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Which brings me to the last painting in this Town House in Lockdown exhibition. It’s by James Mackinnon and it’s an appropriate one to end with as the very first piece of East End art I encountered was by James. It was a long while ago in 1994 and ‘London Fields East: The Ghetto’ was an exhibition at the Museum of London and the memory of peering in through the windows of that extraordinary model of Ellingfort Road in Hackney stayed with me for a long while afterwards. The street was due to be demolished, but was being occupied by squatters at the time, many of them artists.

So, as my journey with East London art started unwittingly with a piece by James Mackinnon, it feels fitting that this lockdown exhibition should end with his Tower at Night, London Fields from 2012. It was the last in a series of paintings of the area around London Fields where he used to live.

To me this has that magical sense of a perfectly still night, that beautiful moon shining, not a breath of wind, like some of the beautiful nights with a spectacular moon we’ve had in lockdown. No cars out, or people walking around but the sense that people are still there in a multi coloured patchwork of urban life.  When I stood in the gallery and looked at this painting I wondered what it would look like if someone switched those lights off….

As soon as lockdown started, I really wanted to to cycle into central London to see it as I’d never seen it before. I expected to find it rather beautiful, the buildings, uncluttered by hordes of visitors, finally revealed in all their glory. Instead I found it very sad, depressing even. The doors of St Paul’s were tightly shut with no one on the steps, just one other cyclist there having a look. Unlike this painting there was no lit window to reassure me that there was someone inside, that life was carrying on as normal. This was very definitely not normal and it made me realise that beautiful as they are, these city landmarks are made by the presence of people. The loss of that same buzz of visitors that I’ve noticed in my empty shop is magnified many times over looking at a tightly shut and desolate St Paul’s.

Which brings me back to Doreen’s Mile End Park. I’ve realised that because it doesn’t look like a city view, I don’t feel the need to find people in it, to see life going on behind the façade; it feels rural rather than urban. It’s the city views that need people, without them they are sad, just as central London has been sad in these terrible last weeks.

And that’s what I’ve taken from hanging these paintings together here: yes, East End art is about the buildings and the loss of them, the shops and markets, the poverty, even the beauty, but more than anything else I’ve realised during lockdown it’s about people and it’s about community.

 

You can see the video of the whole exhibition here:-

https://youtu.be/OOtTDzI115o

Living close to Peri at the same period was Doreen Fletcher. In fact, they knew each other as both were part of the same community of artists in the 80s although their work and whole approach to it was very different. Neither were born East Enders and whereas Peri seems to have taken a while to respond to it emotionally as a subject, Doreen knew when she arrived that she had to paint these dilapidated streets that were under threat before it was too late.

Mile End Park at Twilight was painted in 1983, shortly after Doreen’s arrival in the East End and the gasometer looms over the terrace in Cooperfield Road, illustrating the fading dominance of industry in the East End. It was the target of many bombing raids during the war and its position in the midst of the maze of little streets caused terrible bomb damage, which eventually led to the plans to re-develop the area long after the war. Here the terrace sits, awaiting its fate, shuttered and secured to prevent squatters and vandals.

Doreen is an optimist at heart though: she could have shown the buildings derelict as we saw in Peri Parkes’ painting and the palette could have been much gloomier. Instead Doreen has chosen to paint the scene at sunset, with a glorious multi coloured sky and a hopeful burst of light in the distance. And although we don’t see them, we sense there are still people inside: windows are lit and the street lights are shining, negating the effect of the dark and shuttered terrace.

The second of Doreen’s paintings I hung always looks like an 18th century painting of a Suffolk village by a young Thomas Gainsborough to me, although I suppose if you look closely the Tandoori Curry shop sign is a bit of a giveaway. It’s definitely not a typical East End painting though: no run-down buildings here, these are painted in cheerful colours, well kept, with pretty windows and a nice area of neatly mown grass in front. This is Mile End Park with Church from 1988 and although I hung it in chronological order in the gallery I’m going to return to it in the next post….

 

A short video of the exhibition is available to view on YouTube:-

 

While Rose Henriques paints her local community, and her people are faceless parts of a larger whole, the characters in John Allin’s work are real: his people are characters we feel we’ve met. He was the only artist of the six here, who was born in the East End in 1934 and so he spent his childhood and teenage years there through the war until the 50s. It was in his blood and whereas Rose Henriques did something practical in response to the grinding poverty she saw around her, John Allin was a more political animal and sometimes it creeps into his art, particularly early on.

The Launderette from 1968 depicts the one over which he lived at the time in Hackney.  It’s a large work with bright colours and was painted using ordinary house paint, which he used early on in his career. It’s an attractive scene, but what about the faces? I hadn’t noticed before that none of them are smiling, although maybe the lady in blue might have a half-smile. Look at the man on the right and the small boy with the laundry sack, their figures are slightly bowed and downtrodden, like the people trudging along the street outside. And the lady behind the counter is definitely ready to go home after a hard day! But I like it, he’s portraying what he sees, but it’s more than a record, it’s also what he feels and hasn’t descended into the rather more commercial nature of some of his later work, once he’d achieved success and fame.

