Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, In Search of Rex Whistler: His Life and Work, Frances Lincoln, 2012.
Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Peculiarity of Algernon Newton, Daniel Katz Gallery, 2012.
The artists Rex Whistler and Algernon Newton are the subjects of two new publications created to accompany exhibitions that appeared briefly in London before Christmas. Both artists were twentieth-century painters who revived eighteenth-century methods of painting. Celebrating what they saw as an age of reason, they turned away from modernity to a romantic conception of an English identity that supposedly predated the problems of industrialization and urbanization. Terry Castle has dubbed this movement Rococophilia. Alan Powers, writing in Apollo, once called it the George VI style, and he is right in observing that this latter Georgian era mirrored some of the characteristics of the first.
But what insight is to be gained for scholars of the eighteenth century by studying the twentieth? We here have presented the work of two men who, although painters and not art historians, devoted their lives to the study of eighteenth-century painting techniques and styles. We can learn not only from what they have discovered in the work of the Georgian masters, but also from the contrast between the work of our own times and that of the age of Hogarth. Rex Whistler and Algernon Newton both emulated the thin glazes, minute detail, and the somewhat doll-like figures of Canaletto. However, the one’s work is playful, the other’s mournful, and neither achieves the composure of Canaletto himself. Writing about Newton, Andrew Graham-Dixon attributes this lack of tranquility to the trauma of the Great War. Whether turning towards Canaletto is meant to be ironic, or reflects the painter’s desperate search for order in a broken world is left to the reader to decide.
The Newton catalogue is an exemplary introduction to this underappreciated artist. A war-shocked son of the family that co-founded Windsor & Newton paints, his career was slow to launch, and he did not achieve wide appreciation until after World War II. In developing his own style, he studied Canaletto intently at the National Gallery. Far from the canals of Venice or even the fashionable houses of the West End, however, his own paintings infuse the back corners of contemporary London – the warehouses of the Regent’s Canal and quiet streets of Victorian terraces – with an eerie picturesque beauty. His paintings are almost figureless and the skies are tense, flooding the buildings below in pale yellow light. The effect is somewhat surreal, and some find it disturbing that this level of detail is lavished on quiet and lifeless scenes.
The Peculiarity of Algernon Newton includes only one short essay, but it is a major contribution because there is so little work on the artist. One wishes that the exhibition had included some of his country house portraits, such as his superb depiction of the north front of Stowe, which casts the house and motionless trees in an unworldly golden light. These works too, though less eerie than an unpeopled London, feature skies filled with the tension of a coming storm. As the title of the catalogue celebrates, Newton’s art is undeniably peculiar.
In Search of Rex Whistler (not strictly a catalogue as the exhibition celebrated the book and not vice-versa), is a triumph. Although little of the biographical material is new, it is highly readable and sparks enthusiasm for this most delightful interwar painter. Whistler is renowned for the elegance and humour of his art – for Claude-Lorrain-inspired landscapes filled with Baroque follies, bicycles, and Victorians playing croquet. The book is at pains to stress that there was also a more serious side to his work as a painter of portraits and religious art, though these are seldom without trace of his trademark wit. Although it brings in a few previously unstudied sources, such as an unpublished memoir of Lord David Cecil, the real value of the book lies in its illustrations. For the first time, a comprehensive selection of the artist’s works are reproduced in high-quality full colour, with plenty of detail shots.
As these publications remind us, it is not only the Middle Ages that have been romanticized in British culture: this pair of too-often forgotten artists saw the modern age in a golden eighteenth-century light.