Art of the New Naturalists: A Complete History

Rosemary’s father had joined the Volunteers where he rose to become colonel, a rank he retained on their later absorption into the Territorial Army. He served in the Great War at that rank, initially in training but soon enough on service, first in France and then in Italy. There, having survived the war, he succumbed to the terrible worldwide flu epidemic in 1919. Rosemary, with her sisters and brothers, had been taken by their mother to live with her parents in their large house at Netley Marsh in the New Forest. Rosemary therefore had a similar, if lengthier, formative experience to Clifford’s, of a wartime country childhood. She, too, developed a deep fascination for nature and animals in and around the Forest, and always retained particularly fond and vivid memories of her grandfather’s pigs and rare-breed herd of Gloucester park cattle. After the war Rosemary and her younger sister moved with their widowed mother to London; their elder siblings had, by then, flown the nest.

PICTURES FROM THE THIRTIES

Clifford and Rosemary married in 1931. Rosemary brought to the artistic partnership an instinctive eye for colour, tone and composition; she had a quick mind and the ability to master a new medium at speed. They shared the same open, enquiring spirit, branching out at various times into sculpture, mosaic (including an important commission for the design and laying of the mosaic floor for the British pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1937), ceramics and modelling, needlework and mural painting. But their distinctive sense of colour and design is nowhere better seen than in the posters they designed in the 1930s. Posters in the 1920s and ‘30s were often designed with great care and dash, even those that were advertising a product. They became an art form pursued by progressive artists on both sides of the Atlantic in which an image was used to convey a powerful message. Successful poster art needed to say something clearly, simply and, above all, memorably. Distilling a sometimes complex idea into a single image exercised the brain quite as much as a large canvas or sculpture. In their day many leading artists designed posters in the prevailing spirit of ‘art for all’, as a means of bringing art centre-stage into the lives of ordinary people. Among the rising generation of British artists designing posters and book jackets at this time were Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Barnett Freedman, Paul Nash and the American graphic designer, Edward McKnight Kauffer – more or less a Who’s Who of contemporary British art. The 1930s were, arguably, the high noon of poster art in Britain. Every image, said the artist John Berger, ‘embodies a way of seeing’ (Bernstein, 1992). The artist’s job was to see something as if for the first time, and to communicate that insight.

Clifford and Rosemary designed many posters during the 1930s, for the Empire Marketing Board, for Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, for the great Frank Pick, inspirational Chief Executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, and for the Post Office, as well as lithographs for Lyon’s Corner House (‘the Teashop Lithographs’), all of them institutions that found reasons for persuading top artists to produce work for what one called ‘the art gallery of the street’. Paul Rennie described the Ellis’s poster style as ‘painterly’, effectively building up their designs as a succession of separate colour printings. ‘These combined the expressive style of the early design reformers with a Fauvist-inspired colour palette’ (Rennie, 2008).

BP Poster by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, 1932, printed lithographically by Vincent Brooks, Day & Sons Ltd (75.6 x 114 cm).

Some of their posters were intended for specific events, such as test matches, while others were part of a public service for educational and cultural establishments such as museums, galleries and gardens. One of their first major commissions, from 1932, advertised Whipsnade Zoo above a banner suggesting that BP Petrol was the ideal medium for your car journey to the zoo. Designed to catch the eye of a passer-by (the original poster measured 45 by 30 inches), it is an unforgettable image of four wolves staring wide-eyed from the trees with not a cage or bar in sight. Like so much of their work, this image was based on close on-the-spot observation. Rosemary’s memory was of the young Clifford and herself walking to Whipsnade over the downs by night, and choosing a dry ditch to take a nap, waking to find the wolves staring at them.

