Leading With Great Gusto...

David Haughton
photographed by Roger Mayne

The basic facts of David Haughton's life remain obscure, perhaps beyond reach. The few words written about David are simply repeated in anthologies of "St Ives" art and his exhibition listings remain scant and incorrect.

If you can help put a little flesh onto the bare bones of David's story please get in touch with me at stephenprince.artist@yahoo.co.uk

sketchbook page: David Haughton

Those of us who still retain, upon our bookshelves, a copy of 'British Painting '74' (Arts Council of Great Britain/ Hayward Gallery), will appreciate that David was well enough considered at that time, to find his place at the Hayward Gallery in the summer of 1974, amongst a varied array of significant and prominent British artists including Howard Hodgkin, Edward Burra, R B Kitaj, Alan Davie, Bridget Riley, Kenneth Martin, Patrick Caulfield, John Bellany, Terry Frost and Roger Hilton.

Compared to other pages in the catalogue the biographical notes on David Haughton (pp75) are minimal indeed. There are just two dates. Born 1924: "early life spent in India. Educated St Lawrence College, Ramsgate and the Slade School of Art. Painted in London and Cornwall." / and 1974: "Living in London and teaching at the Central School of Art and Design."

Similarly scant details about David elsewhere suggest the picture of a quiet and private man who had little need for self promotion. The large gaps in his biography surely reveal David just got on with living, the day-to-day, and of painting, and teaching.

At least the 'British Painting '74' catalogue lists his part in "Six Cornish Painters". This exhibition toured Canada in 1955/ 56 and was written about in one of Norman Levine's books (indeed, Levine wrote the introduction for the catalogue).

The Tate's "St Ives 1939-64" catalogue of Spring 1984 does a little better. At least there is a fine Roger Mayne photograph of David taken at the Central.

I would truly love to hear from other past Central School of Art students who remember David. There are many out there and we all have our separate recollections. For instance I recall David talking enthusiastically about Cot Valley near St Just, and his belief that there were fairies thereabouts.

Following the fire at his home and studio in Holland Park, David was in bad shape.  I remember giving him a paperback novel based on the Ridley Scott film 'Alien'. He read it and loved it! David would have identified with the scientist or doctor in such a sci-fi scenario. He spoke to me of his move towards abstraction and of

"measurements down to ten thousandths of an inch...
gradual understanding and knowledge...". 

David Haughton: oil on canvas Green Grid (36 x 28in)

On a lighter note Noel Betowski recalls,

"I do remember some very long walks along the beaches and cliffs, taking in Cot Valley, Cape Cornwall , Geevor and then much further up along the coast which David lead with great gusto. David would have been about 52 at this time and the fresh air and country living seemed to give him a big boost of energy, he had a great sense of humour and could be very witty, a side to him I had not seen while in the studios at the Central.

David was never pompous or patronising, he enjoyed his pint and darts in the evenings after a day spent drawing out on the cliffs, he seemed to be in his element while cooking for everybody in the house, curries were his speciality particularly with banana in, it had to be simmered all day in the biggest saucepan he could find, no fast food allowed here..." (Noel Betowski, July 2011)

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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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CARN BOSAVERN: Indebted to Wallis

David Haughton's "Carn Bosavern the first"
(oil on canvas on board, circa 1948)

Carn Bosavern cottages from a c19th engraving

Carn Bosavern on the edge of St Just-in-Penwith is both a place and two rows of dwellings. From here everything that is the great Atlantic is quite close by. When the wind is in the right direction you can hear the sea at your very backdoor, as if the roaring waves had sent their sound from secretive Porth Nanven right up through Cot Valley.

The granite outcrop that is the Carn overlooks a network of small farm fields, Tom Thumb’s Stone (with its suggestion of human sacrifice), Cot Valley, Kelynack, and the land’s end culminating just beyond Britain’s final hill, Chapel Carn Brea (which sports Land’s End’s solstice beacon). On a clear day the lighthouses of the Longships and Wolf Rock are in clear view, as will be the Scilly Isles if the light is right. Betwixt and between lies submerged the mythical lands of Lyonnesse.

