Raymond Coxon

There are two letters from Raymond Coxon to Ruth Borchard, dated ’10.8.66’ and ‘1.9.66.’, from the Mill Studio at Rowfant in Sussex. He and his wife, the painter Edna Ginesi, divided their time between Mill Studio, which he called ‘this blessed spot’, and a home in Hammersmith in west London. The first reads: ‘... What a good and original idea. When I look in the morning at my face in the mirror I never feel like rushing for my paint box, in the evening the ravages of continued [words illegible] give me no pleasure. Yet somewhere in Hammersmith there lies a really [word illegible, possibly ‘good’] self sketch in oils done when a student sucking a pipe with life-like raw lines and (after growing a large beard) a close crop. There is also a painting of myself having a sixpenny haircut done when in my thirties. It was in a one-man show Leicester gallery [sic] and was reproduced in the Daily Telegraph. If you would like it you can certainly have it.’

Coxon’s self-portrait (1921) is the earliest picture in the Borchard collection. Some of the stylistic roots of many of the collection’s later works can be discerned herein. It was painted in the year that Coxon went to study at the Royal College of Art in London, under its new principal John Rothenstein. Coxon had become a close friend of Henry Moore’s at Leeds College of Art, where he studied from 1919-21. A fellow student there was Edna Ginesi, a very gifted artist. From 1921-25, he studied at the Royal College of Art, alongside Moore, Ginesi, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Vivian Pitchforth, Douglas Percy Bliss and Barnett Freedman; whilst there, he attended Leon Underwood’s life drawing classes.

Coxon was early on enamoured of Cézanne, and noted his book Art: An Introduction to Appreciation (1932): ‘the whole purpose of post-impressionistic effort and experiment... was to be a purifying process... from a realization that naturalism pure and simple was irrelevant to art expression...’ Cézanne’s influence is certainly evident in Coxon’s early and increasingly powerful later landscapes. Even this early, sketchy self-portrait shows an English Post-Impressionistic quality, seeming to advance on (yet not entirely abandoning) Whistlerian tonal qualities. In his ‘Memoir’, the painter Claude Rogers pointed out that his conservative tutor, Professor Tonks, at the Slade School of Art ‘never encouraged us to visit Paris’, whereas ‘the Henry Moore-Raymond Coxon generation at the Royal College made regular forays on Paris like a band of Norsemen.’ Coxon’s first visit to Paris was in 1922, when John Rothenstein gave him introductions to Maillol and Bonnard. Coxon’s pen-and-ink drawing (c.1922) of a young seated woman, nonchalantly poised, shows Maillol’s influence, but the inimitably simple, curving, elegant lines even more clearly reveal Coxon as a born draughtsman.

Born at Hanley, Stole-on-Trent in 1896, Coxon was around twenty-five when he painted this self-portrait. It looks now a period piece, delightfully so: the handsome (contemporary photographs of young Coxon bear this out), fair-headed, pink-faced, serious young man sucking on his pipe – itself only partially adumbrated, with the thin hollow stem or shank visible but the chamber or bowl for the tobacco absent – through full, heightened-ruby lips (again a sketchy, ‘curtained’ or possibly arboreal grey-and-brownish background), possibly contemplating his Post-Impressionistic future: he was then just in the exhilarating, very early stages of a Cézanne-ish ‘purifying process’. The picture has a Bloomsbury look, and also brings to mind the art of a near-contemporary young Englishman, Christopher Wood (1901-1930), who, in 1921, went to live in Paris for the first time, mixing in avant-garde circles, and who produced quintessential 1920s portraits of ‘golden’ young male painters and musicians, in a fresh, semi-naturalistic style. Coxon’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, a 1930 oil depicting a serenely introspective, head-scarved Edna Ginesi against hills and old cottages, is comparable in its enchanting ‘Celtic’ atmosphere to works by Wood and Cedric Morris.

