Last pearl

In the official account of British 20th-century art, the big names belong to the international players whose universal vision won them a place in the annals of world art. This is understandable. What is harder to explain is the official version’s almost total neglect of those native artists who kept alive, through this century of global change, the peculiarly English tradition founded by Hogarth. Carel Weight, Ruskin Spear, Richard Eurich — names virtually unknown to the general public — all played a part in this unwritten history, as did the David Hockney of A Rake’s Progress before defecting to America. Another key figure was James Fitton (1899–1982), whose reputation is up for reassessment in a show of paintings at Crane Kalman.

Fitton had a difficult background for an artist. The son of an Oldham machine-worker and union activist, he entered employment at the age of 14 and had to acquire all his art education at evening classes, first at Manchester School of Art — where he made friends with the much older Lowry — and later at the Central School in London. From his father, he inherited socialism — he was a founder member of the Artists’ International Association and a political cartoonist for Left Review — and a Northern work ethic that kept him in commercial employment all his life, as an illustrator for magazines and as art director and adviser to the ad agency Vernon’s.

By today’s rules — since Bohemia became Sohemia — this would scupper anyone’s hopes of painting, but paint Fitton did, showing regularly at the Academy and missing the Presidency by a whisker on three occasions — the first, in 1956, prompting Munnings to fume in the Daily Mail: ‘I heard that creature Fitton might be elected.