STAITHES : LIFE, LIGHT AND LANDSCAPE

By Adam Chadwick

Kulturalis Ltd., 279 pages. £45. ISBN 978-1-83636-007-0

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Adam Chadwick, writing about the decline of places like Scarborough and Whitby as ports and centres for commercial fishing, points to how the development of the railway system, leading to increased tourism, provided new sources of employment and income.  Smaller locations, such as Staithes, Runswick, and Robin Hood’s Bay, however, tended to be left behind. As a consequence, “they remained relatively unspoilt in comparison. Increasingly, they featured as desirable destinations for middle-class visitors”, including artists attracted by the opportunity to capture on canvas the lives, dress, and customs of the local inhabitants.

There are interesting questions to be asked about why painters and others chose to, in a sense, retreat from the “modern” world, with its urbanisation and its towns and cities and their crowded streets. I recall some years ago seeing an exhibition of paintings by the Glasgow Boys, and being struck by the fact that, despite Glasgow’s status as a major industrial city, none of the canvases on display gave an indication of a factory chimney, a dockside scene, or a busy thoroughfare. It may, of course, have been a simple matter of what the art market wanted. A rural landscape, or a colourful coastal view, would have been more likely to have interested a potential buyer than s picture of a tram trundling along a busy street. If I can put it in more personal terms, my mother would have preferred a print or a postcard of a country scene than one of the mining community she came from or the cotton mill where she worked. It’s perfectly natural to want something pleasing to look at.

Leaving all that aside, Staithes, the central subject of Chadwick’s impressive book, was, for a time (roughly 1894 to 1909), a centre for artists and photographers keen to capture what was a way of life that would soon disappear. To be fair to the artists, their presence wasn’t just a matter of commercial considerations. There was a reaction in the late-nineteenth century to the dominance of what Chadwick refers to as an “overbearing establishment” and the “Victorian notion of painting as narrative and part of a ‘social mission’ ”. Many of the artists Chadwick mentions had studied abroad, often in Paris at the Académie Julian but also in Antwerp and elsewhere, so their horizons had been widened to take in new techniques and ideas. They didn’t completely follow the latest trends from the Continent, but rather adopted certain innovations to suit themselves and used them alongside the disciplines they had been taught in art schools.

I think It’s true to say that if there were influences from France they were more often than not taken from artists like Bastien Lepage, Daubigny, and the painters of the Barbizon School, as can be seen in William Gilbert Foster’s “The Azure Mead” or Owen Bowen’s “Showery Haytime at Robin Hood’s Bay”. There is also something to be said for pointing to the lessons learned by Staithes painters who visited artists’ colonies in Holland, especially Laren. The Hague School, as it was called, shared similar concerns in wanting to portray the day-to-day experiences of the fishing communities. All this springs to mind when I come across what must be one of the most overused (and misused) terms, British Impressionists, in the lexicon of art criticism.

Chadwick spends some time discussing the Staithes Arts Club, its members, and its activities. It’s a useful exercise, though not all of the painters associated with Staithes were members. A lot of those who were there, at one time or another, were short-term visitors, particularly during the summer months. But of those who were members, one who stands out, probably because I’m reasonably familiar with some of his work, was Fred W. Jackson, originally from Middleton in Lancashire. Chadwick says he was “the first Art Club member to visit Staithes, Runswick Bay, and the surrounding area”.  His painting of Runswick Bay, reproduced in the book, shows him, as Chadwick says, “at the height of his powers”.  It shouldn’t be forgotten that, as a professional painter, Jackson had to take on less adventurous work to make money. Commissions for portraits were always welcome, and town halls and galleries in Oldham and Rochdale have their share of long-forgotten worthies. I’ve always been amused by occasional ventures into town halls generally and their displays of similar dignitaries.

Laura and Harold Knight were two of the better-known artists who lived in Staithes, though they later moved to Newlyn to mix with painters there and in Lamorna. Michael Cross, who wrote the introduction to the small catalogue of a 1978 Fred Jackson exhibition in Rochdale, suggested that the Staithes Group “lacked that vital Bohemian element which was a feature of its counterpart in Cornwall, the Newlyn Group”. Chadwick contests this and refers to a variety of activities to indicate that there was a lively social scene among the artists. It’s difficult to know for sure, but from the evidence he provides it did seem to centre around cricket matches, harmless practical jokes, and polite get-togethers, as opposed to the sort of high jinks often associated with artists. And the Arts Club appears to have been a somewhat staid establishment. There was a little bit of scandal when Fred Mayor and Hannah Hoyland eloped (her father had opposed her marriage to a penniless artist) to France. Her “Still Life of Roses” is an attractive, if conventional painting, whereas his watercolour, “A Staithes Fisherman”  is instructive of his observational skills. The man is more than a face on a canvas. And there is the fascinating “Le Touquet, Paris Plage”, which is almost all sky, and as Chadwick asserts, veers towards abstraction. Fred Mayor, who suffered from asthma. died in 1916 and it makes one wonder what he might have progressed to.

