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lifestyle, interior decor, and modes of living

lifestyle, interior decor, and modes of living

lifestyle, interior decor, and modes of living

Among the Bohemians

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

unconventional ways of living: 1900-1940

For almost half a lifetime I have marvelled at the way Bloomsbury bohemians organised their private lives. Switching partners, even sexes in their life choices? They took it in their stride. Menage a trois? Easy-peasy. Menage a quatre? Can be done. How on earth did they manage it? Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians is largely an answer to that question. She looks in detail at the way bohemian English people (largely artists and writers) organised their lives in what we would now call an ‘alternative’ manner and went out of their way to live La Vie Boheme.

Among the Bohemians It’s an enormously entertaining book, packed with anecdotes on every page and written by the daughter of Quentin Bell, who was the son of Vanessa Bell, who in her turn was Virginia Woolf’s sister. This is a very telling provenance. She deals fairly comprehensively with her relatives and friends from the Bloomsbury Group about whom we already know a great deal, but the other figures who feature strongly are Augustus John, Eric Gill, Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, plus minor figures such as Nina Hamnett, Betty May, Mark Gertler, and Ethel Mannin.

The book is arranged around a clever structural device which abandons a chronological narrative and instead bases chapters on themes. How did they cope with money and poverty? How did they arrange their sex lives? How should children be raised? What was their line on interior decor? This makes for a lively read.

The general picture which emerges is that of a group of upper middle class people who decided to kick against the stifling mores of late-Victorian and Edwardian society. Many of them were spoilt toffs and talented wasters who were merely playing at being Bohemian, and there is a distinct theme of nostalgie de la boue in some of the more extreme cases – but given the period, at least they were having a serious tilt at convention.

Some such as Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant managed to combine unorthodox behaviour with a certain degree of professional success. But others slummed it, cadged drinks, or in the case of Dylan Thomas, stole other people’s shirts.

There is a particularly good chapter on interior design in which she analyses the various phases of Bohemian domestic aesthetics – from what Osbert Lancaster satirised as ‘First Russian Ballet Period’ to what she calls (poking fun at the Omega Group) ‘Jumble Sale chic’. Many of these fashions are still with us, though of course they no longer seem shocking, as they did at the time. This was a period in which even brightly coloured crockery was considered outré.

On the downside, some of them do not come off well out of her account: Ottoline Morrell taking two baths a year; Wyndham Lewis writing to his benefactor ‘Where’s the fucking stipend?’; Ruthven Todd stealing from the Grigsons who were supporting him; Augustus John neglecting his children; Eric Gill having sex with his. Much of it was not very politically correct – and that’s putting it mildly.

But her account is much more than gossip and amusing anecdotes, for she includes lots of well-digested social history on topics such as servants, the introduction of tinned food, and the price of wine and restaurant meals, This was the period which started cross dressing, make-up and smoking for women, occasional nude bathing, barefoot children left unsupervised, and for some of the hard cases, taking drugs.

It’s also a fully scholarly piece of work with properly referenced citations, notes on all the major and minor characters, and a huge bibliography. She has done us all the favour of reading the memoirs, the novels, and the journalism of all these now half-forgotten people – Gerald Brenan, Ethel Mannin, Roy Campbell – and digesting their experiences in a most delightful way.

She is perfectly aware that many of them were failed artists and part-time bohemians, well-to-do people who were playing at Artistic Life. And yet she can see that in the context of a world which served up boiled cabbage and stewed prunes with custard, a group which opted for wine, olives, and cooking with garlic represented the choice of Life.

I might be susceptible to literary and more particularly Bloomsbury gossip, but I found this book a real page turner. For me it will stay close at hand as a valuable source of reference to the period 1900—1940, and maybe even as an inspiration if I ever feel like being penniless but happy.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Among the Bohemians   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians, London: Penguin Books, 2003, pp.362, ISBN: 014028978X


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At Home with Books

June 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the libraries of book lovers and book collectors

I once lived in a twelve-room Victorian house filled from top to bottom with a book collection which represented forty years of reading, studying, and loving acquisition. Then a few years ago, a change in life style led me to auction off my libraries – the whole lot – a decision about which I have felt ambivalent ever since. This book helped to remove every last trace of that ambivalence. I now feel like cutting my own throat.

At Home with BooksIt’s a superbly illustrated tour of private libraries and book collections, showing how people have integrated books into their homes. Of course, not many of them are stuck for space: but even those people who live in flats and who have to carve out space from relatively modest surroundings are revealed as book lovers who respect books as objects and who wish to display their collections in a way which combines practicality with a love of good design.

But it’s also about a lot more than that: it covers all aspects of bibliographic enthusiasm. How to store your books so that you can get at them; how to organise your library; how to start a collection (and what to look for); how books should be bound; and even details such as bookplates, library ladders, and how the lighting of a library should be arranged.

