Spaceships by Tim White

This afternoon my eye was caught by a click bait article on the Star Wars sequel novel Splinter of the Minds Eye by Alan Dan Foster. This was written as the story of a possible low budget Star Wars sequel before George Lucas realised he had a major hit on his hands.  Foster, because he did a lot of film novelisations, was regarded as a hack writer by the 'proper' science fiction community but I enjoyed several of his books when I was. admittedly, a teenager.

Monument (1974)

I used to read almost exclusively science fiction from about the age of eight, much of it more advanced reading age wise than my age at the time and there is no doubt it helped me in my English lessons at school, despite the derision it was held in by teachers (especially by the time I reached senior school and the books' reading age started to dip below where I was supposed to be).  I grew out of science fiction by the time I was about seventeen, when I discovered how to explore a much more exotic fantasy world; girls. 

Yes, it's that Gary Chalk, of wargames scenery and Battlecars fame, mentioned as a contributing artist!

Anyway, then as now, I have always had  a primarily visual, rather than a literary, sensibility (much to my sister's despair) and the mid seventies saw a burgeoning of UK science fiction book cover artists. At about the same time, New English Library launched Science Fiction Monthly (1974-1976) a broadsheet loose leaf magazine which featured novel cover art in big poster sized reproductions.  It was through this that I became familiar with many of the artists of the time like Chris Foss, Bruce Pennington and Tim White.  Although Foss (who, amusingly, did the illustrations for The Joy of Sex) was the master of the massive floating bricks style of spaceships I found White's work much more atmospheric.  He really did create whole worlds in his paintings.

Stopwatch (1975)

White was born in 1952 and he studied at Medway College of Art. In 1972 he started working at a number of advertising studios while doing fantasy and SF illustrations in his spare time.  In 1974 he got his first book cover illustration commission, for an Arthur C Clarke novel and became a freelance illustrator shortly afterwards.  His pictures from this period were very accomplished, given he was still only in his early twenties.

Icerigger (1975)

Back to Alan Dean Foster and it was his cover for that author's Icerigger which really was the definitive science fiction cover for me at the time.  It really stood out on WH Smith's bookshelves and it was probably the first book I bought on the basis of the cover alone.  Unlike Foss, although he was, of course, an able illustrator of the human form (especially beardy men and hirsute women) whose SF pictures rarely included human figures, White often depicted people in his paintings which gave them a human scale.

The Legend of GX 118 (1974)

All of these pictures appeared in Science Fiction Monthly and I think I had most of them up on my wall at some point. They really are some of my favourite SF illustrations of spaceships ever.

Wandering Worlds (1975)

I've always toyed with the idea of some sort of science fiction wargaming, especially as I read lots of SF and hardly any fantasy fiction but while I have played Warhammer and Lord of the Rings I have never played a SF game, although I have bought some Warhammer 40000 figures in the past but just didn't like the figures very much.  It was the Spacemarines flared trousers that put me off, primarily.  Still, maybe one day!

Ruins at Uxmal by Frederick Catherwood

This scene of Mayan ruins in Yucatan by the English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854) is a favourite and has been since I first saw this picture in a book on archaeology I was given for my tenth birthday.  This tiny book by CW Ceram, which is about the size of a postcard, captured my imagination from the start and no pictures more so than the mystery and atmosphere in Catherwood's illustration.

Catherwood's illustrated books, following his travels in Central America, introduced people to the civilisation of the Mayans, in the 1840s.  Later he ran a store  in San Francisco selling supplies to California gold rush miners.  

SS Arctic

He drowned, at the age of 55, when travelling on the American ship, the SS Arctic from Liverpool to New York, after the Arctic was struck by a French ship in poor visibility.  The ship sank slowly but there was no women and children first on board, with the six lifeboats mostly filled by the crew who ,ignoring discipline, crowded into them at the expense of the passengers, of whom only 28 were saved. No women or children survived and there was no subsequent enquiry.  Calls for the number of lifeboats to be able to hold all the passengers and crew of ships were ignored.

The Plains of Heaven by John Martin

It’s Art Friday! I remember first seeing this painting by John Martin (1789-1854) on a school Art trip to the Tate Gallery in 1976. The most famous exhibit at the time was Carl Andre’s Equivalent VII (the ‘pile of bricks’). My best friend O and I were not impressed by the latter and hatched a plot to relocate one of the bricks to the gallery cafe but were, perhaps fortunately, spotted by a security guard before we had touched one. 

Although his paintings fell out of favour, he influenced many others from the Pre-Raphaelites to film producers, including DW Griffith, the French Romantics and even his friend Brunel, who based some of his railway bridge designs on Martin's work.

Painted between 1851 and 1853 this vast (2.4 x 3.5 metres) painting was more to my taste, to the extent that I bought a large and expensive poster of it in the shop there. No reproduction really does it justice and you really have to see the actual painting to get the full effect (it had only been left to the Tate in 1974). 

Brasenose College by Claude Buckle

This is a picture of my college at Oxford, Brasenose, by railway poster art master Claude Buckle (1905-1973). Originally trained as an architect, between 1932 and 1963 he produced dozens of posters for the railways, together with a number of those panoramic pictures that I can remember used to brighten up railway carriages when I was small.

Old Quad at Brasenose offers the finest view in Oxford, looking out over the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary's, the university church.  Dating from 1509 the third storey of the quad was added in the seventeenth century,

RMS Queen Mary by William McDowell

This poster of the Queen Mary, featuring  a painting  by William McDowell (1888-1950) was produced in 1938 for Cunard.  McDowell started working in the drawing office of  Vickers shipyard in Barrow-in- Furness. He became a full time artist after Word War 1 and worked on commissions for many of the great shipping lines at the time such as Cunard, Union Castle and White Star Line.