Going back to the Knights, there is little doubt that, during their time in Staithes, Harold was the better artist. His “Herring Boats” is a splendid picture of a crowded harbour with men busy on the boats, while his “Rough Seas at Whitby” captures the drama of a “trawler-tug towing a sailing vessel into port”. Laura, for her part, seemed to be feeling her way towards a personal style. Her “Fishing Fleet” and “Packing Fish on the Quay” are both good examples of life in Staithes, though perhaps still a little uneven in terms of technique. But I do find her “Staithes”, with its view of “the sharp descent into the Village”, appealing.  There is a later painting, “Spring” dating from 1916, and painted in Cornwall and not Staithes, which is more accomplished. It looks almost idyllic, with a rainbow over a country scene and two relaxed people to the foreground of the canvas..  It’s a curious picture and strikes me as somewhat contrived and more a product of the imagination than any authentic scene.

I referred to photographers earlier, and it’s a valuable aspect of Chadwick’s book that it has information about some of those active in and around Staithes. One of them, Frank Sutcliffe, had a photographic studio in Whitby, where he carried out the usual commitments necessary to make a living, i.e. portraits and the like. But he was much more adventurous, and one of his photos, “Flag of Distress”, showing a ship that has run aground, has in its composition some aspects of a painting. The same can be said of “Farmer and Cart”, but the Sutcliffe photograph that really impressed me is “Trees in Mist”. As Chadwick notes, it “turned a mundane subject into a prize-winning exhibit at a Tokyo show in 1893”.  It invites attention. In a comment on Sutcliffe’s relationship to art, Chadwick writes : “He was also only too aware of artistic techniques and clear in his belief that artists had used his photographs. The visual parallels that John Atkinson Grimshaw’s scenes of Whitby harbour by moonlight bear to those of Sutcliffe, for instance, are only part of extensive circumstantial evidence”.

Laura Knight is the female artist now most associated with Staithes, but she wasn’t the only one active in that area in the 1890s and early-1900s. I’ve mentioned Hannah Mayor, and Isa Jobling, from what I’ve seen of her work, had the potential to be a significant painter. Her bright “Haymaking” makes an impact immediately one looks at it. The combination of rural work, with the sea in the distance, sums up life in and around Staithes.  Florence Hess “was introduced to Runswick Bay by her teacher Mark Senior”, and became his good friend. Her “Leeds Wharf”, though obviously not a Staithes painting, is striking and indicates an awareness of industrial matters, whereas her “Sandsend Beck” is clearly Staithes. A portrait of Hess was painted by Senior. Hess painted in a variety of places over the years, and her work can be appealing to the eye. There must have been other women among the many short-term visitors to Staithes and Runswick Bay, and no doubt some of them produced paintings that were never shown in public and no longer survive.

I think I ought to mention Enid Pease Robinson  whose “illustrated diary….provides invaluable first-hand testimony to the artists’ characters and social life”. Her caricatures of them playing cricket and generally socialising are fascinating to see. Chadwick says that “These sketches, many of which are published for the first time, explain why Enid demurred, appended as they are with personal notes that flattered or criticised her subjects”.

It ought to be evident that life in Staithes, especially in winter, could be less than comfortable. Chadwick refers to the well-known description by Laura Knight of Fred Jackson painting outdoors : “Under the mittens he wore, his hands were swollen, stiff and chapped, as were the edges of his ears and the wings of his nostrils”. Norman Garstin, based in Cornwall, said something similar when he remarked, that no painting could be considered good “until you have caught a cold doing it”.  It was Garstin who painted the wonderful “The Rain it Raineth Every Day” which showed Penzance when it was wet. As for Staithes, or nearby, Fred Jackson’s “The Wheelhouse, Ellerby” looks bleak enough with the bare branches of the trees against the dull sky.

There is so much in Staithes : Life, Light and Landscape I would have liked to refer to that I was in danger of including just about everything. It’s not dismissing earlier books on the Staithes Group to say that Adam Chadwick has written what must be the definitive work on the subject. There is a lot of new research in his book, and it takes in information about photographers, in particular Frank Sutcliffe, and the comments and caricatures from Enid Pease Robinson’s diary, not to mention the Staithes Art Club. There are paintings I’ve never seen before. Andrew Colley’s “Old Nab from Quarry Bank”, with people harvesting and the sea stretching to the horizon in the background, stays in my mind. Mark Senior’s “Spring”, to quote Chadwick, “not only captures the colour for which Senior is renowned but also the movement that became a hallmark of his work”. There is John Atkinson’s “Potato Pickers”, which brings out the back-breaking nature of the work. I could carry on listing, but let me mention just one more painting. Ernest Riggs’ “A Fireside Read” shows a young girl intent on the book on her lap, with what I take to be her grandmother looking fondly down at her. It’s perhaps what could be described as typically Victorian. I was moved by it.

Staithes : Life, Light and Landscape has notes, a bibliography, and is profusely illustrated.