Sunday, 16 August 2026
Monday, 27 July 2026
NEW BOOK this September!
Exciting News: This September sees the publication of Frances Lord's long awaited book on David Haughton, with a book-launch to take place at the Penwith Gallery in St Ives. The book can be pre-ordered on Amazon.
David Haughton: Art, Life and the Cornish Landscape
Tuesday, 29 July 2025
A LETTER FROM BOSTON, USA
David Haughton in St Just, West Cornwall
Stephen writes; A letter from a lady in Boston, Massachusetts, enquiring about a David Haughton etching she had purchased for just $18 in a Boston thrift shop, has sparked my fascination once again with David's extraordinarily inventive mark-making. Little marks adding up to an expressive whole, are all the more apparent in David's etchings, and the one in question here is none other than "Rooftops, St Just", one of his stand-out 'St Just' subjects, which began as a pencil drawing in 1958 and became a painting.
"Rooftops, St Just"
The copper etched plate and the original pencil drawing of "Rooftops, St Just"
The oil painting, a large (for him) canvas measuring 44" x 72", is in the collection of the British Arts Council. The painting is likely to have been started about the time the drawing was made (1958 was a propitious time for David's practice) and completed in 1978 after a return to working from the drawings made in Cornwall in the late fifties. The Arts Council purchased the painting from an exhibition devoted to David's paintings I assisted with, near Regents Park at the Work of Art Gallery. Luckily for us, "Rooftops" was one of the survivors from the dreadful fire which severely damaged his home and studio (and David's health) in Holland Park in 1981.
"Backyard"
One has to ask, how exactly did a David Haughton etching end up in a Massachusetts charity shop? The Victoria & Albert Museum collection holds another of David's etchings portraying St Just. It is dated 1960 ("Backyard") so I imagine the "Rooftops" etching dated from the same time (David may have attempted to revive the original etching plates in the mid 1970s, at the time he returned to using his original drawings to complete paintings began years earlier). Both etchings had editions of 50.
In the late Fifties David was on a winning streak. Throughout this time there were mixed exhibitions in London, and in 1955 David exhibited with his contemporaries Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, John Wells, Terry Frost and Bryan Wynter in "Six Painters from Cornwall" an exhibition which toured major cities across Canada, organised by the National Gallery of Canada. If my memory serves me well, I believe there is a mention of this in Norman Levine's book "Canada Made Me".
Terry Frost
Patrick Heron
Interestingly, the St Just etchings came under various spotlights, not least that of St Georges Gallery, London, in 1963. In the two years previous to this David's fine work could be admired as part of two "International Prints" exhibitions which toured as far as New Zealand and Japan. And surprise, surprise! the USA venues included Boston, Massachusetts, - answering, perhaps, our question: How did David's etching end up in Boston?
Questions, questions... Is it too improbable that a travelling exhibition would have had actual editions for sale? Maybe the etching was purchased post-exhibition? And why choose an image of a town some 3,000 miles away across the ocean? Did the buyer know St Just? - I guess we will never know.
photo: David exploring St Just
David Haughton... more St Just rooftops
Tuesday, 27 July 2021
Getting DH back on the wall
LOOKING BACK: Former director of Penlee House Gallery & Museum Alison Bevan had the foresight to sanction my proposal for an exhibition celebrating the work of David Haughton prior to her leaving Penzance in 2013 to take up a new post in Bristol. The exhibition was delayed several times but finally materialized in January 2018. It was a great success and the fifty page catalogue David Haughton in St Just with a text by Frances Lord joined the sadly meagre archive material available about this outstanding artist, and sold out.
Alison, celebrated for
her “humour and honesty, intellect and integrity, and warmth and wit” is seen
here on the steps to the gallery in September 2013, along with her staff (I’m
behind, and beside her in pink is her hard-working deputy Katie Herbert). She had gained
all manner of awards for Penlee House and had certainly put it on the national
and international art map.
Friday, 19 March 2021
Recollections: David & Friends, Kit & Ilse Barker
Above: PZ Fishing Boat by Kit Barker
St Ives
Stephen writes; When I ventured to West Penwith as a 2nd Year art student, on my own, with a borrowed tent, some sketchbooks and a bread knife, and inadvertently followed in the footsteps of David Haughton, who I hadn't quite got to know yet (he was not my assigned tutor), St Ives was a very different place.
