News

To all garden lovers, artists and bookbinders,  Consider a visit this weekend July 6th and 7th, any time from 11am to 6pm, to John Tordoff and Maurice Reeve at 38 Norfolk Terrace, Cambridge CB12NG.

Opening under the National Gardens Scheme , with an entrance fee of £3 in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.  In 2018 the garden won the third prize in the BBC Gardeners World competition for the best Small garden in Britain.  

As well as the garden there will be a show of John’s recent paintings and a display of Maurice’s bookbinding. Drop in for tea cakes and wine!  Hope to see you, John

CDS Member Craig Lee has his recent work 'The Bicycle, A Cambridge Street Scene' featured on the cover of the Venue magazine, and uses the opportunty to give a shout out the Society's Spring exhibition.

Many thanks Craig!

CDS member Katherine Gravett tells her story and motivation behind her artwork in online magazine Interalia. An online magazine dedicated to the interactions between the arts, sciences and consciousness.

https://www.interaliamag.org 

https://www.interaliamag.org/audiovisual/katherine-gravett/ 

On Sunday March 17th I am taking part in a special exhibtion to be held at the historic Cambridge Union Society debating chamber during the Cambridge Science Festival. The exhibition is free and open for one only day from 10am - 5 pm.

The What a Nerve exhibition involves 6 artists (CDS member Jo Tunmer, Charlotte Morrison, Elizabeth Fraser, Virginia Mayo, Liza Reid from Growing Art Partnerships and Kelly Briggs), who explore the disease Multiple Sclerosis, bringing together stem cell researchers and MS affected persons.

The result is a stimulating exhibition of art expressing disease, science and cells through acrylic, glass, paper, photography, paint and sound. I will be installing an art installation in response to my own personal experience of a close family relative living with Multiple Sclerosis.

If you would like to attend the talk where the 6 artists discuss the work they have produced for this colloboration please book for your free place here. We would all love to see you there.

For more information about the event please go to the Cambridge Science Festival website.

Congratulations to CDS member Janet Mayes who has her work Earth Mother Revealed selected for the ING Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall Gallery in London. The exhibition runs from 15th - 25th November 2018. More information can be found; http://discerningeye.org/home/index.php

A researcher for Countryfile contacted Debbie after seeing her page on the Cambridge Drawing Society website. They liked Debbie's and her mother's  art and this has led to Debbie and her work being featured in the Countryfile programme to be aired on Sunday 18th November at 5.30pm. 

The Countryfile team were focusing on Cambridgeshire and Debbie's obsession with trees and how these are reflected in her artwork caught their attention.

Debbie has now completed two days of filming, Most of which was set in Wandlebury Woods on the top of the Gog Magog hills South East of Cambridge. After editing, Debbie's feature will be about four minutes long.

The image above captures Debbie filming with presenter Anita Rani.

A book about Ann MAssing's artwork has just come out as part of the Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry and Art Festival held at King's College:
Ann Massing, A Journey Eastwards: Reflections on Chinese Ink and Watercolour Paintings, Cam Rivers Publishing, 2018. It is available from Heffer’s Bookstore for £15; they also have some ofAnn's handmade cards in their window display. The book is a brief anthology with comments about each painting also an interview - all translated into Chinese as well as English.Ann mentions ink and watercolour techniques as well as why she has chosen to be influenced by the Oriental tradition. 

Iona's work November Fen has been selected for the National Original Print Exhibition in the Bankside Gallery in London. More details can be found at https://www.re-printmakers.com/exhibitions/12/overview/ 

National Original Print Exhibition is an international open competition established by the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers which celebrates the best in all types of contemporary printmaking.

November Fen by Iona Howard

Congratulations to CDS member John Glover for winning the SAA Artist of the Year award 2018,

Cambridge Drawing Society was proud to present the Society's awards for outstanding work by Cambridge sixth form artists showing at The Arts Society Cambridge 6th Form Art Exhibition for young artists, held at Michaelhouse Café from 4-15 July 2018.  The exhibition features young artists from schools in the Cambridge region, who are studying A Level Art.

 Eliza Orme (The Perse Upper School) -Triptych - Presidents Cup Winner 2018

Cambridge Drawing Society awarded two prizes, the silver President’s Cup and £50 for the artwork that the CDS judges, Lizanne van essen (CDS President), Godfrey Curtis and Colin Hayes, considered to be best in show and a £50 token for the most innovative work. The cup and £50, was presented to Elliza Orme from The Perse Upper School for a Triptych.