The examples illustrated come from the homes of people whose entire lives revolve around the purchase, collection and love of books. People such as Seymour Durst whose five-storey house is devoted to books about the history of New York; Paul Getty who has his collection housed in a small castle; people such as the translator Richard Howard and the biographer John Richardson who actually live in the libraries they have created; and there are also some surprises such as the inclusion of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

The one masterpiece of book storage I expected to find but didn’t was that of Sir John Soane’s house (now a museum) in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but that is perhaps because most of the examples shown are located in the USA.

There are all sorts of beautiful oddities: a collector who recovers all his books with cream paper so that they blend in with his furniture; bookspaces arranged by interior designers such as Bill Blass and David Hicks, who has most of his book bound in red to match his trademark colour scheme.

These people take their bibliophilic really seriously. Mitchell Wolfson Jr, who lives in Miami, where the climate is inimical to book life, has both climate control and insect-free environments in his home and his museum.

The advice also includes such curiosities as how to protect books against attack by bookworms and other vermin by putting them into plastic bags and freezing them overnight; plus how to best to design private libraries, and if you are stuck for the details, where to find bookdealers, book fairs, and makers of library furnishings.

This is a beautifully produced book which will appeal to both bibliophiles and lovers of interior design. It is elegantly designed, lavishly illustrated, and it makes me realise I made a terrible mistake.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Estelle Ellis, At Home with Books, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp.248, ISBN 0500286116


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Bloomsbury Art and Design

August 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

painting, illustration, ceramics, interior design

The Bloomsbury Group included a number of painters and designers who had an important influence on the visual and decorative arts during the period of English modernism (1905—1930). The group included artists Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell; the artist and critic (and Vanessa Bell’s lover) Roger Fry; the artist (and Vanessa Bell’s lifetime companion) Duncan Grant, plus painters Dora Carrington and Mark Gertler. Bloomsbury art and design was never a coherent movement with an agreed set of theories: it was a close-knit group of friends who shared an interest in aesthetics.

The following publications deal with the amazingly wide range of their art in its pure and applied manifestations. These range from easel paintings, public commissions, interior designs, book illustrations, furniture and tapestries, plus the celebrated wall decorations at Charleston.

Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Art of Bloomsbury features the paintings and drawings of artists Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant – three of the central figures of the Bloomsbury Group. There are entries on two hundred works of art, all illustrated in colour, which bring out the chief characteristics of Bloomsbury painting – domestic, contemplative, sensuous, and essentially pacific. These are seen in landscapes, portraits, and still lifes set in London, Sussex, and the South of France. The volume also features the abstract painting and applied art that placed these artists at the forefront of the avant-garde before the First World War. There are portraits of family and friends – from Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes to Aldous Huxley and Edith Sitwell. Essays by leading scholars provide further insights into the works and the changing critical reaction to them.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignBloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity is a scholarly study which traces the development of Bloomsbury’s domestic aesthetic from the group’s influential Post-Impressionism in Britain around 1910 through to the 1930s. Christopher Reed makes detailed studies of rooms and environments created by Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry, and he puts them into the context of aesthetic debates of the period. His study challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from orthodox modernism. Whatever you think of the book’s theoretical arguments, it’s a beautifully illustrated production, full of fascinating paintings, fabrics, decoration, interior design, and original graphics.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Art of Dora Carrington At the age of 38, Dora Carrington (1893-1932) committed suicide, unable to contemplate living without her companion, Lytton Strachey, who had died a few weeks before. The association with Lytton and his Bloomsbury friends, combined with her own modesty have tended to overshadow Carrington’s contribution to modern British painting. She hardly exhibited at all during her own lifetime, and didn’t even bother signing her own works. This book aims to redress the balance by looking at the immense range of her work. She produced portraits, landscapes, glass paintings, letter illustrations and decorative work – all illustrated here in full colour. It also acts as an introduction to the artist herself, with rare photographs helping form a fuller picture of this fascinating woman.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Bloomsbury Artists: Prints and Book Designs This volume catalogues the woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and other prints created by Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant – with various colour and black and white reproductions. Of particular interest are the many book jackets designed for the Hogarth Press, the publishing company established by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. Also included are ephemera such as social invitations, trade cards, catalogue covers, and bookplates. Many of these were produced as part of the movement for modern design established by the Omega Workshops.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignVision and Design is a collection of Roger Fry’s best articles and writings. It had a significant impact on the art world in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike many critics and scholars of the time, Fry expanded his discussion on art outside of the Western world, even to the degree of contending that primitive sculpture surpasses that of the West. As well as Western art, the book examines the use of form and aesthetics in ethnic art from Africa, America and Asia. It reinforced his position as a critic and it is still recognised as an extremely influential work in the development of modernist theory.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignCharleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden by Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicolson encapsulates the artistic sensibility of the Bloomsbury Group. It is an illustrated record of the farmhouse at Charleston in Sussex which Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant treated as a blank canvas in interior design. In doing so, they created a treasury of Bloomsbury art. The book provides family memories and anecdotes drawn from a lifetime’s experience. Each room links the interiors with some of the leading cultural figures of the 20th century, plus guests such as Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. Specially commissioned photographs portray the essence of the Bloomsbury style both throughout the house, with its painted furniture and walls, plus decorative items, paintings, and objects in the garden.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Art of Duncan Grant In addition to being a central figure in the Bloomsbury group, Duncan Grant played a leading role in the establishment of modernist art in Britain. His principal works were easel paintings, but he also produced murals, fabric designs, theatre and ballet work, illustration and print-making, and commercial interior decoration. Throughout a long life Duncan Grant continued to experiment with and adapt to new styles and techniques, and this book offers an opportunity to grasp the extent of his achievement. It examines the influence that people and places had on him and demonstrates, with more than a hundred illustrations of his work, the range of his talent. It’s been said that he was as polymorphous in his work as he was in his much-discussed private life.
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Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Bloomsbury Rooms

