gothic identifiers when it was encased in brick and repurposed as the church hall. About two years ago those bricks were removed, revealing a Neo-Gothic window.

Top, St Peter’s Park Lane and its church hall to the right, 2017. Lower left, the church hall being stripped of its brick casing in 2019. Lower right, the original Wesleyan chapel of 1894 before its conversion to a church hall.

In 1954 George Plunkett photographed Plowright’s antique shop at the corner of Tombland and Queen Street. The dilapidated state of the adjacent building is explained by Plunkett’s description of an enemy raid in May 1943 when incendiary bombs gutted Bell’s the estate agents and ‘Plowright’s the antique dealers’ premises next door suffer(ed) severely from blast which scattered and smashed a quantity of valuable silver and glassware.’ [6]

Tombland 1 and Queen Street 1954; note the damage to roof and windows of the building abutting the antiques shop. georgeplunkett.co.uk

By 1956 these buildings had been demolished and Noël Spencer drew, instead, a construction site. Demolition temporarily exposed the ‘hidden church’, St Mary-the-Less, once used by the Walloon strangers as their cloth hall and where French-speaking immigrants worshipped from the sixteenth century until the nineteenth.

Noël Spencer’s greeting card shows RG Carter to be the main contractor for a new branch of the Woolwich Building Society. © Estate of Noël Spencer

Spencer viewed the scene from across the road, from the first floor offices of local architect Ernest Hugh Buckingham (1874-1962). This would have been in a three-storey, round-cornered early C19 building on the site of the ancient Popinjay Inn, roughly where the devastating fire of 1507 started [6]. That building is no longer with us for the corner was presumably demolished as part of the post-war programme of street-widening. The site is now occupied by the bar/restaurant, All-Bar-One. I asked if I could go upstairs to photograph the former building site from Spencer’s vantage point but was told this wasn’t possible. All-Bar-Me then.

Arising on this site was a branch of the Woolwich Equitable Building Society that would obscure the church once more. It is now occupied by Haart the estate agents.

The top of the church tower remains visible; the easily overlooked south entrance is arrowed.
Three cast sculptures from 1957 decorate the former Woolwich building. The martial theme refers to the Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London, which supplied munitions to the British forces.

Another of Spencer’s drawings records a bomb site being levelled in 1949. Trevor Page’s Norfolk Furnishing Establishment had made and upholstered furniture here until it was bombed during a Baedeker raid in August 1942; its loss allowed St John Maddermarket to be seen from Exchange Street [6]. To the far right of the illustration, beneath the tree, we see the stippled wall of the churchyard. This boundary wall was rebuilt in 1578 after land had been borrowed from the crowded graveyard to widen the lane so that Queen Elizabeth I could be conveyed from the Guildhall to the Duke of Norfolk’s palace on the riverside.

Demolition of the furniture shop allowed the Curvilinear east window of St John the Baptist, Maddermarket, to be seen from Exchange Street. The crane bears the name of Edward Edwards whose firm was used on other occasions for groundworks by George Skipper. © Estate of Noël Spencer

1951 was the year of the Festival of Britain, a ‘beacon of change’ for a country recovering from a debilitating war. It was also the year in which the 11-year-old twin King brothers dedicated the forward-looking Norfolk House on this bomb site. Impressed by Halmstad City Hall in Sweden, their father, Raymond King, was determined to introduce a similar note of modernity to Norwich [8]. In spirit, if not in detail, this new building also bears comparison with Norwich’s own City Hall of 1939, which was influenced by Stockholm’s neo-Classical City Hall and Concert Hall. When completed, Norfolk House obscured all but the tip of St John’s tower from Exchange Street.

Right: Norfolk House, currently the home of City College, 1951 (georgeplunkett.co.uk). Left: only the tip of the church tower can be seen from Exchange Street (blue arrow).

Breaking the roofline of the Halmstad City Hall is a sculpture of a man o’ war surmounting a clock (not shown). On Norfolk House this theme is transmuted into the shield of the kingdom of East Anglia topped by a Norfolk wherry.

