Author: The British School at Rome

The BSR houses several records relating to the artist and Rome Scholar in engraving, Job Nixon (1891-1938). Nixon was an artist active across several mediums but was training in engraving during his time in Rome. Catalogues of his works were kept in the BSR archive, and these make note of the name of the print, its size and material. It is also indicated whether or not a piece was sold, and, if so, how much for.

Photographs were also taken of some of Nixon’s works. This is a sketch composition created by Nixon in preparation for his engravings. It speaks to the long process of engraving, which was a delicate and skilled task. The need to make sketches as part of the design process meant that engravers had to be multi-talented. Nixon himself went on to become a renowned watercolourist, a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of engraving.

This image depicts a tavern scene. Note the intricacies of the work, with all the details of people’s hair, faces and clothes, from the figures in the foreground, to the individuals at the back, situated as if they were amidst this bustling scene. The shading and various thickness of the lines was made by varying the depth of the incision made to the metal plate upon which the paper was pressed.

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For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

Engraving onto a metal or wooden plate is one of the oldest printmaking techniques in the world. Before the invention of photographic reproduction, engraving was especially important for the reproduction of illustrations for books, newspapers, and journals. For example, numerous engravings and etchings of the historical buildings of Rome, stored in the BSR’s Library, helped to circulate knowledge about ancient architecture around the world. Thomas Ashby (director of the BSR during 1906-1925) inherited from his father a collection of Renaissance prints, including a volume by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). At the time of the establishment of the Fine Arts Faculties in 1913, engraving had seen a revival beginning in the nineteenth century.

Artists enjoyed this technique as it allowed them to achieve the finest level of detailing, control over the composition and a possibility to produce multiple prints. In the BSR archive, you can find photos of engravings created by resident artists Job Nixon (1891-1938), Lilian Whitehead (1894-1959), Robert S. Austin (1895-1973), Evelyn Gibbs (1905-1991) and others. The Faculty of Engraving was established within the BSR following the end of the First World War — in 1920, with the donation of philanthropist Stephen Courtauld. From its inception, the Faculty was chaired by Frank Short (1857-1945), a prominent artist, teacher of engraving, etching and drypoint, and the revivalist of techniques of mezzotint and pure aquatint.

The Faculty aimed at providing a continuous graduate-level education to promising artists and, as a result, to revive the art scene back home by building connections to the ‘source’ of European culture and artistic craft — Rome. Most engraving scholars arrived at the BSR from Royal College of Art, but also from the Slade School of Fine Art, the Royal Academy School, the School of Art in Liverpool, Birmingham School of Art, and other institutions. One to three scholarships were awarded per year to the most successful engravers who could live and work in the BSR’s purpose-built arts studios for up to three years. Job Nixon was the first engraving artist awarded the scholarship in 1920. He was followed by Lilian Whitehead and R. S. Austin in 1922. Later in the this period the prizes went to Charles Murray (1894-1954) in 1923, William E. C. Morgan (1903-1979) in 1924, Edward B. Hoyton (1900–1988) in 1926, Frederick G. Austin (1902-1990) in 1927, E. S. S. Jones in 1927 and the third women winner of a Rome Prize at the BSR, Evelyn Gibbs in 1929. The Rome Prize for Engraving later was renamed as a prize for printmaking.

The BSR’s engravers produced numerous studies of Roman architecture, but also travelled outside of the ancient capital with the fellow painters to find subjects for their work in the countryside. The area of Anticoli Corrado, for example, was especially popular thanks to its scenery and local community.

So how exactly is an engraving made? Firstly, the design is incised into a metal plate or a block of wood by hand. To do this, an artist uses a burin — a delicate chisel with a small diamond-shaped tip. Incised grooves can be deep or shallow, applied at various angles and with different density. This allows the artist to control the amount of ink that the plate will hold during printing. Burins of different sizes can be used to adjust the hatching by adding finer lines, dots and strokes. After the design’s incision is complete, the plate’s surface is inked and wiped with a starched cheesecloth. Now the plate is ready for printing. While it is possible to produce a print by manually pressing the paper against the plate, most professional engravers roll dampened paper placed on top of the inked plate through the mechanical press to apply pressure evenly. The resulting image on paper produces a reverse impression of the incised design. Plates wear out with each printing, so it is possible to create only a limited number of prints. Each engraving made from the same plate is referred to as an ‘edition’.