I haven't sailed on the Queen Mary (I'm not that old!) but I have had lunch on her!

Unconscious Rivals by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Unconscious Rivals (1893) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) is certainly not my favourite example of the artist’s work (that is In the Tepidarium) but it has resonance for other reasons . In my first year at University my girlfriend, C, was a lovely redhead who, like me, was enamoured of classicist paintings. Her best friend, the dark haired K, and I were close too and C thought that “the lascivious K” was pursuing me romantically. K was surprised to learn this and as a joke bought me a postcard of this painting, as it ‘depicted her and C being rivals’. Last year K and I visited the Alma-Tadema exhibition at Leighton House and saw the original (it is usually in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery). We recalled more torrid times with the amusement that comes from thirty eight years of distance.

I always thought that the setting was rather unusual in that it placed the women in a sort of Roman aircraft hangar.  I don't know of any classical building it is based on which is unusual for Alma-Tadema who was scrupulous about his classical sources.  The cupid here, for example, is based on one found at Pompeii, somewhere the artist had visited.

The sweet siesta of a summer day by JW Godward

The sweet siesta of a summer day (1891), was one of the early successes for the neo-classicist painter John William Godward (1861-1922), It was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1891. Very much in the Alma-Tadema style, it is almost a pastiche of such paintings, with its languid girls in classical dresses, marble steps, a tiger skin, distant view of the Mediterranean, hanging vines etc. One of the girls is playing an aulos, as Godward tried to create a feeling of delicate flute music, Today, however, we know that the aulos was a martial instrument, used by the Spartan army and gave out a rather raucous buzzing sound not unlike a crumhorn. Not very restful! 

It was painted in his London studio in Smith Street in Chelsea and I actually went to a party there, with my Chinese American girlfriend, back in the mid eighties. She later modelled for some nude pastels for me,  I didn't know it had been Godward's studio at the time, though.  Perhaps that is why I found her so inspiring!

Godward ran off to Italy with one of his models and his parents, never keen on his choice of profession in the first place, never spoke to him again and even cut his picture out of all the family photos. Depressed by the march of modernism he committed suicide in 1922 by gassing himself in his oven at home, leaving a note which said "the world is not big enough for myself and a Picasso"

The Kelpie by Herbert Draper

The Kelpie (1913)

Here is a watery maiden by Herbert Draper (1864-1920). Kelpies were spirits who haunted rivers and lakes and would prey on sailors and other travellers. Draper's Kelpie does have something of the sinister about her, although the picture was not well received when it was exhibited; critics thinking that the girl's figure was "too modern" for a mythological subject.  Kelpies were creatures of northern myth and her background setting reflects this. Draper was fascinated, as were other late Victorian artists, with portraying beautiful but evil women and this figure joins his sirens and snake women as another metaphor for the destructiveness of women's sexuality.  The fact that her toes are dipped in the water symbolises the fact that she has lost her virginity.  No innocent maiden, therefore, but a dangerous sexual predator. Draper was an expert at combining source material from different places and fusing them together to provide a realistic and convincing looking whole. In the case of The Kelpie the source material appears to be some photographs he took of a stream in Scotland, together with some detailed pencil studies he made in Savoie. The rendering of the transparently clear water in the foreground of this picture is nothing short of miraculous. 

Seymour Fleming by Sir Joshua Reynolds

The scandalous Lady W

Seymour Fleming (was the heiress daughter of an Irish baronet and married Sir Richard Worsley of Appuldurcombe House on the Isle of Wight. To cut  a very long and torrid story short she and her husband were ill suited and she took a string of lovers (as many as 27 she admitted, over a seven year period).  One of these was one of her husband's best friends and fellow local South Hampshire Militia officer George Bisset.  She ran off with him (abandoning her four month old baby by Bisset) and her husband then sued Bisset for £20,000 (in 1782!) for 'conversation' (which is adultery with a fellow officer).  During the case, Lady Worsley admitted the numerous lovers but said that her husband had 'displayed' her naked to Bisset, which encouraged the affair which made it, by implication, his own fault. Sir Richard won the case but was only awarded one shilling in damages, due to this revelation,  Bisset left Lady Worsley when her husband refused to divorce her so he couldn't marry her.  Relying instead on donations by grateful and 'friendly' gentlemen she had to flee for Paris to escape debts with her French lover.  Trapped by the French revolution she was probably imprisoned during The Terror.  She returned to England in 1797.  Her husband died in 1805 and she inherited £70.000 (about £8 million at today's values).  A month later the 47 year old Lady Worsley married her 26 year old lover, moving to France after the armistice of 1814.  She died there four years later. This painting of her, in the uniform of her husband's militia unit, by Sir Joshua Reynolds now hangs in Harewood House.  It says everything about the character of this independent, unconventional, sensuous woman who was, indeed, scandalous.

Flaming June by Lord Leighton

Flaming June (1895)

Here is Flaming June by Lord Leighton (1830-1896), one of my favourite paintings.  Lost after 1900, it only reappeared in the early sixties and when it was put up for auction it failed to make its reserve price of £140; so unfashionable were the paintings of the Victorian classicists at the time.  It was bought in the mid sixties for £2000 by a Puerto Rican industrialist and now is usually on display in Puerto Rico.