No Tate, of course, and a town practically
closed-down between holidaymaker seasons. On subsequent visits thereafter, when in quick succession I met John Wells, Karl Weschke, Peter Lanyon's widow Sheila and her
children (for afternoon tea), Hilton's newly widowed Rose, and was given space
to roam Patrick Heron's home at Eagles Nest, the town of St Ives was quaintly
silent when off-season, apart from the hammering and sawing of shop-fitters
preparing stores and galleries for the coming season.
There were fewer galleries then, and the opportunities that
now exist for acquainting oneself with the history of the modern art that is
unique to St Ives, hardly existed at all. You were lucky to find a postcard
other than those produced for Bryan Pearce.
How things have changed. Now it seems, every nook and cranny
of the St Ives art story has been investigated, detailed, researched and
researched again. Monographs fill the heaving bookshelves at the Tate shop, and
general art history volumes abound. Chris Stephens in his magisterial St Ives The Art and The Artists (pub
2018) admits, "This is not the first account of 'St Ives', though the
literature is surprisingly scant...". Stephens approaches this huge and
complex subject via the four W's (What? When? Who? and Why?) and adds an
additional So What?
David Haughton gets a mention here and there in Stephens' book and just one painting by DH (the familiar Carne Bosaverne the first (1948) can be seen in a slightly out of focus photograph of a 1952 Penwith Society exhibition. And yet sadly it appears that David would not get a mention at all if it were not for the availability to researchers of Kit Barker Cornwall 1947-1948 Recollections of Painters and Writers by Kathrine Talbot (The Book Gallery 1993).
Dedicated to "the memory of Kit
Barker, David Haughton and Bryan Wynter", Talbot's chronicle of personal
recollections of "little more than eighteen months in West Penwith"
adds hugely to the annals of the time.
see: http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Kit_Barker/Kit_Barker_Kathrine_Talbot.htm
Kathrine Talbot (researchers seem to insist upon Katherine) was of course the pen-name of Kit Barker's wife Ilse. "In 1947," Alison Oldham tells us in her obituary of Ilse Eva Louise Gross Barker, "on learning that her parents had been murdered in the Terezin and Auschwitz camps, Ilse moved to Cornwall to write a novel, never published. The choice of Mevagissey, then home to two writers she had met, Frank Baker and Derek Savage, led to knowing other writers congregating there, including Scots poets WS Graham and Nessie Dunsmuir, pacifist poet Louis Adeane, and her future brother-in-law George Barker. Her monograph Kit Barker, Cornwall, 1947-1948, published by the Book Gallery, St Ives, in 1993, is a rare record of this creative colony. It lists visitors to whom she became close - the deaf South African poet David Wright, first seen "rising out of the harbour like some sea-creature" and, vitally, Kit, then living in a sail-loft in Newlyn, soon to be their first home. The second, Noon Veor, a decrepit cottage above Zennor, made a miserable venue for a fruitless visit by the British Council to see Kit's paintings. Engineered by painters Bryan Wynter and David Haughton, close friends and distant neighbours in other moorland cottages, nothing memorable was said. "It was not as it would have been in a novel."
Kit and Ilse married in London in July 1948. She adopted a pen name because she felt Ilse was too foreign in the post-war era and was reluctant to use Barker because she wanted a literary identity independent of George Barker. The couple moved to America but returned in 1953, when they bought a Tudor cottage on Bexley Hill in West Sussex, becoming for 25 years part of the rural community she described in her monograph A Shared Prospect (2000). It was at their home on Bexley Hill that I enjoyed a wonderful sun-filled visit to Kit and Ilse, enjoying their warm hospitality (and playing the fool in the sun-filled garden - see photo)
"From the gate we looked down the valley to Zennor church tower and a triangle of sea. On the hill to the right (blue with bluebells in the spring, purple with heather in summer and then tawny with bracken), twenty minutes walk across the moors, was Zennor carn and Bryan Wynter's Carn Cottage. More or less the same distance, but in the other direction, going south, was Nancledra and David and Lali's 'Croftpool.' It took us half an hour to walk up from Zennor and the bus."
