Trabajos Futuros

North’s formal training as an artist is said to have been limited to lessons around 1855 at Marlborough House School of Art, from an artist called Hackman.¹³ Hardie also suggests North took lessons from Collingwood Smith (a ‘drawing master with strong religious beliefs’).¹⁴ Herbert Alexander’s unpublished notes show that North had been producing drawings of local scenes regularly from 1854 onwards, of places such as Kimpton, Harpenden, Wandsworth, and Richmond Park, and that by the age of fourteen he was producing his first oils, and by fifteen, a number of watercolours.¹⁵

In 1858 North started as an apprentice at Josiah Whymper’s wood engraving business in London, where he began by creating detailed narrative images for wood engraving on a small scale in black and white. At Whympers he worked with other talented young artists, including Frederick Walker and George John Pinwell.¹⁶ Between 1862 and 1866 North designed book illustrations for the Dalziel brothers, who recollected North explaining that ‘all the art teaching he ever got at Whymper’s was that when a subject was given to him, a print of one of [Birket] Foster’s was placed before him, with instructions to make his drawing in that manner.’¹⁷ The Home Pond (Figure 115), designed for the Dalziel’s book A Round of Days in 1866, depicts fifteenth-century Halsway Manor in Somerset, where North stayed and worked for long periods between 1860 and 1868. The abstract quality of the image contrasts sharply with Foster’s more conventional compositions. North’s nineteen designs for Wayside Posies of 1867 are considered to be amongst his best work in black and white, all of them delicately

‘drawn with a brush’.¹⁸ Gilbert Dalziel, a nephew of George and Edward Dalziel, confirms that ‘never in his life did he use a pen. It was mainly all brush work; but if need be, he would at times use a hard pencil for very fine lines and minute detail.’¹⁹ Designs such as Reaping (Figure 116) provide an early indication of North’s unique ability to suggest atmosphere and poetry in landscape. The strength and simplicity of this illustration recalls Millet’s The Sower of 1850.²⁰ Goldman sees North as ‘the most distinguished landscape illustrator of the entire period’, with his ‘sensitive and understated’ drawings.²¹

During the 1860s, North and Walker worked closely together and developed distinctive watercolour techniques, based on intense colouring, a heavy use of bodycolour, detailed observation, and outdoor working from nature in all weathers.

Alexander writes of North’s early practice of painting ‘from his seat in a covered cart;

then of his many little painting huts at different view-points in the valley for work in winter.’²²

In an Orchard, Devon (Figure 117), one of North’s earliest known watercolours, could almost be a colour version of one of his woodcut designs, with every inch of the page indicating interesting shapes, textures and hatched details. Newall confirms that ‘many illustrators who turned to watercolors [sic] continued to look for subjects in which they could spread a uniform pattern over the entire expanse of the sheet.’²³ In an Orchard, Devon is painted using very thick layers of pure colour, with bodycolour on the child’s apron and highlights on the wooden log. Areas of hatching, a technique directly associated with woodblock illustration methods, are visible on the dress of the seated woman, on the sack behind her and in the foreground soil, with a small amount of scratching in the detail of the grass in the background. The blue and the green colours add a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite tone. The figures and subject here bear a strong resemblance to King Pippin (Figure 118), the illustration created by Pinwell for Wayside Posies in 1867, a book which also featured illustrations by North and Walker.

It has been suggested that Walker or Pinwell painted or drew figures which appear in some of North’s early works.²⁴ Records for the V&A drawing of Halsway Court, North Somerset (Figure 119) state that ‘the two standing figures … are by G. J.

Pinwell,’ while Gleeson White comments that North ‘was a landscape artist who introduced figures only by the way, and in his paintings some of these figures were put in by Walker’.²⁵ The evidence for these comments is unfortunately not given. In 1925 Gilbert Dalziel wrote about the close friendship between North and Walker: ‘Each learned something from the other. North was never very good at drawing the figure, and on many occasions Walker actually put the figures into North’s drawings.’²⁶ Walker himself never admits of such practice, however, although his letters to North do offer advice about figures: ‘The notion of the figures is excellent, especially the woman throwing up her arm’ and ‘Your Blue-coat boy, I thought most charming, and only marred by one little thing – the little girl with him was not as pretty as she might have been.’²⁷

Walker’s letters also provide a rare insight into their daily routine at Halsway in 1868, braving the elements in order to paint from nature: ‘It’s a pouring wet day, but with our waterproofs on we’re going out directly to look at some material’ (Figure 120). They often walked miles to find the right location and drew from local models. ‘Indeed it is easy enough to get models, for North is known to them all.’ Walker describes North’s

careful watercolour method in December 1868: ‘He is most sincere over it, each inch wrought with gem-like care.’²⁸

North’s watercolours, however, did not immediately find wide commercial success, although he did find a loyal supporter in the Glasgow MP, William Graham. In 1867 his application to join the Society of Painters in Water Colours was rejected, Walker reported, on the grounds that some members felt there was ‘a want of finish in parts of your work – which opinion I am not at all sure I share.’²⁹ Frederick Burton and John Gilbert, two long-standing members of the Society, had, however, given him their backing, so he may have met with opposition from a few of the more conservative members of the Society’s selection panel. Birket Foster had similarly met with rejection on his first attempt. A second application by North in 1869 also met with failure, although Walker was quick to point out that the Royal Academy (who had accepted four of his watercolours for their exhibition that year) had appreciated his work:

I called at Little Holland House, and while sitting with Watts, who was full of the Academy, he said…‘Do you know a Mr. North?...Then I beg you’ll tell him, that we, the Council, President, and hangers, were unanimously charmed with his work, and that they each are not only hung, but well hung’.³⁰

North’s work was also successful at the new Dudley Gallery, where, between 1865 and his eventual acceptance into the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1871, he exhibited eleven works.³¹ The Haystack (then known as At Old Court, Somerset) (Figure 121) was shown there in 1865 and Halsway Court (then known as The Old Bowling Green (Figure 122) in 1867. The Dudley had, since its inception, become known for presenting ‘tentative and experimental’ works by up-and-coming artists, with an ‘originality of …ideas’ and ‘freedom from hackneyed conventions’.³² The Athenaeum greeted The Haystack at the 1865 Dudley exhibition with the comment that

‘Mr. J. W. North, though lacking something in completeness, is charming; a gleam of still evening falling upon a pool, a half-cut haystack and some trees; behind is a wooded height and a few cottages: a well coloured picture.’³³ Yet the Spectator was critical.

Some artists have a morbid fear of conventionalism, which makes them turn their backs on beauty of line. Some such fear has prevented Mr. J. W. North’s An Old Court, Somerset [sic] (263), which is for the most part an accurate study of sunlight, from being thoroughly pleasing.³⁴

It may have been the absence of a traditional picturesque format which offended that critic. In 1867, the Art Journal wrote of the ‘high qualities’ and excellent colour of Halsway Court, although it complained that ‘opaque is here used in unmitigated manner.’³⁵ The close correlation for North between his early watercolours and woodcut design can be seen by the fact that he produced his black and white illustrations of The Haystack and Halsway Court (discussed above) the year after he painted the watercolour versions.

North’s use of paint in Halsway Court creates an almost tangible appearance of texture in the plastered stonework of the old house, the thatched roof of the shed and the background tree foliage. The threat of imminent and damaging ‘improvements’ to the property by its owner, including the removal of the traditional plaster layer from the stonework (Figure 123), may have encouraged North to faithfully record the textural appearance of the original structure.³⁶ Figure 124 shows in detail the thick dry opaque brushstrokes used to create the effect of the rough plaster surface. North’s use of strong pure colour in this work is impressive, especially where the violet of the shadow on the roof is placed in direct opposition to the bright yellow of the lichen and the detail of the tiles. Such textured brushwork could only have been achieved using the new nineteenth-century forms of paint, moist pans or tubes of watercolour.

A Young Lover (Figure 125), a small watercolour painted in 1867, also depicts the grounds at Halsway Court. The colours in this work are much more muted than those used in The Haystack or Halsway Court and it is clear from the patches of pale pink, blue and yellow which have been painted in the top margin of the paper that each colour has been liberally mixed with opaque white pigment, probably Chinese White.

It could possibly be an unfinished watercolour, as there is much less detail in it than any of the watercolours described above, with foliage indicated by dry brushstrokes of dark brown or olive green, which have been roughly dragged over light green background washes. The figures are very indistinctly indicated.

Compare the level of detail, too, with The Pergola (Figure 126), painted in the nearby village of Bicknoller around this time.³⁷ This watercolour is beginning to show a more experimental and atmospheric approach to background foliage, which would increasingly become a feature of North’s later work, and a change of palette towards warmer yellow-greens and browns. The innovative brushwork, however, was not well received by some critics, who objected to ‘the blottesque no-meaning of his ground

and background. There is all the difference in the world between calculated slightness of finish and formlessness.’³⁸

A Bit of Southern England of 1868 (Figure 127) features a similar range of bright greens and yellows to The Pergola, with paint applied in thick, dry, smooth layers, largely mixed with opaque white, giving a chalky appearance. The foliage of trees in the background appears to have been almost stippled on, while the foreground grasses are indicated by the briefest flick of the brush.

A small unframed watercolour in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which is undated, would seem to belong to this period of North’s style, both in colouring, composition and use of thick, dry pigment and bodycolour. May on the Hill (Figure 128) originally belonged to Edward Dalziel.³⁹ The Brothers Dalziel relates that they ‘became possessed of several of his very charming water colours,’⁴⁰ and as he worked for them between 1862 and 1867, it is highly possible that the Ashmolean work dates from this period. Gilbert Dalziel praised North’s colour sense as ‘simply superb’, seeing in nature ‘hues and effects which to an ordinary pair of eyes would be unobservable.’⁴¹ This little work was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1871, where the Art Journal found ‘the colour is hot, the horizon high – the sky, in fact, has been almost forgotten.’⁴² The hillside is painted using wet washes of colour on a yellow ground and the girl’s yellow dress is revealed by scratching back through a top layer of dark brown paint. Touches of pure bodycolour indicate the blossom on the tree and on the branch held by the lady on the horse.

North’s watercolours had moved on rapidly, in the space of five years, from the carefully delineated and intricately worked compositions of his early output.