User:Jerome D Rhodes/sandbox

Cecil William Rhodes 1894-1970 artist, poet, craftsman

Cecil William Rhodes was the son of the architect John William Rhodes, and brother of Henry Taylor Fowkes Rhodes, the scientist and writer. Named after his distant relative, Cecil Rhodes, he chose to sign his work as William Rhodes or WR, so as not to take advantage of it after someone told him how lucky he was to have such a famous name. This was typical of his diffidence as to marketing or commercialising, on which he turned an obstinate back all his life.

At Goldsmiths’ College of art, now part of the University of London, he was a pupil of Edmund J Sullivan the illustrator, until E J told him in 1912 he had taught him all he knew and he had better leave. One contemporary was Stanley Spencer. At the age of 16 he already had his self-portrait hung ‘on the line’ at the Royal Academy; many portraits followed and he exhibited there (In 1919 The Entombment) and at Bristol - the International Society Winter Show. In 1936 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was a member of the Guild of Catholic Artists and craftsmen.

In 1914 he volunteered for The Artists Rifles and then the Eighth Lincolnshire Regiment and served in France until 1917, when he was invalided out with an affliction which was to affect his whole life and career. The war injury to one eardrum left him with a kind of disfigurement, whereby the moisture streamed down the side of his face, needing constant mopping. A naturally shy man, he was so sensitive of this effect on his countenance that he avoided public functions and social mixing – hard for a portrait painter. Yet once he got going, he enjoyed the society of friends and was both witty and a deep thinker. He was very musical and passed this on to his second son Sebastian, with whom he would write plays to perform in the miniature theatre set up in his studio. Friends would travel great distances to visit him in the discomfort and welcome of his home. And they kept coming, because he had real charm and was worth the risk of his sometimes terror.

In 1917 he married Gwen and they set up home on the estate of the Earl of Arundel in Wiltshire (I have photo), where the first two sons were born, Francis and Sebastian. Gwen and Cecil were both converts to the Catholic Church, through the powerful combination of St Francis of Assisi and the Dominican Fr. Vincent McNabb. Soon they were to join Eric Gill’s Community of Ditchling in Sussex, along with David Jones, Philip Hagreen, Robert Gibbings, Hilary Pepler and various craftsmen. We have a drawing of Ericus Gillius by CWR. Otherwise, all traces of CWR at Ditchling were removed, surely because he had a massive row with Eric Gill and left in 1924. Gwen remained lifelong friends with the Hagreens and Petra Gill and David Jones.

For somewhere to live with the new baby, Mary, Rhodes was offered a cottage at Creeksea, up-river from Burnham on Crouch in Essex, which his father had leased as a shore base for all his sailing activities (an architect, he was Commodore of the Royal Cruising Club); the long boat store at the top of the garden was to make his studio and workshop until he died, and in that small cottage, with a pump in yard for water and an earth closet in the garden, all four children (Jerome born 1930) were brought up.

CWR spent a year or so with Mr Romney Green at Christchurch, Dorset, where he made several portraits, and where he learned cabinet making and woodcraft. He would ride there on his Sunbeam motorcycle, which surprisingly he cherished. He later designed and built some beautifully made furniture, which he gave as wedding presents and are still in use today.

For a few years around 1926-7, he worked as a draughtsman at the Geological Museum in London, in the exacting task of map-making. He had his studio flat on Haverstock Hill, London or commuted by train daily from Burnham. (I have a photo of him on the roof, which would identify the building and others with colleagues.) He embarked on a wide range of works with religious, biblical, mythic or poetic themes. His 14 Stations of the Cross series was made in 1927. In 1937 his large oil painting of Our Lady and Child was exhibited in Spain He made illustrations for William Langland’s Piers Plowman, including a notional portrait of Langland himself. And for Daniel B. Pulsford’s contributions in The Sign, the National Catholic Magazine in USA - notable writers include Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton. He made many woodcuts and linocuts, printing them in his own press. There exist two photographs of stained glass windows, location unknown, two book covers and illustrations of poems published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury. What people might expect of abstract art is hard to find in William Rhodes’ works. His deepest philosophical insights and ideas take the form of visions and dreams and events, which show humans and animals, saints and angels, scenes that are almost realistic. Only careful study reveals the imagery lurking within and just below the surface.

