Interior Impressions
New Drawings by Trevor Newton
Dartmouth House, Mayfair, 28th September 2017
Introduction & Catalogue
by Dr. Anne Varick Lauder
New Drawings by Trevor Newton
Dartmouth House, Mayfair, 28th September 2017
Introduction & Catalogue
by Dr. Anne Varick Lauder
This exhibition brings together around sixty of Trevor Newton’s drawings inspired by some of the most iconic interiors in Britain and on the Continent. Locations range from London’s Grand Tour-inspired Sir John Soane’s Museum, the opulent Wallace Collection and the quirky Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields, to the lavish state rooms of Versailles and elegant French hôtels particuliers. The display also features Nancy Lancaster’s much admired yellow drawing room in the former Colefax & Fowler showroom in Mayfair, the Rococo-style tea room in the Ritz Hotel in London and the cozy sitting room of Charleston in East Sussex, home and meeting-place of members of the Bloomsbury Group.
The viewer expecting photo-realist images of these familiar places will be surprised. Trevor avoids exactitude. Instead, he bases his drawings on impressions of a place, a detail of a room, an enfilade of rooms, an expansive grand hall, often adding whimsical details from other sources or inventions from his own fertile imagination. ‘I’m not particularly interested in producing a finicky, exact, clear copy of the lines of an interior or building; any decent picture postcard photograph will provide that’, Trevor remarked (personal communication, 2017). ‘My drawings are attempts to convey the emotions generated by art and architecture. I’m not trying to show what a room or building looks like; I’m more interested in showing what it feels like to me personally.’
Occasionally sketching in situ, Trevor will often visit a location and return to his studio to record his impressions from memory, developing a full composition in just a few hours. Experimenting playfully with interrelations of colour, texture, light and reflection, his lively and atmospheric renderings, executed predominantly in dense layers of mixed media – pen and ink, wash, watercolour, wax crayon (occasionally applied with frottage) and white heightening – evoke a theatrical and dreamy wistfulness, spiced with a touch of nostalgia. Adding to their appeal is their ability to capture one of the most elusive qualities of all – memory: memory of the distant past, real or part-imagined, of how things once were, or might have been, and a reminder of how qualities such as style, grandeur and beauty, however faded, can survive the passage of time and continue to ignite our imagination.
Trevor Newton was born in Lancashire in 1959. On his eighth birthday his parents gave him The Observer’s Book of Architecture (1951) and thus began his life-long fascination with buildings. Discouraged with the mathematics and physics required to become a professional architect, he rather devoted his time to conveying the spirit and atmosphere of historic buildings and their interiors through richly-worked drawings. Already familiar with England’s stately homes and country houses, at eighteen he spent a year in Bavaria where he developed an appreciation for the Baroque and Rococo. This experience would strongly influence his work.
At Kings College, Cambridge, Trevor studied Modern Languages, later concentrating on History of Art and Architecture under the supervision of Professor David Watkin. He drew incessantly, with a developing interest in the artifices of pageantry, heraldry and theatre. He designed elaborate May Ball invitations, formal dinner menus and theatre programmes, occasionally turning for inspiration to the work of the designer and illustrator, Rex Whistler (1905-1944), one of the models for Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. Gregarious with a circle of friends that included several now-famous actors and stage performers, Trevor dabbled with acting as well as with debate. After leaving Cambridge, he became the first full-time teacher of Art History at Eton.
Though Trevor received no formal training in studio art, his work reveals a trained art historian’s intimate knowledge of the major art movements and the key artists within them. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s fluent draughtsmanship, seen in his pen drawings, and his dramatically creative approach to printmaking, epitomised in his grandiose and atmospheric Carceri d'invenzione (published in 1750), inform much of Trevor’s approach to drawing buildings and the spaces within them. The ornate and grandiose theatrical designs of the Galli-Bibiena family, active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offered further models for illusory and complex perspective. Indeed, Trevor’s preference for drawing elevations in deep perspective, describing all compositional elements at once, from a single direction, is consistent with that used by architects and stage designers.
Echoes of the painter and designer, John Piper (1903-1992) are detectable in Trevor’s work, particularly in the expressive pictorialism of his approach to buildings, but many of the drawings in this exhibition reveal another inspiration altogether: Walter Gay (1856–1937), an American expatriate painter who spent most of his life in France. Trevor rediscovered Gay through the 2012-2013 exhibition, Impressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay (Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburg; Flagler Museum, Palm Beach). Trevor, following Gay, has chosen to focus exclusively on interiors, chronicling the likeness of many grand examples from eighteenth century France, or nineteenth-century buildings inspired by the ancien régime. To these Trevor has added some well-known British and Continental examples.
