Simon Whistler; glass engraver & musician
Hyfler/Rosner
Maev Kennedy
Thursday May 12, 2005
Guardian
In the best pieces engraved by the musician and artist Simon
Whistler, who has died aged 64, the glass and the marks
scratched into it seem to dissolve, leaving only the images
suspended in light. He described the techniques he inherited
from his father, the engraver Sir Laurence Whistler, as
releasing the light trapped between the surfaces of a piece
of glass.
Laurence (obituary, January 6 2001) had virtually
re-invented the lost techniques of the great 17th-century
glass artists, particularly stippling, a staggeringly
labour-intensive technique of cutting myriad tiny marks into
the glass, which can give the subtlety of pencil drawing to
the brittle medium. Simon wondered if he had measured up to
the genius of his father - who was in turn haunted by the
brilliance of his own brother, the painter Rex Whistler, who
lived fast and died young, killed in action in 1944.
The style of the father and son was very similar, and they
occasionally worked together on commissions, to be seen in
churches, municipal buildings, college collections, museums
and private collections all over the country: lettering
crisp as frost, landscapes, buildings, the spirals of music
in which the musician son excelled, floating in glass. Simon
died with one last design in his mind's eye, a window for
the tiny church near his Wiltshire home, where he and his
violinist wife Maggie ran a music festival. It was never
executed.
In the last decade, he completed a string of major
commissions, including an imposing set of church windows for
All Saints at West Lavington, Wiltshire, to celebrate the
millennium - he was startled when viewers pointed out that
the strong bony right hand of the Christ was unmistakably
his own - and a beautiful Thomas Hardy memorial window at St
Juliot's in Boscastle, Cornwall.
Despite the torrent of work, the early symptoms of motor
neurone disease were apparent. Simon knew in his last years
that he was working against the clock: in his final months
his right hand was still rock steady, but had no longer the
strength even to hold a pencil. His last commission, two
years ago, was a goblet made as a retirement gift for the
head of his old school, Stowe.
T hen he wrote a strange and fascinating book, On A Glass
Lightly (2004), part memoir, part catalogue of a lifetime in
glass. He described it as a rite of passage, a one-sided
continuation of a lifelong conversation with his father. "It
seems strange that it has been done in his absence, so he
couldn't answer back," he told me in December 2004. "I had
him looking over my shoulder all my life as an engraver -
and for me, in writing, the book also had him as a shadow."
Although they were so close, frequently working side by
side, exhibiting together, and consulting one another on
work all their lives, his relationship with his father was
never easy. His mother, the beautiful actor Jill Furse,
granddaughter of the poet Sir Henry Newbolt, died after
giving birth to a daughter, when Simon was only four.
Although cherished by his grandparents, he felt his father
was unable to demonstrate the affection the small boy
craved. One of his most beautiful pieces was an engraving of
his grandparents' Devon home, an evocation of childhood
happiness.
Their working relationship was equally uneasy. He was 10
when he engraved a violin on a tooth mug. His father spotted
and fostered the talent but, Simon felt, also tested and
judged him harshly. As a student, home from Stowe or the
Royal Academy of Music in the late 1950s, he was often set
tasks which would have absorbed the entire holiday. In the
long hot summer of 1961, when Simon just wanted to play
croquet, he failed to finish executing Laurence's designs on
four decanters, resulting in the late delivery of a
commission: the father was enraged, the son anguished. He
still felt the guilt more than 40 years later, and included
illustrations of the two surviving decanters in his book.
His music took him around the world, playing the viola with
ensembles including the English Chamber Orchestra, the
Orchestra of St John's Smith Square and the Orchestra of the
Age of Englightenment. His great love was chamber music: he
performed with the Georgian quartet, Hausmusik, and appeared
as a guest with the Salomon quartet. His music career lasted
for 30 years, until he felt he had to choose - and chose
glass.
In 1971 he married Jennifer Helsham, an Australian musician.
They divorced in 1994. In 1997 he married Maggie Faultless,
of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who survives
him.
Simon died fearing that the art he and his father recreated
and perfected might die with them. There is no full-time
course in glass engraving in the country, a fact he
described, sadly, as "reprehensible".
·Simon Whistler, engraver and musician, born September 10
1940; died April 18 2005
April 26, 2005
Simon Whistler
September 10, 1940 - April 18, 2005
Glass-engraver and musician from a gifted family who
found an artistic realm of his own
THE GLASS-ENGRAVER and musician Simon Whistler was
born into an immensely gifted, artistic family. His father
was the poet and engraver Sir Laurence Whistler, his uncle
the artist Rex Whistler, who was killed in action in 1944.
Simon's sister Robin was to marry the photographer James
Ravilious, son of the war artist Eric Ravilious, who had
been killed the year before Rex. Whistler's mother was the
West End actress Jill Furse. Her grandfather was the poet
Sir Henry Newbolt, and they were distantly related to Sir
Joshua Reynolds.
Such antecedents and associations did not always make
life easy, and there were times when Whistler felt them as
shackles. However, he found an artistic realm of his own in
music, before returning full-time to glass-engraving, taking
up the mantle of his father, who had made something new of
what had previously been only a very marginal art-form.
Simon also found ways to combine music and engraving,
expressing sounds silently in swirling staves on glass, such
as the Lark Ascending (1965). There, on a Swedish lager
glass, Vaughan Williams's music and Meredith's words spiral
up to infinity.