His carving in wood of St Hugh of Lincoln is now with a church near Downside in Somerset but his masterpiece in this medium was created when Seville Cathedral commissioned his Lepanto Crucifix, to replace the original which had been stolen. After the war, the original was traced and its position restored, so that Rhodes’ own work was returned and is currently displayed by his youngest son in his house in Gloucestershire. The crucifix is exquisitely carved in great detail, placed in a triptych cabinet made specially, with a long inscription in Spanish, whose lettering, also designed by himself, is incised in lignum vitae. He afterwards said this required him to sharpen his cutting tools every few letters!

Rhodes was a man for portraits in every shape, size and medium, and even his sketches have unusual perception and power, many made from memory without the presence of the sitter. He had rare insight into character, even projecting what they would be like in later years. His sense of fun is elusive, among the terror, the dark power and the passion of much of his work. It is evident more in his verse than his art, for example in the couplets he wrote for each of the animals he engraved for his Animal Alphabet. The Cat is vain, contemptuous and proud: Her ways are soft, and so she is allowed.”

But there is no irony in his making important portraits of farm labourers with whom he worked during the second world war: showing them in all their serious power, their skill and their wit, making a collection of some of his best drawings. He learned, with scrupulous attention to detail, many of the skills of the farm labourer so as to capture their character and their movement in milking cows, spreading dung, hoeing, hedging, harvesting and above all, being themselves. He knew how to handle men, not looking out of place but very much accepted as part of it.

He would often use charcoal when he had not the money for oil, but also he used old newspapers, the covers of sketch blocks or some rough hessian; just as he would fearlessly cut up a major canvas when completed, or paint another on the back, it was to catch the moment rather than to be economical. For him his art was in the doing, not the possession, so that he often stopped before final finish, because the challenge or the concept had been already met. For one of his important portraits he asked only for a small sailing boat.

In fact, just as his scientist brother was arranging a one-man show for him in London, he actually decided to build a boat, and took three years over it. This boat was named Replica. The original was a beautiful 18-foot clinker-built sailing boat, The Pride of the Crouch. During World War II when she was laid up in a mud berth on the Essex saltings, it was required for a plank to be removed, to frustrate any attempts to use her by the threatening invaders. Afterwards, he carefully dismantled the entire vessel and with new timbers rebuilt her in replica, with improved decking, lockers and many finely made fittings. Not only could he do the woodworking but the metalworking, too, including the building of the plant for steaming the timber, all inside his own studio/workshop and with the faithful help of his wife in the arduous task of fixing the thousands of rivets required for this clench-built cutter. It is said that he never recovered from the loss of what he considered his greatest series, the 14 Stations of the Cross, sunk by torpedo in 1939 en route to Portugal. This was to be only the first of two war losses at sea: the second was to follow two years later when Francis his eldest son, having already survived four previous sinkings, perished in the Atlantic. His series of a different kind, the Alphabet of his own lettering design must have been influenced by working alongside Eric Gill, but each of Rhodes’ letters is illustrated by its own drawing to characterise the particular letter. Two books exist of his writings, the whole manuscript in fine calligraphy.

Though E J Sullivan told him as a young student there was nothing more he could teach him, Rhodes would always try to learn more, from Leonardo of whom he made a close study, to Picasso whom he equally revered. Certainly no modernist, he never ceased to experiment. He even agreed to some of his works being copied by xerography, and commissioned a professional photographer to begin reproducing his remaining and unsold pictures. (Sadly he died in1970 after an operation before more could be completed.) He made many of his own paints and the colours used in his last masterpiece The Cuchulain Battle, depicting the climax of this Achilles of Irish heroes. After careful research, he found the pigments that would be equally effective in black and while photographic reproduction. In his day, colour printing, even in art books of high quality was less than good enough.

As to value, (Cecil) William Rhodes held infuriating views about money and fame and there can be few better examples of the painter who cuts himself off from ‘success’. He would refuse to pursue introductions and opportunities made for him by his loyal wife or with influential people. Much of his work is not signed. Comparisons of diverse periods of his work with William Blake, with Durer, Stanley Spencer or Leonardo himself, would rouse in him severe reactions. The humility would be real. On the monetary value of works of art, he once replied that the way to do it is to hold up the paintings in the market place, as in Florence, so that “the public voice declare”. This was his authentic opinion, a typical paradox for this man, reviewed as “an artist for artists”.

Jerome Rhodes, son of the artist. Cotswold House, Wotton-Under-Edge Gloucestershire 20 August 2011