NEWS | Mon, 22 Feb 2021

Newspaper Cuttings Album Reveals New Exhibitions, Works and Puppets

Richard kept a newspaper cuttings scrap book. Every time we dip into it we discover something new.

Richard kept a scrapbook with newspaper cuttings from the 1920s until the 1950s with a few loose cuttings folded between the pages from later years. They are mainly reviews of exhibitions, with some photos and articles cut from magazines.

We have not had the time yet to mine the scrapbook thoroughly, but we have dipped into it from time to time to help identify works and clarify details. A few days ago our eyes was caught by a headline 'The French Gallery', and we were rewarded with some information that was rather enlightening about the relationship between The French Gallery and the Goupil Gallery in the mid 1930s. After making notes we casually browsed a couple of nearby pages.

We instantly found records of several exhibitions we had not known about before, from around the time when Richard was working on his seaports paintings in the early 1930s. They give us an insight into Richard's continuing relationship with the Goupil gallery after his solo exhibition there, and into his efforts to get work into group shows in many galleries even though the Redfern Gallery had started to represent him.

The new entries to the catalogue include:

A Spring 1929 watercolour exhibition.
A 1930 showing at Leeds Art Gallery for Richard's pencil drawings shortly after the success of his Goupil solo exhibition.
Two 1931 showings of The Club Room - at the Goupil Spring Salon London and at the Yorkshire Group of Artists exhibition in Bradford - before its inclusion in the important solo 1933 Redfern Dorset Seaports exhibition.

The appearance of The Haven in the Goupil Spring Salon before its outing in the 1933 show, a work which has not been recorded since.
Details about the 1931 Goupil Autumn Salon where Round the Point was bought by Richard's patron Sir Edward Marsh, a painting later given to the Laing Art Gallery collection in Newcastle.

In addition to all these discoveries, these few pages in the cuttings album have answered some questions we had about a couple of puppet heads the family have.

We were not quite sure if they had been made by Richard but when we saw one illustrated in the the cuttings file, Puppet Head of Girl with Necklace as shown in 'An Exhibition of Puppets' at Victory House in London in 1932, we decided to look again at the material we had about Richard's carvings in general and about his interest in puppets in particular. You can explore our latest findings on the 3D Work page and the new Puppet Heads and Performances page.

The focus on Richard's carvings ends with one last find, a small and slightly condescending mention of a tiny carving shown at the Wertheim gallery in 1932, the first indication we have of his relationship with them, and the last we know of the carving mentioned in the cutting.

That is a lot of new additions to the catalogue from a few pages in the news cuttings scrapbook. We clearly need to spend more time working through it more methodically.