The designer of this sculpture was James Fletcher-Watson, architect, famous water-colourist and nephew of architect Cecil Upcher, who was the subject of October’s post [10]. In one of those little coincidences in a city bristling with artists, Fletcher-Watson and Spencer portrayed the same lost building on Cow Hill.

Left: Noël Spencer. ‘House on the east side of Cow Hill now demolished’ © Estate of Noël Spencer. Right: James Fletcher-Watson. ‘Junk Shop Cow Hill, Norwich’. Courtesy of Mandell’s Gallery

Another of Spencer’s greeting cards depicts the Golden Ball public house and provides an image missing from a short article I’d written for my recent book [9]. The excellent Norfolk Pubs site locates the Golden Ball pub of 1900 at the corner of Cattlemarket Street and Rising Sun Lane on Castle Hill [11]. The Golden Ball around which my article turned can be seen here, suspended over the junction of the two roads.

An inscription on the inside cover of the card states, ‘”The Golden Ball”, demolished about 1962/Rouen Road passes across the site.’ The words ‘Cattlemarket Street’ and ‘To Spelman’s Horse Sale’ underline the importance of the livestock markets around the castle to the county’s thriving agricultural trade. © Estate of Noël Spencer

The OS map of 1884 shows the Golden Ball pub at the top of Cattlemarket Street at the three-way junction with Golden Ball Street and Rising Sun Lane.

Golden Ball Inn (gold circle); Golden Ball Street (gold line); present-day Prospect House (red star). The blue arrow points to the castle, one map-width away. 1884 OS map.

At the right-hand edge of the map is Prospect Place Works that manufactured agricultural machinery for Holmes & Sons’ beautiful cast-iron-and-glass Victorian showroom (now the Crystal House) on the hill at Cattlemarket Street. This area was to be reconfigured, first by German bombs then by the bulldozers of postwar renewal. In 1962, the Golden Ball pub was compulsorily purchased and, along with Rising Sun Lane, flattened to form a wider, realigned route (Rouen Road) that bypassed narrow King Street. The name ‘prospect’, which must refer to the view across the valley to the Thorpe side, lives on in Prospect House, built in 1970 as the headquarters of Eastern Counties Newspapers. Golden Ball Street remains and the golden globe that once hung over the corner of that street is reimagined in the sculpture by Henry Moore’s assistant, Bernard Meadows, outside the ECN building. Norwich boy Meadows – who would have known the old street and the pub – resurrected the golden ball, now playfully prodded by the apprentice whose master’s works were famously holey and bumpy.

‘Public Sculpture’ by Bernard Meadows at the entrance to the ECN building at the junction of Golden Ball Street and Rouen Road.

In the postwar period, Spencer drew one of only six thatched houses in the city – the sole timber-framed house on Westlegate to survive the twentieth century transformation. The house to the left was demolished to make way for Westlegate Tower.

Left, © Estate of Noël Spencer

The thatched building was once a public house known, in Norfolk dialect, as the Barking Dicky. A comment on the back of the card in Margaret’s hand explains the term.

The Barking Dicky – named after a rather poorly painted sign board of a rampant horse. Norfolk humour for the braying donkey. Norfolk old rhyme – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John/Hold you the dicky bor while I gets on.

Below is one of Spencer’s cards showing two carved figures that puzzled me for a while. The illustration on the greeting card was untitled but an online search turned up a larger version of the drawing labelled, ‘The Fair Tombland, Norwich 1949’.

Tombland Fair © Estate of Noël Spencer

Mention ‘carved figures’ and ‘Tombland’ to Norwich residents and they will automatically think of Samson and Hercules – the pillars holding up the porch of the C17 building in what had been the Anglo-Scandinavian marketplace. Over the years, these famous Norwich strongmen have guarded a war-time dance hall, Ritzy’s night club and a seafood restaurant (when S&H were painted an ignominious shade of lobster red).