The £50 prize for most innovative work was awarded to Jo Swales from Long Road VI Form College, for a thought provoking ceramic work. 

 Jo Swales (Long Road VI Form College) -Ceramic Building - Most Innovative Work 2018

Eliza and Jo will be given the opportunity to exhibit these winning works at the CDS Spring 2019 exhibition to be held at the Pitt Building in Cambridge.

Congratultions to CDS member Chun-Chao Chiu who has been selected to exhibit his work in this year's Royal Academy Summer exhibition. The exhibition runs from 12th June to 19th August. More detail is available from the RA website: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2018

Chun-Chao joined the Cambridge Drawing Society in 2013 and regularly exhibits his work in our Summer and Autumn exhibitions.

Gwendolen Mary Raverat (née Darwin), usually known simply as Gwen, is the Society's most well-known and well-documented member.  She was born in Cambridge in 1885, the first child of Sir George and Lady Maud Darwin.  Sir George was a son of the great Charles Darwin and was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge shortly before Gwen's birth.  Her mother, Martha Du Puy - known as Maud - came from Philadelphia and met George Darwin during a visit to an aunt in Cambridge. They lived at Newnham Grange on Silver Street which is now part of Darwin College.

With the support of a recommendation from Cambridge artist Mary Charlotte Green, who had taught her since she was a child, Gwen entered the Slade School in 1908, to study under the surgeon-painter Henry Tonks (1862-1937) and Philp Wilson Steer (1860-1942) .  Here she would have followed the normal art school curriculum of the time, with an emphasis on drawing and painting.  She learned the basics of wood engraving from a relative, Elinor May Darwin but was mostly self-taught.  Her style  was influenced as much by the French Impressionists as by contemporary English colleagues, such as Eric Gill or C. F. Tunnicliffe.  One of Gwen's first wood engravings to be published was entitled Lord Thomas and Fair Annet in The Open Window (1911) and in 1915 her work was used to illustrate Spring Morning by Gwen's cousin the poet Frances Cornford, another Darwin grand-daughter and Cambridge resident.

In 1911 Gwen married Bedales-educated Frenchman Jacques Raverat who, having left the Sorbonne, was in Cambridge to continue studying mathematics, though he later abandoned his studies in favour of fine-art and joined Gwen at the Slade.  The son of a wealthy French businessman, Jacques was a member of the Marlowe Society and an intimate friend of Rupert Brooke.  He first met Gwen in 1909 at rehearsals for a production of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus at the ADC Theatre, in which he took the role of Mephistopholis and Gwen the part of Lechery.

The friendship between Gwen's father and Sir Leslie Stephen meant that Gwen had close links with the Bloomsbury set and she was a friend of Sir Leslie's daughters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf; she was secretary of Vanessa's Friday Club, and exhibited at the club's exhibitions in 1910 and 1911. 

The Raverats' first home was in Croydon, near Royston and later, after a short period in le Havre to be near Jacques' parents, they returned to England and lived, among other places, at Weston, near Baldock.  They had two daughters, Elisabeth (1916) and Sophie (1919).  However, Jacques health began to fail (multiple sclerosis would eventually be diagnosed) and in 1920 the family moved to Vence in the South of France where, it was hoped, the climate would improve Jacques' condition. It was not to be, however, and the harrowing effects of his disease made life in Vence increasingly difficult and distressing.  In spite of this, Gwen made many striking woodcut images of Provençale life and Jacques continued to paint for as long as his condition would allow.

In 1920, Gwen was a founder-member of the Society of Wood Engravers, a group whose aim was to promote original white-line wood engravings, designed and engraved by the artist, as opposed to the wood engravings of the nineteenth century, which had been engraved by skilled craftsmen to a design of the artist.

When Jacques died in 1925, Gwen returned to England and settled in Bloomsbury.  It was in 1931while she was living in London that she designed the sets and costumes for the first performance of Job, A Masque for Dancing, a ballet to music by her second cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams based on a concept by Geoffrey Keynes and choreographed by Ninette de Valois.  She would go on to make costume and set designs for other theatrical productions, including the famous triennial Cambridge Greek plays.

