Phyllis Ginger; illustrator of "Recording Britain" (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
The Independent ~
May 10, 2005, Tuesday
http://www.merivaleeditions.com/images/schoolprints/07towncentre.jpg
http://www.jhwfineart.com/pages/single/613-6.html
Phyllis Ginger belonged to a generation of women artists
whose work is relatively unknown even though their
contribution to English painting was substantial and their
work survives in many museum and gallery collections. The
V&A Prints and Drawings department holds 19 watercolours
belonging to the 'Recording Britain' scheme, her most
important commission, completed for the Pilgrim Trust
between 1940 and 1942. The British Museum and the Museum of
London both own work mounted in solander boxes to protect
them from light and there has yet to be a catalogue
published to do justice to this most modest of artists.
Ginger was born in New Malden, south-west London, in 1907,
and attended the Tiffin Girls' School, Kingston upon Thames;
during her later years there she went to evening classes at
the nearby Kingston School of Art. Her father, Arthur
Ginger, worked for the Post Office but was an amateur artist
himself, regularly contributing to the Post Office art
society exhibitions, and her parents persuaded her of the
merits of restricting her interest in art to her spare time
alone: she soon got herself a 'proper' job, along with her
younger sister, as a junior civil servant. In later years
she could still recite every postal district in the land.
With only limited encouragement from her family she enrolled
for three years in 1932 at Richmond School of Art, under
Stanley Badmin, attending evening classes at the Central
School of Arts and crafts, under W.P. Robins, before winning
a scholarship aged 30 to become a full-time student there
under John Farleigh and Clarke Hutton. Her first ambition
was to become an illustrator but her interest in etching and
portraiture was encouraged by Robins. In 1938 she exhibited
for the first time at the Royal Academy, an etching entitled
Portrait of My Father Reading.
In 1939 she was elected a member of the Senefelder Club, a
group of artist- lithographers, and joined the important
Allied International Artists group, where she exhibited
twice. At the Central she met her husband through seeking a
recommendation for a metalwork student to help her mend a
silver clasp on her handbag. Leslie Durbin, the silversmith,
who repaired it before travelling to Europe on a Goldsmiths'
Company scholarship, was himself to become a renowned
craftsman and teacher. They married in October 1940, in the
Church of St Marylebone, a watercolour of which became her
Diploma work for election to the Royal Watercolour Society
later in 1952.
Just before the outbreak of severe hostilities in London she
was commissioned to paint a bridge under construction over
the Thames to be presented to the retiring American
ambassador who wanted to take home a souvenir of London. It
was an extremely cold winter and the workmen involved in the
project let Ginger share their shelter and made her tea.
Around this time the Library of Congress in Washington
purchased a lithograph, Show Day at St Bartholomew's
Hospital, another example of which is in the British Museum.
Phyllis Ginger's skill as a topographical artist led to her
involvement in the Pilgrim's Trust scheme Recording Britain,
started in 1939, inviting artists to visit particular places
and make their own choice of subjects to record that might
be destroyed by enemy action. The secretary/editor there,
Arnold Palmer, commissioned eminent artists such as John
Piper, Eric Ravilious, Kenneth Rowntree, Michael Rothenstein
and Barbara Jones. Ginger's work appears in three out of the
four volumes of Recording Britain published by Oxford
University Press, with some American finance, in 1946.
There was much fear of the damage that could be wreaked by
the 'Baedeker' raids, so called because the German bombers
targeted some of Britain's most beautiful cities. However
not many of the resulting pictures make overt references to
the effects of war, but, as is pointed out in Recording
Britain: a pictorial Domesday of pre-war Britain, published
by the V&A to coincide with its 1990 exhibition, Ginger's
views of Catherine Place, Bath, and the Council House,
Bristol, both show scenes of bomb damage, 'meticulous,
delicate and overlaid with pale transparent washes, very
much in the tradition of the English school of topographical
watercolour'.
