ELWIN HENRY HAWTHORNE

 

ELWIN HENRY HAWTHORNE

SUNDAY Series on ART of Architecture -by -Gautam Shah

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Elwin Hawthorne (1905-1954) was a British painter. He and his wife, both were members, of the ‘East London Group’ (which emphasized urban realism through shared outdoor painting trips to locations in Essex, Kent, and Sussex ). His father was also a painter and decorator. Elwin had no formal training, except few ‘hobby’ classes. He was often described as an English Utrillo (a Paris-based urban artist).

Hawthorne painted a number of buildings of London, including, St John-at-Hampstead, St Andrew's church in Vanbrugh Park, North Foreland Lighthouse. He was a versatile artist, in oils, watercolour and printmaking. He concentrated intensively in oil painting, just for fifteen years (1925-40). He met Walter Sickert, and became his studio assistant for three years.

Hawthorne’s style of painting was of extensive use of subdued colours, good rendering of architectural form and urban ordinary urban scenes, but without embellishment. He captured melancholy quietude, nostalgia of urban environments with characteristic softness.

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WALTER SICKERT

 

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SUNDAY Feature ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was a British painter and printmaker. He was an Impressionist and part of the Camden Town Group of London. Unlike other members of Camden group, Sickert was famous in his lifetime. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.

In 1883, Sickert travelled to Paris and met Edgar Degas. He was impressed by the Degas use of pictorial space. Yet he developed own style of Impressionism with sober colouration. Following advice by Degas, he abandoned ‘the tyranny of nature’ and began painting in studio relying more on remembrances or impressions. He painted in heavy impasto and narrow tonal range, but disliked the use thick oil-paints -‘as the most un-decorative matter in the world’.

Sickert's renderings were denounced as ugly and vulgar, and choice of subject matter was deplored as too garish for art. Sickert showed recurring interest in sexually provocative themes. Sickert was a cosmopolitan and eccentric, who often favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects. His work includes portraits of well-known personalities and in later years images formed from own and press photographs. His range of subjects includes domestic interiors, portraits, town scapes and theatrical subjects. In later part of life he developed many eccentric habits and became a celebrity with stunts. He changed his name and appearance.

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CLIVE BRANSON

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Sunday Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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Clive Branson 1907-1944, was born at Ahmednagar, India. He was an English artist, poet, soldier and an active communist. He studied at the Slade School of Art. He was an Impressionist and Modernist. But he deliberately adopted a naïve manner, as a rejection of high-end art.

Branson fought in the Spanish civil war, where as a prisoner of war at the Nationalist camp of San Pedro de Cardeña, he painted and sketched, the camp and many of its inmates. Later, during the WW-II, he served the British army in Burma (Myanmar), where he died.

Branson painted many Battersea street scenes during the blitz. He painted grounds area with some unsophisticated realism, but the skies are filled with forms of surrealistic nature that belie the actual war-time appendages. He painted exteriors of buildings as part of the scenic compositions, but except for the painting of the Indian home interior, never touched the interiors of British Industrial units. His communism was more of the political activism, and less of socialism. 

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