James Holland, 20th Century Artist

Boats on the Medway

Holland was comfortable with a variety of media.  So far the pictures featured on this blog have been oil on board, but he was equally at ease with lino cuts, drawing, lithographs and watercolours.  The featured picture of this article is a watercolour painted in 1987.  The challenge of photographing watercolours is that the glass used for framing is generally reflective to some measure, so you will observe some strange light and shadow effects.

This picture demonstrates Holland's ability to work from memory as well as from sketches and from life.  The scene is of Medway barges, still with sails and rigging as could be seen in Holland's childhood before the First World War, in port on the river.  Chatham and Rochester were busy ports in the early part of the 20th Century. 

 

Medway Boatyards Remembered, 1987, watercolour, framed, in a private collection.

 

 

 

Duclair on the Seine in Normandy

From early visits to the country with Jim Boswell in the 1920s onwards, Holland had a passion for France and made many regular visits, normally with paints or a sketch book.  In October 1987, he and his wife had been on a tour of Normandy and a couple of days before they were due to return to Kent, on the 15th October, they stopped at Duclair on the Seine, where they loved to stay at the Hotel de la Poste.

My mother recalls that there was a sense of drama, and the colours of the sky and the countryside were different.  My father was particularly inspired and did a number of sketches by the river, that culminated in this painting - Before the storm 1987, the Seine near Duclair.  He was able to express the sense of foreboding and the arrival of the storm with his favourite colour palette - purple and green.  That night was a wild one in Normandy as well as in Kent, and when my parents returned home, it was to find the garage crushed by a tree, and they were without power for about 6 weeks.  While they were lucky to have an open fire, my father confessed he would be happy not to see another jacket potato for a number of years, once power was restored!!

 

Oil on board, unsigned, framed, with authentification on rear, shown at The Art Connoisseur Gallery, London, 1997.

 

 

Lowestoft

Holland was fascinated by the great fishing harbour at Lowestoft, and undertook many studies of the buildings themselves, the workers and the boats in harbour.  Many of these works date from the 1950s when the harbour and the fishing trade was still flourishing in East Anglia.  The semi-industrial nature of some of the scenes set the tone for his later works in the early 1960s in Birmingham and the Black Country, which were very dark and moody.

This oil on board study of a single vessel is typical of the colour palete Holland used at the time, and while one of the smaller works portraying Lowestoft (less than 24 inches wide unframed), shows his passion for the subject.  More Lowestoft works will appear in due course.

 

This unframed work is available to purchase - price on application.

 

 

 

Boats at Plymouth Docks

Holland was always fascinated by ships and the sea - both his parents had worked at the Royal Dockyards at Chatham, his father as a blacksmith and his mother in the sailmaking lofts.  On one of his last visits to Plymouth College of Art and Design to do their external assessments, he was taken round part of the docks.  For once, he didn't have a sketch book with him, or time to get his impressions down, so he asked the PCAD team to take some photographs of four old boats that were waiting to be broken up.  Once he received the photos, he painted two versions of the scene, one as oil on board (shown below) and another version as a watercolour (now in a private collection).  These works were done around 1980, and both paintings took the name of one of the boats - Trevol and Friends at Plymouth.

 

James Holland 1905 - 1996

 

James Holland was born on the 19th September 1905, at Gillingham in Kent, the son of a naval blacksmith.  He was educated at the Mathematical School Rochester, at which he won the President's Prize from the Royal Drawing School and a painting scholarship to Rochester School of Art.  In 1924 he attended the School of Painting at the Royal College of Art in London, when the Principal was William Rothenstein, his tutor was Paul Nash and his contemporaries included Henry Moore, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman and James Boswell.

Holland held his first exhibition while still at the College and organised the RCA Sketch Club, where he came in contact with leading painters of the day including Wilson Steer, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

In the late twenties, Holland went to live in Whistler's old studio in Fitzroy Street and worked as a painter, illustrator and designer, exhibiting his early work at the Warren Gallerty, the Zwemmer Gallery, the Bloomsbury Gallery and the Royal Academy.  At this time he started working on advertisements for Shell and illustrations for dailies and magazines including Country Life, Night & Day and Lilliput.  Together with James Boswell and James Fitton - the "three James" - Holland produced many anti-fascist and anti-war cartoons for Left Review and other publications.

In 1937 Holland worked with Misha Black on the Peace Pavillion in Paris.  The "three James" with Diana Uhlman, Edith Simon, Pearl Binder, Millicent Rose and Misha Black helped form the Artists International Association.  He was also a member of the London Group and the New English Art Club.

In 1940 Holland joined the Ministry of Information, working with Misha Black, Milner Gray and James Gardner on exhibition designs including gas showrooms, a replica coal mine and the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow.

When the Festival of Britain was proposed in 1948, Holland became part of a team comprising Misha Black, Ralph Tubbs and James Gardner under the leadership of Hugh Casson, the Festival's Director of Architecture.  It was decided each member of the team should design a section of the site.  Holland chose "Sea and Ships".  To his delight, the First Lord of the Admiralty offered him the aircraft carrier Campania to tour Britain as a floating exhibition hall of which he was the designer in charge.  When the Exhibition closed, he was appointed OBE.

 

After the Festival he returned to advertising and freelance illustration and was involved in reactivating the Society of Industrial Artists, serving as President of the Society in 1960/61.  He became interested in design education and was a member of the DES working group and the Coldstream Committee.  In 1963 he was appointed Head of Faculty of Visual Communication at Birmingham Polytechnic and subsequently became a visiting lecturer at Leicester Polytechnic.  He was assessor and Governor at several art colleges and in 1971 took on the post of Education Officer for the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers (now the Chartered Society of Designers) where he used his experience to help structure increasingly more professional design courses.  In 1980 he wrote Minerva at Fifty - a history of the Society.

Thoughout his life, James Holland continued to paint and write; and whilst in retirement in Kent enjoyed running an art class.  He completed his last painting two weeks before his death on the 7th January 1996.