Betty Swanwick - part 1

Betty Swanwick c1948

Very early in her career, Betty Swanwick established herself as an illustrator and designer of great wit and invention, so complementing her friend and teacher, Edward Bawden. Later, she produced an extraordinary series of visionary watercolours and drawings in the tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, which led to her election as a Draughtsman Member of the Royal Academy. She was born on 22 May 1915, the elder daughter of Harry Swanwick, who developed as a marine watercolourist while serving as a Paymaster in the Royal Naval Reserves. She was baptised at St Peter’s Church, Aldborough Hatch, near Ilford, Essex. Swanwick was educated at a local LCC elementary school, and later at the Prendergast Grammar School, Lewisham, South London. She received her first lessons in art from her father, and was encouraged by her art mistress at the Prendergast. Her father died when she was ten years old, a loss that threw her upon her own determination to develop as an artist. During her formative years and into early adulthood, Swanwick would continue to live in South London, first at Forest Hill and then at Sydenham. At the age of fifteen, she entered Goldsmiths’ College School of Art, where she was encouraged by Clive Gardiner, the Headmaster, and Edward Bawden, her tutor. Four years later, she received scholarships to both the Central School of Arts and the Royal College of Art, and attended them at the same time as Goldsmiths.

Swanwick received commissions even before such friends and contemporaries as Carel Weight and Denton Welch. As a result of seeing her work at a student exhibition at Goldsmiths in 1936, Frank Pick commissioned her to design her first posters for London Transport, and other projects soon followed. In the same year, she returned on a part-time basis, to teach Illustration at Goldsmiths, as a successor to Bawden. Highly talented – and highly respected by her students – she taught at Goldsmiths through the Second World War, and became a full-time Senior Assistant in the Illustration School in 1948. During this post-war period, she developed her range as an artist, painting watercolours and murals, providing illustrations for books and periodicals, and designing further posters.

Having begun to illustrate books from 1939, Swanwick produced her own texts, for both children and adults, from 1945. Describing her idiosyncratic social comedies for adults as ‘novelettes’, she populated them with large-headed wide-eyed figures with tiny feet. Though they hardly hinted at her later, more spiritual preoccupations, the images amply demonstrated her instinctive wit, her innate sense of design and her skilful draughtsmanship. As a whole, the publication of these books marked an important step towards the recognition of her originality, John Betjeman calling Hoodwinked (1957), ‘strange, startling, funny with a weird beauty’. In 1950, a rare solo exhibition at The Little Gallery provided a showcase for Swanwick’s anthropomorphic watercolours, which combined her love of animals and sense of fun in the most delightful way. Her mural designs, for venues such as the Festival of Britain (1951) and the Evelina Children’s Hospital (1955), were equally successful manifestations of her jaunty early style.

Soon after the retirement of Clive Gardiner from Goldsmiths in 1958, Swanwick became aware that the new Principal, Patrick Millard, was introducing changes in methodology that favoured the avant-garde. Most damaging for Swanwick was that drawing in general, and illustration in particular, was marginalised. Increasingly ostracised by those who represented the new order, she would seek solace in artistic certainties, and so carried with her a facsimile of one of Samuel Palmer’s sketchbooks. She eventually resigned as Senior Lecturer in 1970, and left her home in Greenwich for Downgate, Tidebrook, Sussex. By this time, Swanwick was working increasingly on large-scale figurative watercolours and drawings, and exhibiting them regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Gradually receiving some recognition, she was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1972, and a Royal Academician seven years later. She was also elected a member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1976.

In the poetry and intensity of the late narrative pictures, there is a level of achievement that suggests that Swanwick had overcome earlier anxieties. Yet there was something in her character that stopped her being as well known as she might have been. She preferred to spend her time working – and, as a perfectionist, completing work with difficulty – at home, and in the company of her dogs, her cats and Jobo, her African Grey parrot.

On returning to Greenwich in 1973, Swanwick taught again at Goldsmiths for one day a week and continued to do so for five years, by which time she had settled in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Swanwick died in hospital, in Tunbridge Wells, on her birthday, 22 May 1989. She left her money to four charities: the Celia Hammond Animal Trust, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.

