A Quiet word from the List Mistress - From the Hayward's Library

From the Hayward’s Library

The bookplate - or ex libris is a label placed on the inside of the front cover of a book.  It is a miniature art form that has developed specifically to adorn books; it is a way of identifying a book’s owner and the collection that it came from.  It says - this book is mine!

Two bookplates used by Ursula Hayward (nee Barr Smith)

Bookplates production began  in the 1500s when Albrecht Dürer and other German engravers and print makers began creating highly decorative bookplates, often featuring armorial devices and coats of arms for wealthy individuals and institutions.  As the fashion for ornamental bookplates spread, distinctive national styles also evolved.

In more recent times, bookplates have been designed by many important artists and engravers.  The owners of bookplates are also a distinguished group - not surprisingly, Queen Victoria had her own bookplate, as did George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles DeGaulle. Other famous people include Harpo Marx, James Cagney, Sigmund Freud, Walt Disney, J.P. Morgan, Jack London, the list goes on and on.

Many techniques and media are used in the creation of bookplates these include woodcut and linocut, engraving, etching, simple pen and ink and screen-printing.  The fact that it is all done on such a small scale plays an important part in the execution of book plate design as is the use of fine papers and elegant hand printing.

Two of Ursula Hayward’s personal bookplates can be seen here.  One with her maiden name of Ursula Barr Smith dates from before her 1935 marriage and appears to reflect the trading interests of her forebears.  The other later, more stylish plate was designed by the Sydney artist Adrian Feint (1894-1971).  Adrian Feint and Ursula developed a longstanding personal friendship and he was well known for his bookplate designs.  Feint worked for the artist and book publisher Sydney Ure Smith who was another of the Hayward’s’ many artistic friends.

The Collection Library also holds a specialist volume: Woodcut Bookplates; byP Neville Barnett, with a foreword by Lionel Lindsay, published in 1934 as a limited edition of just 275 copies.  It includes many wonderful bookplates designed by Australian, English and European artists and includes the personal bookplates of the World War II dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.  

A selection of bookplates found in books the Hayward’s library



In the year of the centenary year of the birth of Patrick White, regarded as one of Australia’s most significant 20^th authors, it has been interesting to discover this wonderful bookplate that was used by his uncle Henry L White (1860-1927). Adhered to the inside cover of an 1862 publication written about the Colony of South Australia it reflects the diverse interests of both the original owner and the Hayward's love of books.

Ex libris collectors have created an international network by establishing societies in forty-one countries and every two years an International Ex Libris Congress is held in a different country inviting members of the world’s bookplate societies to attend.

For more information about collecting bookplates visit the website of the Australian Bookplate Society @ http://bookplatesociety.com

The Keeper's Random Ramblings - Stylish watering inside the house

Ursula Hayward had a particular passion for growing and arranging cut flowers for her home.  She even had a Flower Room for the purpose designed into the house.  It has a sink, shelves for storing the vases and other equipment  and then a special shelf flap, disguised as an oak panel, that lets down into the Hall so the arrangements can be moved into the house by the servants.

 Once the flower arrangements were in position they would have to have their water topped up, and for this task there are two brass watering cans.

They are no longer used but are displayed in the Flower room and the job is now done with a less stylish but practical yellow plastic watering cans.  However; fresh flowers remain a central part of the life of the house and each week one of four teams of volunteers arrives on a Tuesday to clean out the old flowers and change over the arrangements.  They continue the tradition of cutting fresh flowers and foliage from the gardens and then selecting suitable containers from the Flower Room to make arrangements in six rooms.  Ursula Hayward was a great fan of Constance Spry and her innovative approach to arranging flowers.  There are a dozen or more books by her in the collection on the art of flower arranging (see recent biography ‘The Surprising Life of ConstanceSpry’ by Sue Shephard).  This British woman almost single-handedly changed the approach to arranging flowers, breaking it free from highly architectural arrangements and the dominance of white blooms of 1920s  and 1930s. Her use of unusual vessels for arrangements and informality in their assemblage brought a refreshing visual richness to interiors breaking away from rigid symmetry.
Ursula Hayward acquired three antique cradles and had the copper trays made to line their bottoms so that arrangements and pots of colour such as orchids could be brought into the house.

A quiet word from the List Mistress - William de Morgan lustre ware bowl

Collection of the Carrick Hill Trust, Adelaide; Haywood Bequest.

Accession No: C1983/436

This large gleaming lustre ware bowl catches my eye every time I walk into the Music Room where it usually sits centre stage on a carved Georgian oak pedestal side table 

Although this bowl is not physically marked it is unmistakably the design style of William de Morgan (1839-1917) one of the great practitioners of the English Arts and Crafts movement.  William de Morgan was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and a personal friend of William Morris and he began working for Morris as a designer and painter not long after the establishment of the Morris & Co. company in the 1860s.  William de Morgan is mainly known for his wonderfully bold and dynamic ceramic designs, in particular hand painted tiles, but he was as a designer of stained glass and a painter of furniture panels.   

I find it interesting to reflect on the fact that Ursula Hayward’s paternal grandmother, Joanna Barr Smith had furnished her large family homes almost exclusively with Morris textiles – carpets, curtains, embroideries plus wallpapers and other decorative arts objects.  Many of these items are now in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia and the young Ursula would have been familiar with the look of the many Arts and Crafts style objects that would have been on display in these houses.   