Another important sponsor of commercial art was Shell, which later showcased some of the best poster design from the 1920s and ‘30s in The Shell Poster Book (1992). The man responsible, a counterpart to Frank Pick at London Transport, was Jack Beddington, who persuaded the company to allow artists to produce designs in their own way with a minimum of commercial interference. Together, the Shell collection advertises not so much the corporate brand as the British landscape and way of life, while, seemingly incidentally, presenting Shell in the guise of a patron of artistic good taste. One of c&re’s Shell designs, dated 1934, shows Lower Slaughter Mill in Gloucestershire as an image of a lost rural England of millstreams, sleepy willows and a village lane empty of cars, painted in pure greens, ochres and reds. It is signed ‘Rosemary and Clifford Ellis’, and hence was a Rosemary-initiated design. Another poster, a joint work done the same year, has an array of antique artefacts, including a grinning stone gargoyle, within a ruined abbey and assures us with a wink that ‘Antiquaries Prefer Shell’.

London Transport bill, Winter Visitors, by c&re, 1937, printed by Dangerfield Printing Company Ltd, London (25.5 x 73 cm).

London Transport window bill by c&re advertising Test Match at The Oval, 1939, printed by Sir Joseph Causton & Sons Ltd, London (25.5 x 31.5 cm).

London Transport window bill, Come out to live! by c&re, 1936 (25.5 x 31.5 cm).

It is quite easy to spot a poster by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis even without the cipher. The colours are fresh, bright and without outlines, the designs simple and bold, and the foregrounds and backgrounds juxtaposed in a characteristic way. They often express an idea rather than a product. With hindsight one might discern elements of the New Naturalist jackets in their poster of a trout fisher’s tackle over the legend ‘Anglers prefer Shell’. Their taste for open-air scenes of nature is still more evident in a quartet of metre-tall images commissioned by London Transport, entitled simply, ‘Wood’, ‘Heath’, ‘Down’ and ‘River’, each symbolised by a lively graphic representation of a wild bird, respectively a green woodpecker, an owl, a kestrel and a heron. In the background of each one, people are having fun: ramblers ask a shepherd for directions; a man and his girl choose a spot for their picnic; a dad gives his child a piggy-back ride. Nature is accessible and enhances life.

From 1934 to 1937, the couple also designed dust jackets for novels published by Jonathan Cape, having caught the eye of a young editor, Ruth Atkinson. These were printed in a similar way to a poster, by lithography and in three colours, and they were executed in a modernist style that brings together intriguing elements from the story. Clifford and Rosemary always liked to read the book before they started work on the jacket. I have never heard of North-West by North by Dora Birtles, or The White Farm by Geraint Goodwin, let alone read them, but their striking jackets would certainly make me want to take up the book and open it.

By 1936, the couple, with their year-old first child, Penelope, had moved to Bath where they had both been offered teaching posts. Rosemary became the art teacher at the Royal School for Daughters of officers of the Army on Lansdown, while Clifford took up an appointment as assistant master at the Bath School of Art, then part of the city’s Technical College. Initially he taught art to 12- to 14-year-olds preparing for local trades skills, such as bookbinding, painting and decorating. He must have made a great impression because, two years later, he was appointed headmaster.

London Transport window bill, Summer Is Flying, by c&re, 1938, printed by Johnson, Riddle & Co, London (25.5 x 73 cm).

Meanwhile, shortly after their arrival in Bath, Clifford and Rosemary joined the Bath Society of Artists, where they were soon elected onto the committee for the Society’s annual exhibitions. Among the many artists they came to know was the painter, and sometime pupil of Sickert, Paul Ayshford, Lord Methuen (1886–1974), as well as the famous ‘grand old man of British painting’ himself, Walter Sickert. The now aged and venerable Sickert, with his third wife, the painter Therese Lessore, had moved to Bathampton in 1938, where they lived in what was to prove their last home at St George’s Hill. Ailing but still active and ever quizzical, Sickert proposed to Clifford in March 1939 that he teach at the Art School once a week, free of charge. His offer was eagerly accepted, and Sickert would talk and reminisce for two hours every Friday to Clifford’s students, continuing to do so until his health failed him in the early years of the war. Clifford and Rosemary were to be of great help to Therese Lessore in the hard task of caring for Sickert during his final illness up to his death in January 1942.

