DESPITE being in the forefront of British Modernism, with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, in St Ives during the 1940s and 1950s, Wilhelmina— Willie—Barns-Graham’s work is still relatively little known. Perhaps it’s less easy to categorise than theirs. As Nicholson was, she was both a figurative and an abstract painter and draughtsman, but, unlike him, each did not represent different phases of her career, as she carried on the practice of drawing in the open air throughout her life, even during her most extreme non-figurative periods.
Born in 1912, into a well-to-do Scottish family in St Andrews, Barns-Graham had to fight paternal opposition to be allowed to study art rather than follow a more genteel course to marriage and family life. She succeeded in entering the Edinburgh College of Art, where she was tutored by the Scottish Colourist S. J. Peploe and by William Gillies. In 1938, she was awarded a six-month European travelling scholarship; however, due to illness, followed by the outbreak of war, it became impossible to take this up. Instead, she was encouraged to move to St Ives. As Virginia Button writes in her forthcoming book on the artist published by Sansom and Co, this ‘represented independence from her family and the beginning of a love affair with Cornwall that would last for 60 years’.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
