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The reason why I am writing about the man I call the Michelangelo of the Saloon Bar is that I have just acquired a magnificent volume of his drawings entitled To War with Paper and Brush: Captain Edward Ardizzone, Official War Artist. It is compiled, with great devotion and delight, by Malcolm Yorke, a leading expert on British mid-20th-century artists (who earlier produced a sumptuous illustrated study, Edward Bawden and his Circle). It is published by Simon Lawrence, who founded, owns and operates, virtually single-handed, what must be the highest-quality private publishing firm in the country, the Fleece Press of Huddersfield.
Ardizzone was spotted by Kenneth Clark, who advised the government on official war artists, as a natural for the job. So it proved, and he turned out to be astonishingly productive (and brave) too. He did many hundreds of on-the-spot sketches, often within sound of the guns and in peril of his life, but he also recorded camp and barrack life and the roistering which went on between the fighting. His drawings form a true record of a great part of the war. He was on duty almost from the beginning, in training, in France before and during the collapse of 1940, in London during the Blitz, in North Africa for the final defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, in the Sicily invasion, the campaign in Italy, the Operation Overlord invasion of France and the conquest and occupation of Germany.
He drew it all, producing many watercolour drawings of strange charm and beauty, but also conveying much detail not to be found in photos or the work of other war artists. He drew, for instance, the interior of Warwick Avenue Tube, on the edge of his own country, when it was in use as a shelter, and his drawings convey much more information than Henry Moore’s. They show the fear, the confusion, the horrible discomfort and the friendly humanity of the ordeal. He was not squeamish. His battlefield sketches show unburied corpses, shattered limbs and men in agony. He also drew Allied troops looting Italian shops, and there is a memorable work, after the Rhine was crossed, of a German farmer’s wife dragging away her prize pig by its ears to prevent it from being ‘liberated’ and eaten. Plenty of roistering too: brass hats at the Gezira Club and Groppi’s in Cairo, an ample Italian donna leaning against a sign ‘Out of Bounds to All Ranks’, a lovely sketch entitled ‘A Musical Evening at the Ristorante Roma, Tripoli’, with a local lady singing and looking just like a Maida Vale barmaid, and soldiers gawping at the Sistine Chapel altarpiece. Ardizzone also kept an illustrated diary, and pages of this are reproduced too. The entry for 18 March 1945 reads: ‘She showed us her legs with great aplomb,’ and there is a sketch of the lady doing just that.
The Rowlandson tradition is never far away. Indeed, I am reminded that he, in addition to drawing military reviews, did a magnificent pair of drawings comparing and contrasting British and French officers’ behaviour in their barracks. But Rowlandson, or ‘Bottoms up!’ as I call him, never followed Wellington’s men into action. Ardizzone did, and closely, and his output is both spectacular and exciting, but also a poignant and intimate record of what war was really like in that tragic decade, the 1940s. The originals are mostly in the Imperial War Museum, tucked away, and to see them, in full and in colour, accurately reproduced in a handsomely bound and cased volume, is a remarkable privilege.
The man who made it possible, Simon Lawrence, comes from a family distinguished for wood-engraving, and this subtle art remains one of his chief interests. Indeed his first publishing venture, in 1980 when he was still a student, was to put out a hand-printed letterpress book, full of wood-engravings, in honour of his grandfather. Since 1986 he has made his living running a private press. He does pretty well everything himself, planning, dealing with the author, editing the text and annotations, typesetting and designing, selling and packing of parcels, the last being a task, I can testify, he carries out with impressive skill. His one-man workshop is a converted barn, on the rural outskirts of Barnsley. It houses several printing presses from the 1930s and an Albion Handpress from 1853. Distribution is from there, but he does the editorial work from home. The address of the Fleece Press is 95 Denby Lane, Upper Denby, Huddersfield HD8 8TZ; the website is fleecepress.com.
Lawrence’s most ambitious recent venture has been to publish the complete works of that watercolour genius, Eric Ravilious. His output as a war artist, Ravilious at War (he was killed in 1942), appeared in 2002 and is now a collector’s item, changing hands at £400 or more. It is a treasure. The pre-war work Lawrence published last year in two volumes. It is one of the most remarkable books ever produced on an English artist, and will undoubtedly become a collector’s item too. Its price is £355, which seems a lot. But then it has to be remembered that full-size watercolours by Ravilious now fetch tens of thousands of pounds, and in any case hardly ever come on the market. Lawrence is a public benefactor in making the work of such artists as Ravilious and Ardizzone more generally available, and I salute his achievement.
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