On 13 December Sotheby’s auctioned Our Blacksmith,
a late oil (RA 1931), a work that, for some reason, has been in the
salerooms and auction houses numerous times in the last 20 years, or so
it seems to me. As so often, the painting is known by a different name
from the one GC first thought of.
76 by 91 cm, 30 by 36 in
Signed lower right: G. CLAUSEN
Inscribed with the title and signed and dated on the reverse:
A VILLAGE BLACKSMITH, G CLAUSEN 1931 [catalogue’s upper case]
Oil on canvas
On 20 October 1927, according to the McConkey
1980 catalogue – the Sotheby’s catalogue says 27 October and uses
McConkey material without crediting him – the industrial engineer
Francis Henry Crittall (1860-1934) introduced Clausen to his son,
Walter Francis Crittall (1887-1956), who commissioned this work.
Our Blacksmith shows the interior of the forge at Great Easton in Essex.
WFC was known as “Pink” Crittall. He lived at
New Farm, just on the other side of Great Easton from GC’s
Hillside, Duton Hill. JS thinks that he also had a place in Walberswick
called Old Farm.
The Crittalls loom large in the Clausen family
memory. GC was 75 when they met, WFC around 40. They went on painting
holidays together in Walberswick in Suffolk. See, presumably, GC’s The Old Pier of Walberswick and Laughing Morning Sky – Walberswick (both RSPW 1931) and The Old Jetty, Walberswick and Cloudy Sky, Walberswick (both RSPW 1934). Clausen painted WFC’s portrait for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1936.
Although industrialists, and socialists (and
nobody could have been less overtly political than Clausen), the Crittalls seem
to me to represent a tendency congenial to GC. Their ideas were derived
in part from the Arts and Crafts movement. If you’d wanted to design a
friend for Clausen you could not have done much better than WFC. He had
trained at the St John’s Wood Art School, where Clausen sometimes
distributed prizes. He was an artist in his own right. He had a
progressive, international outlook. He fits the profile of GC’s friends
and acquaintances.
Clausen, on the whole, chose the company of anyone of whatever standing who happened to respect craft.
WFC was a member of The Design and Industries
Association, a kind of updated Art Workers Guild which had been founded
in 1915 by designers and industrialists in order to improve design in
industry, to link art and craft. It was very conscious in its early
years of developments in Germany and Austria. “Mass-produced goods
should bring beauty and pleasure to the humblest dwellings.” Industry
should create beautiful objects which at the same time show “fitness
for purpose”. The founders drew on William Morris’s beliefs about the
dignity of labour. They produced a pamphlet called The Worker’s Right to Pleasure
and they appealed to the trade unions to support the DIA in a
non-political way. Education in design – one of their objectives –
should not start with the manufacturer or consumer, but with the worker
at the bench. See Hugh Clausen here.
And see Raymond Plummer, Nothing Need Be Ugly: The First 70 Years of the Design and Industries Association, DIA, 1985. The Association still exists. If it ever gets a website that lives up to its own principles, I’ll link to it.
The Crittalls made steel windows of the sort
that defined modern architecture between the wars. They were
innovators. They had a world market: they made the windows for the Ford
Model T factory in Detroit. The firm survives,
but passed out of family ownership in 1968. They built a model village
for their Essex workers at a rural place called Silver End.
In 1849 Francis Berrington Crittall had moved
to Essex from Kent to take over an ironmonger’s shop in Braintree. One
of his sons, Richard, took over the business, and he was joined by his
brother FHC in 1883. FHC developed the window manufacturing and turned
the firm into a major local employer. He and his wife visited China,
where they bought sculptures and textiles; their interest in the east
had a marked influence on their second son, WFC.
(Another Essex neighbour and friend of GC was
the Sinologist Launcelot Cranmer-Byng. They were all visited in the 20s
by a Chinese painter, Teng Hiok-Chiu, who paid overt homage to GC in at
least one landscape.) FHC bought a Clausen still life in 1919.
FHC’s first son was Valentine George, who was
also a keen traveller. While visiting the States VGC had been impressed
by the ability of small engineering firms to adapt to armaments
production. By 1915, the British army was suffering from a serious
shortage of shells, the manufacture of which was restricted to a small
number of specialist factories. FHC, encouraged by VGC, contacted
Ransomes of Ipswich to discuss the practicalities of using general
engineering businesses to produce weapons, and this led to the
formation of the East Anglian Munitions Committee of which he was
elected joint chairman. FHC was able to acquire an 18 pound shell which
was carefully cut in half for examination by the two firms. The
government was persuaded that armament manufacture by non-specialist
firms was practicable as well as necessary, and window making was
displaced by weapon making for the rest of the war. At the end of the
war the Munitions Committee commissioned a portrait of FHC from
Augustus John, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. (Hugh
Clausen was a key figure in first world war munitions at the
Admiralty.)
