Amberley, Sussex

Primal light: Illustration of the month

My illustration this month comes from a book published in 1921, Highways and Byways in Sussex, written by E. V. Lucas. I’ve chosen what I think is one of the most evocative of the illustrations, a study of the church and churchyard at Amberley, by F. L. Griggs.

Etcher, illustrator, conservationist, and Arts and Crafts movement leader Frederick Landseer Maur Griggs (1876–1938) grew up in Hertfordshire, went to the Slade, and settled eventually in Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds. There he became a member of the local group of Arts and Crafts luminaries, such as the architects Norman Jewson and Ernest Gimson, and he made etchings inspired by Cotswold architecture and landscape and did illustrations for several of Macmillan's Highways and Byways books. He was an enthusiast for the work of the great 19th-century English artist Samuel Palmer, making prints of some of Palmer's etchings, and becoming, in this and in his original work, a kind of creative bridge between Palmer and the British Neo-Romantic artists of the 20th century – Piper, Sutherland, John Minton, and so on.

The illustration I've chosen from Highways and Byways in Sussex shows Griggs' mastery of atmosphere. The artist faces the evening sun, which is already quite low in the sky, and which throws much of the church and the nearby trees into shadow while also catching the roof and the side of the tower and bathing them in light. The sun also highlights the edges of the gravestones, helping to define their curved tops.

When we look more closely, it's clear that there's a huge amount of delicate detail in the illustration too. Although this is not one of Griggs' images that delineates every stone of every wall, quite a lot of masonry at the right-hand end of the church is picked out clearly, as is the metalwork of the narrow lancet window. The areas in deep shadow also have a lovely texture – Griggs was good at shadows, as another illustration I posted some time ago also shows.

More than this, the light bathing the scene works on all kinds of levels. The westerly sun's pervasive rays suggest the warmth of a summer evening – that golden hour that photographers and film-makers love. This warm light makes dramatic forms of the building and trees, encouraging us look anew at the dark shape of the left-hand tree, the ragged outline of the tree by the chancel, and above all the extraordinarily long slope of the roof. We know it won't look quite like this for long – the sun will soon be down and the sense of an ending hangs about the image. Yet it's not quite the end: we know that the sun will rise once more, illuminating the dark eastern wall, and making us look again anew.

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Note The image file is at a slightly higher resolution than usual, and I hope this enables readers to see some of the detail in the picture by clicking on it. Apologies to those for whom this makes the image slow to appear on screen.

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

Uncommon markets (3)

In contrast to the grand town hall of the previous post, here is a market hall, plain and simple, in the middle of the beautiful Cotswold town of Chipping Campden. The market hall was put up in 1627 by Sir Baptist Hicks, a London mercer who built a mansion for himself at one end of Camden and made various gifts to his adopted town. The building was intended for use for the sale of poultry, butter, and cheese. It consists of little more than three rows of arches, a stone floor, and a roof, but they are done with such simplicity in golden Cotswold stone, that the building provides the perfect centrepiece to the main street.

Chipping Campden, which came to prominence as a centre of the wool trade in the late Middle Ages, is one of the most perfect of all the Cotswold towns. That it is still so perfect is due in part to the numerous craftsmen and artists who lived there in the early-20th century, many of whom came to Gloucestershire under the auspices of C R Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft. It was Ashbee who repaired the market hall in 1903 and the artist F L Griggs, another Campden resident, who designed the war memorial, partly visible to the right of the picture. This is a place that has inspired artists and artisans, and they have repaid it with the work of hand, heart, and head.

Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Line and light

One sunny afternoon in 1904 the artist F L Griggs came to the small town of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, paused in the main street, and began to draw. Griggs, who had settled in Chipping Camden the previous year, was getting to know the Cotswolds well because he was doing the illustrations for the book Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds, one of a series on British counties and regions. The book was to be published by Macmillan in time for Christmas 1905. With his newly acquired local knowledge, Griggs no doubt came prepared for the strong shadow cast across this street, which runs basically east-west, although with such a concatenation of curves that its limestone houses, bonded together in a continuous terrace running towards the 15th-century church, are all higgledy-piggledy.

At this stage in his career as an illustrator, Griggs used ink, and he employed thousands of fine lines to depict the play of shadow on cobbles and limestone, and a much more sparing, almost hesitant line for the houses and church tower bathed in sunshine, so that they seem to shimmer in the light. Using this painstaking way of working, Griggs could sometimes delineate buildings with startling precision – in some of his other drawings, virtually every stone is outlined, every warp in the timbers of a weatherboarded barn. This illustration is slightly looser but still meticulous and wonderfully conveys a sense of place – and as it virtually depicts the view from my front door, I can say this with confidence. This remarkable collection of houses – of various dates between the 16th and 20th centuries, and many containing within them fragments of still older buildings – not to mention the play of sun and shadow, have been caught well.

But Griggs’s way of working also caused him problems. He drew very slowly, and his publishers got frustrated, eventually bringing out the book with fewer illustrations than planned, and reducing the artist’s fee by ten per cent. So for future books in the Highways and Byways series, Griggs used pencil, in which he could work faster in a slightly looser, though still detailed, style. He was a good draftsman with the pencil, but something was lost, and I’m pleased that when he came to this street in Winchcombe – a street that has changed little since 1904 apart from the replacement of cobbles with asphalt and the arrival of a large number of cars – he was still using his painstaking pen.