Click here to see the process of making a contemporary wood engraving by the BSR Alumna Anne Desmet.

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Sources and Further Reading

Griffiths, A. (1996) Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques, London: British Museum Press.

Campbell Fine Art https://www.campbell-fine-art.com/ 

Wiseman, T.P. (1990). A Short History of the British School at Rome. Rome: BSR.

For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

Job Nixon (1891-1938) was skilled in oil and watercolour painting, but is remembered principally for his expertise in etching and engraving. He studied at the Royal College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art before winning the Rome Scholarship in Engraving that entitled him to a three-year stay at the British School at Rome, which he took up from 1920 to 1923.

While in Italy, he stayed with his fellow scholars Colin Gill, Jack Benson, and Winifred Knights at Anticoli Corrado, a hill village in Lazio, which had a long-standing connection to the artists of Rome thanks to its picturesque scenery. Several engravings of the time show his appreciation for the village’s dramatic placement as it was set into the Italian hillside. The records that he left at the BSR show also his appreciation for the Italian people, with sketches and engravings portraying love and life in Italy’s towns and countryside, including a studious and detailed engraving of a busy restaurant. His later works show how he carried this experience with him, with further etchings, engravings, and drypoints showing Rome, Florence, and Subiaco, and others from visits to France. His works also reveal his connection to other artists also studying in Rome at the BSR. One engraving of the Temple of Venus and Roma in Rome, for example, depicts Winifred Knights sketching the world around her. Nixon is similarly noted to have served as a model for her.

Following his stay in Rome, he taught at the Engraving School at the Royal College of Art, before transitioning into watercolours. He became a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1928 and exhibited with them frequently. Though these reflected his training in engraving, some were particularly well-received. He moved to St Ives for a spell, briefly running a painting school, before returning to London to teach at the Slade in 1935. He died soon after in 1938 at 47. During his lifetime he was prolific in his work, and his paintings and engravings are now widely distributed across a number of art galleries and public collections.

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Sources and further reading:

Modern British Art Gallery / LissLlewellyn / Meisterdrucke / TrentArt / ArtUK / British Council – Visual Arts / Manchester Art Gallery / The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art / Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tamaki / NGV

For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

The son of fishmonger, Henry, and mother, Annie Louisa, Frederick O. Lawrence (c.1893-1971) was born and brought up in Liverpool in the north west of England. In 1913 Lawrence received a Certificate from the Liverpool School of Architecture, and was called to military service with the onset of the First World War. He served as a corporal in the Royal Engineers, spending some time in Egypt during the campaign. In May 1920 he was awarded the prestigious Rome Scholarship in Architecture, the first post-war award, for his competition entry to design the Houses of Parliament for a British colony.

The BSR’s Archive holds press clippings and letters documenting Lawrence’s admission. His proposal for the design of Courts of Justice was appreciated by the jury who supported references to classical tradition and highly developed draughtsmanship skills. Lawrence joined the BSR community, along with other recipients of the Rome Scholarship of 1920, such as engraving scholars Lilian Whitehead (1984-1959) and Job Nixon (1891-38).

In the BSR Archive, one can leaf through multiple studies of classical Italian architecture produced by Lawrence during his residency. In particular, the attention of the architects were directed towards the restoration of buildings in Ostia, the former thriving port city of ancient Rome and a site of ongoing archaeological excavations since the beginning of the nineteenth century. His field trips and studies of Ostia’s buildings resulted in a series of drawings which he called Ostia: From the Capitol to the Tiber. In one of the drawings, we can see focus fixed on the ‘actual’ ruined state of the Capitol and the restoration proposal with the elevation to the river Tiber. Other drawings show the proposal for the general plan, restoration of Ostian historic houses, the Bazaar, and the historical storage building Horrea Epagathiana et Epaphroditiana. You can learn more about the approach to architectural practice at the BSR’s Faculty of Architecture in the Architecture at the BSR page.

After completing the Rome Scholarship, Lawrence joined architectural practice Bradshaw, Gass & Hope before leaving in 1925 to take up a post with Edmund Kirby & Sons, a firm whose founder was renowned for his designs for Roman Catholic churches. Fred spent his life in Liverpool and continued to work in private practice until his death in 1971.

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For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

Frederick O. Lawrence (c.1893-1971), like the other architects at the BSR, worked in the genre of restoration drawing. Their practice involved studying the Roman buildings and archaeological remains that surrounded the Scholars in their residency and proposing a vision for their restoration.

