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Tag Archives: New English Art Club


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Birth of E. M. O’R. Dickey, Wood Engraver & Painter

E. M. O’R. Dickey, wood engraver and oil painter who is active at the beginning of the twentieth century, is born Edward Montgomery O’Rorke Dickey in Belfast on July 1, 1894. He is a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers.

Dickey is the son of Edward O’Rorke Dickey. He later marries Eunice Emmeline Howard and they have one son, Daniel. He is educated at Wellington College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studies painting under Harold Gilman at the Westminster School of Art.

Dickey is art master at Oundle School in Oundle, Northamptonshire, England, and then becomes professor of fine art and director of King Edward VII School of Art, Armstrong College, Durham University from 1926 to 1931. He is then staff inspector of art from 1931 to 1957 for the Ministry of Education.

At the beginning of World War II Dickey is seconded from the Ministry of Information and, from 1939 to 1942, is secretary of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. He is a full member of the committee from 1942 to 1945. During this period he establishes a close relationship with Eric Ravilious. He is appointed a CBE in 1952.

Dickey becomes the first curator of The Minories in Colchester, Essex, a post he holds for five years from 1957 to 1962.

Dickey is a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920, and exhibits with them from 1920 to 1924. He is at his most active in the early 1920s and virtually all his engravings date from this period.

In 1922 Dickey contributes a wood engraving to Contemporary English Woodcuts, an anthology of wood engravings produced by Thomas Balston, a director at Gerald Duckworth and Company and an enthusiast for the new style of wood engravings. Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, writes about him in his introduction to the book Mr. Hagreen and Mr. Dickey are among the engravers who rely very much upon the effective use of white lines and spaces. This is a limited edition of 550 copies, as is the only book that he illustrates with wood engravings, Workers by the Irish writer Richard Rowley, published by Balston at Duckworth in 1923.

Dickey devotes more time to working in oils. He is one of the most experimental painters in Ireland technically and stylistically. He paints extensively on the continent, and shows at the Royal Academy of Arts and the New English Art Club. He is elected to the London Group in 1920. He has several one-man exhibitions, at the Leicester Galleries in 1923, at the Manchester City Art Gallery in 1924, and the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1935.

Dickey dies on August 12, 1977. There are a number of examples of his oil paintings in public collections.

Dickey’s lasting legacy, rather than his wood engravings and oils, is his distinguished contribution to arts administration and art education.

(Pictured: “Kentish Town Railway Station” by Edward Montgomery O’Rorke Dickey, oil on canvas, 1919, Hollytrees Museum, United Kingdom)


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Birth of William Orpen, Irish-born Artist

Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE, RA, RHA, Irish artist who mainly works in London and is best known for his vigorously characterized portraits, is born on November 27, 1878, at Oriel, Grove Avenue, Stillorgan, County Dublin. He also works as an official war artist during World War I.

Orpen is the fourth and youngest son of Arthur Herbert Orpen (1830–1926), a solicitor, and his wife, Anne Caulfield (1834–1912), the eldest daughter of the Right Rev. Charles Caulfield (1804–1862), the Bishop of Nassau. Both his parents are amateur painters, and his eldest brother, Richard Caulfield Orpen, becomes a notable architect. His nieces are Bea Orpen and Kathleen Delap. The historian Goddard Henry Orpen is his second cousin. The family lives at “Oriel,” a large house with extensive grounds containing stables and a tennis court. He appears to have a happy childhood there.

Orpen is a naturally talented painter, and six weeks before his thirteenth birthday is enrolled at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. During his six years at the college, he wins every major prize there, plus the British Isles gold medal for life drawing, before leaving to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1897 and 1899. At the Slade he masters oil painting and begins to experiment with different painting techniques and effects.

While at the Slade, Orpen becomes engaged to Emily Scobel, a model and the subject of his painting The Mirror (1900). She ends their relationship in 1901, and he marries Grace Knewstub, the sister-in-law of Sir William Rothenstein. He and Knewstub have three daughters together, but the marriage is not a happy one. By 1908, he has begun a long-running affair with Evelyn Saint-George, a well-connected American millionairess based in London, with whom he also has a child.

Orpen first exhibits at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1899, becoming a member in 1900. In 1901, he holds a solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in central London. His portraits, which establish his reputation, show the influence of the Realist artist Édouard Manet. He also becomes known as a painter of group portraits such as Homage to Manet (1909), in which he portrays members of the contemporary English art world sitting in conversation beneath a famous portrait by that artist.

