Nigel Temple; artist, collector, writer
Hyfler/Rosner
Artist, collector and writer
14 November 2003
Nigel Hal Longdale Temple, artist, lecturer and writer: born
Lowestoft, Suffolk 21 January 1926; married 1955 Judith Tattersill (one son,
one daughter); died Cheltenham, Gloucestershire 4 November 2003.
<independent>
Nigel Temple was an artist, lecturer and writer whose passion for
architecture, gardening, bookbinding, typography and collecting nourished
his diverse and imaginative output. He was a communicator who even after his
retirement from teaching continued conveying his enthusiasms to others
verbally and visually.
Temple showed widely as an artist. As a writer, he made a valuable
contribution to the study of British architecture, especially the work of
John Nash. His collections of Victorian children's books and architectural
postcards were of national importance.
For many artists, vocation is obvious from childhood. Nigel Temple was
unusual in making such a late start. He was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in
1926, the son of Sydney and Honor Temple. At the age of 16 Sydney had been
blinded during a rugby match at Dulwich College, and he decided to devote
much of his life to charity work for the Royal National Institute for the
Blind. He and his wife, whom he had met while he was at blind college, had
two sons, Nigel being the younger, and one daughter.
At school Nigel was undistinguished. As a boy he developed an interest in
aeroplanes and flying. From 1944 to 1948, he did meteorological service in
the Royal Air Force and he remained in the Volunteer Reserve until 1959,
though he was never able to fly solo. A later series of artworks, Portrait
of the Artist as an Aeronaut, mocked this ambition.
Demobilised and back in Farnham, Surrey, where he had grown up, Temple made
several attempts to start a career, attending technical college, but nothing
gelled. In desperation the family consulted a neighbour who lectured at
Farnham School of Art, and he suggested that Nigel enrol there. He was a
full-time student for five years, and from then on his mind was made up.
For his National Design Diploma he specialised in illustration and graphic
design, which spurred a lifelong investigation of 19th-century book
production. He developed a deep understanding of the materials and processes
involved, and books provided an endless source of material for the collages
he began to create in the 1970s. For him,
fragments from wrecked books are the most stimulating material . . . They
have led lives and been discarded as spent, yet they can still speak back
and invite rebirth.
His studies led him towards William Blake, Samuel Palmer and the
20th-century artists they influenced, such as Paul Nash and Graham
Sutherland. Temple's early paintings are strongly influenced by these older
Neo-Romantic contemporaries.
After gaining his Design Diploma, Temple studied for his Art Teacher's
Diploma at Sheffield College of Art, in 1952-53. His dissertation
investigated the buildings of his home town, on which he was to write with
authority. Two books were Farnham Inheritance (1956, reissued 1965), and
Farnham Buildings & People (1963, with a foreword by Nikolaus Pevsner;
second edition 1973). Temple later recalled that walking around Farnham
made me aware of the qualities to be found in vernacular buildings and the
organic nature of the traditional townscape. I was also alerted to the
dangers to which these delicate assemblages were exposed in the post-war
years.
Many of Temple's early collages were inspired by architecture as well as a
shift from the overall building to facets such as crumbling woodwork,
decaying stonework and lichens. From his enthusiasm for buildings developed
his interest in gardening.
After studies at Sheffield, Temple taught until 1978 at colleges of art and
education. It was a job he enjoyed. He became the first male lecturer at
Gloucestershire College of Education, set up to train teachers, based in
Cheltenham. At first visual studies was a solo effort, a department that
would greatly expand with him at its head.
Looking at Things, a filmstrip published in 1968, proved popular in schools
and colleges. While preparing images to accompany his text, Temple
discovered photography as a tool for recording artefacts and for
encapsulating poignant visual situations. It, too, fed into his collages.
The overlapping of such materials as Japanese rice papers, tissue papers and
related materials was inspired by palimpsests, forms of messages half
obscured by time and decay.
Temple had married Judith Tattersill in 1955. He developed an interest in
Victorian children's books and in 1970 an anthology gleaned from them
appeared on which she collaborated. Seen and Not Heard proved a popular
title. Christie's in South Kensington is to sell the Dr Nigel Temple
Collection of Children's Books on 4 December.
His formal studies did not end with Sheffield. In 1978, he gained his MLitt
degree in architecture from Bristol University, followed by a PhD from Keele
University in 1985. He had been artist-in-residence on secondment at Bristol
University in 1978-79. That was the venue for his second solo show, in 1979,
having had a first at Cheltenham Art Gallery six years before.
There was to be another one-man exhibition, "Transitions", at Cheltenham in
1998 that concentrated on collage and assemblage. It followed others at the
Royal West of England Academy, 1981, of which he became a full academician
in 1983; New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, 1990; and Reading University, 1991.
Temple was also an active exhibitor in mixed shows at Cheltenham's Festivals
of Literature and Music, widely elsewhere in the provinces and on the
Continent.
Temple's book John Nash and the Village Picturesque appeared in 1979. With
Sir John Summerson, he became a leading authority on the great Picturesque
Movement architect. Temple had already written Blaise Hamlet (1975), a guide
for the National Trust based on his Bristol thesis, on the model village
housing John Nash cottages near Bristol, and in 1993 he was to produce
George Repton's Pavilion Notebook, a catalogue raisonné, based on his Keele
thesis, on the son of Humphry Repton, Nash's landscape-gardener partner.
Temple also contributed to numerous learned journals on architecture,
archaeology and garden history.
To enlarge his knowledge, Temple amassed a large collection of postcards of
buildings and gardens. This unique archive has been left to the National
Monuments Record.
Temple was registrar of research for the Garden History Society from 1983.
"He was a perfectionist in the garden," says his son Richard:
He had many letters requesting help in architectural or garden-history
matters, often from complete strangers, and would answer them as fully and
carefully as possible, regardless of the cost of time and effort to himself.
His talent as an artist and love of gardening were passed on to his
children, Richard and Sidney Anne. Richard is a graphic designer for
television, his sister an environmentalist.
A good overview of Nigel Temple's achievement as an artist was provided by
his last one-man show, a 50-year retrospective at the Thelma Hulbert
Gallery, Honiton, in 2000. Among the paintings and collages was a selection
of his boxes, reminiscent of the Surrealist assemblages of the 1920s and
1930s, an art form that has gained popularity in recent years.
For Temple, they were attempts to capture memories or to translate
particular moments. Steve Reich: Different Trains - Track 2 (1996) was
inspired by the musical composition of the same title by the American
minimalist composer. Around and within a miniature cupboard were assembled
old dolls, burned-out candles, withered flowers and other telling objects.
The Sofa that Died in Her Sleep (1997) exemplified Temple's
characteristically persistent pursuit of perfection. It took months to
acquire the tattered fabric used, first seen covering a chaise-longue in a
Cheltenham antiques shop. He eventually secured agreement that he could have
the material once the sofa was bought, yet on one of his frequent visits he
found that it had disappeared. Undeterred, he traced the buyer who, after
persuasion, agreed to give him what he needed.
David Buckman