A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War by David Boyd Haycock

Author:David Boyd Haycock [David Boyd Haycock]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906964887
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

By mid-July it was holiday season, and many of the young artists and writers were escaping London. Carrington and Gertler went to the seaside: Carrington with her family to Devon, Gertler to a bed-and-breakfast near Hastings in East Sussex. Epstein was holidaying nearby, and Mark found the Vorticist sculptor’s presence so ‘worrying’ that he was unable to work for the whole first week of his holiday.50 ‘Epstein has a filthy mind’, he complained to Carrington, ‘and he always has some girl living with him, including his wife’.

Nevertheless Mark managed to paint Black and White Cottage, one of his finest works from this period. He described to Carrington his joy in successfully completing the portrait of this building, which he had ‘so long pined to paint.’ In a not-too-subtle analogy, he explained: ‘I should imagine the pleasure akin to that of a lover embracing, for the first time, the girl he for so long loved and longed to embrace. Just as he would passionately and lovingly linger over parts until then forbidden, so I lovingly lingered over those beautiful greens, greys and whites I knew so well but never before had the opportunity to paint.’ He also responded to her comments on Spencer’s recent work: ‘I do not agree with you about “Cookham” being the only individual artist,’ he wrote, aggrieved. ‘That is rather unfair on some of us other artists who work.’51

Spencer, of course, was spending his summer in Cookham, with occasional trips to see Eddie Marsh and friends in London. He also joined Gertler and Gilbert on a Slade picnic, and they walked back to Cookham together.52 * His brother Will was coming home from Germany for the August Bank Holiday weekend, and Henry Lamb was another guest at Fernlea. After their disastrous first meeting in London the previous year, in March Lamb had visited Cookham. He told his friend Lytton Strachey afterwards, ‘I understood his origins & genre much better this time and he was much less nervous and trying; so that I really got to like him tremendously.’53 Even though Spencer did not find Lamb’s work ‘interesting’, they shared a passion for music, and became firm friends.

Nash, meanwhile, was in Lancashire with Margaret, visiting Gordon Bottomley and his wife. The cost of their holiday – kept secret from their parents, who would not have approved of the unmarried couple travelling alone together – had been generously funded by Marsh. Paul wrote to him gratefully, and explained that his sketches ‘are promising for later development but individually rather nice and gentlemanly. Still, I feel I have given a jump right away from “Nash trees”.’54

It was Nevinson who ventured furthest afield, heading to the south of France with his mother. They were in Marseilles when news came that a Serb nationalist in Sarajevo had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In England, where sectarian civil war in Ireland looked more worrying than hostilities in Europe, the news was hardly noticed. The complex web of treaties and

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