Townhouse Spitalfields

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Gallery

Eleanor Crow’s Shopfronts of London

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An exhibition to accompany publication of the book of the same name featuring over eighty of Eleanor’s watercolours from the book, including some new ones

At a time of momentous change in the high street, Eleanor’s witty and fascinating personal survey champions the enduring culture of Britain’s small neighbourhood shops. Eleanor’s collection includes eighty of her watercolours of the capital’s bakers, cafés, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, chemists, launderettes, hardware stores, eel & pie shops, bookshops and stationers. Her pictures are accompanied in the book by the stories of the shops, their history and their shopkeepers – stretching from Chelsea in the west to Bethnal Green and Walthamstow in the east.

The watercolours are £150 framed (A5) and larger ones are £210 framed.

The exhibition opens on the 3rd October with a book launch and signing that evening 6 – 8pm and the exhibition continues at Town House until Sunday 20th October.

Lost Time: Doreen Fletcher’s East End 1983 – 2003

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Doreen Fletcher arrived in the East End of London in the early 1980s and was immediately aware that the dilapidated buildings and small businesses in the streets around her were about to disappear. The sense of community in the area reminded her of her Midlands childhood and inspired by the excitement of being somewhere new, she started a series of paintings of the East End that continued for the next twenty years.

Aware that she was documenting an urban landscape that would be lost forever, she regularly contacted galleries and magazines to promote not only her paintings, but also an awareness of what was happening in the East End. Their negative response reflected the wider attitude at the time: a complete lack of interest. It was the culmination of centuries of neglect of an area that had long been regarded as a vast slum and dispirited by the rejections and the overwhelming changes to the area, Doreen stopped painting.

As perceptions have changed and we have come to realise what has been lost, Doreen’s work can now be seen as a poignant record of the time at which so much of the legacy of the East End disappeared. It is not only a record of the built environment of the 19th century and earlier, but also of a community that had survived the bombs of the Second World War. This community was in many ways the last vestiges of a late 19th century, tight knit society, in which life revolved around the streets of one’s birth and around family and friends living nearby.

These paintings depict a lost time that has gone and cannot be recovered, but perhaps this exhibition will encourage us to make up for that lost time and demand a new way of looking at future development in our cities, before it really is too late.
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A Throw of the Dice

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A little over a year ago I stood before Picasso’s ‘Desmoiselles d’Avignon’ in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and for the first time I got a slight sense of what it might have been like to be one of the first to see that painting a hundred years ago. With its complete negation of classicism and of the decorative in painting, in its brutality and aggression it baffled the first of his friends to see it and received a hostile reception from the Parisian public when it was first exhibited in 1916. Picasso himself continued to receive a hostile reception in Britain until after the Second World War. It is easy for us to see with hindsight the impact this painting had on 20th century art, to see it as the beginning of modernism, yet at the time whether loved or loathed, it would probably have been regarded by most as unimportant, and Cubism as a short lived aberration.

The impact of the painting stayed with me and when I bought a cubist paper collage a few months later, indistinctly signed, but British and dating from just before the First World War, I started to look for the influence of Cubism in some of the other paintings by British artists I had been putting aside for exhibitions. During a long period of thinking and reading it eventually became clear that the thread I was following was not the influence of Cubism, but of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898), the French poet whose ideas inspired Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism in France and Europe. There was (almost) no equivalent British ‘-ism’ however, despite the complex network of connections, which existed between London and Paris from the 19th century through to the 1930s.townHouseThrowOfTheDiceFlyer01.indd

During this period Paris was still the place to go for artistic training and after the First World War was a cheap place to live, with a thriving artistic community. George Bissill was a young miner until after the First World War when he studied art in Nottingham, but as soon as he had his first successful exhibition in London in 1925, he left to spend some time in Paris. Many British artists had visited Paris and knew Picasso and the Paris avant-garde well, yet their ideas apparently failed to take hold. In a modest way this exhibition is an exploration of that theme until around the time of the Second World War.

I also realised during the course of putting this exhibition together, that Mallarmé’s ideas had a strong personal resonance for me as a dealer and collector (most works in the exhibition are for sale, but not quite all). The idea that the juxtaposition of two things each with their own associations for the audience can produce a new, chance idea is as relevant for curators, dealers and collectors as it is for poets, writers and artists. Hence the title for the exhibition is taken from the central idea of Mallarmé’s last great poem: ‘all thought is a throw of the dice’.

The Mind of the Artist

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The catalogue is being printed and after all the preparation I’m looking forward to finally hanging these works next week. 