You can see a bit of this in the next one, which is slightly more formulaic and was painted about 6 years later in 1974. But what a wonderful image of East End shops, every item on sale carefully and lovingly drawn. Incidentally these shops were in Hessel Street, the same street as Rose Henriques’ market painting, but over 35 years later, after the market had gone. His affection for these little shops is almost palpable.

 

 

 

The next two paintings I hung in the gallery during lockdown are completely different. They’re by Rose Henriques, who lived in Whitechapel and who painted these just a few years after the Walter Steggles in the previous post. She and her husband Basil lived in Berner Street and made such a large contribution to the local community over the years, that the street was later renamed after them. They moved there in 1930 and the first painting is of the small court behind the main building. It’s called Our Court, from 1933 and shows the three cottages that they demolished that same year to build flats as accommodation for local people. She was self taught as an artist and her choice to record this court just before it disappeared suggests that her desire to make a record of the area around her was her motivation for starting to paint.

The court had probably changed very little over the 120 years it had been there and the way of life of the people you see in it here, had probably changed very little too. It’s one of those tiny East End courts that we all love to see in photographs, a bit like the Walter Steggles backs of houses, it’s like seeing what’s going on behind the scenes – something we don’t usually get the chance to see. But in this one there are people: two women, or a woman and a child maybe, washing celery and a costermonger with his barrow who’s come around with something to sell to a man waiting. It’s difficult to work out what it is. The barrow is unusual and seems to have a sink, is he washing something, perhaps fish? Preparing oysters? And the women outside their doors with their children: these are lives led on the streets, for all to see and definitely not behind closed doors. Gone are the empty streets of the East London Group, these are teeming with life.

Look at the next painting by Rose, called Upper and Lower Market: also from the 30s, it’s of Hessel Street market. It was re-developed in the 50s and the market was swept away, but here it’s thronging with people: market traders, someone carrying a sack on his back, children, babies in prams, stiff-tailed dogs sniffing each other, policemen chatting and someone with a tray selling ribbons maybe, who looks as though he’s walked straight out of a 19^th century edition of Cries of London. This could just as easily be street life 1880 as 1930.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This post is the first in a series of nine about the exhibition Town House Spitalfields in Lockdown and there’s a link at the end to the video of the whole exhibition:-

Town House shut its doors on 20^th March 2020. The lockdown started the following week and I have visited weekly just to keep an eye on things, to water the plants in the courtyard and once to make the window look a bit more spring like just in case there was anyone passing by.

Already that seems a long while ago.  At first, I found it unbearably sad walking through the door: I hadn’t realised just how much I’ve got used to the buzz of people coming and going and to hearing their chatter as they walk round the shop.

And that was one of the two things I missed overwhelmingly when the lockdown started: the people who visit Town House and talk about their ancestors, the East End and their memories of it and the second thing I missed was the paintings themselves. I’ve found that lockdown has altered the way I look at some things, so I decided to hang some East End paintings in the gallery here and have a look at them all side by side to see.

The first one I hung in this lockdown exhibition was an obvious one: Old Houses Bethnal Green (1929), by Walter Steggles of the East London Group. It’s a tiny painting, much smaller compared to other works by the Group; there’s also less sky and it’s much darker in tone. The whole thing feels cramped and claustrophobic somehow, reflecting the houses it was depicting perhaps, and all emphasised by the size of that frame closing it in. There are no people, but you know they’re there: there’s washing hanging on the line, some junk piled up by a back door. We can sense the lives that the people who live here lead, even though we can’t see them. There’s something fascinating about paintings of the backs of houses, the artist may just be painting the buildings, but we all love to look for what might really be going on behind those closed doors.

A woman sits alone at her work, head slightly bent, absorbed in what she is doing. Not an uncommon theme in twentieth century art and literature, but this watercolour dates from just before the middle of the nineteenth century, when ordinary women in their domestic surroundings were usually to be found as tokens of hard work and drudgery in genre paintings depicting the toils of the working class. In these paintings it was the woman’s surroundings that were important: the sparsely furnished cottage with its fire, cooking pot and perhaps children – all symbols of the inescapable purpose of her life.

This painting is unusual as the women is centre stage for her own sake, the surroundings are almost irrelevant and the affection and familiarity of the painter’s gaze suggests that this was probably painted by someone close to her. Perhaps it was her daughter, practising the painting that would have been part of her education in a ‘middling sort’ of household and as she looked at her mother she would surely have thought of her life to come.

If so, she does not seem to have been unhappy about it as the painting is full of a sense of a quiet contentment. The woman seems to be enjoying her work and she can turn her gaze out of the window to the world beyond, hinting at a life of contemplation. ‘A woman and her thoughts’ or soul was to become a favourite theme for artists around the turn of the twentieth century as attitudes to the position of woman in society began the long, slow process of change.  This watercolour that at first glance appears to be on a familiar theme, is in fact a quiet reminder that attitudes only begin to change in a small, unconscious way and take a long while to be perceptible on the larger stage.