Crypt Group Membership



"Young Man in a Landscape (David Haughton)" by Robert Colquhoun (Dundee Art Gallery & Museum)

"What is this spread country...?" Adrian Stokes: Smooth & Rough

St Ives

At the invitation of Adrian Stokes it was to St Ives that Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson moved in 1939. With Naum Gabo and Adrian Stokes they were soon to revitalise the artists colony that had existed since 1880, and make it a regional centre of international relevance.

From about 1943 onwards the St Ives Society of Artists (founded in 1927) sought to integrate the newly arrived “modern” artists into its exhibitions but in practise their work tended to be given the least prominence. In 1947 the “moderns” began to organise separate exhibitions most notably in the crypt of the Society’s exhibition space. They became known as the “Crypt Group”.

St Ives: The Crypt Group in action

There were two exhibitions in 1947 and a third in 1948. The split between modern and more traditional St Ives artists was confirmed later in 1947, when the notoriously reactionary Sir Alfred Munnings was elected President of the Society. However, also in 1948, the members of the Crypt Group became founding members of the Penwith Society of Arts. This finally established a separate identity for the modern artists in St Ives and the Crypt Group had no further reason to exist.

Co-founders of the Crypt Group had been Peter Lanyon, John Wells, Sven Berlin, Guido Morris and Bryan Wynter. Soon to join the group were Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron, Kit Barker and David Haughton.

David Haughton moved to West Penwith in 1946. He had dropped out of the Slade finding it “totally inadequate” at the time for what he needed; a contact with established painters and the arts, on a personal and social level, rather than on a purely academic one. “All the staff at the Slade at that time,” David told me, “were so elderly, so remote, and didn’t come anywhere near the students if they could help it…”

Bryan Wynter: another young man in a landscape

Shortly thereafter, Haughton wrote to Bryan Wynter, whom he had known at the Slade (and who had settled in Cornwall in 1945), and asked him if there was anywhere available in West Penwith to live. A farmer’s tithe cottage was vacant near Wynter on the moors at Nancledra and Haughton rented the cottage for three years at five shillings a week.

“For quite a long time”, David told me, “the whole place was rather meaningless visually, to me, in terms of painting. I continued to do a lot of figurative (in the literal sense) drawings and paintings… Leslie, my girlfriend… I was very influenced by Wyndham Lewis, Colquhoun, and all those kind of war and post-war painters.”

For Haughton exhibiting with the Crypt Group was something of a “turning point”. He had found the camaraderie that he sought, and he had found his place amongst the burgeoning new generation of modern artists attracted to St Ives.

In his turn Haughton had invited Kit Barker to West Cornwall and Barker settled in a cottage half way between Haughton’s cottage near Nancledra and Bryan Wynter’s near Zennor.



It was by taking a bicycle trip with Kit Barker that Haughton “discovered” St Just. “We didn’t get the whole way…” Haughton could recall, “We got as far as Levant mine. But I felt an extraordinary quickening feeling that something really was beginning to happen, like seeing a girl over the other side of a room and thinking that’s the one for me!”

“It was either the next day, or a day or two later,” Haughton related to me, “that I got my bicycle out very early in the morning and cycled in that direction, all along the coast road… it wasn’t just finding a new place, it wasn’t just like finding a girl that you know is important to you, something else happened…”

Playing the Fool: visiting Kit Barker
(Kit Barker & Stephen Prince, West Sussex circa 1982)

Kit Barker painter (born in 1916 in London and died in 1988 in West Sussex) . He was the younger brother of the poet George Barker. Self taught, he was influenced by the Surrealists in the nineteen thirties and exhibited some surrealist paintings. He served in the British Army from 1942 to 1945. Barker lived in Cornwall from 1947 to 1948. His wife, Ilse Gross, whom he married in 1948, was a writer who used the pen name  "Katherine Talbot".

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