Townhouse Spitalfields

Vintage, gallery, coffee and cake

Paintings

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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The life of an antique dealer

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I bought this painting of a ship the other day, partly because I always respond to naive art and partly because of the glorious blue. But it puzzles me, because it’s one of those paintings where there has to be a connection between artist and subject. Of course there are many artists who just paint in a naive style, but they don’t usually paint things to which they have no connection and there are many ship portraits, but they are usually much more sophisticated. So I googled the name potosi inscribed faintly on it and discovered that this was indeed a ship: she was built in 1895 and had a black hull and was red below the water line, which fits. But she also had five masts, whereas this ship has three masts and two funnels, but despite that somehow she looks like the Potosi in the Wikipedia photograph. Then from nowhere came a memory of the CS (cable ship) John W McKay, which used to be moored in Greenwich off the Standard Telephones and Cables site, where I was a project manager for submarine telephone systems once upon a time. She was built in 1922 and one day I was given a tour of this beautiful ship, still with her wonderful 1920’s wood and brass interior. For some reason one of the things I remember most clearly is my guide telling me that funnels on ships in the 1920’s slope slightly backwards. So I think that this little portrait is of the Potosi from the 1920’s when she must have been modernised by the removal of some masts and the addition of two funnels. And here is someone associated with the ship recording that change for us to see now……. so this is what antique dealers do: find the stories and make the connections.

Five Children

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I couldn’t resist this watercolour when I saw it: there is something incredibly appealing about the five of them standing there in a row, waiting for their portrait to be painted (I imagine they probably didn’t stand still for long), and feeling very important and special as children do even now when they are waiting for their photograph to be taken. You can just imagine the youngest one needing to have her hand held and them all wanting the toy horse to be included, except perhaps the oldest, who looks as though she may want to distance herself ever so slightly from it all. Whoever owned this was as proud, because the vivid colours suggest that it has been carefully put away for much of its life. Sometimes you find inscriptions on the back of paintings of children recording their names and ages and, although there is nothing on this, the image is so strong that you get a real sense of this family without needing to know anything else about them.
For me this is the power of ‘naive’ art, the very immediate connection with ordinary people who wanted to record something in their lives that was very special, whether children, dogs or farm animals. This was not meant to be high art, but were paintings done by journeymen artists as records of people’s lives until this gradually died out during the 19th century, to be replaced by photography. If you think of those early photographs of Victorian men and women standing stiff and straight before the camera it’s the same: everyone likes to feel special.

Tom Mallin, artist

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Tom Mallin, artistI bought a painting by Tom Mallin a little while ago and was lucky enough to be able to track down his son to ask about his father, as I hadn’t been able to find anything out in the standard sources. I wouldn’t usually go to such lengths, but he still had some of his father’s paintings left from his studio and I was curious to see them. So there was quite a long drive on a wintry day, but I arrived eventually at a very cold, empty factory that had become an artists’ collective. As he showed me his father’s remaining paintings, I was able to ask him about Tom’s life. Born in 1927 he became a picture restorer working mainly on 17th and 18th century paintings before starting to paint for himself in the 1950’s. Because he was used to working on paintings in particular styles, many of his own betray the influence of those he was restoring at the time, but the paintings that stood out for me were those of corners of his home and studio in Suffolk. It is as though his emotional response to his own surroundings freed him from the stylistic restraints of constantly working in the guise of other artists, allowing his own talent to take over. I particularly like this long painting titled ‘Studio Clutter’ (a detail of which is shown here), I always love anything to do with workshops and studios: it has something to do with the working space and the clutter of things that people use, whether tools or brushes… It is as though you can look at the tools and know the person.