eardley knollys 2016

Eardley Knollys

Eardley Knollys 1902 – 1991

2016

www.messums.com

28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NGTelephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

Works from the Studio Estate

“Despite all my interest in other peoples’ pictures, I never knew I could paint. It was after the war, when I was going abroad with Edward Le Bas…“Of course, you’re going to paint too”, he said... although I said I couldn’t. Ten days later, when he left me to go to Lucca to meet Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, I was unable even to sleep for thinking about painting pictures. [But] I never looked back.”

It was perhaps inevitable that Eardley Knollys become an artist, albeit rather late in life. A scion

of minor aristocracy, after studying at Christ Church, Oxford, he inherited estates whose income

freed him to pursue a love of watercolour. His early love of prints and drawings possibly compelled

him towards a brief career in advertising at Lever Bros. and J. Walter Thompson. Hoping to break

into the film business, he then left for Hollywood, where he spent a year and a half, followed

by the obligatory pre-war travels in Europe. Eventually, he became private secretary to Viscount

Hambledon, owner of W. H. Smith, but was so skilled at managing both Lord Hambledon’s finances

and his properties, that a few years later Knollys took up a second career. He became an art

dealer.

Around 1936, he became partners in the Storran Gallery, a small space near Harrod’s established

by Ala Story, an Austrian dealer who showed works by Pavel Tchelitchew, Ivon Hitchens, Frances

Hodgkins, Christopher Wood and Victor Pasmore. Story’s assistant was Frank Coombs, a young

member of the London Group, who later became the great love of Knollys’ life. When Ala Story

moved to California, Knollys bought her half of the business. Knollys and Coombs organised

themed and monograph shows of works by Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso, Vlaminck, Derain,

Picasso and Modigliani, dealing on a sale-or-return basis, unimpeded by either overhead costs or

their modest premises. Lady Ottoline Morell was a regular client, and in addition to Duncan Grant

and Graham Sutherland, they befriended many of the artists they showed. In 1937, they moved

to Albany Court Yard off Piccadilly, a small, but brilliantly configured space, thanks to Coombs’s

sophisticated mix of artificial and natural lighting. The gallery continued after the outbreak of

WWII, despite Coombs joining the Royal Navy. (Knollys worked on a farm in Dorchester.) However,

in the spring of 1941, Coombs was killed in a Belfast air raid. Knollys was devastated and while he

continued to buy and sell pictures, eventually he closed the gallery.

He began to work as an assistant to Donald MacLeod, secretary of the National Trust. James Lees-

Milne soon joined them and became one of Knollys’ closest friends, despite their different tastes and

politics. The two men shared a common passion in the growing plight of English heritage. (Lees-

Milne had previously helped to set up the Country Houses Committee.) As more and more owners

of country houses faced losing their properties in the wake of dwindling funds, servants and heirs,

they looked to the National Trust for support. Knollys became responsible for advising properties

in Wales and Wessex, including Avebury Manor, whose Neolithic stone circle he championed to

the Trust and which is now considered second only to Stonehenge in archaeological importance.

Eardley Knollys

After the War, Knollys moved to Dorset, where he joined Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-

Taylor and later Raymond Mortimer in forming a salon at Crichel House, near Wimborne. This small,

Georgian rectory became a cultural haven, where guests included Sybil Colefax, Anthony Asquith,

Graham Sutherland, Lord Berners, Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Henry Reed, Rose Macaulay,

Laurie Lee, Ben Nicolson, Cecil Day-Lewis and Graham Greene.

By 1958, Knollys resigned from the National Trust to devote himself to painting. He moved from Long

Crichel to Slade Hill House, near Petersfield in Hampshire. He shared this modest former hunting

lodge with Mattei Radev, a Bulgarian picture framer, with whom he shared a close, platonic

friendship. Painting from the studio he built there, his sense of composition nevertheless remained

framed by London windowpanes, and he later said: “I tend to see things framed in a rectangle,

and once struck by a composition I have to make a drawing of it and take it to the studio. I do like

a ‘workshop’. [But] I can’t paint in my flat, there are too many memories.”

Knollys spent his later life in Hampshire painting, cooking and giving dinner parties – that were as

likely to include one of the Sitwells as his cleaning lady – in rooms hung with paintings by Grant,

Hitchens, Sutherland, Alfred Wallis, Winifred Nicholson, Lucien Pissarro and Sir Matthew Smith,

whose works strongly influenced Knollys’ decorative Fauvism. When Knollys died in 1991, Radev sold

the house and moved his collection to London, where he effectively preserved it intact until his own

death in 2008. That year, the collection was exhibited for the first time in a dedicated exhibition at

Pallant House in Chichester.