The internet informs us: Kit Barker (1916 - 1988) was a
British painter born in London on 1916, the younger brother of the poet George
Barker. In 1948 he married the writer Ilse Gross (1921 - 2006), who wrote under
the pen name Katherine Talbot. Barker served in the British Army from 1942 to
1945.
He lived in Cornwall from 1947 to 1948, where he and Ilse were involved with
the artists' colony in St Ives. In 1949 Kit and Ilse Barker they travelled to
the USA where Kit lectured at Skidmore College in New York. Kit later taught
with Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff and David Park at the California School of
Fine Arts in San Francisco (1951 - 1952). During their time in the USA, Kit and
Ilse Barker stayed at Yaddo artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York.
From 1953 Barker lived on Bexley hill, Sussex and travelled extensively in
Europe and the US. Kit and Ilse Barker had one son, Thomas (born 1962). Kit
Barker died in West Sussex in 1988.
St Just:
If you are lucky to be in St Just on a clear blue and sun
filled day with the sea glittering in the distance, (early May is a good time)
you will see how the light bounces off the pavement and the granite walls
bringing a clarity to the eye and a stillness, on quiet days, to the scene that
somehow almost wraps around you.
This was the experience of David Haughton visiting St Just for the first time
in the spring of 1948, by bicycle from Nancledra with his friend and fellow
painter Kit Barker.
"I discovered St Just, by taking a bicycle trip with
Kit Barker," David related to me in 1980, "he lived in a cottage half
way between Bryan Wynter and myself; he had come down at my invitation or
recommendation, just as I had come down at Bryan's... We didn't get the whole
way, because it was a long distance we cycled over. We got as far as Levant
Mine. But I felt an extraordinary sort of 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 after, that I got my bicycle out very early in the morning and cycled in
that direction, all along the coast road... But it wasn't just like finding a
girl that you know is important to you, something else happened..."
David's 'discovery' of St Just was a dramatic "turning
point" for him, one he could only explain in terms of the
"divine" and of transcendence. The experience was akin to what
mystics have found; "It was what is called a mystical or religious
experience,” David explained to me, “Which is quite unlike anything else in the
world. It was as though the whole place had become a kind of living being and
that the universe was totally harmonious."
Since that spring day St Just became the source of almost
all of David's work and preoccupied him for the next forty three years.
In her poem Cornwall 1947 Ilsa Barker wrote;
Out of the drowning waters of the war
the painters climbed, their palettes dark with hope,
eyes on the jetsam of the sands...
Victorious derelicts of peace.
they fought the khaki nightmares of their past,
alive to the beginning of their own time...
David Haughton: Carne Bosaverne the first (1948)
Sunday, 18 March 2018
DAVID HAUGHTON IN ST JUST
WORK OF ART:
As a past student of David Haughton (Central School Year 1973-76) and later as a staff colleague of his at the Central School of Art (1979-1985), I had great pleasure in organizing a one-man-exhibition of the work which had survived his studio fire at Holland Park, at the private gallery in Regents Park then calling itself The Work of Art Gallery:
I curated the exhibition, printed the posters, compiled the invitation list, sent out the invitations, and hung the show with the help of my good friend and fellow Haughton enthusiast Noel Betowski.
It was well worth the effort providing David with a feel-good factor ahead of his impending illness.
It was in April 1983 and I wrote in my journal, " 'Rooftops, St Just' forms the focal point in the main room, opposite the only remaining large abstract from the 1960s. All looks neat and assured, The drawings are a delight. David seemed pleased with the result, having been unwilling at first. He has had little energy or enthusiasm for the project. The exhibition sadly serves as a sharp reminder of how much the fire claimed."
I'm pleased to recall the late Dr David Brown attended the exhibition and went away planning that the Tate should purchase 'St Just Houses' for their Modern British collection.
David's friend and fellow painter, Kit Barker, (with whom David had "discovered" St Just during a cycle ride in the late 1940s) also attended the preview. It was a happy occassion.
PENLEE HOUSE:
Most recently I have once again had the honour of reminding art lovers and curators of the remarkable talent that was David Haughton. I instigated the recent exhibition ‘David Haughton in St Just’ at Penlee House Gallery and Museum (12 January - 17 March), an exhibition planned to be curated by me (though events proved this was not to be) and ultimately curated by the museum's director with the assistance of David's daughter, the writer and art lecturer Frances Lord.
