GEORGE
WILLIAM BISSILL (1896 – 1973)
“An Art Critic Amazing a
Man in the Street”
Ink and Watercolour.
Signed. Circa 1930s
Exhibited – Blond Fine Art
Limited, London 1979
IMAGE
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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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