Except … except Spencer’s drawings are usually faithful representations and these half figures don’t look anything like the full-length Norwich strongmen. Margaret recognised the jarring note and wrote on the back of the card, ‘Where can this have been, and when?’

Samson and Hercules House, Tombland.

Despite the inconvenient shuttering around a former jewellers we can see that Tombland curves away to the right and not to the left as in Spencer’s drawing.

By tweaking the signage on the stall, to the left of the figures on Spencer’s drawing, it is possible to make out the name ‘Castle Books’.

This is the Castle Book Stall that once stood on Agricultural Hall Plain, several hundred yards to the south of Tombland. The Shirehall – glimpsed below – is to the right, making the large monolithic block to the left in Spencer’s drawing, the Agricultural Hall (now Anglia Television).

Norwich, Castle Book Stall on Agricultural Hall Plain in the 1950s. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Look closely and you can see these supporting figures to have been lit by strings of light bulbs, showing them to have been a fairground attraction. Until the seventeenth century the annual Tombland Fair was held on the Thursday before Easter but for most of the twentieth century ‘Tombland Fair’ was held at Christmas and Easter on the spaces around the Castle mound (e.g., Cattlemarket Street, Castle Meadow, Market Avenue) [12]. The classical portico (circled) down the road belongs to the old Crown Bank (later the Post Office) next to the Agricultural Hall, meaning that the fairground ride was located at the southern border of Agricultural Hall Plain, adjacent to the hall itself.

From right to left, at the junction of Agricultural Hall Plain and present-day Market Avenue, is a fairground attraction; behind the Castle Book Stall is the looming shape of Agricultural Hall, behind which is the portico with Ionic columns (magnified, inset) belonging to the failed Crown Bank at the top of Prince of Wales Road. © Estate of Noël Spencer
The fairground ride (red star), Agricultural Hall (yellow dot) and Crown Bank/Post Office (blue dot) are aligned along the edge of Agricultural Hall Plain. Tombland is marked by the red oblong. Ordnance Survey 1884 .

In response to a request for information, Adam Brown, chair of The Fairground Heritage Trust [13], seems to have identified the actual fairground ride sketched by Noël Spencer. John Thurston and Sons brought their travelling fair to Norwich and to other venues, such as the Cambridge Midsummer Fair and the Mop Fair in Northampton. It was at the Mop Fair where the photograph below was taken in 1949, the year that Spencer made his drawing. The photograph is of an Ark – a ride consisting of cars or gondolas that moved around undulating ‘hills’. Later, this ride would be converted to a more exciting waltzer in which the cars spun around their axes as they moved around the track. The figures adorning the entrance represent Atlas who, with arms bent above his head, bears the weight of the heavens upon his shoulders. These Atlases (or Atlantes, plural of Atlas) were surely the half figures that Noël Spencer drew in 1949.

John Thurston and Sons’ fairground ride at the Northampton Mop Fair, 1949. Reproduced with permission of the University of Sheffield.

Thanks: I am indebted to Margaret Pearce, one-time student of the Norwich School of Art, for her kindness and generosity in providing the Christmas cards sent over the years by Noël and Vera Spencer, and I am grateful to Sarah Scott for making the introduction. Thanks also to Professor Simon Willmoth of Norwich University of the Arts, for providing images from the NUA Collection & Archives, to Clare Everitt of the indispensable Picture Norfolk site, and to Jonathan Plunkett for making his father’s photographs available to all (georgeplunkett.co.uk). Alan Theobald put me on the track of Thurston’s fairground attractions; Adam Brown, Chair of The Fairground Heritage Trust, identified what was probably Spencer’s fairground attraction; and I thank Jo Pike for discussions on Norwich fairs.

And thanks to you, dear reader, for following these posts and for the comments that illuminate our shared fascination with the history of this fine city: I wish you a Happy Christmas.

This post is respectfully dedicated to Noël Spencer who evidently loved Norwich and recorded this city at a time of great change. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holder of Noël Spencer’s images. I will be pleased to give credit and can be reached via the Contact link at the top of the page.

