Line man

One of the pleasures of the critic’s life is to review exhibitions of work by artists who have been forgotten or overlooked, and to recommend them for general attention. I know some arts editors are only interested in fashionable or mainstream artists, but I’m happy to say that The Spectator’s editorial policy is altogether more wide-ranging. Hence this review of the unjustly neglected Randolph Schwabe (1885–1948), an artist who believed in the value of classical draughtsmanship, which he promulgated through a lifetime of teaching. German by origin (his cotton merchant grandfather settled near Manchester), he trained at the Slade, then studied in Paris and travelled in Italy before returning to England. He taught drawing at Camberwell, was appointed Drawing Master at the Royal College of Art under William Rothenstein, and in February 1930 succeeded the great Henry Tonks as Professor and Principal of the Slade, a post he retained until his death.

Schwabe was thus in a position to influence a generation of students, while continuing to enhance the Slade’s reputation for brilliant draughtsmanship. Among his friends and colleagues were Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Albert Rutherston, Muirhead Bone and Allan Gwynne-Jones. Schwabe was a scholarly artist, though not a boring one, yet the selection of his paintings, drawings and prints at the St Barbe Museum is disappointing: not nearly as stimulating or revealing as I’d hoped. Perhaps this is because it relies too heavily on loans from the artist’s family, which tend inevitably to be things that remained unsold at the artist’s death, and therefore not always the best. The show, not hung chronologically, also feels slightly muddled.

Undoubtedly Schwabe spent too much time and energy as an arts administrator and not enough on his own work, but I have seen sufficient examples elsewhere to indicate that he is a more substantial artist than this exhibition suggests.