At the start of World War I, a number of Irish people living in England return to Ireland to avoid conscription. Among them is Orpen’s studio assistant and former pupil, Seán Keating. Keating encourages him to do likewise, but he refuses and commits himself to supporting the British war effort. In December 1915, he is commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps and reports for clerical duty at London’s Kensington Barracks in March 1916. Throughout 1916 he continues painting portraits, most notably one of a despondent Winston Churchill, but soon starts using both his own contacts and those of Evelyn Saint-George, to secure a war artist posting.

He is the official painter of the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. Throughout 1919 he paints individual portraits of the delegates to the Conference and these form the basis of his two large paintings, A Peace Conference at the Quai d’Orsay and The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors. In both pictures, the architecture overwhelms the gathered politicians and statesmen who’s political wranglings and vainglory diminish them in Orpen’s eyes.

Orpen is appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1918 and is elected an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919.

Orpen becomes seriously ill in May 1931, and, after suffering periods of memory loss, dies at the age of 52 on September 29, 1931, in South Kensington, London, of liver and heart failure. He is buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in southwest London. A stone tablet in the Island of Ireland Peace Park Memorial at Mesen, Belgium, commemorates him. He is posthumously regarded as a facile and prolific, but somewhat superficial, artist who nevertheless achieves great popularity in his day.

(Pictured: “Self-portrait” (1913), oil on canvas by William Orpen, Saint Louis Art Museum)


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Death of Norman Garstin, Painter, Teacher, Art Critic & Journalist

Norman Garstin, Irish painter, teacher, art critic and journalist associated with the Newlyn School of painters, dies on June 22, 1926, at Penzance, Cornwall, England.

Garstin is born on August 28, 1847, in Caherconlish, County Limerick, to Captain William Garstin and Mary Moore Garstin. He is raised by aunts and grandparents following his father’s suicide and his mother’s incapacitating disabilities.

Garstin attends Victoria College on the island of Jersey and then he works in architecture and engineering for brief periods. He then travels to South Africa where he befriends Cecil Rhodes, works as a journalist and is involved in government in Cape Town.

Pursuing an interest in art, Garstin trains in 1880 in Antwerp at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. From 1882 to 1884 he studies in Paris at an academy founded by Carolus-Duran. He then travels and paints his way through Spain, Morocco and Venice, Italy.

In 1886, Garstin marries Louisa Jones, also known as Dochie. Many of Garstin’s friends from school in Antwerp had settled in Newlyn. He and Dochie move to Mount Vernon in Newlyn by 1886. They have three children: Crosbie, Denis and Alethea. The boys take up journalism and Alethea becomes an artist. The family moves to Penzance by 1895.

In 1888 Garstin becomes a member of the New English Art Club (NEAC). He becomes a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists (NSA) and is on the Newlyn Art Gallery‘s Provisional Committee for its opening in 1895. Regarding the plein-air approach used by St. Ives and Newlyn artists he says they are “filled with this idea of a fresh unarranged nature to be studied in her fields, and by her streams, and on the margin of her great seas – in these things they were to find the motives of their art.”

Garstin is a teacher and takes groups to “his favorite painting haunts on the Continent.” For instance, Frances Hodgkins, a New Zealand artist, attends Garstin’s 1901 and 1902 summer sketching classes in France. He teaches Harold Harvey, the only Cornish Newlyn School painter, and his daughter, Alethea.

Garstin’s work consists primarily of small oil panels in the plein air style, something he had picked up from the French Impressionists, like Édouard Manet. He is also fascinated by Japanese prints and admires the work of the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Some of his works are at Tate and Penlee House.

One of Garstin’s best and most famous works is his 1889 painting The Rain, It Raineth Every Day of the Penzance promenade. The title of the work comes from William Shakespeare‘s King Lear and Twelfth Night. “The composition of this painting demonstrates Garstin’s admiration for Japanese art,” says Penlee House.

Garstin dies in Penzance on June 22, 1926.

(Pictured: “The Rain It Raineth Every Day” oil on canvas by Norman Garstin, 1889, Penlee House)


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Death of E. M. O’R. Dickey, Wood Engraver & Painter

E. M. O’R. Dickey, wood engraver and oil painter who is active at the beginning of the twentieth century, dies on August 12, 1977. He is a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers.

