Covent Garden Opera House; The Colonnade; Recording Britain

Physical description

Watercolour; signed. View from across the street of the Royal Opera House, showing the colonnade.

Place of Origin

Covent Garden Theatre, England (made)

Date

ca. 1940 (made)

Artist/maker

Bayes, born 1869 - died 1956 (artist)

Materials and Techniques

Watercolour painting on paper

Marks and inscriptions

' - W B - '

Dimensions

Height: 31.8 cm, Width: 39.7 cm

Object history note

This work is from the 'Recording Britain' collection of topographical watercolours and drawings made in the early 1940s during the Second World War. In 1940 the Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime, part of the Ministry of Labour and National Service, launched a scheme to employ artists to record the home front in Britain, funded by a grant from the Pilgrim Trust. It ran until 1943 and some of the country's finest watercolour painters, such as John Piper, Sir William Russell Flint and Rowland Hilder, were commissioned to make paintings and drawings of buildings, scenes, and places which captured a sense of national identity. Their subjects were typically English: market towns and villages, churches and country estates, rural landscapes and industries, rivers and wild places, monuments and ruins. Northern Ireland was not covered, only four Welsh counties were included, and a separate scheme ran in Scotland.

The scheme was known as 'Recording the changing face of Britain' and was established by Sir Kenneth Clark, then the director of the National Gallery. It ran alongside the official War Artists' Scheme, which he also initiated. Clark was inspired by several motives: at the outbreak of war in 1939, there was a concern to document the British landscape in the face of the imminent threat of bomb damage, invasion, and loss caused by the operations of war. This was allied to an anxiety about changes to the landscape already underway, such as the rapid growth of cities, road building and housing developments, the decline of rural ways of life and industries, and new agricultural practices, which together contributed to the idea of a 'vanishing Britain'. Clark also wanted to help artists, and the traditional forms of British art such as watercolour painting, to survive during the uncertain conditions of wartime. He in turn was inspired by America's Federal Arts Project which was designed to give artists employment during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Over 1500 works were eventually produced by 97 artists, of whom 63 were specially commissioned. At the time the collection had a propaganda role, intended to boost national morale by celebrating Britain's landscapes and heritage. Three exhibitions were held during the war at the National Gallery, and pictures from the collection were sent on touring exhibitions and to galleries all around the country. After the war, the whole collection was given to the V&A by the Pilgrim Trust in 1949, and it was documented in a four volume catalogue published between 1946 and 1949. For many years the majority of the collection was on loan to councils and record offices in each county, until recalled by the V&A around 1990. The pictures now form a memorial to the war effort, and a unique record of their time.

Descriptive line

Bayes, Walter
Covent Garden Opera House; the Colonnade (Recording Britain, London).

Bibliographic References (Citation, Note/Abstract, NAL no)

Catalogue of Drawings in the ‘Recording Britain’ Collection given by the Pilgrim Trust to the Victoria and Albert Museum published by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints, Drawings and Paintings Department, 1951.
The full text of the entry is as follows:
'LONDON

[…]
BAYES, Walter, R.W.S.

[…]

Covent Garden Opera House; The Colonnade.
Signed in pencil - W B -
Water-colour (12 ½ x 15 5/8)
(Reproduced Vol.I)

E.1762-1949'
Palmer, Arnold, ed. Recording Britain. London: Oxford University Press, 1946-49. Vol 1: London and Middlesex, Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire. Introduction to London and Middlesex, pp.1-3.
'For reasons already stated, the coastal counties were the first consideration. When the Scheme began early in 1940, no English cities had been bombed; some people were advancing arguments to show that they never would be bombed; Americans were calling the war 'phoney'. Indeed, the very circumstances which wrought changes in remote country districts where hardly the distant rumble of battle had been heard since the days of Picts. Scots, Danes, and Romans, seemed likely to reprieve for a few years to come many an old street or building lying under sentence in our spreading cities. London, again, is so vast, and so fully if haphazardly recorded, that it offered every reason for deferment.
Before the end of the first fateful summer, however, the case for Middlesex was pleaded by that lifelong and discriminating pedestrian, Sir Ralph Wedgwood. He drew attention to the persistent and independent, if often forgotten, existence of the county of which London is not even the county town; he cited a number of villages, such as Cranford, still hanging on with an indestructible air of good breeding in reduced and jostled circumstances. His proposal was acted on, and by the end of August the first drawing of Middlesex had been acquired, from Mr. Hubert Freeth.
In Middlesex, as already in Kent and Essex and as presently in Surrey, it was difficult, it was soon impossible, to keep unblurred the line between county and metropolis. Country, suburbs, outskirts - London began to creep into the collection almost without notice or intention. It had every excuse; for if, elsewhere, recording was designed to forestall as far as possible the rough usages inseparable from the training of military and civil services, and to anticipate known plans involving the destruction of pleasant buildings and views, in the case of London such procedure had become pedantic. The Battle of Britain had been fought and won. The blitz was in full swing. Everything was in acute danger. And so, though many plans were laid and executed - Chiswick House and grounds, in their old age thrust into uniform and harnessed to the national effort; a series of park keepers' lodges from Hyde and Regent's Parks and Kensington Gardens; squares and terraces of varying types - Molière's ways were followed and good things taken as they turned up. Eventually, drawings of London were more than twice as numerous as those in any county group. Systematized recording of the metropolis on anything like an adequate scale was, and was bound to be, out of the question. It is a task to daunt an army of cameramen - or so one would have supposed but for the courageous and successful efforts of the National Buildings Record.'
Palmer, Arnold, ed. Recording Britain. London: Oxford University Press, 1946-49. Vol 1: London and Middlesex, Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire. pp.22-23, illus.

Materials

Paper; Watercolour

Techniques

Painting

Subjects depicted

London; Topographical views; Theatres; Covent Garden; Opera houses; Royal Opera House

Categories

Recording Britain Collection

Collection code

PDP