© Reggie Unthank 2021

Christmas present?

‘A Sideways Look at the City’ (£14.99) and the recently reprinted ‘Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle’ (£10) are available from Jarrolds’ Book Department, City Bookshop in Davey Place, and The Bookhive – all in Norwich. ‘Sideways’ can also be purchased from Waterstones, Norwich; The Holt Bookshop; and Kett’s Books, Wymondham.

Sources

  1. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/08/15/sculptured-monuments/
  2. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/09/15/sculptured-monuments-2/
  3. Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton and John Stevens (1982). A Happy Eye: A School of Art in Norwich 1845-1982. Pub: Jarrold & Sons Ltd., Norwich.
  4. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2018/06/15/norwich-knowledge-libraries/
  5. Noël Spencer (1978). Norwich Drawings. Pub: Noël Spencer and Martlet Studio. (A beautiful book, worth seeking online).
  6. www.georgeplunkett.co.uk
  7. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/08/15/post-medieval-norwich-churches/
  8. http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=46
  9. Clive Lloyd (2021). Colonel Unthank’s Norwich: A Sideways Look at the City. See: https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/new-book-2021/
  10. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/10/15/cecil-upcher-soldier-and-architect/
  11. https://norfolkpubs.co.uk/norwich/gnorwich/nchgb.htm
  12. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/fair.htm
  13. https://www.fairground-heritage.org.uk/collections/

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After the Norwich School

15 Friday May 2020

Posted by reggie unthank in Art, Norwich history, Norwich School of Painters

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Norwich artists, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norwich School of Art

Influenced by the Dutch Realists, painters of the Norwich Society of Artists depicted Norfolk’s flat land and tall skies in a largely naturalistic way that avoided the religious or mythological themes that had dominated Italian and French landscape painting [1].  Although this society only lasted as a formal entity from 1803 to 1833, the succeeding generations of Cromes, Cotmans, Stannards and their followers ensured that the Norwich School of Painters continued  into the Victorian era. But by the end of the nineteenth century the influences of Impressionism could no longer be resisted and new groupings evolved.

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‘Haddiscoe Church’ by Sir John Arnesby Brown RA. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery NWHCM 1949.129.5

Sir John Arnesby Brown R.A. (1866-1955), born in Nottingham, was never part of even a late continuation of the Norwich School. After he and the Welsh painter, Mia Edwards, married in 1896, the Arnesby Browns split their time between St Ives, Cornwall, and Haddiscoe to the south-east of Norwich [2]. ‘AB’s’ admiration of Corot’s and Millet’s Impressionist landscapes [3] was reinforced by his visits to Cornwall where the Newlyn School were painting rural scenes in an impressionistic manner. 

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‘Cattle on the Marshes’ by Sir JA Arnesby Brown R.A. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery NWHCM: 1948.99. Brown became known for his painting of cattle, suggested by impressionistic flicks and dabs

Sir Alfred James Munnings (1878-1959), the son of a Suffolk miller, came to Norwich when aged 14. For six years he was an apprentice lithographic artist at Page Brothers printers; he also found time to attend the Norwich School of Art where he painted in the room below.

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‘The Painting Room at the Norwich School of Art’ that won 19-year-old Munnings a National Bronze medal in 1898. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery NWHCM : L2001.4.1. Elsewhere, this room was called the Antique Room, reflecting the Greco-Romano statues that students were expected to draw ‘from the cast’.

This would have been in the old School of Art, built as a third floor extension of the Free Library formerly at the corner of St Andrews Street and Duke Street.

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The School of Art occupied the third floor of the Norwich Free Library, opened in 1857. It was always an unsatisfactory arrangement: the floor needed reinforcing, the lavatories stank [4]. Photo 1955 ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

In 1901 the School of Art moved into the newly-built Norwich Technical Institute, occupying the upper two of its four floors.