In 1939 Modelling for Amateurs by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis was published in the Studio ‘How to do It’ series (a revised edition was published, again in two formats in 1945). By then, the Ellises were at the heart of the local art world, teaching, and producing innovative freelance work. Then World War II intervened.

CLIFFORD AND ROSEMARY’S WAR

The art school remained operational throughout the war, even after being transferred to and then bombed out of its wartime Green Park buildings during the ‘Baedeker’ air raids on Bath. Remarkably, under the circumstances, a fine if less spacious house was made available in Sydney Place. Clifford saw the war in a positive light as an opportunity for sharing ‘a deeper and richer life’ through the dispensation of the arts. When war was declared, Clifford was 32 and unlikely to be called up. But he certainly did his bit. He joined the local Home Guard (and said long afterwards that Dad’s Army got it spot on). He also worked as a camouflage officer and instructor, working out how to make factories look like ordinary rows of terraced houses when seen from the air. Moreover he was invited to contribute to the ‘Recording Britain’ programme instigated by Kenneth Clark. The programme gave official work at home to many artists not commissioned into the services under the auspices of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts). In this context, Clifford made a pictorial record of Bath’s bomb-damaged buildings of architectural importance, as well as of the city’s beautiful iron railings and gates before they were removed, supposedly for turning into tanks and planes. Clifford succeeded in saving some of the best examples, but most of the Georgian, Regency and Victorian railings removed in Bath, having (like those removed from London and other cities) proved useless for military purposes, were later dumped in the North Sea. In addition to running the Art School and his continued active involvement in the Bath Society of Artists, Clifford also founded the Bath Art Club in 1940 where, throughout the war on Monday evenings, he sustained a remarkably wide-ranging and inspired programme of notable guest lecturers, including Kenneth Clark, John Summerson, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Piper, Geoffrey Grigson and Lawrence Binyon.

Rosemary, meanwhile, was pursuing her teaching at the Royal School. However, since its buildings, like so many in Bath, had been requisitioned by the Admiralty for the duration of the war, the School had been evacuated to Longleat House, near Frome. This meant that Rosemary underwent a lengthy daily round trip by bus and bike (she hid her bicycle behind a telephone kiosk near the bus stop). She nonetheless found time to make some delightful pen-and-wash studies of the girls’ incongruous occupation of the magnificent Longleat interiors, and of buildings in and around Bath. And, by the end of the war, she and Clifford had their second daughter, Charlotte, born in 1945.

The art school premises at Sydney Place were cramped, and Clifford worried that, as people returned from the war, they might very well be taken over for housing. It occurred to him that were the Bath School of Art to become a residential art college it did not need to be in the middle of the city, and that a suitable rural location would in many ways be preferable. And, as it happened, Lord Methuen’s country seat at Corsham Court, a fine Elizabethan mansion, altered and enlarged in the eighteenth century, was about to be returned to its owner after being used by the War Department as a convalescent home for injured troops.

Book jacket designed by C&SE and printed in four colours by Collins, published in 1958. John Betjeman liked it.

Jackets designed for Jonathan Cape by C&SE, printed in three colours.

London Transport window bill advertising London Zoo by C&SE, 1939, printed by Dangerfield Printing Co Ltd, London (25.5 x 31.5 cm).

‘It was one of those flukes which doesn’t occur very often,’ recalled Clifford. ‘It was a matter of finding somewhere … with a bit more space than we had got then at Sydney Place … I made a mental note of likely places and Corsham Court was top of the list. I telephoned Lord Methuen and asked him what he was going to do when he got rid of the convalescent hospital and he said he wished he knew, so we arranged to meet the next day, and in those few hours of optimism when the war ended, the whole thing was fixed up in something like a week. It couldn’t have been done earlier and it couldn’t have been done later. So we offered ourselves as a place for students to come the following September, and they came, and we started.’ (from a taped interview with C?, 1981).

