Lloyd Ellis Blog

Lloyd Ellis has acquired a collection of pastels and watercolours by the artist and horticulturalist William John Caparne (1855-1940).

This idiosyncratic polymath offers one of the least acknowledged and most intriguing stories of English art in the first half of the twentieth century. Our collection largely dates from the 1930s, a period when his art reached a new sophistication and maturity. His use of soft, rich colour and a misty, atmospheric evocation of coastal landscapes around his home in southern Guernsey, together with brilliant portraits of the flora to which he devoted so much of his life are deeply influenced by French Impressionism and the later works of J M W Turner.

After training at the Slade in 1874, Caparne moved to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian, subsequently taking the post of drawing master at Oundle School. At the same time, he began to develop his life-long passion as a plantsman and horticulturalist. Following in his father’s footsteps, he began to specialise in irises – an area in which he later achieved global renown.

In 1895, following the death of his wife, and his departure from Oundle, Caparne left the East Midlands, initially for Devon, (changing his name from Caparn to Caparne) and then to the Channel Islands, and Guernsey, where he eventually settled at Bon Port near St Martin in 1920. He continued to develop his work as an iris and bulb specialist, creating the completely new variety of intermediate bearded iris in the 1890s. Working from his self-built bungalow and a studio and greenhouse made from an old tram carriage, he gradually transformed his immediate surroundings into one of the most beautiful gardens on the island, and himself into an accomplished landscape and botanical artist.

His transformation from a slightly staid English watercolourist to an inventive painter of light and manipulator of saturated colour owes much to a number of visits to Claude Monet and his circle at Giverny during the first decade of the twentieth century. He and Monet struck up a friendship after a visit to Giverny inspired by Caparne’s admiration of Monet’s depiction of waterlilies. On subsequent visits, Caparne presented Monet with (inevitably) a collection of iris bulbs, receiving a Monet drawing in return. It seems to have been at Monet’s suggestion that Caparne embarked on a series of tours of France and Europe before the First World War.

In the 1930s, with failing eyesight, Caparne produced many views of the sea and coast of south Guernsey, as well as studies of the cacti, succulents and South African flora which increasingly formed his horticultural interest. The great majority of these works were intended for his own reference and pleasure. Few are signed or dated, in contrast to the meticulous record-keeping of his earlier work and more precise botanical studies. The majority of our works fall into this category – freely worked, evocative images, although indisputably by Caparne’s hand. It is likely that our collection, acquired as part of the stock in trade of a retired print dealer, originally formed part of the final dispersal sale of Caparne’s work in 1980.

Little is known of the life of Victor Mathias, a prolific and idiosyncratic British artist. Tentative life dates of 1898-1987 and 1890-1960 have been suggested, and he is said to have been born and to have grown up in the town of Haverfordwest, in South West Wales. The town certainly provided many subjects for his early works, painted in a loose, 20^th century Impressionist style.

It has also been suggested that, as a result of experiences in the Great War, Mathias later followed a reclusive and solitary life, with painting becoming an almost obsessive activity. He certainly painted on any piece of card which seems to have come to hand. Pictures with Lloyd Ellis have been painted on bits of old cardboard representing cut up boxes for anything from Bisto, to sugar cubes, Pontefract cakes, and Mexican Matzos.

His small paintings on these pieces of cut-down card are remarkable. Rarely more than 16cm square, they are carefully signed and dated, and painted with confidence and bravura in a kind of urgent visual shorthand. Dabs of paint and a mixture of fluid and dry media are built up to give a rich texture and tonal range. The great majority represent an ideal landscape – calm river scenes, suffused with a golden light, dreamy detail and soft treescapes fading to mountains in a dim blue distance. The same scene is painted repeatedly, with delicate variation of viewpoint and detail. Reminiscent of southern France, it seems unlikely that the views could have been painted from life – particularly since most dates fall within the years of the second world war. Perhaps they represent a happy memory or a conjuring of such idyllic  places as an escape from wartime Britain.

Other small works show a more naturalistic approach to landscape, freely painted, they have the quality of quick, plein-air sketches.

But who was Victor Mathias? So far no searches of census, war records or family history have offered a possible lead. He is an enigma, who deserves further investigation.