One of the major tasks that the Rome Scholars in Architecture were expected to complete during their tenure was designing a restoration project for an ancient part of Rome or other Italian cities. In the absence of computers, architects honed their draughtsmanship skills. They scaled the building’s measurements down to a drawing working with simple tools such as a scale ruler, a compass, a T-square, and a drawing board. Lawrence’s project involved a restoration of Ostia, the ancient port of Rome. Lawrence envisioned redesigning it in the classical style, as if it were to be restored to its former glory.

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For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

Lilian Whitehead (1894-1959) was a British printmaker and painter. She was born in Bury, Lancashire, to the family of a newspaper proprietor and publisher. Whitehead studied at Bury School of Arts (1912-1914), Manchester School of Art (1914-1917), and the Slade School of Fine Art (1917-1918). Her works were exhibited at the Baillie Gallery, New English Art Club, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in London and the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. In 1921, at the age of 27, Lilian Whitehead was awarded the Rome Scholarship by the BSR’s Faculty of Engraving, becoming the first woman to hold this award. She joined Job Nixon, the Rome Scholar for Engraving of 1920. Many copies of her prints and engravings, along with photo portraits, and correspondence are held in the BSR archives. 

During the first two years of the scholarship, Whitehead did preparatory drawings and designs for engraving plates, travelling across central and northern Italy. The files at the BSR’s archive allow us to map her itinerary: Whitehead’s sketches and drawings were made in Orvieto, Subiaco, Perugia, and Siena. In one of her reports, Whitehead notes that, while in Rome, the artist enjoyed visiting “galleries, museums, and the churches, studying especially the mosaics” in which she was “very interested”. After preparatory sketches, studies and designs were complete, Whitehead moved on to finalise compositions for the etching plates and drypoints during the third and final year of her tenure at the BSR. 

Whitehead’s etchings and drawings often capture scenes from quotidian life in Italy, revealing connections the artist established with Italian people outside of the School. Among other settings, she depicted Italian orchestra musicians, a barkeeper at work, a scene at the coffee show, a waiter, a girl sewing, and groups of tourists exploring Rome. The artist also produced images of Italian historical architecture: Porta Romana in Orvieto, the view onto Perugia, and the Roman Forum. Whitehead reported being overwhelmed with Rome’s variety of ideas and possibilities, so it took her considerable time to settle on the final designs. 

Some of the notable etchings produced during her residency at the BSR and later exhibited in the UK are St. John the Baptist, Bubbles, Candlelight, and A Waiter. These works allow us to see the formation of Whitehead’s personal style and mastery in depicting light, movement, and atmosphere.  

On behalf of the BSR’s Faculty of Engraving, Lilian Whitehead requested books and journals that are now held at the BSR’s library. These are, for example, collections of Goya’s etchings, the catalogue of works of a Scottish etcher and watercolourist Muirhead Bone, examples of etchings by French and British artist Alphonse Legros and other publications which trace historical and contemporary influences Whitehead was exposed to while in Rome. 

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Sources:

Lilian Whitehead, Modern British Art Gallery: https://www.modernbritishartgallery.com/works__A_204__.htm

British School at Rome Administrative Records / Awards and Funding Bodies / Visual Art / Rome Scholarship in Engraving

For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

The BSR holds several items relating to the engraver and 1921 Rome Scholar Lilian Whitehead (1894-1959) in its archival collections. Many of these items have been preserved in the archives as copies of prints, as well as photographs of the original presses.

Here are some that have been preserved through glass photographs.

Many have been preserved in both mediums.

Some have been preserved as physical copies only.

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For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

Amyas D. Connell (1901-1980) was the 1926 Rome Prize winner in Architecture at the British School at Rome. The BSR archive holds collections of Connell’s drawings and plans made in Rome, a testament to his study of the classical tradition at this time, before he went on to work on modernist projects such as his collaboration with Bernard Ashmole on High and Over (1931). In the archive we can find several photographs of unfinished drawings Connell made and show the various stages of his working process.Other images show how he paid attention to the architecture around him, including an unfinished representation of the Capitol building, now the home of the Capitoline Museums on Capitoline Hill.

The Rome Scholars in Architecture were also expected to design a restoration project for some of Rome’s ancient ruins. Connell chose to centre his project on the Villa of Tiberius on the island of Capri.

