Edward Bawden:Hymn from a Village.

I'd never even heard of Edward Bawden when I first saw notice of the Dulwich Picture Gallery's retrospective of his career and if it hadn't been held somewhere so close to my home I may not have gone. I'd have missed out. Turns out that Bawden had a talent that was quite singular, at times jaunty, at times serious, and often very English whilst at the same time remaining open and respectful to other cultures. It was a joy to be finally acquainted with Bawden, even if the man himself died twenty-nine years ago in Saffron Walden.

Albert Bridge (1966)

Judging by the scarcity of the tickets and how packed each of the six rooms of the exhibition were I'd missed an important memo. Bawden seems to have been better known for his book covers, posters, and illustrations than his straightforward 'art' but to these eyes he seems to have mastered every discipline he turned his hand to.

Born in 1903 in Braintree, Bawden studied at Cambridge School of Art before moving on to the Royal College of Art where he befriended the latterly more celebrated Eric Ravilious. Later he'd find gainful employment designing brochures and advertisments for Ealing comedies like Hue and Cry and the delightful Titfield Thunderbolt, a film I watched at home with my parents on Xmas Eve 2013 whilst enjoying a bottle of Moorhouse's Black Cat. Who says Facebook, and its 'memories' function, has no use?

The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953)

The Showboat at Baghdad (1944)

The poster, like most of Bawden's work, is an utter delight. Faux-naif, and multi-coloured, railwaymen and friends chug along as the names of the film's stars, and film itself, appear in puffs of smoke above the titular thunderbolt. It's pitched just right for the gentle, innocent, comedy it promotes.

Equally The Showboat at Baghdad and Newhaven Harbour seem to carry just as much, or as little, gravitas as they need to. The Showboat was a British propaganda ship that sailed up and down the Tigris in a display of ostensibly soft power that also doubled as a passive-aggressive assertion of power.

Newhaven Harbour, at the mouth of the Ouse, is very much a working port (the principal one for the movement of men and materiel to the continent during World War I) but Bawden still manages to find beauty in it. In this it's typical of his work. Work that always seems to find, or at the very least seeks to find, both the humanity and humour in whichever subject is being addressed.

Newhaven Harbour (1955)

York Races (1961)

Hyde Park (1925)

Map of the British Empire Exhibition (1924)

York races, Hyde Park, and the British Empire Exhibition all come under Bawden's exacting, yet appreciative, scrutiny. The exhibition's not chronologically curated in the slightest and this works well in that we get to see how Bawden's style remained fairly constant throughout his career. The convoluted, intricate mapping of the British Empire Exhibition stands further apart from the following year's illustration of horses galloping along Hyde Park's Rotten Row than it does the almost Mr Benn/Paddington like York Races from 37 years later.

As much as the Map of the British Empire Exhibition (commissioned by the infamous transport administrator Frank Pick) is so crammed full of detail it's near impossible to take in without a magnifying glass Bawden could keep it simple too. 1927's Tree and Cow would make a cool tablecloth or some quirky wrapping paper so simple, yet geometrically pleasing, is its design.

Bawden loved village life and after marrying potter Charlotte Epton in 1932 and having two children he moved from Hammersmith to Great Bardfield, a mildly picturesque village on the outskirts of Braintree, where he took to gardening with some gusto. Money was coming in from commissions for Shell, Poole Pottery, and London Transport but he was also designing cookbook covers and it seems like the gardening and the cookery were more his passion than the corporate work. It appears he'd slipped into domestic bliss as comfortably as one does an old pair of slippers.

Tree and Cow (1927)

Francis Bacon's Garden (1928)

Derelict Cab aka My Heart, Untravel'd, Fondly Turns to Thee (1933)

In 1933 he was given his first solo show at the Zwemmer gallery in London and the curators have provided us with a fine example of one of the works on show. Derelict Cab very much seems to dwell on the content home life, and love, of the Bawdens. It's said that the watering cans are 'talking' and even that they're intended to represent Edward and Charlotte.

Later in his career, as interest in watercolour waned, Bawden focused more on linocuts and these marked the point, for me, when he moved from a good artist to a great one. Agave and Autum are joys to behold, managing to simultaneously display both depth and a flattened perspective. 

Bawden had been taught by Paul Nash, not just one of the best British artists of the era but one of the best British artists ever, and in works like Road to Thaxted, Lindsell Church, and Christ, I Have Been Many Times to Church you can see, just about, how Nash's exhortation to explore the concept of the genius loci, the memory palace, came to bear on the younger man's work.

Agave (1970s)

Autumn (1950)

Road to Thaxted (1956)

Christ, I Have Been Many Times to Church (1933)

Lindsell Church (1963)

These are all utterly delightful works that reward, almost demand, repeat viewings but it's with 1936's March:Noon that we can most see the influence of the teacher on the student. If I didn't know better I'd have presumed it be a Nash. Those long thin trees (in Nash's work ciphers for people but in Bawden's?) flanking uncertain paths into uncertain futures. It aches with the anxiety of an artist who knows the good life is out there somewhere, has even experienced it, but can also see the dark clouds of war beginning to form in the sky.

