Edwin La Dell
Edwin La Dell wrote one letter to Ruth Borchard, from Stocks House, Grafty Green, Maidstone, dated 'Aug 6' (either 1963 or 1964), in which he stated: 'I am certain I have two self-portraits and you could have one of them.' Ruth paid twenty guineas for this picture.
Born in Coventry in 1914, Edwin La Dell made his name as a printmaker, and had a considerable influence on the post-1945 revival of this art form – notably colour lithography in the tradition of Bonnard and Vuillard – among British artists. His self-portrait, with its expressionist (and partly Fauvist-like) palette and its strident melancholy, therefore may come as a surprise to those accustomed to his lyrical illustrations and lithographs in the style of les peintres-gravures inspired and promoted by the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard. Yet, La Dell practised as a painter as well as a lithographer and teacher for much of his life. He was the son of two still-life painters, Ellen La Dell and Thomas La Dell, and he studied at Sheffield College of Art, and then at the Royal College of Art in London under the painter Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979), the painter and lithographer James Fitton (1899-1982), and also the artist Barnett Freedman (1901-1958) (the latter himself an early pioneer of the revival in colour lithography, and a fine illustrator, who believed, as David Buckman has written, 'there was no such thing as commercial art, only good art and bad art’.).
La Dell's self-portrait is undated; it may have been painted c.1960, when he was in his mid-forties. It is a composition with three main sections: the figure of the artist in the left foreground, with his head set against a dark background; the enticing aspect of an empty blue bentwood chair on a sunny balcony or small conservatory-type room; and, lower-right, a 'full-on' depiction of a canvas showing a landscape (with, seemingly, the outlines of two human figures just visible) which the artist was presumably working on at the time.
The painter meets us out of the corner of his eye, his naturally high-pitched eyebrows apparently raised even further in a casually sceptical way. It is by no means a shifty look, simply one of alert yet circumspect self-appraisal. His lean face takes on a rather noble appearance, the line of the cheekbone down to the chin finely 'sculpted'. But it is a face also seemingly shadowed by unknown psychological currents (all those blue shadowings across the features), as well as one illumined maybe by a fierce, inner psychic stream indicated by those streaks of orange and red. As a friend recollected after his death, La Dell characteristically wore a 'stern frown belied by a general aspect of wonderful benevolence' – also an apt description of the ambiguous nature of his countenance here.
On 26th November 1955, Art News and Review featured La Dell in its fortnightly 'Portrait of the Artist' piece. It illustrated a spontaneous yet firmly structured ink-and-gouache self-portrait, which gives La Dell a fiercely concentrated yet vulnerable look. This picture is now in the Tate Gallery Archive, along with three other ink self-portraits gathered by, but not published in, Art News and Review.
A remarkable children's book, The Five Little Pigs: Cut-Outs Designed by Edwin La Dell was published by John Miles, London in 1939; the artist was then 25 years old. Printed in audacious colours on card sections that concertina outwards, it shows the cut-out figures of pigs in contemporary human dress going to market, feasting and crying 'wee, wee, wee all the way home'. The wicked humour, gentle satire of middle-class English mores, and bold formal inventiveness of these porcine studies are a delight.
In 1939 he joined the Civil Defence Camouflage Establishment in Leamington Spa, working as a camouflage designer though continuing to make some lithographs of his own. (Among fellow artists who worked here during the war were William Coldstream, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Robert Medley, Rodrigo Moynihan, Roland Penrose, Edward Seago, Julian Trevelyan and Leon Underwood); the purpose of the unit was to disguise key civilian and military bombing targets in and around to the nearby armament factories in Birmingham and Coventry through techniques such as applying fake road markings onto rooftops and draping giant nets over buildings.) La Dell went on to become senior tutor in the print-making department at the Royal College in 1948. There, he 'did much to enliven the disciplinarian rule of Robert Austin. To advise on printing technique he installed George Devenish, who became vital to the RCA's successful association with modern lithography' (quotation from British Printmakers 1855-1955; edited by Robin Garton; Garton & Co. & Scolar Press, 1992).
