drawing
- Museum number
- 1954,0722.9
- Description
-
Robin Proctor, a limestone hill in the West Riding of Yorkshire; rugged outcrops across foreground, and in background sheer rock face. 1913
Black chalk and watercolour
- Production date
- 1913
- Dimensions
-
Height: 252 millimetres
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Width: 362 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Holmes’ sketchbooks (British Museum) suggest that he sketched Robin Proctor over the course of two days in March 1913 (no.37, f.92; no. 38, f.1&9). The sketches are slight, without wash or colour notes, and focus on the craggy outline of the hill and its outcrops. It is therefore unsurprising that Holmes produced this watercolour in reference to them. The emphasis on outline, rendered in black chalk, is characteristic of Holmes’ work, as is the slightly unnatural use of colours.
Holmes was primarily concerned with decorative design, and readily sacrificed nature for art, as he himself acknowledged. He cultivated a method whereby he would rapidly indicate the outline of the forms with black chalk to ‘provide a firm foundation for almost any type of design. Washes of colour, if tactfully added, would not only clothe the nakedness of this beginning, but would themselves acquire a certain “muted purity”…’ (Holmes quoted in A.M. Hind, ‘OWCS,’ 1943: p.2)
The predominant muted green that Holmes has used here is tinged with viridian, a pigment that A.M. Hind identified as being used by Holmes for its synthetic ‘decorative quality somewhat removed from nature,’ in a conscious effort to keep a balance between nature and art (A.M. Hind, ‘OWCS,’ 1943: p.8). Holmes theorised this balance in his Slade lectures at Oxford, which were published in ‘Notes on the Science of Picture-Making’ (1909).
This watercolour was probably that exhibited in summer 1913 at the New English Art Club. A critic reviewing the exhibition commented that, 'Mr. C.J. Holmes continues to rear up monuments to nature in the Lake District and elsewhere with great simplicity of style and an even greater severity of effect'. (‘The Manchester Guardian,’ 24 May 1913)
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
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Probably New English Art Club, summer 1913, no.130 ‘Robin Proctor’
- Acquisition date
- 1954
- Acquisition notes
- According to Dodgson's inventory card, given to him by the artist in July 1913
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1954,0722.9