Art of the New Naturalists: A Complete History. Peter Marren
wolves staring wide-eyed from the trees with not a cage or bar in sight. Like so much of their work, this image was based on close on-the-spot observation. Rosemary’s memory was of the young Clifford and herself walking to Whipsnade over the downs by night, and choosing a dry ditch to take a nap, waking to find the wolves staring at them.
Another important sponsor of commercial art was Shell, which later showcased some of the best poster design from the 1920s and ‘30s in The Shell Poster Book (1992). The man responsible, a counterpart to Frank Pick at London Transport, was Jack Beddington, who persuaded the company to allow artists to produce designs in their own way with a minimum of commercial interference. Together, the Shell collection advertises not so much the corporate brand as the British landscape and way of life, while, seemingly incidentally, presenting Shell in the guise of a patron of artistic good taste. One of c&re’s Shell designs, dated 1934, shows Lower Slaughter Mill in Gloucestershire as an image of a lost rural England of millstreams, sleepy willows and a village lane empty of cars, painted in pure greens, ochres and reds. It is signed ‘Rosemary and Clifford Ellis’, and hence was a Rosemary-initiated design. Another poster, a joint work done the same year, has an array of antique artefacts, including a grinning stone gargoyle, within a ruined abbey and assures us with a wink that ‘Antiquaries Prefer Shell’.
London Transport bill, Winter Visitors, by c&re, 1937, printed by Dangerfield Printing Company Ltd, London (25.5 x 73 cm).
London Transport window bill by c&re advertising Test Match at The Oval, 1939, printed by Sir Joseph Causton & Sons Ltd, London (25.5 x 31.5 cm).
London Transport window bill, Come out to live! by c&re, 1936 (25.5 x 31.5 cm).
It is quite easy to spot a poster by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis even without the cipher. The colours are fresh, bright and without outlines, the designs simple and bold, and the foregrounds and backgrounds juxtaposed in a characteristic way. They often express an idea rather than a product. With hindsight one might discern elements of the New Naturalist jackets in their poster of a trout fisher’s tackle over the legend ‘Anglers prefer Shell’. Their taste for open-air scenes of nature is still more evident in a quartet of metre-tall images commissioned by London Transport, entitled simply, ‘Wood’, ‘Heath’, ‘Down’ and ‘River’, each symbolised by a lively graphic representation of a wild bird, respectively a green woodpecker, an owl, a kestrel and a heron. In the background of each one, people are having fun: ramblers ask a shepherd for directions; a man and his girl choose a spot for their picnic; a dad gives his child a piggy-back ride. Nature is accessible and enhances life.
From 1934 to 1937, the couple also designed dust jackets for novels published by Jonathan Cape, having caught the eye of a young editor, Ruth Atkinson. These were printed in a similar way to a poster, by lithography and in three colours, and they were executed in a modernist style that brings together intriguing elements from the story. Clifford and Rosemary always liked to read the book before they started work on the jacket. I have never heard of North-West by North by Dora Birtles, or The White Farm by Geraint Goodwin, let alone read them, but their striking jackets would certainly make me want to take up the book and open it.
By 1936, the couple, with their year-old first child, Penelope, had moved to Bath where they had both been offered teaching posts. Rosemary became the art teacher at the Royal School for Daughters of officers of the Army on Lansdown, while Clifford took up an appointment as assistant master at the Bath School of Art, then part of the city’s Technical College. Initially he taught art to 12- to 14-year-olds preparing for local trades skills, such as bookbinding, painting and decorating. He must have made a great impression because, two years later, he was appointed headmaster.
London Transport window bill, Summer Is Flying, by c&re, 1938, printed by Johnson, Riddle & Co, London (25.5 x 73 cm).
Meanwhile, shortly after their arrival in Bath, Clifford and Rosemary joined the Bath Society of Artists, where they were soon elected onto the committee for the Society’s annual exhibitions. Among the many artists they came to know was the painter, and sometime pupil of Sickert, Paul Ayshford, Lord Methuen (1886–1974), as well as the famous ‘grand old man of British painting’ himself, Walter Sickert. The now aged and venerable Sickert, with his third wife, the painter Therese Lessore, had moved to Bathampton in 1938, where they lived in what was to prove their last home at St George’s Hill. Ailing but still active and ever quizzical, Sickert proposed to Clifford in March 1939 that he teach at the Art School once a week, free of charge. His offer was eagerly accepted, and Sickert would talk and reminisce for two hours every Friday to Clifford’s students, continuing to do so until his health failed him in the early years of the war. Clifford and Rosemary were to be of great help to Therese Lessore in the hard task of caring for Sickert during his final illness up to his death in January 1942.
In 1939 Modelling for Amateurs by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis was published in the Studio ‘How to do It’ series (a revised edition was published, again in two formats in 1945). By then, the Ellises were at the heart of the local art world, teaching, and producing innovative freelance work. Then World War II intervened.
CLIFFORD AND ROSEMARY’S WAR
The art school remained operational throughout the war, even after being transferred to and then bombed out of its wartime Green Park buildings during the ‘Baedeker’ air raids on Bath. Remarkably, under the circumstances, a fine if less spacious house was made available in Sydney Place. Clifford saw the war in a positive light as an opportunity for sharing ‘a deeper and richer life’ through the dispensation of the arts. When war was declared, Clifford was 32 and unlikely to be called up. But he certainly did his bit. He joined the local Home Guard (and said long afterwards that Dad’s Army got it spot on). He also worked as a camouflage officer and instructor, working out how to make factories look like ordinary rows of terraced houses when seen from the air. Moreover he was invited to contribute to the ‘Recording Britain’ programme instigated by Kenneth Clark. The programme gave official work at home to many artists not commissioned into the services under the auspices of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts). In this context, Clifford made a pictorial record of Bath’s bomb-damaged buildings of architectural importance, as well as of the city’s beautiful iron railings and gates before they were removed, supposedly for turning into tanks and planes. Clifford succeeded in saving some of the best examples, but most of the Georgian, Regency and Victorian railings removed in Bath, having (like those removed from London and other cities) proved useless for military purposes, were later dumped in the North Sea. In addition to running the Art School and his continued active involvement in the Bath Society of Artists, Clifford also founded the Bath Art Club in 1940 where, throughout the war on Monday evenings, he sustained a remarkably wide-ranging and inspired programme of notable guest lecturers, including Kenneth Clark, John Summerson, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Piper, Geoffrey Grigson and Lawrence Binyon.
Rosemary, meanwhile, was pursuing her teaching at the Royal School. However, since its buildings, like so many in Bath, had been requisitioned by the Admiralty for the duration of the war, the School had been evacuated to Longleat House, near Frome. This meant that Rosemary underwent a lengthy daily round trip by bus and bike (she hid her bicycle behind a telephone kiosk near the bus stop). She nonetheless found time to make some delightful pen-and-wash studies of the girls’ incongruous occupation