James Holland, 20th Century Artist

The South Bank and the Festival Ship

As mentioned in the Biography note, my father was one of the key designers of the Festival of Britain.  On the South Bank itself, he led on the Sea and Ships pavilion while he also lead the team that set up the Campania to be the floating exhibition that went round the key ports of Britain.

For years we had a box of stuff linked to the Festival in Dad's studio, including his Gold Pass and various documents and papers, but we have donated this to the Festival of Britain Society, as that seemed the appropriate place for it.  I do still have a battered lapel pin that must have done service on jackets over the years, and I do have a photograph of the model of the South Bank site, which is rather splendid.

We also have a number of artist's drafts and watercolours of the Campania, a monochrome version of which is shown below.

 

Perhaps my favourite bit of Festival memorabilia that we still have in the family is the photo below however - presumably a press or PR photo - taken when my father was showing the Royal Family around the site.  The King and Queen are talking to my father, although the former seems to be moving on a bit.

 
 
The Today programme is doing a special edition from the South Bank on Friday 22 April 2011 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Festival.

Lowestoft lino cut

As indicated in an earlier post, Holland was fascinated by the fishing port at Lowestoft, and did a major series of paintings of it.  He also explored showing the harbour in other media, including this study done as a lino cut.

 

He created three blocks for this print, one for black, one for red and one for green, and sent copies to his friends as a Christmas card.

Lowestoft Harbour, lino cut in three colours, one of a number of copies, c. 1973.

 

Houseboats

Today's picture is another study of boats, this time houseboats moored either on the Thames or in Essex, and dates from the 1950s.  This charming study uses another of Holland's favoured  colour themes - dusty pink - for the horizon panorama as well as on one of the boats.

As indicated, Holland's garage was severely damaged during the "hurricane" of October 1987, but this was where many older or larger works were stored.  Even from the photograph as it appears on the web page, but more if you click on the image for an enlargement, you can see the damage wrought by water and time on this work.  This is a great shame as it is a charming scene.

 

Houseboats, oil on board, significant water damage, signed, not for sale.

 

 

Polperro Harbour

During the 1970s and early 1980s, friends of Holland owned one of the houses on the harbour wall at Polperro in Cornwall.  Holland visited the house on a number of occasions out of season, enjoying the atmosphere in the local pubs with the fishermen and the opportunities for sketching.  In particular he enjoyed the challenges for drawing boats in the narrow tidal harbour and the way the village climbed up the steep valley.

This picture shows a boat in the harbour at high tide, and with one of Holland's favourite oppressive skies.  This may have been based on sketches done at New Year 1978/79, when Holland was trapped in the village for several days by heavy snowfall.  There are other pictures in private collections showing the harbour and village under thick snow - a rarity at sea level in Cornwall.

 

Polperro Harbour, oil on board, signed, undated, framed, available for purchase - price on application.

 

 

French beach

Not all Holland's paintings are dominated by the green and purple spectrum of colours.  Today's painting shows a sunny holiday scene, but with sea and boats as well.  When travelling with a car, it was easier for Holland to take an easel, a number of boards and different paints with him, so that he could chose the best media to capture what he saw before him.  This painting sketch of the beach at le Treport in Normandy, with fishing boats drawn up onto the shingle is a good example of one of his holiday snap shots.  The view looks east along the coast with its white cliffs to Fecamp in the distance.

In 1999 I spent a few days with my husband on the Normandy coast, and when we got to Fecamp, it seemed foolish not to carry on to see le Treport and the view along the coast, to compare it with this picture.  For anyone who tries the same, the road to le Treport is tiny and easily missed, but when you get to the beach the view is the same, but dependent on the weather!

 

Fecamp from the beach at le Treport, 1988, oil on board, framed, signed, exhibited at The Art Connoisseur Gallery 1997, available for purchase - price on application.

 

 

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.