The touchingly solemn look of Coxon’s early self-portrayal may perhaps be partly accounted for: he had seen and known terrible hardships during the First World War. After he went off to serve with the Cavalry in Palestine in 1915, in spare moments he made many quick, perceptive watercolour sketches and drawings of army and local civilian life, which he sent home to his mother, who assembled them in a volume; on one occasion in Palestine he nearly drowned (a later oil painting he made of shipwrecked young servicemen flailing and floundering in a stormy ocean whilst others desperately seek refuge on a raft, has a harrowing, expressionistic urgency). At the self-portrait’s heart seems to be a tension between innocence and experience: the pipe, suggesting a manly, introspective heartiness peculiarly of that period, is sketchy and incomplete; the fresh pink complexion is close-cropped (he had just shaved off a large beard); the serious mien indicates he is no longer in the full flush of youth. Here, Coxon seems to be at a critical moment: in a raw psychic state somewhere between careless youth and hard-won maturity.

At the Royal College, Coxon painted many portraits of friends and fellow students, including Portrait of Henry Moore(1924), now in the Collection of Manchester Art Gallery, when they shared a studio at 1 The Grove, Hammersmith – its admirably succinct composition shows the young sculptor as a young man in an open-necked gray-blue shirt, with morose, downcast mien and strikingly illumined forehead against an austere dark backdrop. Coxon later recalled that he and Moore went to college ‘usually a bit late because we had been arguing too long and we got tired in the morning... on these late nights when we talked lying in opposite beds, just enough room to pinch each other if need be... a lot happened in our outlook... The three main subjects were religion, art and women and we went round in circles on these...’ After their marriage in 1926 (with Henry Moore as best man), Raymond and Edna moved to a large house at 10 Hammersmith Terrace, overlooking the Thames. Here they lived until 1989, when they moved permanently to Mill Studio, which they had bought in 1938.

In her introduction to the catalogue for a Coxon retrospective at Stoke-on-Trent Museum and Art Gallery in 1987, Julia von Meijer notes that Coxon has ‘also experimented with what he calls the twenty-minute portrait [his self-portrait in the Borchard Collection may very well be one of these]. He prepares very carefully these, laying out all his materials in advance. The idea came from Van Dyck’s method... of making rapid sketches which enables him to capture an instant likeness...’ Examples of this approach include Coxon’s oil portrait of the painter Ceri Richards (late 1940s) as a serious, ruggedly resolute, still youngish-appearing man in a handsomely bohemian ensemble of tomato-red tie against blue shirt, and three even more informal yet tersely delineated sketches of the author J.B. Priestley playing the piano (1950s). Fellow artists he portrayed in oil on canvas included Gertrude Hermes (1935), Jacob Epstein (c.1948) and Vivian Pitchforth (early 1960s).

In 1923 Coxon was commissioned to paint a mural, the Expulsion from Eden, for the Royal College of Art. This and other early paintings of heroic-looking nudes and bathers show the mark of Cézanne and also figures like, notably, Puvis de Chavannes. In the same year, while teaching part-time at Richmond School of Art, he met John Piper, who later said that ‘Raymond was sensitive and dedicated in his ideas and opinions, with the easy going life and humour of a born painter. He was very funny and very natural, but a stickler for standards. As a painter he never lost his freshness and I was very lucky to encounter him.’