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For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

Amyas D. Connell (1901-1980) was born in South Taranaki, New Zealand, to the photographer and drawing teacher Nigel Douglas Connell. In 1926, he was awarded the Rome Scholarship. Examples of Connell’s work, along with some of the correspondence, are included in the collections of the BSR’s archives. 

Like other Rome Scholars in Architecture, such as Frederick O. Lawrence, during his residency at the School, Connell was working in the genre of restoration drawing. Through on-site measurements, research and masterly draughtsmanship, Connell produced a project of restoring the Tiberius villa on Capri Island. Rome Scholars from the faculties of Decorative Painting and Sculpture were often invited to collaborate with architects on restoration projects. In the BSR’s archives, we can see the result of such a partnership between Connell and the painter Rex Whistler (1905-1944), who painted trees for Connell’s reconstruction project of the Tiberius Villa on Capri. While architectural projects are usually attributed to one person, we can see webs of collaborations behind the façade of individual authorship through these documents. 

Acquaintances made by Connell at the British School of Rome significantly influenced his later professional career. The BSR’s director at the time of Connell’s scholarship was the professor of Classical Archaeology at London University and head of classical sculpture at the British Museum, Bernard Ashmole (1898-1988). Ashmole became Connell’s friend and client. After completing the Rome scholarship, they collaborated with Ashmole to design a ‘modern villa’ for the professor and his family. 

The villa in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, also known as the ‘High over Park’ estate, was the first suburban residence in the UK built in the so-called ‘International’ style. At the same time, Connell and Ashmole shared knowledge and appreciation of classical Roman heritage. Modern ideas about the organisation of living introduced by such architects as Le Corbusier were a decisive driver behind the concept of the estate. In contrast to a more traditional understanding of the architectural profession advocated by the creators of the Rome Scholarship, in this project Connell leaned towards a practical sense of domesticity in architecture. Among other features, he designed a functional kitchen with ‘labour-saving’ appliances, a glass-covered stairway that allowed natural light into the building, spacious and airy interiors, and other innovations qualifying rather as artefacts of modern engineering than fine arts. The iconic Y-shape of the building was erected with the help of modern materials: the concrete frame and blocks and created three different facades opening the views on the Misbourne valley. 

Two villas — the restoration project Tiberius villa on Capri island and the modern ‘High over Park’ estate — exhibit drastic differences in Connell’s work during his tenure at the BSR and after the scholarship’s completion. These different projects allow one to understand the professional twists and turns an architect could undertake in their approach to the profession at the beginning of the twentieth century. 

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Sources

High and Over, Amersham Museum: https://amershammuseum.org/history/on-the-hill/high-over/.

The House of A Dream. Footage of High and Over. British Pathe (1931) https://www.britishpathe.com/video/the-house-of-a-dream.

Dennis Sharp Archive Collections. https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/archives-and-library/archive-collections/dennis-sharp.

‘English Houses of the Thirties’ (1975). Amyas Connell interview with Geoffrey Baker in A305, History of Architecture and Design 1890–1939, The Open University: https://dezignark.com/blog/a305-15-english-houses-of-the-thirties/.

Benton, C. (2004). ‘Connell, Amyas Douglas (1901–1980)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sharp, D. and Rendel, S. (2008). Connell, Ward and Lucas: Modernist Architecture in England. London: Frances Lincoln.

Thistlewood, D. and Heeley, E. (1997). Connell, Ward and Lucas: Towards a Complex Critique in The Journal of Architecture, Vol 2, Spring 1997. London: The Royal Institute of British Architects/Routledge.

For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.

Architecture, along with Decorative Painting and Sculpture, was one of the founding faculties of the British School at Rome. The establishment of the faculty coincided with the launch of the Rome Prize in 1913 that facilitated the mobility of young British architects to Rome. The prize, granting the winner a professional residency and scholarship in Italy in a prolific community of artists and scholars, followed the traditional French ‘Ecole de Beaux Arts’ model with its prestigious ‘Prix de Rome’ scholarships awarded once per year to the most gifted architecture graduate by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The scholarship, tenable for up to three years, aimed at raising professional standards by building connections to Rome seen as a source of European architectural tradition.