VGC was an ardent believer in the welfare
state. He took his convictions into politics and stood successfully as
Labour candidate for Maldon, though the parliament was short-lived and
he failed to achieve re-election. In recognition of his commitment to
the welfare of his workers, he was knighted in 1931 and ennobled (as
Lord Braintree) in 1947.
WFC was the second son. He had artistic
talent, particularly as a watercolourist, and collected Japanese
prints. He helped to design the Crittall catalogues and the Crittall Metal Window Dictionary and
designed furniture for his own use. Like his father and brother, he
travelled (I’ve seen an illustration of a drawing by him of Shanghai),
and was so impressed by the products of a pottery
factory in China that he opened a shop for them in Walberswick. It was he who discovered the rural charms of Silver End
and persuaded FHC, in 1925, to begin building the model village there.
Silver End, a new village on a virgin site
between Braintree and Witham, was one of the great English experiments
in town planning and social engineering between the wars. It was for an
overflow of Crittall workers from Braintree. It was a modern
feudalism: FHC offered land in exchange for services. He moved into
Silver End himself, with his wife, and their house was even (for some
reason) called “Manor’s”. They lived there until their deaths in 1934.
To the workforce, he was the “Guv’nor”. The houses had electricity, hot
and cold running water, inside lavatories, large gardens. The village
had its own water and power supplies. There were allotments and non-profit making farms,
piggeries, a dairy and slaughterhouse, a bakery and sausage factory, print
works and a newspaper,
a school, churches, a cinema, a “department store”, playing fields, a
social club, a hotel, medical and dental provisions. A new factory was
built for employees with war disabilities, who were paid the same as
able workers. Buses took other workers to Braintree.
Production continued without interruption
through the 1926 General
Strike. Where did enlightened provision of facilities end and
regimentation begin? Some photographs of Silver End remind one a little
of early holiday camps. In the press, it was the “Metal Window Kingdom
of Happiness”, the “City of 2000 AD”. Susan King writes on a site partly about Silver End:
[Silver
End] was the final attempt by an enlightened employer to provide an
ideal environment for his workers, the end [sic] of a long tradition
started by the mill owner Robert Owen at New Lanark at the start of the
nineteenth century, and continued by Titus Salt at Saltaire, Lever at
Port Sunlight, Rowntree at New Earswick and Cadbury at Bournville. It
was also part of the garden village movement – Silver End was the first
garden village in Essex. The village was a practical response to the
deep social problems of its time – the problems of housing shortage and
slum dwellings, unemployment and industrial unrest, the problem of
finding work for the disabled war veterans. It was also a solution to
the immediate problem of Francis Crittall – that of finding sufficient
housing for his expanding workforce.
Robert Owen was a notable
influence on the thinking of Paul Derrick. FHC followed many of the
ideas of Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the Garden City Movement and
an early member of the present Royal Town Planning Institute.
He had been impressed by the German Bauhaus, and this influence is
evident in some of the houses, with their Crittall windows made in
Braintree.
[The houses] were
award-winning and as deliberate policy were designed by different
architects to avoid regimentation. The resulting mixture of styles
included Arts and Crafts type cottages, modernistic houses of German
inspiration as well as the classic elegance that can be seen at “Manor’s”. It was the Modernist houses that attracted most comment and
continue to attract attention today. Breaking away from traditional
styles Francis Crittall, probably encouraged by his son, the artistic “Pink” Crittall, employed architects known for their innovation – men
like Thomas Tait – and by doing so brought the Modern Movement to
Britain. [...]
(It was planned that villagers should buy their homes from the company, but the
Depression and then the war prevented this in most cases.)
The resulting avenues of white painted flat-roofed houses became the trademark of Silver End.
GC showed a portrait of Sir
Raymond Unwin, the planner of Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb,
at the Royal Academy in 1933. In the 20s he tried to get work for a
young Bengali artist in the decoration of buildings for the greatest
garden city project of all – New Delhi.
GC was known for his sympathy with some modern
movements even if he kept a distance from them. He’d have had some
interest in the Bauhaus style adopted by the Crittalls at Silver End,
but his Essex was not industrial, and when it came to a commission he
painted a blacksmith.
The workforce was
drawn from the immediate area but also from the depressed regions of
Wales, Scotland, the Midlands and the North. Many villagers had been
unemployed or striking miners – Crittall’s offered them the security of
a home and a job. People still living in the village today speak of the
distinctive cultural groups that made Silver End unique. Part of Silver
End’s identity is still bound up in this “pioneer past”, living, as one
woman put it, as part of “an ethnic jigsaw”. [...]