The longest section of Carn Bosavern, that is, the longer of the two rows of cottages with their backs to the Carn, face the town looking down across rooftops, to the parish church and to Botallack and Pendeen. From this vantage point one might assume the town practically unchanged since David Haughton’s day. The Atlantic Ocean forms an unchanging backdrop.

The discovery of the small grey granite town of St Just whilst on a bicycling trip with Kit Barker, was for David Haughton a revelation. "It wasn't just finding a new place," David told me, "it wasn't just like finding a girl that you know is important to you, something else happened. It was what is called a mystical or religious experience. Which is quite unlike anything else in the world. It was as if the whole place had become a kind of living being and that the universe was totally harmonious. I can't honestly describe it, and I couldn't describe it then. One can just mouth words which have no meaning... And then I went into the town and... all I can say is that I knew there were certain boundaries beyond which this thing didn't work... it was in fact one of those experiences that really do change people's lives."

"I had to start all over again, I had to start measuring," David continued, "there was no longer any freedom, and I made a drawing out of which I made a painting, which was irregularly shaped hardboard and I put some canvas over it. I was to that extent indebted to Wallis for the eccentric shape, but in fact it exactly fitted the image. I then went on from there, always drawn back to the place..."

The row of cottages known as Carn Bosavern here seen  as

the minor details at the top of a detailed drawing made from the

 vicinity of St Just's parish church looking back towards the Carn
(detail: "St Just Rooftop" David Haughton, drawing 1958) 

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Teaching ART...

              David Haughton teaching at the Central School of Art in the 60s.

Pear Drops...

Unbeknown to many, David is part of the history of St Just. His paintings record a St Just before modern changes and they therefore have a story to tell. Indeed, my next door neighbour on the Carn could remember as a child watching David setting up his easel amongst the disorder of the old goose pens and hen runs at the rear of the cottages. He could recall how David shared out boiled sweets to all the local children who came to appease their curiosity. The artist sketching Carn Bosavern with a pocket full of pencils and sweets!
All those years later at the Central School of Art (now Central St Martins) David would still in the late 1970s and early 1980s produce a crumpled white paper sweet bag from his pocket and offer you a pear drop - his favourites!

CARN BOSAVERN

... I never imagined I would "live" in a David Haughton drawing. Yet, I did for a while, until I gave up my cottage in St Just for an apartment in Penzance. And for several years the drawing that had been a gift to me from David, that had moved with me from London to Nottingham, to Cheltenham, to Tewkesbury and finally to Cornwall, hung in the very cottage that it portrayed, one in the long row of old miners’ cottages known as Carn Bosavern in St Just-in-Penwith.
Carn Bosavern is both a place and two rows of dwellings. From here everything that is the great Atlantic is quite close by. When the wind is in the right direction you can hear the sea at your very backdoor, as if the roaring waves had sent their sound from secretive Porth Nanven right up through Cot Valley.
The longest section of Carn Bosavern, that is, the longer of the two rows of cottages with their backs to the Carn, face the town looking down across rooftops, to the parish church and to Botallack and Pendeen. From this vantage point one might assume the town practically unchanged since Haughton’s day. The Atlantic Ocean forms an unchanging backdrop.

Some six miles from Land’s End far-flung St Just is a place of contrasts, and as a town known for its isolation and desolation, for newcomers at least, an acquired taste. John Halkes has written, “St Just polarises attitudes. It is, perhaps to do with its uncompromising position, architecture and climate. Either one loves it for its emptiness, bleakness and mystery – or one is irked by its cold and windswept uncertainty.”

In the drawing no.20 Carn Bosavern is mostly obscured by the little cottage you can see in the foreground, which is actually at the end of the garden of no.20. It is impossible to find where David sat to draw this quite detailed rendering as today it is quite overgrown with gorse and brambles.

St Just - in - Penwith

St Just as it appears in a 19th century engraving:

St Just from Bosvargus Hill