Edward Montgomery O’Rorke Dickey is born in Belfast on July 1, 1894, the son of Edward O’Rorke Dickey. He later marries Eunice Emmeline Howard and they have one son, Daniel. He is educated at Wellington College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studies painting under Harold Gilman at the Westminster School of Art.

Dickey is art master at Oundle School in Oundle, Northamptonshire, England, and then becomes professor of fine art and director of King Edward VII School of Art, Armstrong College, Durham University from 1926 to 1931. He is then staff inspector of art from 1931 to 1957 for the Ministry of Education.

At the beginning of World War II Dickey is seconded from the Ministry of Information and, from 1939 to 1942, is secretary of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. He is a full member of the committee from 1942 to 1945. During this period he establishes a close relationship with Eric Ravilious. He is appointed a CBE in 1952.

Dickey becomes the first curator of The Minories in Colchester, Essex, a post he holds for five years from 1957 to 1962.

Dickey is a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920, and exhibits with them from 1920 to 1924. He is at his most active in the early 1920s and virtually all his engravings date from this period.

In 1922 Dickey contributes a wood engraving to Contemporary English Woodcuts, an anthology of wood engravings produced by Thomas Balston, a director at Gerald Duckworth and Company and an enthusiast for the new style of wood engravings. Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, writes about him in his introduction to the book Mr. Hagreen and Mr. Dickey are among the engravers who rely very much upon the effective use of white lines and spaces. This is a limited edition of 550 copies, as is the only book that he illustrates with wood engravings, Workers by the Irish writer Richard Rowley, published by Balston at Duckworth in 1923.

Dickey devotes more time to working in oils. He is one of the most experimental painters in Ireland technically and stylistically. He paints extensively on the continent, and shows at the Royal Academy of Arts and the New English Art Club. He is elected to the London Group in 1920. He has several one-man exhibitions, at the Leicester Galleries in 1923, at the Manchester City Art Gallery in 1924, and the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1935.

There are a number of examples of Dickey’s oil paintings in public collections.

Dickey’s lasting legacy, rather than his wood engravings and oils, is his distinguished contribution to arts administration and art education.

(Pictured: “Kentish Town Railway Station” by Edward Montgomery O’Rorke Dickey, oil on canvas, 1919, Hollytrees Museum, United Kingdom)


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Birth of Artist Thomas James Carr

Thomas James Carr, British artist who is associated with the Euston Road School in the 1930s and has a long career as a painter of domestic scenes and landscapes, is born in Belfast to a well-to-do family on September 21, 1909.

Carr attends Oundle School where his art masters include E.M.O’R. Dickey and Christopher Perkins. In 1927 Carr moves to London where he studies at the Slade School of Fine Art. After two years at the Slade, he moves to Italy and spends six months in Florence. Upon returning to London, he establishes himself as a well-regarded painter of domestic scenes.

Although essentially a realist painter, Carr is included in the 1934 Objective Abstractionists exhibition at Zwemmer’s Gallery. In 1937, he shares an exhibition with Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers at the Storran Gallery and subsequently becomes associated with the representational style of the Euston Road School. Starting in 1940, at Georges Wildenstein‘s gallery, he holds a series of one-man exhibitions at various galleries including at the Leicester Galleries, The Redfern Gallery and also at Thomas Agnew & Sons.

In 1939, Carr returns to Northern Ireland and settles in Newcastle, County Down. During the World War II, he receives a small number of commissions from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to depict parachute manufacture and the Short Sunderland flying boats being built at the Short Brothers factory in Belfast.

After the war, Carr teaches at the Belfast College of Art and moves to Belfast in 1955. After the death of his wife in 1995, he moves to Norfolk, England to be nearer one of his three daughters and her family. He continues to paint into old age and tends to concentrate on landscape painting.

Carr is a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Arts and is a member of the Royal Ulster Academy, the New English Art Club, the Royal Watercolour Society and is an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. Queen’s University awards him an honorary doctorate in 1991. For his services to art in Northern Ireland, he is awarded the MBE in 1974 and receives an OBE in 1993.

Thomas Carr dies at the age of 89 in Norwich, England on February 17, 1999.

(Pictured: “Making Coloured Parachutes” by Thomas James Carr (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/4674) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)