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A stone portico fronts the building made from red Gunton Bros’ bricks

We have previously seen young Munnings’ early commercial designs, including the Jolly Brewer for Bullards’ Brewery and the art nouveau-influenced illustrations for Caley’s chocolates and Christmas crackers [see 5].

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Munnings’ illustrations c1900 for the Norwich firm of Caley’s, makers of chocolate and Christmas crackers. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Collections. 

Sir Alfred Munnings took on George Stubbs’ mantle as the country’s leading equestrian painter. He would paint working, hunting and racing horses – even maintaining a studio in Newmarket.  

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‘Gravel Pit in Suffolk’ c1911 by Alfred Munnings. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. NWHCM : 1928.108

President of the Norwich Art Circle 1932-4, Munnings was knighted in 1944, the year he was made President of the Royal Academy. In a notorious retirement speech broadcast by the BBC, a sozzled Munnings lashed out against modernism and accused Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso of adulterating art.

There must have been something in the East Anglian air for, 53 years earlier, similarly reactionary views had been expressed by a critic from the Eastern Daily Press when he attacked Catherine Maude Nichols (1847-1923) for daring to introduce elements of French Impressionism to the Norwich Art Circle. Miss Nichols was well able to fight her corner for she had travelled to Barbizon near Paris, and Newlyn in Cornwall to familiarise herself with painting outside the East Anglian bubble [see previous post on CM Nichols].

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‘Lime Pit Cottages, Ipswich Road, Norwich.’ NWHCM: 1917.1

Edward Seago (1910-1974) was born in Norwich, the son of a regional manager of a Norwich coal merchant. From his sixteenth birthday and ten years after, Seago exhibited with the Norwich Art Circle . The Circle had formed in 1885 but Alfred Munnings and Arnesby Brown were still contributing when Seago joined. Although Munnings took a personal interest in the young man’s work [6], and Arnesby Brown is said to have given him tuition [7], Seago is generally thought of a self-taught artist with influences ranging from East Anglian artists like Constable, Cotman and Crome to the Dutch Realists. From 1947 he lived on the Broads at the Dutch House, Ludham, and in the decades that followed he was to enjoy enormous success, with collectors queueing down Old Bond Street to make sure of buying a Seago at one of his annual exhibitions at the Colnaghi Gallery. 

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‘Winter Landscape, Norfolk’ by Edward Seago. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. NWHCM : 1963.253

Despite his enormous popularity with the public, Seago did not achieve enduring critical success, probably because his instincts were derived from East Anglian tradition instead of the avant garde.

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‘The Haystack’ by Edward Seago. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. NWHCM : 1976.77

Mary Newcomb (1922-2008) was born in Harrow-on-the Hill but spent most of her painting life in East Anglia, including farmhouses at Needham, in South Norfolk, and Newton Flotman, ten miles south of Norwich [3]. She exhibited at the Norfolk and Norwich Art Circle from 1951 to 1963, was a member of the Norwich Twenty Group, and  was a visiting tutor at the School of Art in the 1980s. As someone trained in science, Mary Newcomb had a clear idea of how nature worked, yet as a self-taught artist she remained unbothered – perhaps deliberately so – by the traditional spatial concerns of setting down the countryside on canvas. Perspective, depth, recession seem to play little part in her paintings, which can be read as mood boards in which ideas float in a shallow picture plane. These poetical works were often enlivened by descriptive titles: e.g., ‘Lady defying advancing waves and hot driving sand (she is quite safe).’

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‘Moths and Men with Hay, August’ © estate of  Mary Newcomb (1960). Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. NWHCM: 2002.2.1

Jeffery Camp (1923-2020) was born in Oulton Broad, south of the border, down Lowestoft way. In the 1950s he taught at the Norwich School of Art and it was during this period that he won a competition run by the Eastern Daily Press to paint a reredos above the altar of St Alban’s – a beautifully-detailed interwar church in the Norwich suburb of Lakenham.