Coxon’s paintings from about 1930-38 merit comparison with wondrously childlike yet innately sophisticated paintings by Christopher Wood, Cedric Morris, David Gommon and Julian Trevelyan (all artists encouraged and exhibited by Lucy Carrington Wertheim (1883-1971), the London-based gallerist renowned for adventurously showing work by such artists as well as gifted naive artists). Trevelyan himself lived nearby to the Coxons in Hammersmith, and he, like Wertheim, was drawn to the art of naive and untrained artists, recording that their work ‘filled me with doubt about the value of professionalism in painting; they expressed themselves with so much more ‘sayfulness’ (a favourite term of Tom Harrisson [the young anthropologist who was a founder in 1937 of the Mass-Observation movement, a project to study the everyday lives of ordinary British people]) than most of the exhibitors at the London Group or the Royal Academy.‘ Coxon’s deliberately naĩve, somewhat exaggerated forms – customers in a pub (including the writer A.P. Herbert smoking a pipe) in Sunday Morning at the Black Lion; a dark, young, melancholic man (also smoking a pipe) in front of hills, barns and cows, in Rushton in Staffordshire; and two Cumberland Wrestlers, their glowing, monumental bodies locked in a fierce embrace against a brooding landscape, watched over by an enigmatically shadowy spectator – are nevertheless unerringly observed and portrayed. Throughout his career Coxon also made some impressive and moving drawings, paintings and etchings based on the life of Christ.

From the 1920s onwards, he painted many landscapes, set in Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and America’s Grand Canyon (which he first visited in 1947) and the Florida Keys swamps. A glowering post-1945 Landscape, Skye evokes a sense of wild, remote majesty. Delicate, swirling shapes here on moor and hillside, literal landscape striations on the verge of abstraction, portend the playfully linear, uncanny forms of his later abstracted landscapes and poetic ‘inscapes’, which he made from the late 1940s onwards. These latter biomorphic-seeming forms were inspired partly by those he observed in art as diverse as Neolithic fragments, African Bushmen cave painting, ancient Peruvian pottery motifs, Utamaro’s Gifts from the Ebb Tide, the ‘Shell Book’ and Miro’s graphics. Some of his 1950s’ paintings are semi-abstracted landscape, seascape and swamp-inspired fantasies, such as the exuberantly colourist Concordance (1955), in which shells, jellyfish and an eery, monster-eyed flatfish are seen co-existing in the blissful deeps. (Coxon was a keen though unpublished short story writer, one of whose best stories is entitled ‘The Amoeba’).

In his cool but spirited Self-Portrait on Grey (c.1960), sparse, abstract forms in blue, white and turquoise are seen to free-float against a reticent grey background. Here, the artist’s appearance itself has become biomorphic: what a fine surprise it is suddenly to discern Coxon’s dapper, hat-wearing form, abstracted so vigorously and wittily in a corner of the canvas.

In a 1969 letter to the Tate Gallery, Coxon outlined his working method:

First to find the shapes in the observation of nature and making drawings, looking for shapes (and their relative positions sometimes) then, by the time I’ve forgotten the ‘venue’ of the drawing... I face the problem of continuing the painting in terms of colour and within the battleground of the area of the canvas. I like to find forms, which surprise me by their unexpectedness. In short I am motivated by these beginnings to make a disciplined but not essentially concordant marriage between colour and form.

In 1929 Coxon was a ‘Full Member’ of the London Artists’ Association, alongside Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Edward Wolfe and William Roberts. At this time Maynard Keynes and Samuel Courtauld were keen, discerning collectors of his work. The Courtauld Collection contains some beautifully modelled, freshly poetic paintings by Coxon from this period, including one of resting farm labourers and horses, the other of young boys playing marbles. From 1936 to 1960, he had regular one-man exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries, London (which, directed by Oliver Brown, gave Pissarro, Picasso and Matisse their first British solo shows, and also held solo shows by modern British artists such as Henry Moore, Mark Gertler and Robert Medley; and whose annual exhibition, ‘Artists of Fame and Promise’ – referred to by John Craxton and Lucian Freud, with characteristic scurrilous wit, as ‘Artists of Shame and Compromise’ – is often recalled as a stepping stone for artists like David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Christopher Nevinson and William Roberts, who went on to find great renown). Coxon exhibited with the London Group over many decades. He shared an exhibition with Edna Ginesi at the Michael Parkin gallery, London in 1985, while the Walton Gallery, London showed a wide range of his work in 2001. Raymond Coxon died in 1997, aged 100.