July 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity

Bloomsbury Rooms is a beautifully illustrated book which explores the relationship between Bloomsbury notions of aesthetics and the actual interior designs of the homes in which its members lived. Christopher Reed takes their various houses as starting points – 46 Gordon Square, Asheham, Brunswick Square, Charleston, 52 Tavistock Square – for meditations on their socio-psychological development and the notions of art practised by Vanessa Bell, Walter Sickert, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant.

Bloomsbury RoomsIt should be said from the outset that although this has the size and has the high production values of a coffee table book, it is not a casual or an easy read. Christopher Reed situates Bloomsbury within theoretical concepts of art that were competing with each other in the early phase of European modernism in a serious and heavyweight fashion. And these theories themselves are analysed in a political and ideological manner. In fact his study is not only about Bloomsbury’s domestic interiors. He is profoundly well-read in the whole Bloomsbury oeuvre, and right from the start he emphasises the political radicalism out of which much of its artistic practices sprung.

He engages quite passionately with art theory, social criticism, and the philosophic relationship between politics and human relations to which they gave expression in their domestic lives. He sees this as an early version of an idea we now express as ‘the personal is political’.

His study challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from orthodox modernism. He argues that their aesthetics were formed by fully conscious choices, made by people who were often more politically radical than was generally acknowledged – both then and now.

Whatever you think of the book’s theoretical arguments, it’s a beautifully illustrated production, full of fascinating paintings, fabrics, decoration, interior design, and original graphics. It’s meticulously researched, fully annotated with extensive notes, an enormous bibliography, and a full index.

And Bloomsbury was a world of graphic and interior design, as well as literary culture. Vanessa Bell was a painter and book illustrator, Duncan Grant was a painter and interior designer, and Roger Fry was a painter, art critic, and at one time advisor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Many of their designs for the Omega workshops are in evidence here, as well as the decoration of their own homes in both London and the countryside. Artistic theory aside, for most readers it will be the photographs, illustrations, the paintings, ceramics, and textile designs which will be the main attraction here. There simply aren’t any other books in print offering such a rich glimpse into the visual world that Bloomsbury represents.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity, New York: Yale University Press, 2004, pp.314, ISBN: 0300102488


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Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

alternative lifestyles amongst modernist bohemians

What are Bohemians? Are they people who choose poverty in order to produce works of art – or characters who dress flamboyantly, take drugs, and parade up and down Kings Road in Chelsea, hoping to become famous? Well, it appears it can be either or both of those things – and more besides. Elizabeth Wilson brings together both major and minor bohemian figures from two centuries and both sides of the Atlantic in a scholarly attempt to define the phenomenon. She identifies the key element of Bohemia as a gravitation towards the city, to be free of the constraints of provincial life.

Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts And she opts for Paris as its true birthplace – despite offering Byron as the first great Bohemian figure, though she does follow him with Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde who have stronger Parisian connections. Her chapters are built on themes, and the content can be both chronologically lose and geographically disconcerting. One minute it’s the opening night of Alfred Jarry’s scandalous Ubu Roi, next it’s California’s Venice Beach in the 1950s, and then on without pause to Viv Stanshull setting fire to himself in bed in 1995.

But at least this does have the virtue of suggesting that what she calls Bohemia can exist at any time and in any place. She speaks of it in the past tense, and yet there’s every reason to believe that this sort of world still exists – though as Malcolm Cowley, speaking of Greenwich Village in the 1920s observed, “Bohemia is always yesterday”.

She’s particularly good on the role of women in relation to Bohemianism – whether as muse to a male artist (Elizabeth Siddall, Alma Mahler) or as long-suffering wife-supporter (Dorelia John, Caitlin Thomas). But I think she’s stretching her notion of Bohemia rather for including relatively successful female artists such as Louise Colet and George Sand.

