James Pryde (1866–1941) is one of those artists who enjoyed a considerable vogue in their own lifetime, and resurface now and again but never with anything like the same success. (The last solo show of his work I saw was at the Redfern in 1988. There was a museum show in Edinburgh, his native city, in 1992, but nothing since.) He is not widely known, nor is he popular. ‘His paintings show much dramatic contrast and emphasis, not always justified by their subjects,’ opines the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists. He is perhaps more familiar as one half of the artistic partnership which produced ground-breaking poster designs under the pseudonym of the Beggarstaff Brothers. For that early venture he teamed up with the energetic William Nicholson, who was actually his brother-in-law and was probably the main driving force. Their association was never a commercial success, though their designs were (and still are) much admired, and it only lasted a few years in the 1890s. Pryde had to make his own way after that, and succeeded in producing a small body of work which has a distinct tinge and flavour, indeed a decided originality, which will doubtless find a new band of admirers today.
The Fleming Collection, with the expert assistance of guest-curator Cecilia Powell, has mounted an impressive and enjoyable loan exhibition of Pryde’s paintings and prints, backed up with a wealth of documentary material. (The accompanying catalogue is a useful addition to the scant literature on the subject.) As you enter the gallery, three large paintings face you on the right-hand wall: reading from left to right they are ‘The Husk’, ‘Cowdray Ruins’ and ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Bedroom’. (These rarely seen pictures are from Dunecht House in Aberdeenshire, and were commissioned by Annie, Viscountess Cowdray, Pryde’s principal patron.) At once a preoccupation with history and the ends of things will be apparent. This is Pryde’s hallmark, delivered in sombre renditions of often imaginary architectural settings. The effect of this trio is, however, grand rather than grim. The intensity he brought to his chosen imagery is enhanced by the strange disjunctions of scale he was so fond of: vast façades and tiny figures. The viewer is reminded of Fuseli’s famous drawing ‘The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments’, or, if a more modern comparison is sought, the extreme attenuation and tininess of some of Giacometti’s figures, overwhelmed by space.
Rough canvas textures are left visible, and the paint surfaces with their large brushstrokes often look abraded, as worn as the buildings they represent. Pryde keeps the colour low, offering an occasional dramatic highlight such as the bright patch of blue on the right of ‘The Haunted House’, or the vertical passage of incarnadine down the left side of ‘The Red Ruin’, leaving the rest grey or oatmeal. His upbringing in Edinburgh was partly responsible (‘to me it is the most romantic city in the world’, he said), with its tall dark houses and gloomy portals. No doubt impressed by this prevailing perpendicularity, he was also struck by the beauty of dereliction, and married this with an appetite for gloom. The darker sides of Velázquez, Hogarth, Piranesi and Guardi all exerted an influence, and his pastiche of Old Masters will no doubt appeal to contemporary taste. As perhaps will his instant impact and theatricality. (Ironically, Pryde was not a success as a theatre designer when he tried it late in life, though his influence on other designers such as Gordon Craig and Lovat Fraser was significant.)
Another abiding theme for Pryde was Mary Queen of Scots’ bed, which he saw as a child in Holyroodhouse, a giant four-poster which reappears in various guises such as ‘The Derelict’ and ‘The Red Bed’. Oddly, the amphitheatre or bullring shape which features in ‘The Deserted Garden’ (c.1909) seems to foreshadow a number of William Nicholson’s downland compositions, and most particularly his ‘Plaza del Toros, Malaga’ of 1935. Other subjects include a slum, a shrine and a blasted oak; crepuscular in tone, if not downright creepy. Downstairs is Pryde’s Rogues Gallery, his lithographs of the likes of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, and Henry Irving playing the robber Dubosc, together with a humorous watercolour portrait by Dulac of Pryde in his wartime role as Special Constable. There’s a section devoted to half-a-dozen variations on the theme of the arch, of which ‘The Unknown Corner’ (c.1912), owned by the Fleming Collection itself, is perhaps the finest. Here it’s revealing to see the small gouache studies for paintings that frequently Pryde simply squared up and enlarged (possibly leading to a certain listlessness in handling in the big canvases). The arch is a fruitful subject, whether blind or leading to a view, an opportunity for dramatic lighting and towering verticals, and fully exploited, as one might expect.
Pryde made decay his speciality. Christopher Woodward, in his study of the subject In Ruins, writes thus:
When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future. To statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and to philosophers the futility of mortal man’s aspirations. To a poet, the decay of a monument represents the dissolution of the individual ego in the flow of Time; to a painter or architect, the fragments of a stupendous antiquity call into question the purpose of their art. Why struggle with a brush or chisel to create the beauty of wholeness when far greater works have been destroyed by Time?
Why, indeed? Pryde gave up the struggle fairly promptly, and did less and less during the last 20 years of his life. He died in St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington, in the winter of the Blitz, a time of greater devastation than anything he himself had painted. The younger Romantic painters such as John Piper (who, writing as an occasional art critic, had reviewed Pryde favourably in The Spectator in 1940) continued and enlarged his vision of melancholy ruin. Today, the Romantic yearning of Pryde’s images may sound a distinctly nostalgic chord, but their imaginative power is indisputable.
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