It was painted in 1936 and at that time, in Europe, not all was as quiet, as desolate, as Great Bardfield's High Street. Three years later Bawden was appointed an official war artist and the home loving, devoted husband, father, and gardener was thrust into the big wide world just as that world entered its most tumultuous, and deadly, phase.

Bawden was posted to both France and Egypt from where he visited Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Ethiopia (where he made a gothic, portentous rendering of the Catholic Church in Addis Ababa). Not only did he imbue the edifices of southern Europe, Africa, and Asia with just as much as passion and detail as he did Great Bardfield High Street or the houses of Ironbridge he extended the same courtesy to his human sitters.

March:Noon (1936)

With Little Here to See or Do aka The High Street, Great Barfield (1933)

The Catholic Church, Addis Ababa (1941)

Houses at Ironbridge (1956-57)

Canmore Mountain Range (1950)

Zeminchel Tesfai, Eritrea Police Formed by the British Administration, Asmara (1940-44)

At a time when many artists would've been more interested in 'types' than actual humans, Bawden took time not only to learn his subject's names and professions but to find out something about them. For an artist who'd previously shunned portraiture, Bawden did a great job in eking out something of the essence of characters like Zeminchel Tesfai, a youthful looking Eritrean policeman whose fancy uniform can't quite cover up the anguish he must have felt about finding himself embrioled in such a war.

Elsewhere, Bawden gave dignity to Indian units deployed to Iraq, refugees in the northern Italian city of Udine, and a ruined bridge over the Po near Ferrera. At first glance they look almost like rough sketches but further investigation reveals them to be full of detail. Bawden was not the sort of artist to retreat to the solitude of the studio, always preferring to paint plein air.

Shaikh Haji Farhud al-Fandi of the Hatcham Tribe (1940-44)

Baghdad:A View of the River Tigris and of the Camp of the Hygiene Section, an Indian Unit (1943)

Refugees at Udine (1945)

A Pontoon Bailey Bridge Over the River Po near Ferrera (1945)

Back in the home country Bawden kept developing, honing, englarging even, his signature style. Albert Bridge, Bushy Park, Brighton Pier, Liverpool Street station, and the markets of Covent Garden and Borough joined pre-war favourites London Zoo and Hyde Park in Bawden's ever more impressive catalogue of works.

These are probably my favourites of all his works. They seem to celebrate, at the same time, the marvels of Victorian engineering, the dignity of labour, and the simple joy of observing the world, and the people, around you. I love the empty boat on the beach at Brighton, the Lowryesque figures rushing for trains at Liverpool Street (as an Essex native it's to be assumed Bawden was very familiar with this particular station), and the mighty Southwark Cathedral rising up to occupy the top right of Borough Market.

These could almost be illustrations for a children's book such is their innocent joy and it's difficult to escape the fact that Bawden, after the war, and like many others, was now seeking solace with that in which he felt most comfortable. For a proud villager, Bawden did good London (and Brighton, and York).

Brighton Pier (1958)

London Zoo (1937)

Liverpool Street Station (1961)

Six London Markets:Covent Garden (1967)

Six London Markets:Borough Market (1967)

City (1952)

He gave St.Paul's an imposing aspect quite at odds with the, oft sunlit and illuminated, view many of us may have of it these days either from Waterloo Bridge or the South Bank. Yet, at the same time, in 1952's City he added splurges of colour to a London still war damaged and full of rubble (as many an Ealing comedy will show you) and often smog-ridden and dark. 

It's a style that's more in keeping with 'cool' American artists like Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis, almost as if Bawden is proudly, and correctly, asserting that one day London will recover from the ravages of the recent conflict and be able to look the great bombastic American cities of New York and Chicago in the eye again. Even if that eye, like the pigeon's in City, is formed of a London Transport logo.

St Paul's Cathedral (1958)

Tyger Tyger (1974)

Bunyan's Dream (1977-80)

Quirky to the end, Bawden may have seen beauty in the destruction of architecture but he saw more in the architecture itself - but then he seemed to see beauty wherever he looked. Kew Gardens, Aesop's fables, the Natural History Museum, Fortnum & Mason, all of these fell under the appreciative gaze of Edward Bawden and all of them became subjects of his work. He designed the cover for a book on Leonardo da Vinci with no more or less passion than the one he did for a London A-Z. 

He took from the highbrow to add to the lowbrow and he took from the lowbrow to add to the highbrow. In using a Snakes'n'Ladders board as a template for a portrait of Pilgrim's Progress author John Bunyan, Bawden showed that he saw no distinction between these different 'brows'. Bawden, it seems, just saw beauty and, thankfully for us, he had the talent, generosity, and platform to share it.

I walked back home through Dulwich Park where I stopped for a mug of tea and a slice of ginger cake, thus completing the sort of quintessentially English day you can't help thinking Edward Bawden would approve of. Jolly good show.

Sahara (1928)