What is noteworthy in the interiors of both Trevor and Walter Gay is, with few exceptions, the absence of human beings. Instead, the rooms – usually just a corner or part of a grand vista – and their contents, a chimneypiece, a tablescape or a set of mirrors, become the main event. And yet a human presence remains palpable perhaps in the display of man-made wonders: mantelpieces displaying clocks (cat. nos. 1-6), plaster casts on the walls (cat. nos. 7-11; 13-15) or brackets or cabinets containing precious china (cat. nos. 17-18, 20, 31-32, 36), book-cases with first-editions (cat. nos. 30, 55) or letters and cards casually strewn (cat. no. 26). Drawing rooms with artfully arranged sofas, chairs and pictures (cat. nos. 23-24, 59-60) or tables lavishly set for candle-light dinner parties (cat. nos. 33-35) or breakfasts (cat. no. 21) suggest their occupants are about to enter or have just departed. In the rare cases where human figures are present, they are relegated to the background where they are hardly noticeable (cat. nos. 37-40). Private spaces, such as bedrooms furnished with canopies and swags of silk, are represented as sumptuous refuges where monarchs or heads of state, retreating from society's gaze, can be revealed in their intimacy (cat. nos. 48, 53-54).
Trevor’s drawings – exuberant, stylish and wholly original – have earned him the admiration of many discerning collectors. A group of drawings was commissioned and sold by Christie’s in 2004 (Christopher Howe sale, London), and they have featured in various publications, including Country Life (2001, 2009). The actor, writer and presenter, Stephen Fry, Trevor’s contemporary at Cambridge and a keen collector of his work, observed in 2009: ‘While many of his contemporaries at Cambridge were Footlighting or Rowing, Trevor Newton seemed to spend much of his time drawing and painting…He managed to combine the frivolous and the Baroque in a curious and most engaging manner; Osbert Lancaster meets Tiepolo. Trevor is still drawing and painting as passionately as ever and though the content of his work may be more serious, in style and execution it still has all the youthful energy and verve which characterised it over thirty years ago.’
Professor David Watkin, Trevor’s Cambridge University mentor, remarked in 2003: ‘Trevor Newton has developed over the last few years into one of the most individual, lively and atmospheric of all English recorders of buildings and interiors. His work has a vivacious and spontaneous quality with a memorable handling of line and mass, conveyed through unexpected colours and textures. He will become a cult figure.’
Interior Impressions is the first monographic exhibition of Trevor’s drawings since 2009 and the only one to focus entirely on the theme of interiors. All the drawings on display are of grand or highly individual British and European interiors: appropriately this exhibition takes place in one of the finest private interiors in Britain, Dartmouth House, the former town house of the Baring family and of the Earls of Dartmouth. With its splendid series of reception rooms – several lined with original 18th-c. French panelling – its Louis XVI style courtyard and its spectacular double-flight Baroque marble staircase, the building is not usually open to the public and so a visit to our exhibition offers the added pleasure of a glimpse into one of the country's most imposing domestic interiors. We look forward to welcoming you to Dartmouth House on the 28th of September.
Acknowledgements:
We wish to extend our warmest thanks to Jon Arias-Prieto, Emanuel van Baeyer, Nicholas Bowlby, Gino Franchi, Peter Iaquinandi, Paul Joannides, Anne Lauder, Cheryl Madgwick, Bernard Malhamé, Albert S. Messina, Keith Newton, Marina Somers and Maryanne Wilkins
The viewer expecting photo-realist images of these familiar places will be surprised. Trevor avoids exactitude. Instead, he bases his drawings on impressions of a place, a detail of a room, an enfilade of rooms, an expansive grand hall, often adding whimsical details from other sources or inventions from his own fertile imagination. ‘I’m not particularly interested in producing a finicky, exact, clear copy of the lines of an interior or building; any decent picture postcard photograph will provide that’, Trevor remarked (personal communication, 2017). ‘My drawings are attempts to convey the emotions generated by art and architecture. I’m not trying to show what a room or building looks like; I’m more interested in showing what it feels like to me personally.’
Occasionally sketching in situ, Trevor will often visit a location and return to his studio to record his impressions from memory, developing a full composition in just a few hours. Experimenting playfully with interrelations of colour, texture, light and reflection, his lively and atmospheric renderings, executed predominantly in dense layers of mixed media – pen and ink, wash, watercolour, wax crayon (occasionally applied with frottage) and white heightening – evoke a theatrical and dreamy wistfulness, spiced with a touch of nostalgia. Adding to their appeal is their ability to capture one of the most elusive qualities of all – memory: memory of the distant past, real or part-imagined, of how things once were, or might have been, and a reminder of how qualities such as style, grandeur and beauty, however faded, can survive the passage of time and continue to ignite our imagination.
Trevor Newton was born in Lancashire in 1959. On his eighth birthday his parents gave him The Observer’s Book of Architecture (1951) and thus began his life-long fascination with buildings. Discouraged with the mathematics and physics required to become a professional architect, he rather devoted his time to conveying the spirit and atmosphere of historic buildings and their interiors through richly-worked drawings. Already familiar with England’s stately homes and country houses, at eighteen he spent a year in Bavaria where he developed an appreciation for the Baroque and Rococo. This experience would strongly influence his work.
At Kings College, Cambridge, Trevor studied Modern Languages, later concentrating on History of Art and Architecture under the supervision of Professor David Watkin. He drew incessantly, with a developing interest in the artifices of pageantry, heraldry and theatre. He designed elaborate May Ball invitations, formal dinner menus and theatre programmes, occasionally turning for inspiration to the work of the designer and illustrator, Rex Whistler (1905-1944), one of the models for Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. Gregarious with a circle of friends that included several now-famous actors and stage performers, Trevor dabbled with acting as well as with debate. After leaving Cambridge, he became the first full-time teacher of Art History at Eton.