In 1928 she moved to the Old Rectory at Harlton, near Cambridge, which would be her home for the next eighteen years.  Frances Cornford's son Christopher wrote: "The hub of [Gwen's home] was her studio which was also - for she made no barriers between art and life - the general sitting room. We would gather round the fireplace reading or chattering or listening to the gramophone whilst she, two or three feet away, sat paring delicately away at her boxwood under an Aladdin lamp."

In the 1930s, Gwen's engravings were often used to illustrate limited-edition books by Cambridge friends and associates.  In 1932 she provided engravings for Kenneth Graham's Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, published by the Cambridge University Press, at that time famous for the high quality of its printing.  This was followed by many other publications, including Farmer's Glory by A. G. Street, perhaps her most celebrated work in this genre.  She also illustrated a number of books with line drawings, including Over The Garden Wall by Eleanor Farjeon (1933), Mustard, Pepper and Salt by Alison Uttley (1940) and Crossings by Walter de la Mare (1942).

In 1934, Gwen was elected a Fellow of the Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers.  Though her reputation rests on her work as a wood engraver, Gwen continued to paint throughout her career, making oil sketches en plein air in Cambridge and the surrounding country.  She was also a shrewd and witty (if rather conservative) art critic for Time and Tide magazine. 

During the war of 1939-45, she moved to a flat in Cambridge and worked as a draftsman on an Admiralty project based at the Scott Institute in Lensfield Road.  Since 1915, the Geographical Section of Naval Intelligence had been producing handbooks containing comprehensive details of the physical geography of various countries.  It had been found that line-drawings offered a clearer delineation of topographical features than photographs, and with the onset of war the production of these guides was stepped up and aimed to include any country in which British servicemen might find themselves operating.  At first, Gwen's work lacked the precision required but with practice she adapted her style to the needs of the project and was given the task of rendering Ordnance Survey Maps into three dimensions.  She described the work as "queerly absorbing" and ended up mapping the entire coastline of Greece in 3D, not to mention a great many of the Pacific Islands.

After the war she moved to The Old Granary in Silver Street, next to her birthplace, Newnham Grange.  Here she wrote Period Piece, a memoir of her childhood in Cambridge at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Illustrated with her own line-drawings, it was in instant success and has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1952.  In 1951 she was forced to give up wood-engraving after she was left partially paralysed by a stroke.  Her creative instincts remained undimmed, however and she continued to paint, mostly views of Coe Fen and Lammas Land, done from the balcony of her home.

Gwen Raverat died by her own hand in 1957 and is buried with her father at Trumpington Extension Cemetery.

Frances Spalding has published a biography Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family & Affections, published by Harvill.

Sources: (i) CDS records, (ii) 'Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections' by F. Spalding, (iii) Wikipedia, (iv) notes by Christopher Cornford for the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition of Gwen's work held in Royston in 1987 (in the CDS archive), (v) The Oxford National Dictionary of Biography.

Known to her family as Polly, Mary Charlotte Green was born in Takeley, midway between Great Dunmow and Bishop's Stortford, to a prosperous brewing family.

As a child Mary was considered delicate and received a rather patchy formal education. When she was about six years old her family moved to a house called Riversdale in the village of Grantchester. Whilst her brother Graham went to school in Cambridge, Mary and her sisters were taught at the Old Vicarage by 'Aunt Lally', the unmarried sister of a Mrs Widnall, whose husband, Mary tells us, planted the famous Orchard next to his house.

After about five years in Grantchester the Greene family moved to Bedford, where, they believed, the schools were better than those to be found it Cambridge, and Mary was sent to the Moravian School for Girls.  She must have shown artistic talent, for, after her father's death in 1881, she was allowed to study art at the St John's Wood School in London, which prepared youngsters for entry to the Royal Academy Schools. For the first six months of her time at the school Mary lived with her brother Graham in his lodgings at Highgate.  Later she returned to her family when they left Bedford and settled in Hampstead.

In 1885 or thereabouts, Mary won a place at the R.A. Schools and though her studies started well the arrival in 1887 of a strict new Keeper of the Royal Academy, Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833-1898), changed things in ways that were uncongenial to her. For example, she recalls that she lost valued friendships when Calderon decreed that seniors may no longer associate with students in lower years. Unhappy at the Academy, she did not finish the course.

