Over the Blackdown Hills and far away

In the early 1900s, a group of London artists became enraptured by a little-known corner of rolling farmland on the Devon and Somerset borders. Peyton Skipwith explains why they kept returning to paint its patchwork of small fields and hedgerows

- Peyton Skipwith

IF the question ‘what was the attraction of the Blackdown Hills for artists of the Camden Town School?’ sounds like a riddle, the answer—‘a former cattle rancher from the Argentine’—would appear to confirm it. Yet the reality was more mundane.

Harold Bertram Harrison was the rancher and the artists were Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner, plus Robert Bevan and his Polish wife, Stanislawa de Karlowska, known as Stasia. Harrison, scion of a prosperous Somerset family with Argentinian interests, was born and brought up at Waterhouse Monkton near Bath, later leaving to help run the family ranch. He returned to England in the mid-1890s and enrolled as a 41-year-old mature student at the Slade School of Fine Art, together with Augustus John, Harold Gilman and Gore, the latter becoming a particularly close friend for the rest of his life.

Through these connections, Harrison— although content to remain a talented amateur—was drawn to associate with the more advanced groups of young painters, such as the Allied Artists’ Association and the Fitzroy Street Group, both founded in 1907–08. This brought him within the orbit of the Anglo-French artist Walter Sickert, who was at the heart of most of the avant-garde art movements in pre-First World War London. Sickert dreamed of starting an English version of the Salon des Indépendants (French Impressionists) and was the moving spirit behind both the Fitzroy Street Group and the slightly later Camden Town Group.