Though Trevor received no formal training in studio art, his work reveals a trained art historian’s intimate knowledge of the major art movements and the key artists within them. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s fluent draughtsmanship, seen in his pen drawings, and his dramatically creative approach to printmaking, epitomised in his grandiose and atmospheric Carceri d'invenzione (published in 1750), inform much of Trevor’s approach to drawing buildings and the spaces within them. The ornate and grandiose theatrical designs of the Galli-Bibiena family, active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offered further models for illusory and complex perspective. Indeed, Trevor’s preference for drawing elevations in deep perspective, describing all compositional elements at once, from a single direction, is consistent with that used by architects and stage designers.
Echoes of the painter and designer, John Piper (1903-1992) are detectable in Trevor’s work, particularly in the expressive pictorialism of his approach to buildings, but many of the drawings in this exhibition reveal another inspiration altogether: Walter Gay (1856–1937), an American expatriate painter who spent most of his life in France. Trevor rediscovered Gay through the 2012-2013 exhibition, Impressions of Interiors: Gilded Age Paintings by Walter Gay (Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburg; Flagler Museum, Palm Beach). Trevor, following Gay, has chosen to focus exclusively on interiors, chronicling the likeness of many grand examples from eighteenth century France, or nineteenth-century buildings inspired by the ancien régime. To these Trevor has added some well-known British and Continental examples.
What is noteworthy in the interiors of both Trevor and Walter Gay is, with few exceptions, the absence of human beings. Instead, the rooms – usually just a corner or part of a grand vista – and their contents, a chimneypiece, a tablescape or a set of mirrors, become the main event. And yet a human presence remains palpable perhaps in the display of man-made wonders: mantelpieces displaying clocks (cat. nos. 1-6), plaster casts on the walls (cat. nos. 7-11; 13-15) or brackets or cabinets containing precious china (cat. nos. 17-18, 20, 31-32, 36), book-cases with first-editions (cat. nos. 30, 55) or letters and cards casually strewn (cat. no. 26). Drawing rooms with artfully arranged sofas, chairs and pictures (cat. nos. 23-24, 59-60) or tables lavishly set for candle-light dinner parties (cat. nos. 33-35) or breakfasts (cat. no. 21) suggest their occupants are about to enter or have just departed. In the rare cases where human figures are present, they are relegated to the background where they are hardly noticeable (cat. nos. 37-40). Private spaces, such as bedrooms furnished with canopies and swags of silk, are represented as sumptuous refuges where monarchs or heads of state, retreating from society's gaze, can be revealed in their intimacy (cat. nos. 48, 53-54).
Trevor’s drawings – exuberant, stylish and wholly original – have earned him the admiration of many discerning collectors. A group of drawings was commissioned and sold by Christie’s in 2004 (Christopher Howe sale, London), and they have featured in various publications, including Country Life (2001, 2009). The actor, writer and presenter, Stephen Fry, Trevor’s contemporary at Cambridge and a keen collector of his work, observed in 2009: ‘While many of his contemporaries at Cambridge were Footlighting or Rowing, Trevor Newton seemed to spend much of his time drawing and painting…He managed to combine the frivolous and the Baroque in a curious and most engaging manner; Osbert Lancaster meets Tiepolo. Trevor is still drawing and painting as passionately as ever and though the content of his work may be more serious, in style and execution it still has all the youthful energy and verve which characterised it over thirty years ago.’
Professor David Watkin, Trevor’s Cambridge University mentor, remarked in 2003: ‘Trevor Newton has developed over the last few years into one of the most individual, lively and atmospheric of all English recorders of buildings and interiors. His work has a vivacious and spontaneous quality with a memorable handling of line and mass, conveyed through unexpected colours and textures. He will become a cult figure.’
Interior Impressions is the first monographic exhibition of Trevor’s drawings since 2009 and the only one to focus entirely on the theme of interiors. All the drawings on display are of grand or highly individual British and European interiors: appropriately this exhibition takes place in one of the finest private interiors in Britain, Dartmouth House, the former town house of the Baring family and of the Earls of Dartmouth. With its splendid series of reception rooms – several lined with original 18th-c. French panelling – its Louis XVI style courtyard and its spectacular double-flight Baroque marble staircase, the building is not usually open to the public and so a visit to our exhibition offers the added pleasure of a glimpse into one of the country's most imposing domestic interiors. We look forward to welcoming you to Dartmouth House on the 28th of September.
Acknowledgements:
We wish to extend our warmest thanks to Jon Arias-Prieto, Emanuel van Baeyer, Nicholas Bowlby, Gino Franchi, Peter Iaquinandi, Paul Joannides, Anne Lauder, Cheryl Madgwick, Bernard Malhamé, Albert S. Messina, Keith Newton, Marina Somers and Maryanne Wilkins
The Wallace Collection
(Catalogue nos. 1-6) |