ASSOCIATIONS of artists can exist without controversy, clashes of personality, petty tyrannies, bitter recriminations, financial crises, vendettas, sequestrations by sheriffs and repeated resignations. Of course they can.
It is just that they cannot keep it up for 200 years, as Simon Fenwick emphasises in his worldly-wise and drily humorous memoir, The Enchanted River: 200 Years of the Royal Watercolour Society.
It was through a sense of grievance that the Royal Watercolour Society came about in the first place — on November 30, 1804. Founder members Samuel Shelley and William Frederick Wells were indignant that the Royal Academy discriminated against watercolour artists, seeking out the darkest corners in which to hang their pictures, and not hanging them at all if the artist did not, like Turner, have the cachet of being primarily an oil-and-canvas man.
Founded as the Society Associated for the Purpose of Establishing an Annual Exhibition of Paintings in Water Colours, the RWS was quick to hold its first exhibition — a wild success, it appears — in hired rooms in Brook Street, London, in spring 1805. But the first scandal came just two years later when a member was ignominiously expelled for passing off other men’s work as his own so as to receive a larger dividend from the 1807 exhibition profits.
“Disagreements over hanging have been a constant in the history of the Society and continue to the present day,” says Fenwick. The most spectacular row was in 1857 when Joseph Nash, a painter of architectural, historical and literary scenes, noticed that of his 18 pictures, only two had been placed “on the line” (at eye level) while nine had been “skyed” — needing a ladder, he claimed, for proper perusal.
“The hopes and labours of six months have been blasted and nullified by this cruel and unworthy act,” he fumed. “Reflection cast upon me by having nine drawings placed in the worst possible position might be a question of life or starvation.” In a bitter correspondence, which he printed and circulated, he impugned the impartiality of three of the four members of the hanging committee, whose own pictures, he noted, were in “the very best places possible” .
There was another furore in 1870 when Edward Burne-Jones, exhibiting his Phyllis and Demophöon and refusing to chalk over Demophöon’s genitalia in response to public outrage, resigned his membership. Persuaded, against his better judgment, to return to the fold 17 years later, he moaned: “Why on earth, and in the name of what infernal ghoul we fret our hearts yearly over these trumpery exhibitions, I cannot think — it has nothing on earth to do with me really, and is mere weak-minded flabby acquiescence in a system I hate, loathe, and abjure.”
Having weathered such storms as this, the society finally received its royal prefix at the hands of one of its most faithful patrons, Queen Victoria, in 1881, becoming the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. Some of its artists endured considerable hardship to satisfy Victoria’s taste for Scottish art. Alfred Pizzey Newton, whose assiduity in this direction led to his becoming known as Glencoe Newton, had to mix his paints with whisky when they froze as he worked on snow scenes in the hardest Scottish winter for 40 years. Thomas Hennell, working as a war artist in Iceland in the 1940s, resorted to mixing his paints with urine.
A war-weary public was able to turn for comfort to the rural landscapes and seascapes which RWS members continued to favour during two world wars. “Although access to the coast was severely restricted (in the First World War), this did not prevent Henry Scott Tuke from producing his usual pictures of naked boys bathing in the sea,” writes Fenwick. And in the first exhibition of the Second World War there was only one war-related painting, Looking for Submarines by Keith Henderson, a not very martial picture of “three mites standing on the cliff-top and gazing down patiently at a calm, silvery bay circled about with the great white cliffs of England”. In October 1940, bomb damage to the RWS galleries in Conduit Street forced the cancellation of the autumn exhibition — but brought a rent reduction.
When the long lease on Conduit Street ran out in 1980, it was with some misgivings that, after 176 years in and around Mayfair, the RWS moved south of the Thames. The Bankside Gallery, the home it now shares with the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers — and which opens again on Fridayafter refurbishment — seemed remote in the early years. “On grey days with the weeds sprouting in the concrete paving slabs outside and when the numbers of visiting public inside were thin,” says Fenwick, “many of the members found themselves wondering if the RWS had acted wisely in moving to a then very unfashionable part of London so lacking in obvious charm.”
Since then, however, Shakespeare’s Globe and Tate Modern have joined the RWS on the South Bank, and, with free entry to the Bankside Gallery for the whole of the RWS bicentenary year, greater numbers than ever could be attracted to view pieces by modern members that are as innovative as David Whitaker’s shimmering abstracts and as full of movement as David Remfry’s big, bold watercolours of dancers in Manhattan night clubs.
If any novelists are drawn to inspect Remfry’s dancers, they would be following the precedent of 1813, the year Pride and Prejudice was published, when Jane Austen went round the spring exhibition on the lookout for portraits that reminded her of characters in that novel. She found a small likeness of Mrs Bingley but sadly, it seems, none of Mrs Darcy.
Simon Fenwick’s The Enchanted River is published by Sansom (£39.95 / £29.95).
FREE BICENTENARY EVENTS AT BANKSIDE
Then & Now: Our Watercolour Tradition, exhibition of watercolours by RWS members of the past, shown alongside present members’ works inspired by them. February 6 to March 7.
RWS Spring Exhibition (of paintings by members only). March 18 to Mon April 12.
Below the Surface: Secrets of the RWS. Exhibition to include ephemera and works by Samuel Palmer, Edward Burne-Jones and John Singer Sargent. May 28 to June 20.
21st-Century Watercolour. Open exhibition. Any watercolour painter may submit entries (application forms from the Bankside Gallery). July 8 to August 1.
RWS Autumn Exhibition (of paintings by members only). October 8 to 31.
The Presidents: Lives and Paintings. Exhibition of work by the RWS’s 30 presidents over 200 years. November 5 to 30.
Bankside Gallery, 48 Hopton Street, London SE1 9JH.
Closed Mondays (except bank holiday Mondays).
Tel. 0207 928 7521. www.banksidegallery.com
