Forgotten Artists - Part 1

Two or three weeks ago Jim at The Truth About Lies was kind enough to send me a DVD which he thought might interest me and might even form the basis of a post. He was correct on both counts. The DVD was a BBC Wales production, a recording of a documentary put out on the life and work of Mildred (Elsi[e]) Eldridge. Who? Well, exactly, that was the point of it. I have always had more than a passing interest in the question of how it is that poets, artists and others who were highly regarded in their day, were even thought to be important, can come to be disregarded, neglected even, by later generations. Sometimes they bounce back, but not always. There are many reasons, of course why they fall into disfavour. Sometimes it will be that they were simply over-rated and couldn't stand the test of time. At least, that's the explanation most often given. Sometimes they just become unfashionable. But saying that begs the question of why some are then reinstated when the new fashion has passed, but others are not. Mildred Eldridge hasn't so much been neglected as completely forgotten. It is incredibly difficult to turn up any information on her. Pop Mildred Elsie Eldridge into Wikipedia and it will ask you if you meant Mildred Eddie Eldridge. Try reducing it to Mildred Eldridge and it will offer you other Eldridges, but not Mildred. The BBC Wales production relied very heavily on the memories of her son, Gwydion, and various friends and neighbours.

So who was she, this mysterious person? She was a painter and illustrator. The title of the documentary was Mrs R. S. Thomas. That's right, she was the wife of R.S.Thomas, the Welsh Priest and Poet. Try Mildred Elsie Eldridge in Google and you will be offered a few references, mostly in Welsh, to do with the BBC documentary or the odd book reference, the majority of which are books that she illustrated. Some of these illustrations were to be found on the web, but what I have been unable to find so far (with one exception - more of that later), are any usable images of any of her paintings - of which it is said she produced over one thousand. Google Mrs Thomas and you will get her husband by the page load.

Let's begin again, back at the beginning: she lived and went to school in Wimbledon, South London, was utterly miserable at school, and eventually escaped to The Wimbledon School of Art. I could find very little about her childhood and early student days (R.S. Thomas's autobiography is about him, not her), but we find her a few years later, one of the most successful students at The Royal College of Art. She is something of a work-a-holic - at least that is probably how she would be described these days - working until 9.o'clock every night. Which seems to have paid off, for when it came to her final exhibition, she was the first student to sell all of her exhibits. Move on a bit and she is a successful artist, critically, financially and socially. She has a series of one-man shows, the most notable probably being the one at London's Beaux Arts Gallery. She has travelled on a scholarship across the continent to further her studies, and you would have had to part with a small fortune to pay for one of her paintings from a London Gallery.

There was a downside. She felt she was in danger of being sucked in to the social whirl, and decided that she needed to flee the bright lights, both for that reason and to escape the clutches of an unwanted lover. Maybe it was that which was her undoing, so far as posterity is concerned. She took off for the solitude of the Welsh borders, which was where, eventually, she came to meet R.S.Thomas. He was not at that stage either a fully ordained priest or a known poet. He was just beginning to make his way. They found themselves in the same lodging house, Bryn Coed, though his account merely says, rather ambiguously and somewhat disingenuously that she was lodging fairly close by. In fact, she was teaching at the Oswestry Grammar School. It must be true to say that her world was very different from his and that her horizons were far broader than his. She dressed very much in the Bohemian style, in stark contrast to Thomas, who was from a Bourgeois family from Holyhead. R. S. and Elsi (she would henceforth be known as Elsi) Eldridge were married in Llanycil, on the shore of Bala Lake on 5 July 1940. Many years later he would write the following, recalling their life together.

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
`Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance, And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

So now I have fallen into the trap. Time after time, looking up a reference to her, I would find information on, or work by, not her, but R.S.Thomas. Gwydion recalls that as a boy he used to wonder which of his parents would eventually be the more famous. People are always remarking to him, he says, on how prolific was his father, with over 2000 poems, though her 1,000 paintings must have compared very favourably. It seems to me there are two main reasons for her neglect: one I have mentioned, her self-contrived isolation from the centre of things, from other artists and critics and from the social whirl that might have kept her work before the public eye; and, not unrelated to that, the fact that her work was (and is) mainly in private hands and not in important collections or public galleries. There was one exception. A commission to paint a mural, The Dance of Life, for the staff canteen in the Gobowen Orthopaedic Hospital. It was a huge undertaking for someone who had no studio, being composed of six panels and in all a hundred and twenty feet long. Physically this would have been a daunting task at the best of times, but to make it more so, the family moved house when the work was half way through. Gwydion maintains that the mural can be compared to the Whistler panels. Alas, they are not still in situ but were taken down in 1950 to facilitate alterations to the hospital, and have been in store since then.

It has proved extremely difficult to uncover any images, even of the mural, which must be considered her major work. Gwydion maintains that the time has come for her to be given her long over-due notice and critical acclaim. For that to happen, it might not be a bad idea for those who have access to her works to make them known on the web. It seems to me that would be a good place to start.

I have been able to find only three tiny details (more accurately, one tiny detail - shown above - and two microscopic ones) from the mural and a couple of her illustrations,shown further down. They are illustrations to Walter de la Mare's Journey Round My Skull. Many commentators seem to suggest that the reason for her eclipse was R.S., that she lived in his shadow. It's true that she did, though it was from choice. Gwydion says she chose not to go her original route, and that is true. Furthermore, in many ways she facilitated Thomas's poetry - but that's another story, and not one, I would think, that impinges on our neglect of her..

I had intended this post to be a look at forgotten painters and sculptors in general, but I have found Elsi compelling enough to have devoted the whole of it to her. Maybe I will fulfil my original intention at a later date.

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Haiku #231

Breathe easier now -
the swine 'flu pandemic is
history, my friend