Rebecca John and Dominque Lacloche
In Great Britain’s Brexit-burdened summer of discontent, gleams of light have been generated by her scientific and cultural industries. One such gleam radiated from the Tristan Hoare Gallery in Fitzroy Square in London’s Bloomsbury district.
The Hoare Gallery is one of the best showing spaces in the capital. It contains the very grand, south-facing drawing room of an old Fitzroy Square private house. Bare-boarded and white painted, empty of furniture now, the main showing space is nevertheless peopled by ghosts. The Bloomsbury Group of artists and intellectuals dominated Britain’s cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s. You can imagine Leonard and Virginia Woolf coming to tea, T.S. Eliot dropping in for a drink on his way home from the Faber office in nearby Russell Square, John Maynard Keynes chatting about a new acquisition to a rather silent E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell flirting with a woman in a corner, the young Freddie Ayer and the young Stephen Spender listening to their elders and plotting some competition. The Tristan Hoare Gallery summer show, Botanica, had a theme, The Trembling of a Leaf, title of a novel by Bloomsbury contemporary William Somerset Maugham. Maugham’s books outsold all the others combined so he lived in the South of France. Multifaceted, an anthology of stylistic difference, the show offered fascinating variations on the theme of Botanical Art.
Rebecca John, whose watercolour of the title page of Maugham’s symbiotic novel, which is shown opposite, is in my view, now Rory McEwen has gone our foremost botanical artist. McEwen’s work was also exhibited. John’s most recent works are exquisite watercolour images of books, antique books especially. We are used to books appearing in classical still lives. It is startling, surreal even, to see them painted on their own. This artist happens to be the granddaughter of an important painter of the Bloomsbury era, Augustus John. Indeed John’s great swagger portrait of
Lady Ottoline Morrell, who kept the leading salon of the day, is perhaps the iconic Bloomsbury painting. Henry Lamb’s portrait of Lytton Strachey and Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of Eliot would also be contenders.
Dominique Lacloche’s immense and startling Gunnera Leaf reveals botanical rather than Bloomsbury genes. Her mother, Arabella LennoxBoyd, has designed gardens all over the world. The Lacloche leaf, much the largest work in the show, has the impact of a great abstract painting. More than ever one becomes aware that all styles in art are rooted in the natural world.