To run what became the Bath Academy of Art, Clifford had turned down a proffered Chair of Fine Art at Durham University. In the words of the Prospectus of 1953–4, he ‘hoped that the existing school might contribute “depth” and the new school “breadth”, to an Academy which as a whole might be greater than its parts’. The four-year course, leading to the Ministry’s National Diploma in Design, was based on an unusually liberal and broad-based scheme of teaching, which would include not only the visual arts but music, dancing and drama, as well as various branches of science and technology. In response to the vast national demand for teachers (secondary education having been guaranteed for all under the 1944 Butler Education Act), he was also able to provide a training course for art teachers; by the time the course closed in 1967, some 600 art teachers had passed through the college.

The Academy opened as a residential college in September 1946 with Clifford as its Principal and Rosemary as an active member of staff (her role changed from ‘art education’ in the 1950s to ‘senior year tutor’, ‘senior lecturer’ and ‘chairman of the board of studies’ in the 1960s, specialising in audio-visual studies and visual communication). The Ellises moved into a flat in part of the top floor of the east wing.

Lithograph (with added watercolour) of a pike and arrowhead lilies signed by Clifford Ellis, shown at West Riding Spring in 1973 (77 x 56.5 cm).

‘THE FULFILLED LIFE’

Clifford ran the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham for a quarter of a century, from 1946 until his retirement in 1972, aged 65. He did so with enthusiasm and vigour, and with a syllabus strongly flavoured with Clifford’s inner conviction that ‘arts are the staple of the fulfilled life’. One teacher had been warned before arriving that Clifford ‘had a lot of funny ideas. Corsham was trying to teach too many things all at once … the students were only dabbling in drawing and painting and sculpture’ (Pope). To this, Clifford might have replied that his idea of teaching art was to practise it. He wished to draw from his students the same sense of vocation that he felt himself, ‘like a gardener tending his plants’. He was ahead of his time in believing in teaching by suggestion, by opening windows and encouraging the student to develop their own burgeoning talent.

To further this aim, Clifford resolved to restrict the number of students to a maximum of 250 or so. He also assembled an impressive number of full- and part-time teachers who were, like himself, practising artists, some of whom were, or later became, famous. The distinguished painter William Scott (1913–1989) was the part-time senior painting master, while Kenneth Armitage (1916–2002), who notably made his name with his bronze figures, was in charge of sculpture. The painter-potter James Tower (1919–1988) taught all aspects of pottery and ceramic art, and took students on archaeological digs. A taste of cosmopolitan Europe was brought by the Warsaw-born painter Peter Potworowski (1898–1962). Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932), first a student, taught part-time for eleven years before concentrating full-time on his own painting. At different times, amongst other staff were influential artists like Peter Lanyon (1918–1964), Adrian Heath (1920–1992) and Gillian Ayres (b. 1930). Among such a stellar gathering, the sense one gets from the recollections of Corsham teachers and students is of a bucolic idyll in the Wiltshire countryside among a group of like-minded masters and apprentices.

The surroundings lent themselves to nature study, which was always close to Clifford’s heart. The Court was set in grounds that recalled his beloved boyhood Arundel Park. The academic syllabus included, in the early years at least, botany, biology and geology, and natural forms always remained a key component of pre-diploma and design courses. In keeping with these precepts, Clifford created various gardens at nearby Beechfield, which had also been acquired for the Academy. His ‘bog garden’ lent itself to the first-hand study of various botanical ‘forms’, and there were also aviaries where the students could observe and sketch small birds, pheasants, ducks and geese.

Although they could both put a name to most of the birds and wild flowers they saw, Clifford and Rosemary were more interested in the shapes and designs of nature, with their energy, strength and boundless variety, and the way they feed the artist’s imagination. ‘The artist,’ said Clifford, ‘must develop an acute sympathy for the forms of nature. He is himself part of nature. He is a living organism and its rhythms are his rhythms. Though, as an artist, he will work “parallel to, and not after nature”, he must still refresh himself, and constantly, by a sensitive observation of its forms’ (Ellis, 1945).