After the Royal Academy Schools, Mary and her younger sister Helen went to Paris, where she studied art at the Académie Colarossi. (Some sources state that Mary attended the Académie Julian, a similar institution to Colarossi, which also accepted female students. However, Mary's own memoir clearly states that she attended the Colarossi Academy.) Unlike the celebrated Ecole de Beaux-arts, the Académie Colarossi accepted women students and did not impose a strict French language test upon foreign applicants. Here she received tuition from Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois (1852-1923) and Rene-Xavier Prinet (1861-1946). She remarked that there was an 'atmosphere of freedom and trust' at the Colarossi school, in which she was able to "recover [her] spirits, which had been lost in the cellars of the Royal Academy."

In 1894 Mary's elder brother Graham, by this time knighted and Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty, purchased Harston House near Cambridge. Old-fashioned and in need of improvement, the house was nevertheless large enough for his widowed mother and his sisters, including Mary, to live with him there.

At first Mary regarded Cambridge as an artistic backwater, set in what she
described as 'impossible country', far from the artistic life she had enjoyed in Paris and London; but as a dependent spinster of 34, she had little option but to accept the move and make the best of it. Initially she took little artistic inspiration from the flat Cambridgeshire landscape and wrote, "I wandered over the countryside looking for subjects to paint and found none that I cared for."

When Mary's recently widowed sister Florence moved to Harston and took charge of Harston House, Mary had greater freedom to follow her artistic interests. It must have been around 1895 that a Dr Lumby of Grantchester asked her to give art lessons to his children. From these beginnings Mary's circle of pupils grew steadily. Lady Horace Darwin, invited her to the Orchard in Grantchester to teach her children and some of their young cousins and friends; among her pupils was Gwen Darwin, who - under her married name of Raverat - would become an important figure in the revival of English wood-engraving, and a future President of the Cambridge Drawing Society. Little Gwen clearly enjoyed her Wednesday classes with Miss Greene. In her memoir Period Piece she recalled that the lessons "were the centre of my youthful existence. I lived from Wednesday to Wednesday; for not only was drawing an ecstasy, but that Miss Greene's warm, generous, appreciative nature was a great release and encouragement to me." Mary was clearly a lively and, in some ways, unconventional soul. In her unpublished memoir, The Joy of Remembering, she wrote: "For the good of one's soul it is necessary to venture occasionally to do something that is rash or even forbidden." In this was as good as her word, and her adventures include getting lost with her pupils in the labyrinthine cellars of the Cast Museum (for which she was rebuked by the city authorities) and finding herself locked at night inside the Round Church with her young students - and a lunatic!

Shortly before the turn of the century, Mary built a corrugated-iron studio behind lawyers' offices on St Andrew's Street in the centre of Cambridge. This became the venue for her art classes, for exhibitions of her work and for meetings of the Cambridge Drawing Society. [Mary had joined the Society in 1894 and was its President from 1926 until 1929. Though several sources claim that her membership of the Society ended with her Presidency in 1929, it is clear from CDS records that she remained a member until her death.] Later, however, Emmanuel College wanted the land for new buildings and gave Mary notice to quit. Though she dismantled her iron studio and rebuilt it in the garden at Harston House, she still needed facilities in town and eventually re-established herself in a cottage on Brookside. The property included a coach-house, stables and other outbuildings which, over time, she improved and adapted to meet her needs as an artist and teacher.

It was at her brother Edward's suggestion that Mary set about making an artistic record Cambridge's ancient inn-yards, courts, and byways. She wrote: "I drew the old galleried Falcon Yard before it was pulled down and the Bell Yard before it burned down. I showedthese drawings to my brother Edward and he said: 'Go on. Make a collection of the yards for me.'" Mary says that she made more than forty such pictures, at a time when the yards and courts "were in the same state as in the old days when undergraduates rode or drove into Cambridge." When Edward died the pictures were left to the city and were hung for many years in the reading room at the Guildhall.

Coe Fen and Lammas Land were among Mary's favourite Cambridge subjects.  When Mary heard of plans to develop the fen into a landscaped park, she leapt into action and went to see George Kett, the mastermind behind the plans.  A city Alderman and three times Mayor of Cambridge, Kett owned and ran Rattee and Kett the most important building firm in the city and had been instrumental in transforming Christ's Pieces into the municipal-style park we know today.  Mary claims that after she explained to him the importance of preserving the fen in its natural condition, Kett was persuaded to abandon his scheme and even agreed to plant new willow and poplar trees by the river.

In 1912, Mary set up a weaving school in Botolph Lane, in a building which she named The Pelican and Lilies, after the armorial bearings of nearby Corpus Christi College.  The school was run by a Swedish weaver called Nina Lindell and her assistant Britta Johannison, and seems to have enjoyed considerable success. A newspaper report from March 1912 records that a Miss Forsell was to be the instructress at the school, though Mary does not mention this lady in her memoir.