Footnote: My wife (illustrator Pauline Ellison) and I live in Tunbridge Wells. We knew Betty well and enjoyed afternoon teas at her cottage in the “Village” area, accompanied by her talkative (rude) parrot. She was a lovely lady; when she gave up working at the easel she gave her three-legged “easel stool” to Pauline:

                                       

This is part 1 of a 2-parts  on the works of Betty Swanwick:

1936 To the fields
colour lithograph poster for London Transport
101.6 x 63.5 cm 

1936 By Green Line
colour lithograph poster for London Transport
101.6 x 63.5 cm 

1936 To the farms
colour lithograph poster for London Transport
101.6 x 63.5 cm.

1936 Smithfield Club Cattle Show
colour lithograph poster for London Transport

1936 Fly away in Sussex
colour lithograph poster for London Transport
101.6 x 63.5 cm

1937 Life Study
 pencil on paper 25.5 x 47.2 cm

1937 Kew Gardens
colour lithograph poster for London Transport
102 x 64 cm

1937 Kew Gardens
colour lithograph poster for London Transport
102 x 64 cm

1937 Chestnut Time Bushy Park by Underground
colour lithograph poster for London Transport

1938 London Transport for all occasions
colour lithograph poster 102 x 64 cm

1945 Cover of The Cross Purposes by Betty Swanwick
"The Garden Party"
 published by Editions Poetry, London

The Cross Purposes
The Brother and Sister.

The Cross Purposes
The Ceremony

1949 Enjoy Your London Underground
No.4 The River
colour lithograph poster for London Transport

1949 Enjoy Your London Underground
No.4 The River

1949 Enjoy Your London Underground
No.4 The River

1949 Poster for London Transport
colour lithograph 13 x 62 cm

1949 Poster for London Transport
detail

1949 Poster for London Transport
detail

1949 Poster for London Transport
colour lithograph 17 x 62 cm

1949 Poster for London Transport 
detail

1949 Poster for London Transport 
detail

1954 Wild or Savage
colour lithograph poster for London Zoo
 102 x 64 cm

Hoodwinked: Written and Illustrated by Betty Swanwick
front cover

Hoodwinked: Mr. Fox’s suicide.

Hoodwinked: Madeleine, Cora, Castor, and Gemma.

Beauty and the Burglar: written and Illustrated by Betty Swanwick

Beauty and the Burglar: Coshing Class

c1960's  The Mercat Dream
watercolour, pencil and gouache on paper
23 x 32 cm

c1967 Preparatory Sketch for "The Pool"
pencil on paper 64 x 35 cm

c1967 Preparatory Sketch for "The Pool"
(size not given)

1970 by The River: Study for The River pencil and watercolour on paper 48.3 x 50.8 cm 

1970 Original menu card for the Spread Eagle restaurant, Greenwich, London

1973 Selling England by the Pound
cover of the fifth studio album by the English progressive rock band Genesis

c1974 Preparatory sketch for The Wilderness Regained
pencil on paper 27.5 x 35.5 cm

1975 The Flight of the Doves
pencil, watercolour and gouache on paper 43.2 x 52.1 cm

1975 The Eye of the Beholder
pencil on paper 26 x 51 cm

1976 The Strange Reply
watercolour on paper 46 x 48 cm

1976 The Awakening
pencil on paper 32.5 x 56 cm
exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 1978

1978 Primavera and the Sleeping Gardener
pencil on wove paper
Royal Academy Collection, London

1978 Pandora
pencil & watercolour on paper 62 x 51 cm
exhibited in the Royal Academy of Arts, Summer Exhibition 1979

1979 The Monaghan Shroud
pencil on wove paper 54.8 x W 62.5 cm

1980 Romanoff Conservatory
(Conservatory on Romanoff Lodge, Tunbridge Wells)
 pencil on paper 26.5 x 27 cm

1980 One amongst us
pencil & watercolour on paper 48.3 x 58.4 cm

1980 Design for a cat scarf
pencil on paper 65.5 x 65.5 cm