Clifford and Rosemary’s book, Modelling for Amateurs, includes not only lively renditions of nature but natural objects themselves: ‘Notice the full roundness of the fox’s skull, and then the sudden ridge that runs down it: or the tough but delicate curve of the deer’s jaw…,’ they wrote. ‘Compare the three shells on the left – see what they have in common and yet how freshly and surprisingly different is each of the individual spirals. Then turn the book sideways and upside down and look at them again. There will be surprises. Then instead of looking at the shells look at the shapes of the background.’

Clifford was remembered at Corsham as a visionary, a man with the confidence to tread his own path and flavour the syllabus with his own artistic credo. Never part of the art establishment, he was seen as a crank in some quarters and never received the national honour many thought he deserved (Brown, 1988). In thanking Clifford and Rosemary for making ‘a seemingly redundant Mansion into a virile Academy of Art’, Lord Methuen felt they had ‘welded Bath to the structure [ie. the house] for another hundred years’ and proved that ‘these historic houses have a future, when used for the benefit of those who come under their influence and who are receptive to their principles of life’ (private letter, 19.7.1972). Alas, long after the Ellises’ departure, changing times finally caught up with the Bath Academy of Art. In 1983, it was amalgamated with the Bath College of Higher Education, and, three years later, lost the unique ambience of Corsham Court. It is now called the Bath School of Art and Design within Bath Spa University. Beechfield, where the students learned to paint and turn their pots, is now a ‘gracious’ housing development, with the house and former stable block converted into flats.

RETIREMENT YEARS

Clifford and Rosemary had bought a house in a Wiltshire village just below the downs where the family moved in 1972. One sunny room was allocated as a studio, and another became home to Clifford’s large and wide-ranging book collection. Below the house, Clifford planted a new valley garden with an artist’s eye. He continued to teach, part-time, on adult education courses, and he and Rosemary collaborated with others on the texts of educational books for children. Rosemary pursued her photographic interests and, with her elder daughter, Penelope, produced numerous sets of large prints illustrating aspects of the natural and man-made world. They also, of course, continued to design the New Naturalist book jackets as well as some of those of the Collins Countryside series. Both their daughters qualified, Penelope as a sculptor at the Slade and subsequently as a teacher at the Institute of Education at London University, and Charlotte as an architect at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Book jacket designed by c&re, 1945 and published by Collins. The author, Stuart Smith went on to write The Yellow Wagtail in the NN monographs.

Clifford died, after a short illness, 19 March 1985, aged 78. Rosemary and Penelope continued to live in the same house until Rosemary’s death, aged 87, on Ascension Day, 21 May 1998. They are buried in the same grave on a grassy plot in the village cemetery below the downs under a headstone (carved by Penelope with some advice from Charlotte), inscribed simply ‘C&RE ‘with their respective dates.

THE NEW NATURALIST JACKETS

The House of Collins was not, until the New Naturalist library appeared, noted for imaginative jackets for their non-fiction titles. For the great wartime series, Britain in Pictures, the jacket had simply repeated the pattern stamped on the boards; it did little more than provide the title of the book and a common branding. The lowly role of such ‘wrappers’ is summed up in a piece of doggerel the New Naturalist collector Roger Long once found inscribed on the wrapper of a book of verse:

This outer wrap is only meantTo keep my coat from detriment.Please take it off, and let me showThe better one I wear below.

