Hermione Hammond, Painter & Portraitist
Bill Schenley
Hermione Frances Etheldreda Hammond, artist: born Hexham,
Northumberland 11 August 1910; died London 29 July 2005.
FROM: The Independent ~
By David Buckman
Hermione Hammond was a versatile artist who invaluably recorded Second
World War bomb-damaged London. After her own war service, she seized
the opportunity to capture aspects of the city never before visible
and soon to be hidden by rebuilding. Her pictures of the city and its
churches made an exhibition at All Hallows, London Wall, and continued
to be sought after for many years. As well as being a landscape artist
she painted portraits of many distinguished sitters.
Still active in her mid-nineties, Hammond was one of the few surviving
painters in Chelsea's old artistic quarter, based at 2 Hans Studio,
Glebe Place. The architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh had
worked there from from 1915 to 1923.
Hermione Hammond was born in Hexham, Northumberland, on 11 August
1910. Her father remarked that if she had been born a day later she
could have been christened Grouse. Captain Leslie Hammond was a
professional sailor who had taken part in an expedition to the South
Pole, on the voyage out meeting the writer R.L. Stevenson, on return
viewing his grave in Samoa. He met his future wife, a Canadian, Edith
White, on the West Indies station in Bermuda.
Naval rules dictated that when Hermione was born he had to take a
shore job - sea-going officers had to take half-pay if they did not
have a ship; it was peacetime, and he did not - and he was assigned to
the Admiralty, eventually managing the Navy's munitions factory in
Dorset. It blew up in 1936, he had a stroke and was thereafter an
invalid. Hermione said that her birth had blighted his career.
She suffered the family complaint, a delicate stomach, being
frequently sick as a child. It would prompt her Irish nanny to remark,
"Oh, shucks!" The children could not say "shucks", but "tooks", and
for the rest of her life Hermione was known to intimates as Tooker.
She had one brother and one sister. Rolt was a civil engineer who
became a freelance journalist and wrote 26 books, notably engineering
textbooks; Rosemary wrote music and assisted the composer Peter
Maxwell Davies when he taught at Cirencester Grammar School. Hermione
attended Francis Holland School in London, her mother insisting that
while she might not learn a lot there she would make excellent and
interesting friends. She did, among them the actress Joyce Grenfell.
Encouraged by her mother, herself no mean artist (she had exhibited in
Quebec), she studied art at Chelsea Polytechnic under Graham
Sutherland and Henry Moore, then at the Royal Academy Schools, under
Walter Russell and Tom Monnington. She learned mural decoration at the
Royal College of Art and attended night classes in etching. Hammond
remembered Moore leaning over her shoulder to examine work on her
easel and saying: "Just keep going on as you are."
She kept herself by winning prizes and doing odd jobs. The altarpiece
in the ecumenical chapel of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, was a
student work and the altarpiece in Marlborough House School,
Tenterden, was a commission carried out after the Second World War.
After winning the competition to decorate the ceiling of the new
Senate House of London University in 1937 she gained a Rome
Scholarship in 1938, but her studies there were cut short by the
outbreak of war. With an added sense of urgency, she absorbed all she
could of the Italian Renaissance in Rome, Florence, Arezzo and
Ravenna. She met the future Pope Pius XII and later attended his
coronation in St Peter's.
Hammond left Mussolini's Italy for England via Switzerland, having
strapped money to her body underneath her ski pants. "She always had a
sense of the dramatic," says her niece Jane Brown, who cites other
aspects of the Hammonds' eccentricity:
Her sister Rosemary after the war when rationing had stopped, but she
was still convinced there was unofficial rationing, bought a jar of
jam then returned disguised with a wig and glasses and other things
and bought another.
Because the prime minister Neville Chamberlain's daughter Dorothy was
Hammond's best friend, during the critical period before the war she
several times visited Chequers. "I am very worried, Hitler is a very
dangerous man," Hermione remembered him telling her one day during a
walk. She was behind a curtain at 10 Downing Street in September 1939
when Chamberlain made his famous broadcast that Britain was at war
with Germany.
A painter again after the war, in 1949 Hammond took the Glebe Place
studio that she would occupy for the rest of her life. When she
arrived, most of the 40 studios were occupied by artists. The painters
Pietro Annigoni, Edward le Bas, Alfred Egerton Cooper and Nina
Hamnett, the sculptors Derwent Wood and David McFall and writer Vita
Sackville-West had lived and worked there at various times. By the
early 1990s Hammond was only one of two or three painters left, high
rents having driven away the rest. This spurred her to work hard. On
one occasion, paintings of Eton and Windsor led to a show in Eton
which paid the year's rent. She was proud to have "lived by my brush,
without having to sink to teaching as yet", she told me when in her
late eighties.
She was a busy exhibitor, showing in mixed company at the Royal
Academy, New English Art Club, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, in
the provinces and abroad. Her ink drawing Park Bench was included in
Edward le Bas' superb exhibition "A Painter's Collection" at the Royal
Academy in 1963. It was typical of the little features that
distinguished her landscapes and interiors: a pavilion on a pier, a
summer house in an Oxford college garden, a staircase, a drawing room,
with often human figures to bring vigour and vitality to a scene.
Mullahs in Iran set off the mosques, peasants in Cyprus enliven the
olive groves, the posture of the figures suggesting a whole attitude
of mind and personality. A trip to the Taj Mahal, in India, was
financed by the sale of William III candlesticks owned by her parents.
One of Hammond's most enterprising commissions was to decorate, in
collage, the Director's rooms of the Institute of Historical Research
at London University. Of its then Director, Professor Francis Wormald,
she painted a touchingly sympathetic portrait for the Society of
Antiquaries. Other portrait commissions included Sir John Peel for the
Assembly of the Western European Union in Paris, Dr Kate Bertram for
Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a number of studies of the
cellist Jacqueline du Pré before her first concert.
Her works were acquired by institutions including Guildhall in the
City of London; Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; the Hunterian Museum,
Glasgow; the Fondation Custodia (Lugt Collection), in Paris; the
Museum of London; and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
Hammond's solo exhibition venues included Colnaghi's, the Bishopsgate
Institute, Arthur Jeffress Gallery, New Grafton Gallery, the
University of Madison, Wisconsin, Hartnoll & Eyre and Michael Parkin.
Latterly, she abandoned galleries for her successful studio June
"cash-and-carries", from which those invited could pay for and take a
picture or leave a red spot and collect later. "People look on these
as a social event," she would say. "I don't want to be a social
event."
Hermione Hammond remained a forceful personality to the end, strong on
etiquette and social behaviour. "She could say outrageous things,"
says Jane Brown, "but people, including the young, still adored her."
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