Earlier Duncan Grant had written: “It has been about twenty years since I first saw a canvas by

Eardley Knollys. What I felt then was the integrity of his courageous enthusiasm – courageous

because it seemed to me relatively late in life, like Gauguin, he was burning all the boats in his

dedication to painting.”

Knollys said of his own work: “I have always loved bright strong colours – muddy ones seem to me

symbols of gloom. This led me to the Pont Aven and Fauve painters, and they remain my favourites.

But I soon discovered – as they did – that youth and exceptional genius are needed to apply

blazing colours so recklessly... I try to drive along the splendid roads they opened – in my own car

of course and with some personal diversions.”

The mixture of salon culture, country-house parties, old school and Charvet ties that colour Knollys’

life might have been lifted straight out of P. G. Wodehouse (although it’s doubtful he would have

found this comparison flattering). Nevertheless, the enduring point of Knollys’ life was pleasure: the

joy he took in painting, and the joy he took in sharing it with such a supportive, stimulating circle

of friends.

Andrea GatesDirector

Lan

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1. The Younger Trees

oil on canvas63 x 76 cms 243⁄4 x 297⁄8 ins

2. Reflections at Mottisfont


3. Clumps of Trees


4. Cityscape

oil on canvas76 x 61 cms 297⁄8 x 24 ins

5. Reflections

oil on canvas71 x 91 cms 28 x 36 ins

6. Blue Poplars

oil on canvas71 x 91 cms 28 x 357⁄8 ins

7. In the Drome

oil on canvas 66 x 46 cms 26 x 181⁄8 ins

8. The Chalk Heap


9. Olive Grove


10. Summer, Renishaw


11. Pink Blossom


12. Thames Warehouse


13. Hampshire View


14. View from Window, Le Touquet

gouache on paper55 x 43 cms 211⁄2 x 167⁄8 ins

15. Earthworks


16. May Tree


17. Landscape in the Var, Provence


18. View from the Studio, The Slade


19. The Valley


20. Crofton Hall Lake


21. Spring Blossom


22. Hampshire Fields

oil on paper45 x 65 cms 171⁄2 x 251⁄2 ins

23. River Valley, Hampshire

lithograph46 x 56 cms 18 x 22 ins

24. Hampshire Landscape

lithograph76 x 56 cms 30 x 22 ins

Still

life

25. Still Life with Chrysanthemum

pastel28 x 53 cms 11 x 21 ins

26. Dahlias


27. Omega Roses


28. Chianti Bottle Still Life


29. The Pink Bowl


30. Poppies in Purple Vase


31. Black Vase Yellow Flowers

pastel61 x 47 cms 24 x 181⁄2 ins

32. Still Life with Pears


33. Still Life: Lemons Peaches and Cucumber


34. Tulips


1902 Born Arlesford, Hampshire on November 21

1920s Oxford University, founder member of Antony Eden’s Uffizi Society.

Working in Hollywood in various studio roles aiming to be a film director

1930–40 Secretary to Lord Hambleden, owner of W. H. Smith

1935 Moves to Belgravia, where he will have his London base for the rest of his life

1935–40 Proprieter Storran Gallery, Brompton Road, London

1942–57 National Trust, agent and representative for South West England

1945 Shares Long Crichel House, near Wimborne, Dorset, with the music critics Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor (later joined by a third critic, Raymond Mortimer)

1949 Takes up painting on the urging of his artist friend Edward Le Bas

1949–64 Contemporary Art Society committee member

1957–72 National Trust committee member

1960 First one-man exhibition, at the Minories, Colchester

1965 Exhibition Hambledon Gallery, Blandford

1966 Leaves Long Crichel House and recreates a smaller version of this rural idyll at The Slade, near Alton, Hampshire, with Mattei Radev

1970–1984 London exhibitions at the Wilton, Mansard, Green & Abbott, Marjorie Parr, Alwin, and Achim Moeller galleries

1985 Exhibition Achim Moeller Gallery, New York

1986 Exhibition Southampton City Art Gallery

1987, 1989, 1991 Exhibitions Michael Parkin Fine Art, London

1991 Died London on September 6

1999, 2001 Memorial exhibitions, Bloomsbury Workshop, London

2002 Exhibition Messum’s Cork Street, London




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CDIX ISBN 978-1-910993-01-9 Publication No: CDIX Published by David Messum Fine Art © David Messum Fine Art

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage

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ISBN 978-1-910993-01-9

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eardley knollys 2016

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