Monday, June 9, 2014

On the high seas


Provincial, rustic, folkish, naïve – and fun

A friend remarked that the painted boss in my previous post would look at home on the prow of a sailing ship, and I have to say he’s on to something. The straightforward, slightly naïve carving of the boss is close to folk art, as is quite a lot of the sculpture on churches, especially the gargoyles, corbels, grotesques, and similar carvings on some of our smaller parish churches. Folk art is usually defined as art created by untrained amateur artists who worked outside the tradition of art education, apprenticeship, or art school. Medieval church carvers no doubt served apprenticeships and carved for a living but their style often seems more personal and provincial than the work of the sculptors who decorated the west fronts of the great cathedrals, from Chartres to Wells. Call it rustic, call it folk art, it does have something in common with the carving of old shop signs, puppets, and ship’s figureheads.

I therefore turned to the pages of the several books on English popular art and found, in Noel Carrington and Clarke Hutton’s Popular English Art (King Penguin, 1945), this colourful illustration by Hutton of the figurehead from H M S London. Noel Carrington described the art of ship decoration like this: ‘Marine decorators took their motives from those current in architecture and furnishing ashore, but gave rein to that little extra exuberance for which sailors always seem to have a partiality.’ In Britain’s navy, such figureheads, along with a riot of other carving along the bows and sterns of ships, found favour between the Restoration and the end of the 19th century Subjects varied from goddess to royalty, lions to naval heroes.  

The early-19th century figurehead in Hutton’s picture is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Hutton seems to have gone for exaggeratedly strong colours – the actual figurehead has much paler skin and her dress has a more muted hue. Her crown, in the form of a castle or city wall, is a common attribute when the ship’s name is that of a city – the notes on the museum’s website suggest that it may be based on the White Tower, the central structure of the Tower of London and the square structure with corner turrets is certainly reminiscent of this famous castle.

Readers within reach of London who like this kind of thing will find much of similar sort in Tate Britain’s Folk Art exhibition, which opens on 9 June and promises to be spectacular. I’m planning my visit.

7 comments:

Stephen Barker said...

I am looking forward to this exhibition as well. I assume you have visited the British Folk Art collection at Compton Verney. Cheltenham Museum has some very good pieces particularly the figure of the chimney sweep.

Philip Wilkinson said...

Yes, I'm a fan of the Folk Art collection at Compton Verney, and of the pieces in Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum (now known as The Wilson), where there's a tall figure of a guardsman, once outside a tobacconist's in the town, that I remember from my childhood.

Chris Partridge said...

I love the technical name for castles on the head -"mural crowns".

Philip Wilkinson said...

It's part of the wonder of language that such an obscure thing as a crown on the head should have a technical term at all. I'm not sure if the term used in heraldry and whether figures crowned murally appear on coats of arms...

Joseph Biddulph (Publisher) said...

Yes, "mural crown" is straight from heraldry and is a well-established motif. Portuguese towns have one above the shield: Birmingham before re-organisation had one on a fesse ermine in the middle of its arms - I had one on my school badge for 7 years. But allegorical figures murally crowned probably go back to Classical times - symbolising cities or civic virtues I think?

Chris Partridge said...

The old LCC had a mural crown on its shield.

Philip Wilkinson said...

Ah yes. Your comment has made me google the old LCC arms and of course as soon as I saw a picture it came back to me. The 'crown', though, doesn't look quite as odd when on top of a shield rather than on a person's head!