Scrapbooks
Detail of page from one of Edward Bawden’s scrapbooks, courtesy The Fry Art Gallery
Eric Ravilious’ scrapbooks, which were published in part some years ago in an attractive edition, reveal an interest in subjects as diverse as tennis, cricket, fireworks and aeronautics, but in the main they comprise sketches and trials of one kind or another, and especially of engravings. They don’t contain the variety of engaging material that is found in the companion volume compiled from the scrapbooks kept by his friend and artistic contemporary, Edward Bawden, but they reflect the progressive unfoldment of an inquisitive mind, expressed in an unruffled and delicate visual language, in which many of his motifs and images can be seen developing from their early forms.
Ravilious was adroit at capturing everyday scenes in English life, particularly in the countryside; most of them conveyed a sense of restrained happiness or contentment, and when he became an official war artist, his paintings remained curiously calm and reassuring. Perhaps for these reasons he has come to be identified with a kind of quintessential ‘Englishness’, and they may also explain why his art is often dismissed as tastefully conservative. Nevertheless, his watercolours and prints, Ravilious’ preferred media, are rarely just comforting and refined, mainly because of the work’s subtly complex relationship with modern life, and especially with its underlying aspects of psychological emptiness and alienation. Even so, while his images are often thinly scattered with such things as cars, lorries, railway engines, fencing, pylons, as well as the machinery of war, they are always subservient to a more traditional, and sometimes archaic, landscape. Ravilious’ paintings tend to be emotionally distant, their palette subdued, the paint application light and dry, with plenty of hatching and stippling, and as one writer has put it, their feeling of detachment, infused with suggestions of mystery and the surreal, creates in them a peculiar combination of the bleak, the odd, and the appealing. They are able to evoke nostalgia for a world that most people, even the English, have never known.
A similar mood can be found in, or projected onto, the work of Edward Bawden. Like Ravilious, he is a popular artist in England, and his rural and seaside scenes, as well as his views of London buildings, can often be found on greeting cards, calendars, crockery, and tea-towels. Although he is commonly brushed off with faint praise, there are many who consider him to be a brilliant designer who astutely blended tradition with modernism. This is certainly true of his scrapbooks, assembled over a period of half a century and filled with all kinds of ephemera, including letters and Christmas cards from various artistic friends such as Edward Ardizzone, John Betjeman, Evelyn Dunbar, Enid Marx, John Piper and the writer A.J.A. Symons.
The scrapbooks vividly reflect Bawden’s life, both personal and professional; among their diverse contents are newspaper cuttings, receipts, cigarette cards, bus tickets, exhibition notices and invitations, and oddities such as a Portuguese sardine-tin wrapper. There are many designs for book covers and and some early proofs for his own book, Life in an English Village, as well as sketches for a mural and some stage sets. All these items appear to have been added to the albums without a deliberate effort to combine them artfully; they often obscure or overlap each other in configurations that are neither chronological nor thematic. Like many scrapbooks, Bawden’s are free and haphazard; he seems to have enjoyed serendipity, and while some elements resonate with each other meaningfully, others are only related through casual juxtaposition. Wallpaper designs adjoin letterheads or samples of calligraphy; costume studies abut cards or laundry lists.
From today’s perspective, an interesting aspect of old scrapbooks is their contrast to current social phenomena such as Instagram and Twitter, which usually register only responses to the present or immediate past. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, probably their heyday, scrapbooks were customarily created to preserve memories in material form and were often nostalgic, rooted in a form of longing that combined pleasure with sadness, a sense of loss, or of time passing away. Some, however, were used as diaries or records, and these can be rich records of cultural history, revealing aspects of society that might otherwise have been unremembered. Newspaper and magazine clippings disclose how people reacted to current events, while everyday mementos reflect general as well as personal tastes. Even quotidian things like menus or seed packets tell us what people ate and what they planted in their gardens.
Most early 20th century scrapbooks appear to have been made by women, perhaps because the keeping of autobiographical and family memories was then considered to be a feminine pastime or duty. There are, however, some intriguing exceptions to the usual displays of polite female domesticity. Maud Mary Arncliffe Sennett, a suffrage campaigner, actress and businesswoman, used scrapbooks as a way of expressing her political activism. Sennett helped to organise marches and demonstrations, wrote to newspapers, and formed her own movement, the Northern Men’s Federation for Women’s Suffrage; her thirty-seven scrapbooks chronicle a life of protest in evocative and telling detail. In them she gathered documents of the suffragette movement, including pamphlets, newsletters and newspapers, and often inscribed her own thoughts in their margins. Clippings record her window-smashing campaigns, a police telegram notes the date of her court hearing, letters reflect her joy at women finally being granted the vote. Sennett’s scrapbooks are not just celebratory, however; they recount the complicated experience of campaigning and social activism. She even expresses frustration, as when she rebukes the Pankhurst family for excluding her from a large gathering of suffrage campaigners on Women’s Sunday in June, 1908.
For further exploration:
Eric Ravilious: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/apr/05/ravilious-dulwich-picture-gallery-review-watercolours
Eric Ravilious: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/18/eric-ravilious-alan-powers-review
Edward Bawden: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/may/22/london-through-eyes-graphic-designer-edward-bawden
Edward Bawden scrapbooks: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/14/rachel-cooke-shelf-life-edward-bawden-scrapbooks-wondrous-almanac-one-mans-sensibility
The social history of scrapbooks: https://theconversation.com/the-radical-history-of-scrapbooks-and-why-activists-still-use-them-today-172581
Maud Arncliffe Sennett’s scrapbook: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/maud-arncliffe-sennetts-scrapbook-volume-1
Image on index page: ‘Ship’s Screw on a railway truck’ by Eric Ravilious. courtesy Asmolean Museum
Page from a Mabel Arncliffe Sennett scrapbook, courtesy British Library