Despite her scholarly approach, her prose style occasionally slides into a poetic mode, as in her comments on the relationship between cafe life and smoking:

To smoke was more than a way of passing the time. It was the classic ‘displacement activity’ which gave coffee drinkers who had long since emptied their cup, lovers who had been stood up, and intellectuals who had lost their ‘circle’ the feeling that they were doing something, had a purpose. I smoke, therefore I am. Smoking orchestrated time, gave it a rhythm, punctuated talk, theatrically mimed masculinity and femininity, was the intellectuals’ essential accessory, and was also an erotic gesture, enhancing the mystery of some unknown drinker seated at her table, veiled in a bluish haze.

Her chapters are packed with interesting characters and rich in social history. She covers the surrealists, Parisian night life, and the cult of negritude in the 1920s, symbolised so magnificently by Josephine Baker.

Yet despite several attempts, she never gets round to defining bohemianism successfully. She simply chains together various types of outsider or larger-than-life figures. Sometimes her subjects are members of a quasi-artistic sub class, but often they are just alcoholics, scroungers, and hangers-on.

There’s a big difference between someone who produces great works of art but dies young (Modigliani) and someone like Marianne Faithful (mentioned more than once) who does very little except take drugs and who is no more than a talent-less has-been, .

Her book could do with a different title. Many of the people she describes were not really bohemian – just famous, dissipated, or so rich they could do as they pleased. Other were neither glamorous nor outcast. Some were fat, ugly, and badly dressed, and others cast themselves out simply by choosing not to work. But it’s a fascinating collection of portraits nevertheless.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, London: Tauris, 2003, pp.275, ISBN: 1860647820


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Charleston: Past and Present

May 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

official guide to one of Bloomsbury’s cultural treasures

Charleston is the country house in Lewes, Sussex which was established as a family home by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. She was married to Clive Bell at the time and had children by both men, but this was how things were done in the Bloomsbury Group. They lived in the house for over fifty years, covering the walls and furniture with their paintings, designing ceramics, making rugs and wall hangings, cultivating the gardens – and generally forming what became a unique collection of domestic and interior design.

Charleston: Past and Present The house also became the country retreat for many of the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa raised her children Julian, Quentin and Angelica there, and she was visited by her sister Virginia Woolf, as well as by her ex-lover Roger Fry, and at weekends her husband Clive Bell and his lover Mary Hutchinson. These people in turn brought their friends such as John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M.Forster, and David Garnett. Their personal lives and relationships were rather complicated, but this joint artistic venture was one that helped cement their common interests in design, decoration, painting, and domestic arts.

The Bloomsberries were great supporters of modern art, and many of them had made judicious purchases long before the artists became well known. Consequently, the walls of the house came to be decorated not only with their own paintings, but with works by Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and Modigliani.

The main part of the book is the official guide to the house and gardens, written by Bloomsbury expert Richard Shone. This contains details of the contents of all the main rooms, and is well illustrated by colour photographs of their principal features and objects.

The latter part of the book is a collection of letters and memoirs, written by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, who was his sister but who didn’t know that her father was Duncan Grant until she was eighteen. Quentin Bell’s memoir is of an idyllic childhood, spent with his brother Julian, largely unsupervised by semi-absent parents. He gives a Swallows and Amazons type of account.

His sister Angelica’s is more seriously thoughtful and reflective. It combines observations on Vanessa Bell’s fabric designs with psychological analyses of her relationship with Charleston and its other inhabitants. She captures the spirit and the development of the house as if it were a living being. She also draws an interesting socio-political contrast with her Christmas visits to the conservative house at Seend, which was the home of Clive Bell’s parents:

Even though it was at Seend that I celebrated my birthday – a birthday that belonged by rights to Charleston…the atmosphere of Victorian constraint could not have been tolerated for longer than the three or four days we spent there … it did not contain, as Charleston seemed to, the secret of creativity and renewal.

It’s also a paean of appreciation for her mother, as the presiding spirit of generosity and creativeness that permeated the house. This chapter is an interesting addendum to the account of her childhood that she provides in Deceived with Kindness.

Miraculously, the house survived the second world war and was kept in more or less its original condition. Quentin Bell (who grew up there) describes the practical difficulties and strategic frustrations of restoring the property. Fortunately for the historical records of English modernism, the house was completely refurbished, then purchased from its original owners, and is now governed by The Charleston Trust.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Quentin Bell et al, Charleston: Past and Present: The Official Guide to One of Bloomsbury’s Cultural Treasures, London: Harvest Books, 1988, pp.180, ISBN 0156167735


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Eric Gill

August 29, 2015 by Roy Johnson

artist, engraver, typographist, stone carver, and more

Eric Gill (1882-1930) was a sculptor, a typographist, a wood engraver, and an influential artist-craftsman in the early years of the twentieth century. He is probably best known for his typeface Gill Sans which became ubiquitous from the 1920s onwards, but he was also famous in his own day for his radical views and eccentric appearance.. He took a highly moralistic, quasi- religious attitude to his work in art, but he has become the subject of bemused attention in recent years because of revelations about bizarre practices in his sexual life.