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‘Christ in Majesty above Norwich’ by Jeffery Camp 1955

It was in London that Camp made his reputation. In the 1960s he taught first at the Chelsea School of Art then at the Slade. In 1961 he had been  elected a member of The London Group, which had been set up in 1913 by metropolitan artists such as Walter Sickert and Wyndham Lewis to ensure that contemporary art, of the kind not supported by the Royal Academy, would have a voice. In 1984 he became a Royal Academician [8].

In some ways comparable to the London Group (although not composed exclusively of artists), the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society was founded in 1956 to suggest contemporary art to the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery that would counterbalance its fine collection of Norwich School painting. In 1959, an exhibition that included works by Lucian Freud and Jeffery Camp raised enough money for NCAS to purchase a painting by Camp and to loan it to the museum.

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‘Golden Clifftop 1959’ © estate of  Jeffery Camp. NWHCM: 1960.30

In the 1950s, Sheffield-born Derrick Greaves (b. 1927) achieved early fame as one of the four Kitchen Sink painters (along with Ed Middleditch, John Bratby and Jack Smith). In the post-war years their work focused on everyday lives. But by the time Greaves set up the Printmaking Department at the Norwich School of Art (1983-1991) Pop Art had made incursions and his own style had undergone a radical change: ‘I made attempts to form a pictorial language which would be easily accessible to all who cared to look’ [9]. His paintings became highly stylised, involving abstracted outlines of objects often set in intense fields of colour. He still lives and works in rural Norfolk.

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‘Irises’ © Derrick Greaves. Courtesy of Mandell’s Gallery, Norwich

The enterprising Mandell’s Gallery of Elm Hill is holding an online exhibition of Derrick Greaves’ recent work. Click here for further details.

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Edward Middleditch R.A. (1923-1987) – another member of the Kitchen Sink School – came to the Norwich School of Art as part-time Head of Fine Art (1964-1984) before becoming Keeper in charge of ‘Schools’ at the Royal Academy.  After the early fascination with social realism his work, too, became more stylised, although he retained his love of flowers and landscape throughout.

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‘Cow Parsley'(1956) by Edward Middleditch. ©Estate of Edward Middleditch. Photo credit: Walker Art Gallery

Michael Andrews (1928-1995) was born in what would become known as Norwich’s Golden Triangle. He was born in 142 Glebe Road at a time when older residents could still remember the site as open fields belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Norwich Cathedral. His association with the Norwich School of Art began in the Sixth Form, when he attended Saturday morning painting classes held by Lesley Davenport.

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© Estate of Lesley Davenport, self-portrait. Member of the Norwich Twenty Group

In the early 1950s, Andrews was taught at the Slade School of Fine Art by the Principal, William Coldstream; later, he taught at the Slade himself. In 1976, RB Kitaj wrote about ‘The School of London’, conjuring up a loose group of ‘world class’ painters who were adhering to figurative art in the face of abstraction. Michael Andrews was one of this group, along with Lucien Freud, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Francis Bacon.

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Taken in Wheeler’s Restaurant Soho 1963, The School of London artists: Tim Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews CREDIT: JOHN DEAKIN / GETTY

Despite being included in a cohort that represented the human form in a largely figurative way, Andrews himself painted very few portraits [10]. However, his painting showing him teaching his daughter to swim sold for over a million pounds in the 1980s and is one of the favourites hanging in the Tate Gallery.

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‘Melanie and me swimming’ by Michael Andrews 1978-9. ©The estate of Michael Andrews

In 1981 he returned to Norfolk to live at Saxlingham Nethergate, about 10 miles south of Norwich. Michael Andrews was a member of the Norwich Twenty Group. 

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‘The Lord Mayor’s Reception in Norwich Castle Keep on the eve of the installation of the first Chancellor of the University of East Anglia’ (1966-9), by Michael Andrews. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery NWHCM: 1968.820

In the second half of the C20, in an age of abstraction, life drawing was increasingly abandoned and Life Rooms closed down. To counteract this loss of essential skills the Head of Fine Art at the Norwich School of Art, Edward Middleditch, recruited the ‘Two Johns’,  John Wonnacott (b.1940) and John Lessore (nephew of Walter Sickert), to develop the Life Room. wonnacott.jpg

 ‘The Life Room (Norwich School of Art)’ © John Wonnacot (1977-1980). Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. NWHCM : 1981.92. The plaster casts were still there when I attended life drawing classes in the mid-1980s.