Once again art viewers have been delighted and surprised by the quality of this very individual artist's mastery of observation and personal technique. The exhibition was long overdue. Penlee's press release states,
"Although David Haughton’s work has been included in group shows, notably at Tate St Ives and the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, in the 1980s, this is the first time since his death in 1991 that a solo exhibition has been organised."
The director of Penlee explained,
“David Haughton was an important player in the St Ives art movement of the 1950s that included major artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. I sincerely hope that ‘David Haughton in St Just’ will raise awareness of the contribution that this artist made to 20th century art, not only in Cornwall, but on a national level.”
St Just-In-Penwith:
St Just town mayor Brian "Clemo" Clemens (pictured here - centre right - with the Town Mayor of Penzance, Dick Cliffe, and consorts) attended the exhibition to give St Just's seal of approval to the exhibition's emphasis upon David Haughton's continual observation, over many years, of this inspirational town.
David's stay in West Penwith was short lived. He moved back to London in 1950. However, he returned every year for 30 years, often bringing small groups of students with him. The exhibition at Penlee House showcased over 40 paintings, etchings and drawings that David made of St Just between 1948 and 1979.
MESSAGE OF THANKS:
Former student of David Haughton, Chris Gough has kindly written to me saying,
"I first spotted your blog in May 2014 and was delighted as a fellow ex Central student to read of David's show.
Although David didn't take my year on the regular Cornish drawing trip he and I did a substantial amount of walking both during my time at Central ('69-72) and for several years after. I have David to thank for introducing me to both serious walking and serious looking. If I was with him the two were usually combined!
So/but the real reason for writing is to say a huge thank you for all your work over what seems to have proved to be a sustained period promoting and organizing a wonderful tribute to a unique artist, teacher and man.
Last week I took the train down from Broadstairs via Paddington staying the night round the corner from the museum and the next day spent a wonderful morning enjoying the show followed by a taxi ride to St Just itself. Lunch in the Star Inn and bus back completed a magical day. Caught the train back and still reeling from the experience!"
Thanks Chris, I am glad weather conditions didn't interrupt your visit as it did for a few days of snow, during which Penlee Gallery was forced to close. West Penwith can be full of surprises!
Cape Cornwall Road, 2018
David Haughton: "Cape Cornwall Road"
Houses St Just, 2018
(photos Stephen Prince)
Tuesday, 15 March 2016
MORE RECOLLECTIONS OF DAVID HAUGHTON
Past Central School student Bob, ("St Just class of '81 and '82"), writes;
"I am pleased to see that David is likely to get more recognition for that stunning body of work."
 |
| DAVID HAUGHTON |
 |
| David Haughton oil painting (St Just) |
"My own memories of David are from a five year period between 1980-1985, in London, Cornwall and when he came to visit the Reyntiens' in Somerset while I was recovering from illness there during the Spring of 1984 before I returned to Central."
 |
| Patrick Reyntiens, former Head of Fine Art at the Central School of Art & Design. He is notable for his work on Liverpool's Roman Catholic Cathedral and on the new Coventry Cathedral in collaboration with the artist John Piper. |
Allan Wilkie, Mark Rafter and myself (as well as two other older ex students of his whose names escape me -Jerry?) helped him to clear out his house after the fire. The memory of those two or three days spent sifting through the charred remains of his life's work had a profound and lasting effect upon me. He didn't pay us for our time as such and I doubt we would have accepted anyway."
 |
| Natural History Museum, london |
A real tutorial in how to look."
 |
| ("Carn Bosavern" by Bryan Wynter circa 1954.) |
- O -
Due to planned maintenance work within the galleries at Penlee Gallery & Museum, Penzance, the DAVID HAUGHTON exhibition has been postponed until January 2018.
This gives the team at Penlee extra time to gather interest and promises of loans, and for this blog to find its way to even more Haughton enthusiasts and collectors.
If this includes you, please do not hesitate to email me at stephenprince.artist@yahoo.co.uk
(www.stephenprince.co.uk)
....................................................................
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)