Eric Gill

Early years

He was born in Brighton in 1882, the second child of thirteen to a clergyman with a family background of missionary ‘work’ in the South Seas. The cultural atmosphere of Gill’s childhood was a combination of evangelical fervour and what became known as Muscular Christianity. He had a fairly undistinguished education, but he did meet a fellow day boy at school who introduced him to woodworking tools.

The even tenor of his youth was interrupted by the death of his favourite sister Cicely and his father’s conversion to Anglicanism and the family’s subsequent move to Chichester. More importantly for his future development, he discovered what he thought of as ‘the mystical power of the phallus’.

He enrolled at Chichester Art School and started drawing buildings in the town. The cathedral there played a big part in his personal life. It also introduced him to his first serious love affair – with Ethel Moore, the sacristan’s daughter whom he later married. But in 1900 he felt he had outgrown the town and set off to London to find his profession.

Apprenticeship

He entered a practice of church architects as a trainee, but his real intellectual development took flight when he enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and he encountered a world of radicalism, William Morris-inspired handicrafts, and the company of Edward Johnston, the calligraphist with whom he was to produce Gill Sans.

In London he also had his first sexual encounters (with prostitutes) which he characteristically related in detail to his girlfriend Ethel. By the time he was twenty-one he was sharing Johnston’s lodgings at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and participating in late night bachelor discussions on Truth, Religious Faith, and English hand-lettering. Almost by accident, he established a reputation as someone who could cut letters in stone, and commissions came to him regularly from this time onwards.

He obtained work contracts from Healds and W.H.Smith, the designs for the latter establishing what we would now call a corporate identity. His success led him to get married to Ethel, and they set up home in Battersea, where one of his first important patrons was Count Harry Kessler.

In 1905 he moved with Ethel to Hammersmith and joined a community of radical printers and craftsmen. Gill, plus his friends Johnston and Hilary Pepler were in the habit of writing letters late at night, then meeting at the local post box for the midnight collection, then carrying on their aesthetic debates until two and three o’clock in the morning.

The move left

He joined the Fabians the following year and lost no time on lecturing the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw on the inadequacy of their views on Art. He also joined in their enthusiasm for the idea of the New Woman by starting an open affair with Lillian Meacham, which his wife did her best to tolerate. What Ethel did not know was that at the same time he was also ‘fornicating’ with their domestic help Lizzie.

Eric Gill

In 1908 the family moved again to Ditchling, a country village near Lewes in Sussex. Here he advocated a life of rural simplicity – whilst spending much of his working week in London where he had kept on the flat at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Artistically, he added two skills to his repertoire – wood engraving and sculpture in stone. In London he was mixing with Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, Ottoline Morrell, and other fringe Bloomsbury Group figures. He also came under the influence of Ananda Coomaraswamy, an Indian aesthete. When he produced an erotic carving of a man and woman copulating (bizarrely entitled Votes for Women) it was bought by Maynard Keynes for five pounds.

Family fun

Around this time Gill began incestuous relationships with his sisters Angela and Gladys, recording the fact in his diary quite casually, with no recognition at all that he was breaking a social taboo. What is even more amazing is the fact that he maintained these relationships throughout the remainder of his adult life.

At the same time he was going through a religious conversion – rather surprisingly to Roman Catholicism. He and his wife were received into the church in Brighton, she changed her name to Mary, and they celebrated the event by having Leonard and Virginia Woolf as house guests for the weekend.

They moved to another house on the outskirts of Ditchling, and he was joined in the area by his old Hammersmith colleagues Johnston and Pepler. He cultivated a Spartan, almost medieval close-to-the-soil existence, and when the war came he more or less ignored it.

Religion

He also threw himself enthusiastically into the rituals and beliefs of the Dominican order of the church, and took to wearing ecclesiastical garments, including the belt of chastity, which he wore with no apparent sense of irony. The guild that he formed with Pepler took itself very seriously and issued propaganda leaflets arguing against birth control and the use of Bird’s Custard Powder.

Ditchling became famous as a place for spiritual retreat, and Gill was celebrated as its presiding religious genius. But beneath the homespun cassock and the stonemason’s paper toque, he had started having sex with his own daughters. He recorded the details of his ‘experiments’ in his diaries, admitted misgivings to his religious confessors, and rationalised his behaviour with a new theory of phallic ‘Godliness’.

Eric Gill

In 1924 he felt oppressed by the public attention he had generated at Ditchling and moved to an abandoned abbey in the Welsh Black Mountains. The move resulted in him turning his attention back to engraving and typography. He became the principal designer and illustrator for Robert Gibbings’ Golden Cockerel Press, whose publications now seem the most distinguished of between-the-wars private presses. The relationship with Gibbings was particularly warm – close enough to include weekend threesomes in Berkshire with the publisher and his wife Moira whilst his wife Mary kept the monastic abbey going in the Black Mountains.