In her pictures of Cheltenham she includes portraits of the
American servicemen and she completed three works near
Regent's Park, one of which shows roads closed and a distant
barrage balloon. Probably inspired by Durbin's association
with the Goldsmiths' Company, she produced Goldsmiths' Hall
after Bombing, acquired via the War Artists' Advisory
Committee by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The Recording
Britain works were dispersed for display in relevant
regional council departments, but fortunately the V&A has
now retrieved most of them (though some have suffered
considerably from over-exposure to light).
During most of the Second World War the Durbins lived in St
John's Wood, London, in a studio which had once belonged to
the cartoonist and illustrator Harry Furniss in Titchfield
Road, and from there she could operate as an unofficial war
artist, with a permit to sketch in London. One of the
surviving artists from the Recording Britain scheme, Malvina
Cheek, reminisced with Phyllis Ginger in 2004 about their
both being approached by policemen while sketching London
buildings, especially near the Houses of Parliament. When
bombing became more relentless she accepted an invitation
from friends to Keynsham, between Bath and Bristol, and
remained there, before moving with her young son Paul (born
in May 1944), to Marlow to be near where Leslie Durbin was
stationed with the RAF. (In 1943 he had been seconded to
assist R.M.Y. Gleadowe with the production of the
'Stalingrad Sword', presented by King George V in
celebration of the Russian victory to the city of
Stalingrad.)
Ginger was invited in 1941 to illustrate her first book, Mrs
Robert Henrey's A Farm in Normandy, instigating a
collaboration lasting more than 30 years " and including two
books on London, London (1948) and The Virgin of
Aldermanbury: rebirth of the City of London (1958). In 1943
she was commissioned by Puffin Picture Books not only to
illustrate but to write a children's story book, Alexander,
the Circus Pony, which has been reprinted many times. She
also illustrated Joan Lamburn's The Mushroom Pony, published
by Noel Carrington, founding editor of Puffin Picture Books,
in 1947.
In 1953 Ginger drew Cliff Horton of Arsenal Football Club to
be made into a lithograph, which was included in the seminal
'Football and the Fine Arts' exhibition that year held in
Park Lane and organised by the Arts Council and the Football
Association. The portrait resurfaced in JHW Fine Art's 1998
exhibition 'Muddied Oafs: an exhibition of football' and was
illustrated in The Footballer's Year (2002).
Portraiture became more important to Phyllis Ginger,
particularly in her later years: even in the last few months
at her nursing home in Kew " where Leslie Durbin, five years
her junior, died in February " she was still sketching
portraits of the residents and staff in pencil and pastel.
Her regular contributions to the group exhibitions at the
Royal Academy and the Royal Watercolour Society often
included portraits of friends, Carla with Angel the Cat
(Royal Academy, 1978) being a particularly fine example.
London's commercial dealers including Chris Beetles and
James Huntington-Whiteley have appreciated her fine style
and printmakers such as Merivale Editions have made posters
from her work.
Kew Gardens remained a favourite place for her. The
Government Art Collection owns a watercolour, Waterlilies,
Kew Gardens (1971), and she went there with her family to
see the bluebells only two days before she died.
Phyllis Ethel Ginger, artist: born New Malden, Surrey 19
October 1907; married 1940 Leslie Durbin (died 2005; one
son, one daughter); died Kew, Surrey 3 May 2005.
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
>
> There was much fear of the damage that could be wreaked by
> the 'Baedeker' raids, so called because the German bombers
> targeted some of Britain's most beautiful cities. However
> not many of the resulting pictures make overt references
> to the effects of war, but, as is pointed out in Recording
> Britain: a pictorial Domesday of pre-war Britain,
> published by the V&A to coincide with its 1990 exhibition,
> Ginger's views of Catherine Place, Bath, and the Council
> House, Bristol, both show scenes of bomb damage,
> 'meticulous, delicate and overlaid with pale transparent
> washes, very much in the tradition of the English school
> of topographical watercolour'.
In a nice coincidence, I recently discovered there will be
an exhibition of war artists in Bath when I will be there
for the next Obituary Writers Conference. (June) She will
be represented there. I love the work of war artists. Do
we have any in Iraq? Does England?
I posted the obituary for her husband, Leslie Durbin, the
silversmith, in February.