The Mind of the Artist

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Beryl Touchard Colour FieldIt was almost four years ago that I held my first art exhibition here ‘Spirit of Place’ by a group of students in their final year at the Sir John Cass School at London Metropolitan University. It was a wide range of work spanning photography, large pieces of abstract art through to exquisite jewel like watercolours. The last were by Beryl Touchard and talking to her one day she showed me her sketchbooks including some colour fields, which I absolutely loved for their spontaneous intensity of colour. I was struck too by her surprise at my liking them: to her they were just preparatory colour fields, of no interest outside their usefulness in her work. I just wanted to buy one, frame it and put it on the wall.

About a month later I visited an auction to view a painting I had seen in the catalogue and which I thought might be of interest. Sadly it was not, but rather than have a wasted journey I looked round the rest of the sale including some sketches and watercolours in folios. To my surprise one included a design by Duncan Grant for a plate for the Festival of Britain and I was happy to be able to buy the folio in the sale.

Looking through that folio of watercolours and sketches made me realise that in general, works on paper reveal the mind of the artist in their immediacy with which they are committed to paper much more than say an oil painting, a much more forgiving medium that can be worked and re-worked over a longer period of time. So the germ of the idea for the next exhibition: ‘The Mind of the Artist’ was born, which will run in the gallery from 14th – 30th November at Town House. It will include works by Hercules Brabizon Brabizon, Laura Knight, Feliks Topolski, Madge Gill, Austin Osman Spare, Scottie Wilson, E Q Nicholson and of course the Duncan Grant design for the plate.

The Huguenots of Spitalfields Map

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Huguenots of Spitalfields mapI can’t believe it’s already a year since the Huguenots Festival and the launch of the Huguenots of Spitalfields charity. It was an amazing couple of weeks: so many people coming in who’d never visited the area before, but fascinated by it all and very keen to share their family history. I know the feeling: we discovered a couple of years after I opened the shop here in Fournier Street, that my husband’s ancestors had lived at number 29 in the 18th century and were married in the church opposite in 1756 – an extraordinary coincidence!

I had the idea last year of a Huguenot family history map of the area, but too late to organise it. However, this year I have and Adam Dant has drawn a very large map of the Spitalfields area extending from Bell Lane in the south to Calvert Avenue in the north and from Norton Folgate/Bishopsgate in the west to Brick Lane in the east. From 1st July to 31st August this year the map will fill the back wall of the gallery at Town House. We’re asking anyone who has details of their 18th and 19th century family who lived in the are (dates, names and addresses), either to come in and put the details on the map or email us on fiona@townhousewindow.com and we’ll do it for you.
We’ll also have a very large blank piece of paper on another wall, which will be a ‘message-board’ for anyone seeking further information about their family members.

We need as many people as possible to come and take part so that we can build a good family history map of the area and if we get enough families then we’ll get it printed for sale and give the original to the Bishopsgate for their archives. So come and see us in the summer and put your family on the map!

Now and Then

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I am delighted to present  ‘Now and Then’ an exhibition by a group of artists living and working in the East End of London in the spirit of the original East London Group of artists active from the 1920’s.

The recent resurgence of interest in the history of the East End of London has been demonstrated by the extraordinary success of  ‘Spitalfields Life’ and the campaigns to preserve such buildings as The Marquis of Lansdowne, precisely because they reflect the way in which ordinary people lived their lives.

In the 1930’s a group of artists were inspired to record the stark beauty of Whitechapel, Bow and Stratford as recounted by David Buckman in his ‘From Bow to Biennale’ published recently and now a new group of artists has been similarly inspired to record these streets as they undergo the upheavals of gentrification and re-generation. We are fortunate to be able to show some of the original East London Group’s works alongside that of the new group in the forthcoming exhibition and also to be able to include some works by Anthony Eyton who had a studio in Spitalfields from 1968 – 1982 and who forms the perfect link between the two groups.

A Mudlark and his Dog

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My email box is unusually exciting at the moment as I’m being sent lots of images by the artists taking part in the New East London Group exhibition ‘Now and Then’ at Town House from 28th November – 8th December. The exhibition sets a group of six artists living and working in the East End now alongside some works of the original East London Group from the 1930’s and some works by Anthony Eyton working in the area from the 1960’s.

 

I love this etching of a mudlark and his dog, which arrived from Joanna Moore recently. At first it was the visual appeal of the sketching and the rapid strokes that convey the repetitive movement of man and dog as they search for ‘treasure’, almost resolving into a pattern. Yet it soon reminded me of an article I read recently about the artist Simon Ling, shortly to appear in an exhibition at the Tate, who also likes to work outside and whose intense focus is such that a detail becomes everything. I realised that Joanna is doing something similar in this etching, but focusing on the event rather than the object.

 

The etching comprises a series of sketches made as she watched the mudlark and his dog, but combined into one image as they are here, they analyse the event over a period of time so that we can view it from every angle. Not only does it convey the closely focused, minutely choreographed movement of the mudlark as he works, but we also understand the close relationship between man and dog much better than we would from a single sketch.