The Tailor of Frant
The Goosewoman and Mr.Bright the Postman, courtesy private collection
George Smart, born in 1774, lived and worked in Frant, near Tunbridge Wells; there are early 19th century prints that depict his shop in the main street and show Smart outside his premises, offering his wares to people in passing carriages. Although a tailor by trade, he soon became better known for the curious portraits and other pictures he made using fabric off-cuts. Describing himself as ‘an artist in cloth and velvet figures’, he once sold a piece to the Duke of Sussex and decided that this meant he worked ‘By Royal Appointment’. Much of this information, augmented by short witty texts and doggerel, is on the printed labels that were usually affixed to the back of the picture frames. Little more is known about Smart, but it appears that he spent time in the army, was married and had a daughter, kept a large camera obscura in his garden, and died a pauper.
Until Tate Britain’s 2014 exhibition of British folk art, which included a substantial group of his pictures and featured an image of one of them on the publicity poster, Smart’s fabric art was not at all celebrated, but interest in his work has increased dramatically in the wake of the show. The widely circulated poster showed ‘The Goosewoman’, an older woman in profile, dressed in a peddler’s red cloak and carrying a basket that contains two geese, their heads hanging limply on one side. In all the variations of the composition, of which there are many, she wears a large black bonnet, tied with a ribbon and bow, a patterned dress, plain apron, and black shoes with buckles. Described on some labels as an ‘Old Maid of tempers mild’, she appears to have been a local character, either Elizabeth Horne, known as ‘Good Betty’, or the wife of ‘Old Bright’, the Postman.
The pictures of ‘Old Bright’ which often form a pair with ‘The Goosewoman’, also exist in many different variations, but he is always shown wearing a black or dark blue felt coat, light blue trousers, a flat top hat, and black buckled shoes; he has white hair and whiskers, often bushy, and he carries a walking stick and a satchel. Occasionally there is a letter in his hand, addressed to ‘G.Smart’, and he usually leads a donkey that commonly has a glint in its eye, because it is formed by a glass bead. The Postman’s expression varies rather more often than the Goosewoman’s; sometimes he looks surprised, and from time to time he frowns. There are normally identifiable buildings in the background.
As in much English folk art, there something odd and uncanny about the Goosewoman and Old Bright; they would not be out of place in a Grimm fairy-tale. This trait is even more overt in ‘The Earth Stopper’, another of Smart’s popular compositions, based on a contemporary print, which represents a man riding a horse on a moonlit night, throwing his arms in the air because he has been startled by a vision on the road ahead. He sees a figure in silhouette which he thinks is the Devil but is actually a chimney sweep and his donkey returning home. The rider’s presence on the road is just as unlikely and peculiar as the sweep’s - he is an estate worker looking for foxholes to block, in preparation for a hunt the following day. Smart seems to have liked the effect of silhouettes, for he also made many animal ‘dummy boards’, intended as ornaments but as strange as ‘The Earth Stopper’, which were fashioned from fabric, affixed to card or wood, and then mounted on wooden bases.
The appeal of these eccentric images owes much to nostalgia, the longing for a past that is imagined to be more agreeable and harmonious than the present, and which is often widespread in periods of pronounced social change. Their charm, however, is shadowed by unsettling oddness, which is precisely what makes them compelling. Sigmund Freud called this combination of ordinary and strange ‘das Unheimliche’, explaining that the ‘uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’. Jacques Lacan went further, suggesting that the uncanny can lead us to a point where we find it difficult to distinguish between bad and good, pleasure and discomfort, with a consequent experience of anxiety.
In recent times there has been much interest in the concept of ‘hauntology’, another twist on the idea of the uncanny. The term was first used by Jacques Derrida to refer to the ‘return’ of cultural elements from the past, but it has since been expanded, often inconsistently, in the context of postmodernism. The influential cultural commentator Mark Fisher, for instance, in his collection of melancholic essays entitled Ghosts Of My Life, wrote about ‘Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures’, particularly in relation to popular music, but more pertinent to George Smart’s art is some of the material in Stephen Prince’s book and website, A Year In The Country - Wandering Through Spectral Fields, which he describes as ‘journeys in otherly pastoralism, the further reaches of folk and the parallel worlds of hauntology’. Although frequently speculative and, like Fisher, increasingly focussed on music, Prince often reveals intriguing and unlikely connections between disparate and overlooked cultural phenomena, many of them with a pronounced ‘folk’ character.
For further exploration:
https://georgesmartfrant.wordpress.com/about-george-smart/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/09/british-folk-art-review-tate-britain
Felt dog dummy board, courtesy Tunbridge Wells Museum