During its first decade Silver End – largely a
village of young people – was cited as the healthiest village in
England, with the lowest death rate and the highest birth rate. [...]
World-wide depression at the start of the
thirties was to cut short Silver End’s “high summer”. From 1931
redundancies and short time working became a reality in the Utopian
village. The Crittall Building Society was wound up and plans for a
further 200 houses, a hospital and swimming pool were scrapped. Many
concerns – the farms, hotel, transport and stores were sold off.
Crittall involvement in the village continued, however, perhaps
reaching a high point during the Second World War. [...] When the war
was over there was time again to start remembering and to commemorate
the special history of the village. When [Japanese] gardens [with a
cherry avenue] were designed in memory of the “Guv’nor” and his wife
after the war by his son WF “Pink” Crittall, workers gave their labour
free to provide decorative gates “in gratitude”.
Bad later planning and poor
maintenance have spoiled the original concept. Like dozens of revivals
and reform movements across Europe in the first half of the twentieth
century, the garden city and garden village movements lost their way
after the second world war. The houses were taken over by the local
council. The bureaucratic planners of 1945 had a different agenda –
though Essex’s Silver End did in some ways look forward to Essex’s
post-war new towns, Harlow and Basildon.
The “Sixty-Five Club”,
where retired workers could still put in a day or so a week – keeping
them involved and preventing the wastage of their skills – has until
recently been a local geology museum and now stands empty. Members of
the Crittall family have long since left their village homes. However,
the sense of community and history in Silver End remains remarkable.
The community’s sense of itself has outlived and outgrown its original
purpose as a company village.
WFC commissioned Our Blacksmith from GC. McConkey thinks that he may have got the idea from the earlier The Blacksmith, a similar but smaller work from 1926 which was still in GC’s studio. The Blacksmith
is now at Leighton House in Kensington. (How did Leighton House acquire
that and why didn’t they get hold of a Clausen from the 1890s, the
period when Leighton admired him?)
GC’s finished sketch for Our Blacksmith, squared up for transfer of the design to canvas, is in the V&A.
On the left of the picture is Great Easton’s
blacksmith, George Turner. On the right is his assistant, John Rolph,
who had served in the Great War. He is wearing protective leather
puttees and was paid half-a-crown for standing with his hammer held up.
When the painting, along with 29 sketches, was sold at Christie’s in
1981, Rolph, aged 83, was still working in his own blacksmith’s shop in
Mill End Green, near Great Easton. In the background is George Hayden,
the horseman at Tilty Grange, a house historically associated with the
Abbey of Tilty.
There are glances at modernity: a
quasi-brutalism in the figures; the pieces of metal on the floor and of
wood on the right are almost abstractions, just as the tubes in the
lower right of In the Gun Factory at Woolwich Arsenal had been; the
surface of the log must have been flat, but it’s seen almost from a
different viewpoint. But they are distant glances. The log reminds us
of a prop in an Italian primitive. There may even be a slight influence
of Thomas Derrick. The picture was the last Clausen painted with an
industrial subject. McConkey places it in a tradition that Stanhope
Forbes began with paintings such as Forging the Anchor of 1892 (Ipswich Museum and Art Gallery), The Smithy of 1895 and The Steel Workers of 1915 – but isn’t GC more interesting than Stanhope Forbes?
McConkey says that Crittall asked Clausen to
find other artists to paint further local workers for a series of
pictures. I don’t know what happened to that project.
WFC collected a great deal of art. An Epstein head which he had owned, called Dolores, was recently sold by Peter Nahum.
Another local industrial family who were also
art patrons were the Courtaulds, whose textile business originated in
Pebmarsh and Braintree. I am not sure whether any links – local or
otherwise – can be established between the Samuel Courtauld of
collecting fame (1876-1947) and GC and to what extent the Essex
connection persisted for SC in the 20s and 30s. There are no Clausens
in the Courtauld collection.
I’ve used several sources here, including:
1. Ariel Crittall, talk summarised by Michael Leach, AGM, Essex Society for Archaeology and History, Village Hall, Silver End, 27 June 2004.
Ariel Crittall is the widow of WF Crittall’s son John and I think made a brief appearance at Leonard Overy-Owen’s
Clausen in Essex exhibition, Great Dunmow, 2002. I’ve rewritten and added to this
summary, so no quotation marks. It ended
with a “Crittall bibliography”. I’ve edited this and added a further
title. You can download it here.
2. Susan King, Silver End – A Place to Work and Play, 1996, web article for the 70th anniversary of Silver End, op cit.
3. Duncan Willoughby and Leonard Overy-Owen, Clausen in Essex, Duncan Willoughby, 2002.
4. McConkey, op cit.
The commentary on the picture and other opinions are mine.
Our Blacksmith