Readers who may be thinking there was something homo-erotic (or polymorphous perverse) in all these shenanigans will be confirmed in their suspicions when he records his impressions (and celebrations) of the male member in his diaries::

A man’s penis and balls are very beautiful things and the power to see this beauty is not confined to the opposite sex. The shape of the head of a man’s erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered – now I know.

When he returned to the abbey he busied himself showing his new secretary Elizabeth Bill slides of semen under the microscope and inviting her to measure the size of his own beautiful penis before demonstrating it at work on her. Elizabeth had an ageing fiance, but she also had money, and when she bought a villa in the Basque country Gill was very happy to go and live there.

He was also taken up by Stanley Morison, adviser to the Monotype Corporation, and the typefaces he designed for him – Perpetua (1925), Gill Sans (1927), and Solus (1929) – are probably his greatest claim to fame as a designer. Doing so gave him the urge to move on once again, so he uprooted his entire household from Wales and went to live on an estate called Pigotts, near High Wycombe.

Animal farm

There he had a sculpture workshop, an art studio, and a printing press all in their own buildings. At a private level he started an affair with Beatrice Warde, the glamorous American typographist who was the mistress of his champion (and employer) Stanley Morison. Then suddenly in 1930 he had a mysterious seizure and lost his memory. It took him quite some time to recover, but when back to normal he found new ways of amusing himself. He started having sex with the family dog. This is a man who celebrated holy mass twice a day at an altar in his own home.

But the medical interlude in no way diminished his creative energies. In the early 1930s he composed his famous Joanna typeface and he completed his public commission Prospero and Ariel over the entrance to BBC at Langham Place. It is generally thought that these large scale public carvings were not as successful as his smaller, more domestic works, and he has also been criticised for spreading his talents across so many varied forms of visual art.

As commissions proliferated, so he became more famous at a Daily Express level. People wanted to know if he wore underpants beneath his stonemason’s smock. Domestically he enlarged his entourage by moving his latest mistress May Reeves into a caravan on the site at Pigotts. This gave him the convenience of sex with May and his wife (sometimes on the same night) without as it were leaving the premises.

In the later years of his life two changes came over him, and these were typically contradictory. First of all he became far more bourgeois – accepting physical comforts, employing a chauffeur, installing a black marble bath. But at the same time he became more politically radical, and espoused many of the left wing causes of the late 1930s – including workers control and support for the Republicans in Spain.

He became increasingly frail in the latter years of his life (though he was only in his late fifties) yet he embarked on two large scale projects which consumed all his energies. The first was his debut as an architect. He designed and supervised the building of a simple church in Norfolk in which he radically placed the altar in the centre of the building. The second project was a new and extra intense affair with Daisy Hawkins, a nineteen year old servant at Pigotts. She was unusually attractive, and he both made drawings of her and had sex with her on almost a daily basis for nearly two years.

Not surprisingly, this did not go down well with his two other sexual partners – his wife (in the house) and May Reeves (in the caravan). There was eventually a showdown and Daisy was exiled to Capel in Wales. But Gill simply followed here there, pursuing her from one room to another for sexual couplings, the locations of which were all systematically recorded in his diaries. But this late satyriasis was the last gasp of an exhausted figure. In 1940 he suffered from a number of debilitating ailments and was then diagnosed with cancer of the lung. It was that which killed him – at the age of only fifty eight.

© Roy Johnson 2015

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Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, London: Faber and Faber, 2003. pp.416, ISBN: 0571143024


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Go It Alone!

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the streetwise secrets of self-employment

I bought this book on the strength of enthusiastic reader reviews at Amazon – and I was right to do so! It’s written as a guide and confidence-booster for those people who have decided to start their own businesses and embrace self-employment. It’s written in a lively, fast-paced style which makes for entertaining reading and what I liked was that Geoff Burch makes important distinctions between essentials. Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean making lots of money or creating a huge business empire. It might mean working for a couple of days a week, then having the rest of the time off for gardening, family, or golf – whatever takes your fancy. In other words success is not always equal to wealth. There are other ways of defining it.

Go It Alone!And without being naively optimistic, he points out both the advantages of being self-employed and the many opportunities which exist to create your own work. Surrounded as we are by universally bad service, all the new entrepreneur has to do is offer prompt and good quality service with a smile, and he’ll put the old traders under pressure. This is something the eBay and Amazon traders are doing right now. Take the order, send a confirming email within minutes, and get the goods into the next post in a padded bag.

He also explains those small-but-important issues which most business self-help guides would not think to cover. Where do you meet clients for business meetings when your office is in your back-bedroom? What do you say when the bank tries to force you to open a business instead of a personal account? What title do you give yourself and think of yourself as, when your duties run from executive decision-making down to taking letters to the local post office?