William de Morgan is credited as being the first of the English potters to rediscover the secrets of antique lustre effects but he was a primarily a designer and decorator rather than a hands-on potter so the undecorated bowl may have been actually been produced as a blank by another factory.  The earthenware body is covered with a beautiful ruby lustre glaze on an ivory ground and features a frieze of 5 large seated boars surrounded by de Morgan’s typically stylized leaf and floral motifs, the inside of the bowl is undecorated.  This bowl may have been decorated and fired at the Sands End Pottery at Fulham, London that de Morgan had moved to in 1888 or perhaps this was done at one of the other top art potteries that abounded in the area at that time.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has a large covered vase worked in a similar style however their vase is rather more exotic than this one as it features an all-over design of bold, sinuous mythical beasts and  stylized foliage.  

link to blog: http://victorianpeeper.blogspot.com.au/2007/07/victorian-things-vase-by-william-de.html

References:

The William de Morgan Foundation, London http://www.demorgan.org.uk/collection

Metropolitan Museum of Art   http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/23.163.2ab

British Pottery: An Illustrated Guide by Geoffrey A Godden pub. Barrie & Jenkins Ltd, London, 1974 p.223-226

Musings from the Backwater Blogger - From the artist's window 1938

Stanley Spencer, Great Britain, 1891-1959

From the artist’s window 1938

 I can’t help it with Stanley Spencer’s work, I am intrigued. How could one not be? He was eccentric, intense, apparently had a wonderful sense of humour, and was obsessed until death by his first wife Hilda. He maintained contact with both his wives (he never consummated his second marriage to Patricia Preece) and loved his village, Cookham, were he was born and spent virtually all his life.

The Haywards purchased four flower paintings by Spencer in 1938. I am drawn to them all but the one that fascinates me the most is From the artist’s window, Cookham 1938.  It seems so fresh and celebratory that it is hard to believe that at the time he painted it Spencer was struggling with so many demons which were manifesting themselves into a series of erotic paintings. This painting engages more than just my visual sense. I can feel the clean spring breeze that makes the lace curtains move gently and I can imagine the heady perfume of the jonquils (when they flower in my garden their rich smell always make me sneeze). That smell is mixed with the delicious odour of linseed oil, turpentine and oil paint. The jonquils are simply plonked into the enamel basin with some water and the space at the window seems ambiguous and precarious. Are the flowers just dropped there because Spencer is busy on one of the other flower paintings that is in the Carrick Hill collection? Or have all these flower paintings provided some kind of creative relief from the intensity of working on the erotic pieces? Maybe, as I look out the window past the bowl of jonquils onto the charmingly ordered world of Cookham’s rooftops, there is one of these great works behind me –  open, raw, alarming, confronting – as hard to look at as this still-life is easy.

Like so many works at Carrick Hill, the Stanley Spencer paintings hold a personal connection to the Haywards. The flower pieces link to Ursula’s garden, glimpsed from the windows of her home, and the blooms that regularly filled the house with their scent or rose up in a blaze of seasonal colour in the grounds around the house. Spencer was one of a number of British artists patronised by the Haywards, and Carrick Hill holds nine of his works - eight paintings and a lithograph. He is the most represented British painter in their collection, one of the largest groups of Spencer’s works outside Great Britain.  At the time that the Haywards collected these works (and at one time they also had at least one other) it would have been among the most significant private collections of this major artist’s oeuvre. How astonishingly forward-thinking they were.

Jane Hylton the Backwater Blogger



A quiet word from the List Mistress - Redoute Rose

Pierre-Joseph REDOUTE  (1759-1840), Weeping Rose, watercolour and pencil on parchment, mounted on paper.  Carrick Hill Trust, Adelaide, Haywood Bequest

 You may not know his name, but chances are you have seen his work as it is now mass produced and appears on decorator items around the world.  It is to be seen on millions of greeting cards,  decorates your daily tea or coffee cup, or hangs as a print or poster on your walls - you might even use these images as your computer screen saver. 

I am talking about the exquisitely drawn images of old roses that are the work of the Belgian born artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté, (1759-1840).  Most people consider him a French artist but he was actually born into a family of painters and decorators who lived in a little village in the forest of the Belgian Ardennes.  Pierre-Joseph’s unique artistic talents took him to the very height of the 19^th century French court where he became attached to the circle that surrounded the Empress Josephine and the court of Emperor Napoleon.  Over a period of fifty years he became one of  the world’s greatest botanical artists and although he is now more commonly known as the ‘man who painted roses’ he actually painted all types flowers and his meticulous studies of primula, iris and lilies are all just as detailed and beautiful as his more familiar ‘old’ roses. 

Redouté also produced some of the earliest known botanical studies of the then strange, and newly discovered, Australian flora that Empress Josephine grew in her extensive gardens at Malmaison on the  outskirts of Paris in the early 1800s and some of these exotic antipodean plants were actually grown in France many years before they appeared in English gardens.  During his lifetime, Redouté’s drawings were published as hand-coloured engravings in expensive, limited edition publications and it was not until the later years of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries that his work became more widely available to the general population as cheaper, mass produced prints.

Carrick Hill has a small but significant collection of French paintings that includes this delicate original watercolour by Redouté.  It was acquired by Lady Ursula Hayward and as far as we know, is the only original work by this artist in an Australian collection.  Little is known about this painting except that it was painted for Redoute's friend, the French novelist and playwright, Honoré de Balzac.

The rose, still with a droplet of early morning dew on its petals is a 'cabbage' or Centifolia rose called Grand Choux Hollandais, originally grown, as the name suggests, in Holland.  The accompanying blue-violet auricular primula is equally beautiful and, at that time was just as exotic and desirable a plant to grow to demonstrate wealth and privilege.   

References:  The Man Who Painted by Roses: the story of Pierre-Joseph Redouté by Antonia Ridge,  pub., Faber & Faber Limited, London, 1974.

Napoleon, the Empress and the Artist: the story of Napoleon, Josephine’s garden at Malmaison, Redouté & the Australian Plants by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, pub., Kangaroo Press, Australia, 1999