Inevitably the war deprived Mary of her younger female students who left to work on the land or in factories and workshops.  She continued to teach younger children, of course, and made up class numbers by offering tuition to older people and shell-shocked soldiers.  But when her sister Florence left Harston to run a small-holding, Mary had to take over the running of Harston House.  Feeling herself overstretched and unwell, she decided to give up her Cambridge studio and passed responsibility for the weaving school to a committee of ladies.

Though Mary's work focused mainly on Cambridge and the surrounding country, for much of her career she spent one day a week painting in London, a habit which she continued into her eighties and throughout the 1939-45 war; she even claimed that peace-time London was a little dull after the risks and uncertainties of war!  She worked en plein air and ventured into areas which at the time might have been considered risky for a middle-class lady.  She had a particular liking for Wapping, in the heart of the Port of London, and made many paintings of its shipping, its canals and wharves, and the daily toil of the men who worked among them.  At first the dockers and stevedores regarded her with amused suspicion but they quickly got used to having a genteel lady artist among them and Mary describes many acts of good-humoured kindness which she received from them.  In 1936 her London pictures came to the attention of a West-End art-dealer and she was invited to put on a one-woman exhibition at the Renaissance Gallery in Regent Street.   Transporting her pictures from Harston to London caused Mary considerable trouble and she describes riding on the picture-laden lorry as it trundled slowly towards the capital.  Her efforts were rewarded, however, for the show, entitled, London Then and Now, was a considerable success and was reviewed in The Times and the Evening News.  Mary recalled that, at one point, sales became a little too brisk, when a picture of Eros - which the owner had lent to her for the show and had been duly marked 'Not for Sale' - was inadvertently sold.  The buyer insisted on his rights, however, and - after what she describes as "some hot talk" on the matter - Mary was obliged to paint a replica.  Plans for a second show were abandoned when the gallery owner, depressed by rumours of war, decided to retire.

At some point in later life, Mary lost the sight in one eye but in spite of this
she continued to paint into great old-age; some of her oil paintings of Cambridge, now stored in the Local Collection of the public library and the Folk Museum, date from 1950, when she would have been ninety years old. After Mary died in 1951 six of her paintings were displayed In Memoriam at the Cambridge Drawing Society's annual exhibition the following summer.

In his boyhood, Mary's nephew, the author Graham Greene (1904-1991), spent summer holidays at Harston House, and in his autobiography A Sort of Life remembers his aunt as "dear muddled-headed Polly who painted bad pictures and wrote ambitious plays for the village institute." Whether or not we agree with Greene's assessment of her work, examples of her paintings currently available to view on-line at the ArtUK website reveal that - whatever their artistic merit - they form a poignant record of areas of our city which have changed greatly or have been lost forever under the developer's wrecking-ball.

Sources:
(i) Period Piece by Gwen Raverat, 1952, Faber and Faber;
(ii) The Joy of Remembering by Mary C. Greene. Unpublished memoir in the Local Collection, Cambridge Central Library;
(iii) CDS records;
(iv) The Harston History webpage;
(v) A Picture of the Cambridge Drawing Society by Anne C. Clay, 1969; Local Collection, Cambridge Central Library;
(vi) One Will in the House, a Memoir of Sir Graham Greene and Miss Mary Charlotte Greene, E.L. Gaetyens, 1974, Cambridge Library Local Collection;
(vii) Cambridge Evening News, Cambridge Weekly News and Cambridge Independent News
(viii) The photograph of Mary C. Greene in her studio is courtesy of Mr John Roadley of the Harston History website;
(ix) The painting of Coe Fen is courtesy of Oriel Fine Arts.

CDS Member Susan Abbs participates in the Wednesday Life-drawing group in Cambridge. The group has recently relocated from Kings College to a new venue at The Signal Box in Glenalmond Road in Cambridge http://www.thesignalbox.org/new2018/find-us/ 

CDS members may be interested in joining the group which meets weekly.

Venue: The Signal Box
Time: Wed 7.15-9.30pm
Price: £7
Format: Short poses ranging from one minute up to one hour, untutored

More information is available at https://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-sketch-group. 

CDS members and Friends of CDS can contact Susan Abbs: susanabbs_art@yahoo.com