In the post, something fantastic arrives: the scrapbooks of the artist and designer Edward Bawden, gathered together between hard covers for the first time thanks to a collaboration between the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden, the publisher Lund Humphries, and Peyton Skipwith and Brian Webb, whose job it was to edit them. It’s a publication that feels at once both long overdue – Bawden died in 1989 – and timely: thanks, perhaps, to the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s recent retrospective of the work of Bawden’s friend, Eric Ravilious, interest in the group of artists who lived in Great Bardfield, Essex, has probably never been higher.
Bawden assembled his scrapbooks over a period of 55 years (though most of the pages in Skipwith and Webb’s collection seem to date from the 1930s to the 1950s), filling them with all kinds of ephemera: among the things he stuck in beside his own sketches and works-in-progress are newspaper cuttings, cigarette cards, bus tickets and, most fascinating of all, letters and Christmas cards from his various artistic friends, among them Peggy Angus, Edward Ardizzone, John Betjeman, Muirhead Bone, Evelyn Dunbar, Enid Marx, John Piper and AJA Symons.
Two notes in particular brought a lump to my throat. The first was a letter dated 1944 from Hassan Mirzah, Bawden’s “batman” when he served in Baghdad as a war artist, in which he begs him (Bawden) not to forget his Iraqi friends. The second was the telegram sent by Bawden’s wife, Charlotte, on 28 March 1951, informing him of the death of Tirzah Ravilious; Bawden pasted it carefully above Tirzah’s Christmas card from 1950, a wood engraving of some snowy farm buildings. (Tirzah Garwood, another artist, married Ravilious, who died in a plane crash during the war, in 1930.)
These scrapbooks take you into every corner of Bawden’s long life. Here are the porridge bowls he ordered from the great potter Michael Cardew; the hand-coloured proofs of his 1949 book Life in an English Village; the cover designs he drew for Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Razor’s Edge; the anthropomorphic snails he liked to sketch for his children. What an eye he had – for absolutely everything. Wondrous almanacs of one man’s sensibility, their every page bulges with interest and beauty.
