And Another Thing

21 March 2009

Celebrating the Michelangelo of the Maida Vale pub

One of my favourite parts of London, in easy walking distance of my house in Newton Road, is what I call the Ardizzone country. This stretches from the edges of Little Venice into Maida Vale and is, or was until the crunch, in the process of rapid gentrification. I call it after the artist because, from 1920 until his death in 1979, he lived (on and off) at 130 Elgin Avenue, and made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little sketches of its people. He had not much artistic training, apart from a spell under Bernard Meninsky at the Westminster School of Art, but he had an extraordinary skill at doing rapid figure drawings, which he deepened by clever hatching and watercolour washes. They look lightweight at first glance, but the more you study them, the more you come to admire their quality and the amount of interesting information they convey.

Edward Ardizzone had a fine gift for drawing children, and made his living by writing and illustrating books for them. But what he most liked to do, I think, was to frequent the Victorian and Edwardian pubs, in which the area then abounded, and draw their habituees, especially women, in their usual activities: drinking, arguing, pontificating and, occasionally, fighting. He liked drawing buxom barmaids, blowsy streetwalkers, and those ample women who used to sit, quietly, behind brimming pints of Guinness. Others in his cast were men propping up bars, and occasionally wiping the foam off their Lloyd George moustaches, and old codgers, hands in pockets, greasy felt hats crammed down over their ears. There is about his work a whiff of mild-and-bitter, a hint of sex and a huge expenditure of humorous good nature, in which he obviously abounded. I wish I had known him, just as I wish I had known that card-sharping genius Thomas Rowlandson. The two have often been compared. If I were starting again, I would collect both. Neither is cheap but nor are they unobtainable. In recent shows at Chris Beetles, who now runs the best private gallery in London — in Ryder Street, SW1 — he had nearly 50 Rowlandsons for sale, and half a dozen Ardizzones.

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