Old Houses, Stroud; Recording Britain

Physical description

Watercolour painting; signed. Close view of a row of four seventeenth-century stone cottages with dormer windows set in tall, steeply-angled gables, mullioned windows and arched doorways.

Place of Origin

Stroud, England (made)

Date

ca. 1940 (made)

Artist/maker

Spradbery, Walter E., born 1889 - died 1969 (artist)

Materials and Techniques

Watercolour painting on paper

Marks and inscriptions

'Walter E. Spradbery'

Dimensions

Height: 26 cm, Width: 26.7 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

Watercolour by Walter E. Spradbery, 'Old Houses, Stroud', from the Recording Britain Collection (Gloucestershire); England, ca. 1940.

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:
'GLOUCESTERSHIRE.

[…]
SPRADBERY, Walter E.
Old Houses, Stroud.
Signed Walter E. Spradbery.
Water-colour (10 ¼ x 10 1/2)
(Reproduced Vol.III)

E.1486-1949'
Palmer, Arnold, ed. Recording Britain. London: Oxford University Press, 1946-49. Vol. 3: Lancashire and Westmoreland, Derbyshire, Cheshire and Shropshire, Staffordshire, Welsh counties, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire. pp.218-219, illus.
'In Nelson Street and elsewhere it is not very difficult to find seventeenth-century houses, like those shown here. Most of them have no history; their faces are their fortune, and both are modest. In many cases they have been occupied, since the day they were built, by makers of the broadcloth from which Stroud has always got its living.'
Palmer, Arnold, ed. Recording Britain. London: Oxford University Press, 1946-49. Vol. 3: Lancashire and Westmoreland, Derbyshire, Cheshire and Shropshire, Staffordshire, Welsh counties, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire. p.201.
'At first Gloucestershire's place on the list of urgencies was a lowly one. The county seemed to us, in our innocence, far enough to discourage visits from air raiders; and since its scenery and its buildings have always attracted artists - amateur as well as, even more than, professional - it was supposed to be in no great need of recording. Both notions proved ill-founded. The Germans soon showed that they knew all about Bristol, including how to get there; and Gloucestershire turned out to have, like every other county, appropriate subjects sufficient for generations of recorders yet to come. If numbers be taken for a test, it ended, after its slow start, by occupying the ninth position in the collection. Sixty-five paintings of the county were done.

The chief recording centres were the Cirencester-Quenington area in the east; in the south, Clifton and Bristol, though much of the great city had gone by the time the artists got there; and a curving strip down the middle of the county, from Winchcomb via Cheltenham and Stroud to Tetbury.'

Excerpt from the Gloucestershire introduction.

Materials

Paper; Watercolour

Techniques

Painting

Subjects depicted

Topographical views; Houses; Cottages; Gloucestershire; Town views; Stroud

Categories

Paintings; Recording Britain Collection

Collection code

PDP