Simon began exhibiting in 1962, when he showed seven
pieces at the Festival Hall. Two of Laurence Whistler's
other children, Daniel and Frances, were also to experiment
with glass-engraving, but only Simon was to engrave
professionally. As well as various solo exhibitions, he
showed work with his father at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge,
Agnew's, the Corning Museum in New York and elsewhere, and
with the Guild of Glass Engravers in Cork Street, at the
Ashmolean Museum and at Castle Howard.
Most of his work on glass was done to individual
commission, producing unique works, often for specific
settings. In 1996, however, he made a design for the
National Trust using its acorn logo on a glass bowl, to be
reproduced in an edition of 500.
At the start of Laurence Whistler's engraving career,
his staple subject was 18th-century architecture. Gradually,
though, the subject came to matter less than the light, in
all of its varieties, and symbolic possibilities. Simon
Whistler was to explore these, too, but most fruitfully of
all he concentrated upon landscape.
Although he engraved symbolic scenes such as And There
Was Light - the burst of light representing the explosion of
sound in Haydn's Creation - he also transferred to glass the
contentment of pastoral scenes and domesticity. One of his
favourite artists was the Romantic painter John Sell Cotman,
who made a series of drawings and watercolours of Wales
after a tour in 1800. Turner, too, had been inspired by the
Welsh landscape, making five sketching trips in all, and
during 1988 Whistler followed Turner's itinerary of 190
years before. The result was a series of seven engraved
goblets.
Simon Whistler was born in Barnstaple and named after
the boy in the preface to Come Hither by his father's
friend, Walter de la Mare. He remembered his earliest years
in a thatched cottage without running water, electricity or
telephone as the idyll of "a truly happy child".
When he was 4, his mother died, and before long he was
an apprentice in his father's world. At 8 he was allowed to
turn on the motor of the tool-sharpener, and when he was 10
he engraved a violin on a tooth mug. Sybil Eaton, a relative
who had given the world premiere of Finzi's violin concerto,
gave him a violin of his own and began to teach him. From
Magdalen College School in Oxford, where he was a chorister,
he followed his father to Stowe, which he always considered
one of his greatest blessings and he was later to engrave
scenes of the landscape garden and its temples several
times.
When he came home for holidays, there was sometimes an
engraving task awaiting, sketched out on to a goblet by his
father in black wax pencil. By his late teens his pieces
were no longer just for family and friends - one was
presented, for instance, to Edward Gordon Craig - and by the
time he was 21 he was reproducing scenes meticulously on
four decanters, for presentation by a member of the Cabinet
to the Inner Temple.
Winning a place at the Royal Academy of Music led to a
30-year career as a viola player, beginning with four years
in the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under Szymon Goldberg.
He studied in Italy with Bruno Giurana, and joined the
English Chamber Orchestra, and then became principal viola
in the Orchestra of St John's, Smith Square. He later played
with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. His varied
career ranged from seasons at Glyndebourne to playing for
Phil Collins, and the 1988 recording of Philip Pickett's
Alchemist. But it was chamber music that was his greatest
love, and he particularly enjoyed his collaboration with
Hausmusik, with whom he recorded the Mozart Quintets.
He also continued engraving. In 1988, for instance, he
produced two Armada scenes to mark the reopening of the
gallery at Buckland Abbey, the home of Sir Francis Drake.
And in 1994 he chose to devote himself full-time to
engraving. With collectors overseas and commissions for
churches and memorial windows, as well as invitations to
lecture and some teaching at West Dean College, he was
always busy.
The imagery he used came directly from his father -
trees and roots, doves, harvest sheaves, the chi-rho and
strong silhouettes. Experiment had proved this a visual
vocabulary ideally suited to the medium. "Branching out is
more alarming and frankly I felt no urge to do it," he
wrote. Instead, he took pride in continuing the same work.
There were collaborations too, with Simon engraving
staves of music by four composers, for instance, on the
joint panel for the Jacqueline du Pré music building at St
Hilda's College, Oxford. Until his father's death in 2000,
Simon continued to consult him about designs.
The millennium brought commissions for commemorative
windows, and in 2002 he engraved a dish for presentation to
the Queen for her Golden Jubilee. The following year, when
his Thomas Hardy window was installed in the Church at St
Juliot, Cornwall, showing the local scenery and Hardy's
first wife on horseback as he first glimpsed her there,
Claire Tomalin wrote in The Sunday Times that the window
alone would make a visit worthwhile.
In 2004, On a Glass Lightly, summed up the
achievements of 50 years. On the cover was Templa Quam
Dilecta (1990), a bowl engraved with 43 temples and
monuments from the gardens at Stowe, as if from a platonic
central perspective point. The book was designed by Michael
Mitchell, who used a slight grey tone on all the pages to
make the crystal whites glitter and used red for the
binding, to distinguish Simon's book from the five starkly
monochrome collections of Laurence's work.
Simon Whistler was twice married. In 1971 he married
Jennifer Helsham, an Australian musician. They divorced in
1994. His second wife, Margaret Faultless, whom he married
in 1997, was co-leader of the Orchestra of the Age of
Enlightenment.
The last five years of Whistler's life were gradually
overshadowed by motor neurone disease. Although he completed
two major church windows (at West Lavington, Wiltshire, as
well as St Juliot, Cornwall), engraving eventually became
impossible. He bore his growing disablement with courage. As
he said, the darkness enabled him to find a new inner light,
with the help of music ("a daily requirement") and the love
of his wife.
Simon Whistler, glass-engraver, was born on September
10, 1940. He died on April 18, 2005, aged 64.