He comes up with all sorts of practical, matter-of-fact advice for anybody planning to start up their own business – much of it common sense, but only if you have the benefit of experience. You don’t need an ‘office’; you probably don’t need lots of equipment such as printers and fax machines, and office furniture. You shouldn’t take out bank loans, and you should never mortgage your house. If you want to survive as a self-employed guerilla, the secret is “Travel light, live off the land, and strike from the shadows”

  • Don’t recreate your old working environment. The last thing you will need is a hat stand.
  • Develop the virtual office, the virtual car, and virtually anything else you need.
  • Don’t let your clients know that you are enjoying yourself. It might make them jealous.

This not just for those who want to set up their own businesses. It’s for people who are about to be made redundant; people who face early retirement; people who want a part-time job; and people who are already self-employed but who want to feel more confident and hold their heads up high.

I wish I had read this book ten years ago when I first set up my own company. I might not be any richer today, but I know I would have felt more confident that I was doing the right thing – and more importantly, going about it in the right way.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Go It Alone!   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Geoff Burch, Go It Alone!, London: Harper-Collins, 1997, pp.203, ISBN: 0722534604


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Hip Hotels: New York

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

glamorous, modern, and fashionable locations

Who would have thought that books on architecture and interior design would suddenly become fashionable. But that’s what’s happened with this Hip Hotels series, which made a big impact when it first appeared a couple of years ago. What are Hip Hotels? Well, Herbert Ypma defines them as Highly Individual Places, but I think it’s a bit more than that – because even traditional hotels can be individual. The selection he shows (and he claims to have stayed in them) are all very modern, usually minimalist, and the emphasis throughout is that they are located in very fashionable parts of the city – even if that means you’re in the Meatpacking District.

Hip Hotels: New York But he covers other parts of the city too. His survey goes from the Lower East to the Upper West Side, with Tribeca, SoHo, Midtown, and Times Square in between. The common features of most examples are dark brown modernist furniture, exposed brick or granite, soft downlighting, stainless steel bathroom fittings, no pictures, decorations, or knickknacks of any kind, a lot of square, black leather chairs and settees, and of course some stupendous views over the city’s roofscapes.

You get an eight page spread on each location. It goes almost without saying (these days) that the photography is of superb quality, and there are full contact and location details for each hotel – so you can phone in or log onto their web sites and book a room if you wish.

And it’s not just pretty pictures. He’s obviously well informed on the practical issues of architecture: he gives details of the planning permission, zoning regulations, and the acquisition of ‘air rights’ necessary for these largely high-rise buildings. He’s also good on the way in which the districts have changed their nature – turning from manufacturing to arts and fashion centres within a couple of generations.

These publications are normally big expensive coffee table books, but for this series they have been reduced in size to a more easily portable format. You lose some of the visual expansiveness of the originals, but Thames and Hudson call it their ‘travel format’. I suppose the idea is that you could take them along on your cultural pilgrimage. However, I should warn you, before you get too excited, that most of these places charge $300-plus minimum per night. Buy the book instead. It’s twenty-five times cheaper.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Herbert Ypma, Hip Hotels: New York, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp.192, ISBN: 0500286183


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How to work from home

September 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

working from home – living at work

Work from home – and survive

Lots of people work from home today. If you have a mobile phone, an email address, a broadband connection, and a laptop on your coffee table, nobody knows you’re a consultant dog on the Internet. You could be:

  • starting up your own business
  • switching from employed to ‘homeworking’
  • creating a job for yourself
  • downsizing from larger commercial premises
  • making money from your hobby

Making a start

Working from home can have plenty of advantages – and you can use all of them to make your life easier – and bring everything under your own control..

  • you don’t need to rent expensive offices
  • you can combine work with home life
  • you don’t have to travel to work
  • you’re your own boss
  • it’s tax deductible

Work from homeThis is a morale-boosting guide for anybody who wants to start their own business, or who harbours deep desires to be their own boss. Geoff Burch takes an entirely practical approach and shows how it can be done – by cutting your costs to a minimum and steering clear of get-rich-quick schemes. It will also be useful for all those folk who are facing early retirement and wondering what to do with themselves. Do your own thing – and walk tall!

 

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A Room of Your Own
Some people can work with very little in the way of equipment. But for most of us, if you’re going to be business-like, you’ll need a space of your own in which to work. Even if most of your activity is outside the house (working as a hairdresser, surveyor, plasterer, gardener) you need a space in the house which is your own.

The options are usually quite obvious. It could be a spare bedroom, an attic, or even the garage or a garden shed. In smaller spaces it might be one corner of a flat. The important thing is that you establish a space in which to conduct your business.

In his best-selling book on self-employment, Go It Alone! Geoff Burch describes the ultra minimalist approach were you have no office and no equipment at all. But even he agrees that you need to establish your own space – even if this is a psychological space.

Take a professional attitude and carve out a space for whatever you need. Your equipment could be no more than a few box files, a telephone, a computer, or folders full of papers. Keep this space for yourself, and don’t let it get mixed up with household matters. Don’t try to work off the edge of the kitchen table.