Between 1978 and 1986, Wonnacott taught the traditional skills necessary for figurative painting: looking, measuring, seeing the relationships between objects, the negative shapes, looking again. Wonnacott’s own work is characterised by a wide-angle view.

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‘The Norwich School of Art’ (1982-4). © John Wonnacott

Colin Self (b.1941), born in Rackheath and living in Norwich, is firmly rooted in East Anglia and can trace his Norfolk ancestors to the Domesday Book. He studied at the Norwich School of Art where he was encouraged by Michael Andrews, but it was after his time in London, at the Slade School of Fine Art, that he emerged as a major figure in the Pop Art movement [3, 11]. Pop Art took its cues from supposedly ‘low’ culture – movies, pop music, consumerism – but Colin Self’s early work was influenced by Cold War politics and thoughts about the nuclear threat. This work, which depicts a battery of Bloodhound missiles, was influenced by staying on a Norfolk farm near a US airbase [12].

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‘Guard dog on a missile base, No1′ by Colin Self 1965 ©Colin Self. Photo Credit: Tate

‘The landscape in some ways is my visual script’ (Colin Self) [13].

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 ‘Large Harvest Field with two Hay Bales at Happisburgh, Norfolk, Wednesday, 19th September’ © Colin Self 1984. NWHCM : 1998.505.9

As far back as 1885, ‘Schools of Art turned out droves of talented academic female artists’ who, at least in Norwich, were winning most of the major annual prizes [4]: women were not to head those departments until a century later. In 1985 (to 89), Brazilian-born Ana Maria Pacheco (b.1943) succeeded Edward Middleditch as Head of Fine Art at the Norwich School of Art, becoming the first female to hold such a post in the UK.

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‘Perils of Faith’ © Ana Maria Pacheco 1990. Etching. Photo credit: tooveys.com

Pacheco, also a printmaker and painter, is primarily known for her sculptures. These involve slightly larger than life-sized figures carved from single lime trees. Two main themes in these dark and thought-provoking works are the imposition of power and the tension between the Old World of her birth and the New.

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‘Shadows of the Wanderer’  ©Ana Maria Pacheco. Exhibited in Norwich Cathedral (2008). Photo credit: Pratt Contemporary Art

Gerard Stamp (b. 1955), who lives in Norfolk, was educated at Norwich School where he was taught painting in a room above the cathedral’s Ethelbert Gate [14].

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‘St Ethelbert’s Gate’ by John Sell Cotman 1817. The upper chamber, where Stamp was taught art, was once a chapel that figured in the riots of 1272. The gatehouse has been restored since Cotman’s day.

Gerard Stamp does paint landscape though he is better known for his ethereal watercolours of Norfolk’s medieval churches. His experience as an illustrator and designer is part of his painting but it never dominates; the overriding impression is of the kind of mystery and stillness that Cotman imparted to his own unpeopled churches. To achieve this, Stamp makes a pencil drawing that he completes in watercolour as a first stage. ‘Then (when it’s bone dry) I wash over the entire painting with copious quantities of water, sometimes with a sponge. That removes pretty well everything (including pencil) but leaves the stained paper (which looks a bit like an image seen through tracing paper). Then I rework the entire painting again.’

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‘Salle Choir Stalls, 2005’ © Gerard Stamp

Cotman thought that St Michael Coslany in Norwich-over-the-Water provided one of the nation’s finest examples of flintwork [15]. Here, Stamp captures the beautiful tracery flushwork that echoes the lacework of stone in the upper part of the window.

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‘St Michael Coslany’ by ©Gerard Stamp. 

