April beginnings: "so priketh hem Nature in hir coragis"*

"Sweet Thames run Softly",  Robert Gibbings wood engraving, 1940

"The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms.  Spring was moving in the air above  and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.  It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said "Bother!" and "O Blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.  Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air.  So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again  and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."

The Wind in the Willows,  Kenneth Grahame 1908

"The Wind in the Willows"     Paul Bransom

The first illustrations, by Paul Bransom, were not until the eighth edition in 1913, and many notable illustrators have followed, like Arthur Rackham and E. H. Shepard, but I have always read Kenneth Grahame's story of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Mr Toad in a sibling's 1941 school edition with no pictures, just the excitement of Grahame's words.

As a child, when his mother died, Kenneth Grahame and his sister and brothers were sent to England  to live with their grandmother at The Mount, Cookham Dean, close to the Thames.  Here his uncle, the local curate, introduced him to boats and the river and later when Grahame lived further west at Blewbury with his family, the stories he wrote in The Wind in the Willows were those he had told to his young son Alastair.

  The gardens at The Mount,  Cookham Dean,  Stanley Spencer  1938 © artist's estate

Cookham Reach and Barley Hill,  Stanley Spencer c. 1920

Stanley Spencer grew up in Cookham itself and his paintings of the village and Cookham Lock have made the place famous.  Robert Gibbings was a friend from the Slade Art School, and in 1939 rowed along the Thames in his boat the "Willow" compiling his book Sweet Thames Run Softly.

*"Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages."  The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

Bermuda: "In th' Ocean's bosom unespy'd"

"The strange thing was that when I came to the surface I found that during my time below I had forgotten all rules of perspective and other dicta of the art schools, and that I had drawn everything in proportion of its importance to me.  In the upper world of air we have accustomed ourselves to make subconscious adjustments in our vision, so that an elephant seen a mile away still conjures up an idea of something large, though its actual dimensions on our retina may be no bigger than those of the fly on our boot.

 Under the water all these adjustments vanished, and if a particularly interesting small fish passed in the distance, I found that in my drawing it was depicted very much larger than some dull fellow twice the size who happened to be near at hand.  This suggests a parallel with primitive art, where objects were drawn on cave wall or canvas according to their importance to the artist, and not according to mathematics and laws of optics.  Doubtless, when I have dived more often, I shall begin those accursed adjustments of reason, and may even, in time, write a textbook on the subject.  God forbid!"

Blue Angels and Whales  Robert Gibbings

'Where the remote Bermudas rise'

"Each time I went down I made a drawing: there was no need to wander about and search for a subject; wherever I looked there was something new to draw."

BERMUDA

Blue angel fish pass and repass in scores                           Three miles from the shore a ring of coral rises from deep water

The drawings printed on this and the eleven following pages are direct reproductions from the author's pencil sketches made on Xylonite while he was actually under water.

Blue Angels and Whales    Robert Gibbings

Young Giotto's pigs

" 'Nothing like pigs for significant form, Bob, '  interrupted a small man who had banged the door of an ancient car and come from the road to join us.  Though I did not recognise him at first, there was something familiar about the untidy twist of his necktie and the eager eyes that looked out from under two unkempt shocks of hair.  'Haven't seen you in twenty years,'  he said to me. 'Only heard last week that you were hereabouts.'

'Near fifty years since  the Slade,'  I said at a guess.
'More than forty, anyway,'  he said.

I knew who he was then -- Giotto Junior, as we used to call him because of his obsession with the early Florentine artists and because of the intensity of his own religious paintings.

'Pigs, I could draw them all day long,' he said, 'but they're awkward in a studio.'

Though I had followed his work through the years, I had never known him put pencil to pig.  Saints and angels and humans in mystic communion: allegories, they were his line, at times difficult to comprehend but always combining  a richness of form with minute and loving detail.

As he walked ahead of me towards the cottage I noticed that his shiny blue serge trousers had a slit across their seat, and through it was hanging a wide flap of linen shirt immaculately white.  I said nothing, but when two days later he paid his return visit I saw that the rent had been mended by a rectangular patch of mustard red tweed which spread from side to side of his behind.

'Why, Giotto,' I said, 'What's happened to you? You're all poshed up.'
'Oh yes, I know,'  he said wearily.  'But I'm going to a reception.'

Giotto was the master draughtsman among the students of our generation at the Slade.  Form and its interpretation obsessed him:...  Clean, cold, unrelenting drawing with a hard pencil was the order [at the Slade]:  no 'sketching,' none of the charcoal don't-give-yourself-away school: and Giotto, though physically the smallest student in the class, was with pencil in hand the biggest man among us."

Till I end my Song  Robert Gibbings