The New Naturalists were different. The war was still on when Clifford and Rosemary designed their first New Naturalist jackets, Butterflies and London’s Natural History, in autumn 1944. The first dozen or so were done at home at Lansdown Road, Bath, and the later ones, until 1972, at Corsham Court or while on family holidays, often abroad. The jackets were all based on first-hand research, and, as often as not, involved journeys to look for suitable material for a jacket. For example, they made a special trip to Dartmoor, and, later on, visited both Orkney and (Clifford alone) Shetland for their respective jackets. Sometimes material was found much closer to home, such as for Lords and Ladies and the bee orchid for the discarded jacket of Wild Orchids which were found growing by the north walk at Corsham Court. For The Pollination of Flowers, Clifford visited the Hatherley Laboratories at Exeter University to see Michael Proctor and hear about his work on pollination photography. Each jacket was the result of research, sketches, colour experiments, and much thought before arriving at a suitably arresting image.

The basic form of the New Naturalist jacket was worked out on the very first jacket, Butterflies, and continues, barely changed, 65 years later. Its distinctive style has no obvious link to other book jackets published at the time by Collins, and it seems likely, though nothing we have seen explicitly says so, that every element on it – the coloured band with the title in nearly all cases spelt out in white, the oval on the spine containing the New Naturalist ‘colophon’, and the wrap-around, lithographic image itself – was thought out by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. They also designed the distinctive New Naturalist symbol of two conjoined letters N, together with the charming idea of a small symbolic image where the letters meet. Similarly, they designed the special monograph colophon of ‘NMN’, which was worked out with pencil on the commissioning letter from Collins. The idea of a numbered series was, however, probably taken from the long-running Britain in Pictures series published by Collins and Adprint between 1941 and 1945. It was implicit from the start that this would be another numbered ‘library’ of books.

Art jackets were not new in 1944; Clifford and Rosemary had themselves designed jackets for Jonathan Cape. The first book jackets that aimed to be more than pictorial paper bags had appeared in the early 20th century, and by the 1930s a new generation of artists like Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious had begun to specialise in the medium, producing jackets that look vivid and fresh even today. Adventurous jackets were not confined to works of fiction. For the English Life series published by Batsford, Brian Cook produced dazzling wrap-around designs that exploited a new process for overlaying coloured transparent inks of high intensity that were, in his words, ‘blatant, bizarre, strident and unreal’ (Cook, 1987). Encouraged by craftsman-printers like Thomas Griffits, lithography became a popular printing method to produce jackets of brilliant colour and bold graphic form. World War II and rationing brought most of this to a screeching halt, and the bookshops of the immediate postwar world were a good deal dingier than before. Fortunately the firm of Collins was a printer as well as a publisher, and had stocks in hand to make a splash with the new series.

While the public were used to seeing art jackets around books, they might have been surprised to see them on books about butterflies and geology. It would be an exaggeration to say that the New Naturalist jackets created a sensation, but they certainly impressed the booksellers and William Collins was much encouraged by the positive trade response to the first two Ellis jackets. The colours were bright but not garish, reminiscent of lithographic prints, and produced using matt inks on rough-surfaced paper. They strongly implied something new and in which Collins took great pride. It was unusual, even then, for jackets to be completely hand-drawn, right down to the series colophon and title lettering. They caught the eye, as intended, but the books also sat sweetly together on the shelf, more and more so as the series expanded. Perhaps few jackets had paid such close attention to the spine and the way it fitted into the rest of the design. They might have been more stunning still if the artists had been allowed to carry on the design over to the back of the book, as Brian Cook did on the Batsford books, but that space was needed to advertise, and later to list other titles in the series.

To summarise the New Naturalist jacket:

1 It portrayed the contents of the book in bold forms and bright colours, printed by craft methods. The arts-and-craft look was intensified by the exquisite hand-lettering of the early titles.

2 The design was ‘bled off’, that is, there was no frame or margin. It ran over the edge in every direction except one, where the design petered over on to the back, ending not in a mechanical line but in brushstrokes.

3 The jackets were, at least initially, prepared for printing by skilled lithographers used to interpreting the ideas of an artist.

4 The book was easy and pleasant to handle because the design was printed on slightly rough paper and did not slip. For the same reason it fitted snugly to the buckram binding of the book.