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‘St Michael Coslany’ by John Sell Cotman 1814

The influence of the Norwich School of Painters continued to be felt throughout the C19 but, by the end of that century, Impressionism had arrived and local art became open to the many art movements that followed. As we have read, it wasn’t until the latter part of the C20 that women occupied positions of influence in the art schools and from 2001-2008 Susan Tuckett became Principal of the Norwich School of Art and Design. Of course, many of Norwich’s female artists work outside any formal or academic grouping. Here are two personal favourites:

Zheni Maslarova Warner, born in Bulgaria in 1954, has lived in Norwich since obtaining her degree in Fine Art in her early twenties. At the Norwich School of Art she studied under Ed Middleditch and Derrick Greaves and later taught life drawing at the NSA. Since then she has migrated from the figurative to the abstract, producing canvases reminiscent of the colourist Howard Hodgkin. The titles of her works seem playful rather than descriptive for Warner is motivated largely by colour, building up depth and luminosity with rich layers of paint. After a viewer at a gallery looked at the back of one painting, convinced it was lit from behind, Warner started to use light boxes and neon, embroidering her paintings with illuminated wire as a further play with colour and light.  

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‘Show us the caskets of your rich memories/Those wonderful jewels of stars and stratosphere’ © Zheni Warner (2008). Photo credit: saatchiart.com

 Jayne Ivimey’s (b.1946) artistic connection with Norwich runs deep: her great-great-great-grandfather was one-time President of the Norwich Society of Artists, James Stark. Ivimey went to the High School, studied art at The Sorbonne before returning to Norwich for her Master’s degree at Norwich University College of the Arts (one of the Art School’s various incarnations). Like her friend Mary Newcomb, she is fiercely observant of the natural world. She seems as much an investigator as artist with works including: a study of the effect on salt meeting fresh water; the Beaufort wind scale; coastal erosion; and the grim drop in the number of bird species.  

The Red List makes shocking reading for it numbers the endangered bird species that have declined by at least 50% in the last twenty five years. In response, Jayne Ivimey visited Norwich Castle Museum and other collections to see the preserved bird ‘skins.’ These were then sculpted in stoneware clay that was fired to matt bisque, which – in contrast to shiny ceramic – confronts us with the ghostliness of things we are about to lose. In her words, ‘a material that remains a material rather than an art form.‘

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‘The Red List’ 2016 © Jayne Ivimey

This is a personal look at art in Norwich and I am only too aware of the many fine artists I’ve omitted. Apologies.

©Reggie Unthank 2020

Sources

  1. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2019/09/15/the-norwich-school-of-painters/
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mia_Arnesby_Brown
  3. Ian Collins (1990). A Broad Canvas. Pub: Parke Sutton Publishing, Norwich.
  4. Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton and John Stevens (1982). A Happy Eye: A School of Art in Norwich 1845-1982.  Pub: Jarrold & Sons Ltd., Norwich.
  5. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2019/03/
  6. https://www.richardgreen.com/artist/edward-seago/
  7. http://www.portlandgallery.com/artists/30911/biography/edward-seago
  8. Adrienne May and Brian Watts (2003) Wide Skies Pub: Halsgrove.
  9. https://www.artuk.org/discover/artists/greaves-derrick-b-1927
  10. https://gagosian.com/artists/michael-andrews/
  11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Self
  12. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/self-guard-dog-on-a-missile-base-no-1-t01850
  13. http://www.bbc.co.uk/norfolk/content/articles/2005/05/16/visual_pob_colin_self_feature.shtml
  14. Ian Collins (2010). Watermarks: Art in East Anglia. Pub: Black Dog Books, Norwich.
  15. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/07/07/flint-buildings/
  16. https://jayneivimey.com/index.html

Thanks. For discussions, I am grateful to Keith Roberts, John Allen, Gerard Stamp and Jayne Ivimey. Ian Collins’ books were invaluable. The Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery was the source of many paintings in this post; explore their treasures on http://norfolkmuseumscollections.org/#!/home.

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