Diary & Memoir extracts for December 1929
3rd Dec 1929:
Mother had to go to a sanatorium last Saturday; I wish Father would get a rest.
[unknown date]:
I feel very nervous about my exhibition. Nobody seems to be selling at all. All the Galleries I have visited are the same. So what chance do I stand, I don’t know.
Memoir • [unknown date]:
When Richard visited his mother, she described a ‘bonny' Mrs. Green who was dying of TB. She wanted to meet Richard and ask about painting. He did go to see her and struck up a correspondence.
The room was very different from Mother’s. It was light and airy . . . But it was rather like a pet canary’s cage and the wounded bird was lying in the bed her thin arms stretched out over the bedspread ending with hands that looked rather large and long. But her face, though emaciated and her hair cut short like a boy’s, was certainly bonny.
In one of my latest letters to her I told her I was painting a small portrait of her from memory [Mrs Green (1930)]. I wasn’t at all sure what her reactions would be but she seemed to feel nothing but pleasure at the idea . . . She perfectly understood my feelings about it as she must have known that we would not meet again. Not long after this I had a letter from Mother, who had gone home again, telling me she had heard from another patient that Mrs, Green had been removed from the sanatorium as she was an ‘obstreperous patient’ to a nursing home where she died shortly afterwards.
[unknown date]:
Preview Day
My drawings were to be hung in the first room through which everyone had to go to get to the other galleries.
I strolled in in the afternoon at 2.30 to find the place empty . . .
I was just going out to get the paper [with a review in it] when Bill Wilkinson and wife came in. He was much impressed with the show and said he expected I should get rid of half of it! ... if only I could . . .
People began coming in thick and fast after 3 o’ clock. Mostly for the other two shows in the Gallery . . .
Lady Lavery wished to be introduced to me. She was wearing a black velvet shapely jacket with a most astonishing flower pinned to it, a luxury that must have cost something. She had come to see the other shows but found mine much more interesting! A number of people said the same thing . . .
One lady who I was told to be affable to . . . said she thought (her false teeth clicking) that people wanted coloured pictures at this time of the year!
A Miss Julia Bower was the first to purchase. I wish her the best of thanks. She selected ‘The Girl with Large Eyes’.
The show happened just a couple of months after the Wall Street Crash, but Richard’s turned out to be one of the best-selling in London at that time.
He met Christopher Wood there for the first and only time. This meeting left a great impression on him.
Memoir • [unknown date]:
I turned to the young man with great interest as I had much admired recently some water colours and drawings by Kit Wood which showed a vision of almost child-like clarity combined with draughtsmanship of undoubted mastery. So I asked if he was Christopher Wood and he replied that he was. We talked for some time about each other’s work and then he too left the gallery which became less populated as the afternoon was nearly over. In less than a year he was dead.
12th Dec 1929:
Last night I had a note from the Goupil asking me to call round as they had an offer for a drawing or two. The little cockney doorkeeper greeted me with a grin saying that his favourite: ‘The Charlady Bows’ was not sold yet! But otherwise they had been selling like hot cakes yesterday!
18th Dec 1929:
Concert by the Oriana Madrigal Society… Bax’s ‘Mater Ora Filium
Bax himself was there with that creature Harriet Cohen who was made up like a clown. Freda Swain the composer, wife of Alexander (pianist), a magnificent specimen of humanity, huge and delightfully fresh-looking and quite unaffected. Sir William Rothenstein also there. The English Folk Dance Society’s team gave a splendid performance of the Northumberland Sword Dance.