Sir Muirhead Bone: Artist and Patron
The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 September
The Fleming Collection mounts loan exhibitions of artists represented in its permanent collection, its focus on Scottish artists a strength rather than a limitation. (Would there were an institution in London which just showed American artists. Perhaps then we’d get decent exhibitions of Wayne Thiebaud, Nancy Graves or Martin Puryear.) In recent years the Fleming has shown James Pryde and Joan Eardley to good effect, and now the great etcher Muirhead Bone is given the same treatment.
The chronological survey begins in the downstairs gallery, where a fine drypoint portrait of Bone by his great friend Francis Dodd depicts the artist leaning over his etching press in a curly-brimmed hat. There’s lots of useful documentary material here in the wall-length display case — historic exhibition catalogues and paper-covered volumes of his war drawings from the Western Front, published in ten parts. Bone had the distinction of being Britain’s first war artist when he was appointed in July 1916. Always a hard worker, during the first world war he pushed himself to the verge of breakdown. But it was his war work that established his reputation.
Muirhead Bone (1876–1953) was born in Glasgow and apprenticed as an architect’s draughtsman, a training that stood him in good stead for his later preoccupation with buildings and demolitions. He was ambitious and attended evening classes at Glasgow School of Art, later claiming that he never had a single lesson in oil painting because the light was never good enough at night. This did not prevent him from wanting to be a painter, and, although he later burned most of his early paintings, one or two have survived, including ‘The Fair, Ayr Racecourse’, c.1901. This hangs at the Fleming Collection among such early drawings as ‘The Turkey Market, Smithfield’ (1897), with its touch of Daumier, and a rather lovely depiction of the back of the ‘Underground Railway’ (c.1905) in lithographic ink on tracing paper.
It was evident early on that Bone was by instinct and inclination a draughtsman, and that etching was a process exactly suited to his talents. (See the beautiful, slightly Whistlerian ‘Gorbals’ from 1899.) He was drawn to serious, dramatic subjects, and spent much time drawing the slums, having determined to do for Glasgow what Charles Meryon (1821–68) had done for Paris. Bone aimed to go beyond topography, and somehow capture the feel of a place. His search for fitting subjects took him to jails, docks and building sites. ‘I am the only prison artist in Britain,’ he proudly declared.
He moved to London in 1902, and soon developed a circle of influential friends that included the critic D.S. MacColl, the artists William Strang and William Rothenstein, and the collector/curator Campbell Dodgson of the V&A. Bone was able to take full advantage of the booming print market, which ensured him a very good income until the Wall Street Crash in 1929. By that time he was well known and widely celebrated, not least for such remarkable works as ‘The Great Gantry, Charing Cross Station’ (1906), a tour-de-force of etching, the virtuosity of which can perhaps be best judged by studying the dramatic first trial state. (This is hung at the Fleming with two pencil studies and the final print. The etching went through eight trial proofs in five states before Bone was satisfied.) The trial state depicts the main part of the scaffolding, which had to be built after the station roof collapsed, strikingly dark against the unfinished composition.
The first world war is well represented with powerful watercolour, ink or charcoal drawings, such as ‘Wounded from the Somme’ (1916), a sensitive description of the evacuation of a hospital train, or ‘The Fight for Lens’ (1917). There’s also ‘Oiling: a Battleship Taking on Oil Fuel at Sea’ (c.1917), in which Bone surveys his subject from a characteristically high viewpoint and concentrates on the structure of the craft. By contrast there’s a large and peculiarly fascinating drawing from the second world war (in which Bone again served as an official war artist) of a torpedoed oil tanker, done in charcoal, chalk and wash. The steel plates of its hull are riven, buckled and crunched, an effective display of the brute destructiveness of modern warfare.
Upstairs, there are superb large war drawings, including the extraordinary ‘St Bride’s and the City after the Fire, 29 December 1940’. This magnificent panorama reaches a new standard of achievement for Bone. He may have eschewed experiment, but he plumbed his own techniques to a great depth. He always maintained that the only praise worth anything was that of younger artists, and as soon as he had the influence and resources, he set about helping young talent. A group of paintings and drawings by the likes of Bernard Meninsky, Stanley Spencer, William Roberts, Mark Gertler and David Bomberg attest to this. Recommended.
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