And Geoff Burch has another excellent piece of advice, which I firmly endorse. Don’t try to re-create a typical office environment. Why should you be surrounded by ugly metal filing cabinets and cardboard boxes full of rubbish. There are perfectly good storage solutions available at suppliers such as IKEA and Habitat which will visually enhance your environment, as well as being functional.


work from homeThis is visual proof that you don’t need to be surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets. The examples in this beautifully illustrated book include quite small family homes which have been adapted to the demands of creating a working space within a domestic environment. Learn from the principles illustrated: no clutter, clean spaces, and a well organised room.

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The home office
But if it gets more serious and you want to establish a grown-up home office, you might want to create a professional work space. The basic requirements for a home office are a desk, a telephone, and storage for paperwork. Depending on the nature of your business, that’s probably the minimum. But if you want to give yourself a chance of being taken seriously, I would recommend two additions – a computer and a connection to the Internet. Since you’re reading this on the Internet, you’ve probably already got that.

The telephone
Get a dedicated line or use your mobile telephone number exclusively for your business calls. Don’t try to piggy-back off the household telephone line. Nobody will take you seriously if they ring up and are answered by a child who says “I’ll pass you to my Mum/Dad”. You might need a separate land line or a mobile number – but this is a small and worthwhile investment. Just look around you. Painters, plumbers, decorators, sales reps – everybody these days has a mobile phone.

Don’t even share a line with your spouse/partner/wife/husband (does that cover it all?) because when the phone rings, who answers it? Believe me, it’s a recipe for arguments and territorial squabbling. A separate telephone number is a minimal requirement for anybody wanting to be taken seriously in business. You’ll also benefit by having an answerphone. They’re cheap, and will cover any time you’re not in your office.

Email
The same’s true of an email address. Your customers will not be impressed if they are asked to reply to <johnandbarbara@fireside.Yahoo.co.uk>. Who is running the business – John, or Barbara? Do they both read the emails?

You should have an email address of your own – and it should have your business as a domain name. In other words <Barry@hotmail.com> could be anybody in the world. It gives you no identity, no distinction, and no business credibility. On the other hand, <info@bigservices.co.uk> looks more professional.


Fax
A fax machine used to be a badge of pride for anybody setting up their own business. But now you’ll find that it’s only the most old-fashioned concerns such as solictors who use them. Everybody else uses documents sent as attachments to email messages. So you can save on setup expense by ditching this cumbersome bit of Old Technology. All you need instead is an all-in-one printer-scanner-copier. At the time of writing these start at only thirty pounds.

Meeting clients
If you are working from home – from an office in the box room or even a corner of the spare bedroom – there comes a moment when you make contact with a potential client and need to meet up to discuss business. Ooops! It wouldn’t look good to invite Mr Big from Megabucks Ltd to your semi at 13, Oildrum Lane. You’re certainly not going to invite them back to your house to discuss business surrounded by unmade beds and children’s toys.

Don’t worry. This happens to everybody when they start up. But there are perfectly simple solutions. Either you offer to meet them on their premises (and you turn up on time, looking smart) or you invite them to meet in a public space in a location convenient to both of you. This could be a hotel lounge, a restaurant, or a bar somewhere convenient.


Work from HomeWorking at Home shows interiors for writers, artists, musicians, and graphic designers. Most are minimalist design – plain walls and floors, no decoration, wood in teak or beech, lots of opaque tinted green glass, polished chrome fittings, simple halogen lights, chairs with tubular chrome legs, and giant settees in black leather. And the clutter which blights commercial offices has been purged – to stunning effect.

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Extra tips

Here are some tips for making your work space more professional, more visually appealing, and more productive. All the suggestions are easy to implement, and they’ll make an immediate improvement to your working life.

Straighten your bookshelves
If you have books, folders, box files, or any other items stored on open bookshelves – get them straightened up. Make the items stand up straight; get them in line; and eliminate any flopping and sloping items. Leave any empty spaces free or fill them with decorative objects, such as vases or ornaments.

Clear the desk
A cluttered desk is a recipe for constant irritation. Get rid of papers, memos, post-it notes, paper-clips, coffee mugs, photographs of the family, ‘amusing’ messages, and any other detritus from your working space. Be completely ruthless, and start from a clear working space. You’ll immediately feel better.

I know that there are exceptions. The painter Francis Bacon famously worked in a state of abject squalor. But you’re not Francis Bacon – and anyway most successful business people don’t work that way.

De-clutter regularly
Every day you will receive circulars, flyers, bills, advertising, and publicity materials through the post. Take one look at each item; decide if it’s important or if you want to keep it; and if not – throw it away. Don’t have a big IN-tray – otherwise that’s extra work to be done.


work from homeLive/Work is a collection of projects where living and working environments have been merged. The results prove that you can transform a house, a flat, or even an industrial site so that it becomes a very comfortable and attractive hybrid. Examples include the homes of architects, a painter, a photographer, a fashion designer, a restaurateur, a documentary film maker, a physical trainer, even a priest marrying people out of his own home-church.

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© Roy Johnson 2004


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