As with any prize, it favoured certain forms of practice and quietened others. The initiators of the scholarship, the president of the RIBA Reginald Theodore Blomfield and renowned British architect Aston Webb, advocated systematization of architectural education in accordance with the ‘classical’ tradition, and were wary of the new tendencies sweeping the profession. Contemporaneous modernist and avant-garde experiments questioning the social role of art and architecture from France, Germany, the USSR or even the London-based Vorticism movement, were openly resisted by the decision-makers behind the Prize. The Prize, in turn, rendered architectural education primarily as an arts-based training which placed architectural drawing and a comparative study of historical styles at the core of the curriculum.

Thanks to the Rome Prize, the BSR archive holds numerous studies of ancient buildings and ‘imaginary’ restoration proposals as the scholarship supported the study of important historical (classical and Renaissance) architecture across continental Italy and in the islands of the Mediterranean. To develop restoration projects, resident architects conducted direct measurements of historical buildings and ruins using just a tape measure, pen, and paper. Scholarly expertise on the analysed buildings was provided by resident historians and archaeologists. Surveying was therefore a time-consuming and arduous process, requiring lengthy field trips and extensive professional collaboration.

At this stage, after necessary examinations were completed, architects received inputs from mural painters and sculptors, produced a graphic representation, and proposed a restoration project as a final project of their residency. In the absence of computers, architects honed their draughtsmanship skills. They scaled the building’s measurements down to a drawing, working with simple tools such as a scale ruler, a compass, a T-square, and a drawing board. One of the earliest examples of such work is attributed to the first Rome Scholar of the Architectural Faculty (1913), H. C. Bradshaw. Bradshaw conducted a study for the restoration project for Praeneste (Palestrina), an ancient city east-southeast of Rome, in collaboration with the student of the Archaeological Faculty Mary Taylor and presented the results in a series of ‘Beaux-Arts’ style drawings.

From 1922 scholars were also permitted to collaborate on original design projects. This initiative allowed the BSR to leave a tangible material imprint by developing sculpture and mural decorations for international building and memorial projects. Among other contributions, sculptures were created to decorate Ploegsteert Memorial (Belgium), the Guards’ Memorial in St. James Park (UK) or Norwich Town Hall designed by the Rome Scholar S. Rowland Pierce. To maintain the adherence to classical tradition, it was required that each project had a “precedent in ancient or Renaissance architecture”. Modern building typologies and materials were discouraged. The restriction, however, did not stop some of the Rome Scholars. For example, see the project for a country house ‘High and Over’ (Amersham, Buckinghamshire) designed for, and in close collaboration with, the archaeologist and BSR director from 1925 to 1928, Bernard Ashmole, by the 1926 Rome Scholar Amyas D. Connell (1901 – 1980). Despite the criticism and fear surrounding the new tendencies in architecture, the architect executed the project in a daringly modern approach.

As well as Bradshaw, Pierce and Connell, other architecture Rome Scholars in this period include Frederick O. Lawrence (1920), S. Welsh (1922), R. A. Cordingly (1923), G. A. Butling (1925), R. P. Cummings (1927) and J.B. Wride (1929).

One of the aims of the BSR was to establish a library, where English travellers could find information about Italian history and culture. The Faculty of Architecture took part in selecting books for the collection. For example, as we can see in this letter from 1922-1923, the department purchased a study of Genoese Palaces and expressed an interest in five volumes on palace architecture in Northern Italy and “American periodical publications”. Due to this focus, the department avoided purchasing books written by contemporaneous leaders of the modern movement such as Le Corbusier and Bruno Taut. Despite the fact that their world-famous theoretical treatises, Towards a New Architecture (1927) and Modern Architecture (1920), were recently translated to English, these publications did not make it to the BSR library.

Sources and Further Reading

High and Over, Amersham Museum: https://amershammuseum.org/history/on-the-hill/high-over/.

The House of A Dream. Footage of High and Over. British Pathe (1931) https://www.britishpathe.com/video/the-house-of-a-dream.

Dennis Sharp Archive Collections. https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/archives-and-library/archive-collections/dennis-sharp.

Campbell, L. (1989). A Call to Order: The Rome Prize and Early Twentieth-Century British Architecture. in Architectural History, vol. 32, pp. 131–151.

Wallace-Hadrill, A. (Ed). (2001). The British School at Rome: One Hundred Years. Rome: BSR.

Wiseman, T.P. (1990). A Short History of the British School at Rome. Rome: BSR.

For a full bibliography and further reading, see here.