During 1951-52, a series of his articles on 'Colour Lithography for the Artist' was published in The Artist magazine. Highly technical in expository detail, these pieces were illustrated by examples of his own colour lithography. Some are tenderly domestic, including one showing a mother bathing her Five and a Half (the picture's title) year old child in the bath, another of a little boy, Tom, standing naked in the bath. In their abstracted expanses of pale, delicately modulated colour tones interspersed with vibrant high notes, and in their decorative humanity, these pictures read like versions of pictures by Bonnard or Vuillard set in austere, late-1940s Britain, a country seemingly intent on recovering its cosy, homely patina after the drab, exacting war years. Further lithographs by La Dell from this period set out to celebrate certain comforting aspects of Englishness: the cricketers and spectators in MCC at Lords, bathers in Serpentine Summer, cycling dons and undergraduates in King's Parade, Cambridge. These works are saved from being nostalgically maudlin by La Dell's sense of form, the way in which he made use of what he termed nature's 'cut-outs', where 'the shapes in nature have been used to make a strong pattern and design’.
La Dell was closely involved in several schemes in post-war Britain to bring good quality artists' lithographs to a mass market. He contributed a poster-print of the Tower of London to the first series of 'School Prints' in 1946. (School Prints Ltd. had been set up by Brenda Rawnsley and her husband Derek towards the end of the war with the aim of introducing exceptional art to schoolchildren who, otherwise, would be deprived of access to such original work in the classroom, as elsewhere. Brenda sought the advice and assistance of the art historian Herbert Read, and they selected the artists together; these included Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Leger and Dufy and, from Britain, Moore, Lowry, Tunnard, Trevelyan, Michael Rothenstein, John Nash, John Skeaping and Topolski [q.v.]. The Baynard Press printed these works from stones or zinc plates drawn by the artists, who were asked to use no more than six colours. The scheme's success was marked by the way many schoolchildren went on to develop a lifelong curiosity about, and enthusiasm for, aspects of modern and avant-garde art as result.)
After the War the catering giant J. Lyons & Co. commissioned three series of lithographs from leading British painters for their teashops around the country; these artists included Edward Bawden, David Gentleman, John Minton, John Nash, John Piper and William Scott. For Lyons Lithographs, La Dell himself made three poster-prints: Hastings (for the first Lyons series in 1947), Fishing at Marlow (for the second series in 1951), and Clare Bridge, Cambridge (for the third series in 1955). (All three series were shown at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, alongside some of the artists' original paintings and working drawings, in the 2013 exhibition The Lyons Teashops Lithographs: Art in a Time of Austerity).
Alongside artists such as John Minton, Keith Vaughan (q.v.), Lynton Lamb (q.v.) and William Scott, he made the MCC at Lords lithograph for the series of twenty-one artists' prints commissioned to mark The Festival of Britain in 1951. La Dell was one of forty artists, including Minton, Michael Ayrton (q.v.), Edward Bawden, Robert Colquhoun, John Piper and Vaughan (q.v.), who were commissioned to illustrate the ceremonial and festivities in London marking the accession of Princess Elizabeth to the throne. For this 'Coronation Series', printed at the Royal College of Art in 1953, La Dell made two prints, Band in the City and Whitehall.
When Edwin La Dell died in 1970, his Times obituary, by 'R.D.', stated that 'he liberated [lithography] from the [...] straitjacket of the more recent past and brought it a painterly quality [...] Barnett Freedman, whose favourite pupil he was, remained essentially a draughtsman; Eddie was an explosive colourist, working with a freedom of hand and conscience which sometimes took one's breath away [...] In himself Eddie was gay and guileless, simple and modest to an extraordinary degree: and the least pompous of men. He was tall and gangling with a stern frown belied by a general aspect of wonderful benevolence. He seemed to have no personal ambition at all.'
- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004