GEORGE
WILLIAM BISSLL (1896 – 1973)
“Corfe, Dorset”
Oil Painting on Canvas. 14” x 18”
(355 x 457mm). Signed IMAGE
George Bissill was born in Fairford in Gloucestershire in 1896 but spent his early
life at Langley Mill near Nottingham where his father was a miner and where it was taken for granted
that George too would work in the mines.
As a child however, he loved to draw and paint: “I would draw on the
walls and doors of the cottage, to the amazement and anger of my father”.
Sometime between the ages of 11 and 13 Bissill began
his experience of the Mines. He was put
at first to pony driving and two years later began more serious work
underground. When the First War began he
was glad to join the Army and to escape from the mines. Transferred to the Sappers he worked with
them throughout the war, utilising his mining expertise. Having survived a number of serious mishaps
such as once being buried underground for three hours he was, in March 1918,
very badly gassed and invalided out of the army. He lay in hospital for three months and then
went back to the Nottinghamshire mines.
“The Horror of returning to the mines, even from the battlefield, was
indescribable. I could scarcely breathe
and continually thought of those dreadful three hours of slow suffocation”.
Medical advice prompted him to leave the mines.
“I was no longer strong enough to stand the strain of mining, and I
decided, as I had always made drawings and sold some, to take up art as regular
work. I applied to the Ministry of
Pensions and got a grant of 27s 6d a week for one year and free tuition at the
Nottingham School of Art” (Interview in Evening Standard, 13th Feb.
1925). He found that his teachers could
neither understand nor help him and he left the school after only a few weeks.
“When I left the art school I worked at drawing most of the day, and as village
postman for the rest of the time to make my bread and butter; and I began to
sell my sketches. In 1922 I came to London and worked as a pavement
artist outside Bush House, which was then being built. People think that pavement artists collect
big sums each day. That was not my
experience. I rarely took more than 3s
in one day…” (Evening Standard). The Evening News discovered interesting
caricatures in the portfolio of the pavement artist and, in its issue of 9th October 1922, reproduced ten such
caricatures, including those of Harry Tate, Harry Welldon,
Charlie Chaplin, William Orpen and Rudyard
Kipling. For a short time he was
employed to paint cinema posters but he hated this work. Bissill
was having a very precarious existence when in about 1923/4 a Miss Berry of the
Arts League of Service met him and urged him to do a set of drawings of the
mines. The Arts League of Service included his work in their travelling
portfolios and it aroused considerable interest. Quickly the Redfern
Gallery proposed a one-man show of drawings which was held in April 1925. Arnold Haskell described the result “The
sensation caused by the show was tremendous, and the majority of the
illustrated papers reproduced the work.
Articles also appeared in nearly all the dailies and Sunday papers. But best of all, work was bought by
collectors from all over the country.” P.G. Konody,
the Observor’s Art Critic wrote on 12th April 1925 of Bissill’s
“quite exceptional talent”…His drawings of the coal mines are essentially
modern in spirit. They are not so much
visual impressions as rhythmically organised designs showing what it feels like
to be working in the bowels of the earth…His synthesis of the human figure in
action which connects him with such modern English artists as Mr Roberts and Mr
Wyndham Lewis, and his calligraphic line which in the case of a cultured
student would be ascribed to sympathy with Chinese art, spring from an inner
consciousness of what is right and serve but to express the emotional
significance of each subject. Here at
any rate, is a modern artist who cannot possibly be accused of affectation or
notoriety hunting, for Mr Bissill evolved his style
as a lad working in the mines, before he ever thought of taking up an artist’s
career”. There followed heady years for Bissill. Further exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery in 1926 and 1927 (which included oils,
watercolours and woodcuts on a variety of subjects as well as mining scenes);
an exhibition at the Claridge Gallery in 1928;
commissions for posters from the London and North Eastern Railway, the Post
Office and Shell; the commission for the whole scheme of decoration of the
Kensington House of Arnold Haskell, the art collector and critic, including
fireplaces and furniture; and commissions for the design of various bookjackets. In 1925 whilst in Paris for the first time Bissill decided to try his hand at woodcuts and found that
he had a great affinity for this medium.
Within a short space of time he had produced over thirty woodcuts, and
in 1926 or 27 the Redfern Gallery published a series
of the woodcuts in portfolio. He moved to Hampshire in the 1930s and painted
mostly landscapes. Living quietly in the
country at Ashmanworth, near Newbury in Berkshire, he earned his living as
a restorer as well as by selling the occasional landscape. Looked at as a whole
his work shows great range and variety both in the media employed and in the
subject matter. George Bissill produced witty caricatures, delicate watercolour
landscapes, powerful and grim mining pictures, superbly designed woodcuts
displaying sometimes horror, sometimes humour. They are all a monument to his versatility and
individuality. His painting “Landscape
Layton” was purchased in 1940 by the Chantrey Bequest
for the Tate Gallery.
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