We have been fortunate to acquire a collection of works by the Japanese artist Ryuson Chuzo Matsuyama (1880-1954). He was a member of a small but intriguing group of Japanese artists working in England during the first decades of the 20th century. While the best known of this group are the printmaker Urushibara Mokuchu and the illustrator Yoshio Markino, Matsuyama is arguably the more interesting, bringing a freshness of practice and perception to the essentially British art form of watercolour. He also adopted Britain as his home, marrying an English girl, Mabel Davies, in Chelsea in 1914, and bringing his family up in London and the Surrey countryside. Unlike the great majority of the Japanese expatriate community, who left the UK to return home in the face of increasing anti-Japanese feeling in the 1920s and ‘30s, Matsuyama remained in England, becoming a naturalised British citizen in 1947.
After initial training in a broad range of media, as well as receiving an introduction to watercolour in Tokyo, Matsuyama travelled to England in 1911 to develop his knowledge and practice. We have two small sketches produced during his journey – recording scenes in Singapore (shown here) and Marseilles. Settling in London, he, like the painter Sato Takezou, studied at the Chelsea School of Art, while also working as a decorative painter, restorer and lacquer repairer. His watercolours of London scenes found a ready market within the Japanese community, and he exhibited regularly at the Japanese Club in Cavendish Square, showing alongside his compatriots as well as artists such as Frank Brangwyn and George Clausen, who were active supporters of the group of Japanese artists. He was also an active and successful member of the British art world, exhibiting from 1916 at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy, the National Portrait Society and regional art galleries. He was a member of the Holborn artists’ society and was elected an Associate of the British Watercolour Society – an honour he was asked to resign in 1947 in the aftermath of World War II – a shameful act by the Society, which coincided oddly with his receipt of British citizenship

.As well as London scenes, Matsuyama’s earlier subject matter includes floral still-lifes, reminiscent of prints by Urushibara, and an aesthetic in landscape and genre scenes which seems to owe much to the Japanese shin-hanga movement. He undertook a range of painting tours to archetypal picturesque areas such as North Wales, the Lake District and the South West, but also visited Flanders and Northern France in 1920, recording the devastation wrought by the First World War, as shown in his view of Ypres (right).
It is perhaps his mature work of the 1920s and ‘30s that is most striking, He seems to have taken delight in the colours, activities and seasonal rhythms of the English countryside, recording particularly the landscapes of Surrey and West Sussex. His landscapes are rich, authoritative and idiosyncratic: flooded with saturated colour, applied from a heavily laden brush, and contrasted with precise, calligraphic linear outline. Most are carefully annotated with place and date, and convey real pleasure in the subject,  sometimes recording favourite places or walks. Much of his work is subtly imbued with a charm and gentle humour – more obviously seen in his cartoon of the family (noticeably excluding Mr Matsuyama himself) struggling to hoist the roof onto the family’s new shed.
While much is documented relating to Japanese ceramic artists working in Europe, particularly those associated with Bernard Leach, too little is known of the community of Japanese painters, printmakers and illustrators working in London at the beginning of the 20th century. The work of Matsuyama and his contemporaries deserves more serious research.

Halima Nalecz brought a mid-European glamour to a rather dowdy post-war London art market. In establishing the New Vision gallery in Marble Arch in 1956, and her own Drian Gallery in 1957, she created a vehicle for the active promotion of new British artists, as well as for her own work.

Halima Nalecz was born near Vilnius in 1914, and spent much of her youth as a refugee, travelling around Europe and the Near East, before arriving in Britain in 1947, and marrying Zygmunt Nalecz in 1952. Her work is fresh, idiosyncratic and decidedly un-English, drawing on imagery from nature – fat, heavy flower heads and startling upright foliage, strange animals, vivid starlit skies – all transmuted through a semi-abstracted vision. The National Portrait Gallery holds some lovely images by the photographer Bob Collins of Nalecz in her studio, surrounded by examples of her mature work.

Famously unselfish, she was a generous supporter of new talent, giving artists as diverse as John Bellany, William Crozier and Leon Zack their first major London shows. Her commitment to buy a new work from another artist for every picture of her own which she sold, enabled her to present a large collection of contemporary art to the Polish state in 1983.

Read more about her in the Guardian obituary by Adam Zulawski.

See her work for sale with Lloyd Ellis