The Story of Art in Barnes
Barnes is an idyllic place for artists not just as a community but also for its en plein air painting opportunities: Barnes pond with elegant buildings overlooking it on various sides; The Terrace which faces the Thames leading to Barnes Bridge, a masterpiece of Victorian engineering and a great subject for any painter; Barnes Green, a delightful subject with dappled light falling through the trees onto the pathway towards the brook; and the pastoral delights of the common beyond.
J.M.W Turner
The river Thames with its bends and diminishing perspective inspired J.M.W Turner to do some drawings and well-known paintings. He lived in nearby Twickenham and in 1825 came to Barnes to make a drawing of The River Thames at Mortlake, looking North-East towards Chiswick and Barnes. This stretch of the waterfront has a similar low-rise character today, although it is difficult to match individual buildings here to survivors among later additions. Turner notes the White Hart pub, which was rebuilt after his time, in the late nineteenth century.
Barnes School
The earliest record of artists actually living in Barnes is of the Williams family of painters, also known as the Barnes School. They were a family of prominent 19th-century Victorian landscape artists known for their paintings of the British countryside, coasts and mountains. Edward Williams (1781–1855), the patriarch of the family and founder of the Barnes School of artists, became very popular during the Victorian era for painting moonlit scenes of the English countryside. He was followed as a landscape artist by his six sons and several of his many grandchildren.
This large family of artists became known as the Barnes School because from 1846 until about the turn of the century, Williams, several of his sons, and some of his grandchildren worked out of neighbouring studios attached to their home at 32 Castelnau Villas in the then rural setting of Barnes. Charles Leslie, Caroline Fanny Williams, and Herbert Sidney Percy are probably the best known of the grandchildren of Edward Williams, and their paintings show up regularly at auctions and in galleries.
Henry William Pickersgill
Henry William Pickersgill (3 December 1782 – 21 April 1875) started out as a landscape painter. He lived at Nassau House, 32 Nassau Road from about 1854 to 1857. He became a pre-eminent portrait painter of his day. Robert Peel, William Wordsworth, George Stephenson, Jeremy Bentham, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Faraday were among the many notable people who sat for him. He famously painted author James Silk Buckingham and his wife Elizabeth in Arab costume in 1816, reflecting Buckingham's own travels in the East as well as the fashion of the times for the Orient. The National Portrait Gallery, London has over 50 of his portraits in its collection, including 16 original oils and 35 engravings after him, along with a small number of portraits of Pickersgill himself by others. He was elected to associate membership of the Royal Academy and showed a total of 384 paintings there. He is buried in Barnes Cemetery.
John Atkinson Grimshaw
John Atkinson Grimshaw (6 September 1836 – 13 October 1893) was an English Victorian-era artist best known for his nocturnal scenes of urban landscapes. He was inspired by The Terrace in Barnes which he captured beautifully in a painting and sketch ‘On the Thames, Barnes’.
As much of Barnes was rural countryside in Victorian times, made up of quiet marshes beneath windmills, farms where horses pulled ploughs, and wheel-rutted dirt roads running past country inns or through shaded glens, it suited landscape artists perfectly, as it still does today despite having become quite urban. Barnes pond became a favourite subject for Royal portrait painter William Dring RA (1904-1990).
Joseph Pike
Lived at 22 Nassau Road in the 1950s and had a studio in the garden. He was a master of the art of pencil drawing. He produced evocative sketches of old churches, colleges, monasteries, modern offices and picturesque street scenes in historic towns such as Rugby and Chester, as well as of a great number of London landmarks. When he died in 1956, the Catholic Herald referred to him as a distinguished artist, though not personally well known. A biography of Joseph Pike, The Happy Catholic Artist, reveals that his early attempts to launch a professional career as an artist were interrupted by military service in the First World War, and it was only through dogged determination and hard work that he established himself in the 1920s. He was friends with Ronald Knox and Bede Camm.
Kurt Schwitters
From 1942 the German collage artist Kurt Schwitters lived in Westmorland Road. He was a maverick artist who worked in different genres and media – Dadaism, constructionism, surrealism, poetry, sound sculptures, sculpture, graphic design, topography, installation art and is most famous for his collages called ‘Merz’ pictures- a nonsensical word he invented. These pictures were made of discarded materials – tickets, bits of wood, contents of his waste paper basket and other debris.
Jan Pienkowski
Jan Pienkowski was an artist, illustrator and a long-time Barnes resident. Famous for his series of picture books Meg and Mog. Born in Warsaw in 1936 he came to England in 1946 and after school went on to study classics and English Literature at Kings College Cambridge. In 1961 he co-founded Gallery 5 with Angela Holder producing greetings cards, children’s friezes, and decorative papers. To start with he drew most of the cards himself but later on he began to commission other artists.
His illustrations were distinctive. He traced influences back to pre-war Poland where there was a folk-art tradition of paper cut outs and wood cuts which made a strong impression on him as a child. The silhouette is a fundamental element in his draughtsmanship – a way of seeing which pervades his pictures.
The first Meg and Mog, created with Helen Nicoll, was published by Puffin in 1972. Haunted House with paper engineering by Tor Lokvig was published in 1979. This was a pioneering pop-up book which sold over a million copies, and won the Kate Greenaway Prize in 1980 as did The Kingdom Under the Sea in 1972. He died in February 2022.
Judith Kerr
Fondly known for her series of 17 Mog books based on her own cats and in part her family and set in her own house in Ranelagh Avenue, Barnes. The Tiger Who Came to Tea is similarly well known and popular with young as well as older children. Born in Berlin in 1923 Judith studied at The Central School of Art and Crafts and was a long-time Barnes resident. She started writing and drawing children’s books when her own children were learning to read. She died in May, 2019.
Gillian Ayres
Painter and Printmaker, sadly died in 2018. Born in Barnes in 1930 she attended St Pauls School for Girls and then Camberwell School of Art 1946-50. Gillian was a member of a group of artists in the mid-1950s whose anti-authoritarian feelings helped to form a new British school of abstract painting. She didn’t draw, line was irrelevant to her, and instead, like the American artist Jackson Pollock her way of working was to splatter paint on huge canvases laid on the floor. She disliked being asked for the meaning in her art for there was none; it was all visual, about shapes, space and colour.
She was the only woman artist included in the influential Situation exhibition at the RBA Galleries in 1960. This was a show of work of 20 artists whose work was totally abstract. In 1978 she became the first woman to head a fine art department in a British art school when she was appointed head of painting at Winchester. Her most creative period came after she had resigned in 1981 and moved to North Wales where she painted gigantic canvases using thick layers of oil paint and an emphatic, lawless palette of colour.
She was the leading British abstract painter of her generation, was elected Royal Academician in 1987 and in 1989 was short listed for the Turner prize.
Taking a Line for a Walk in Barnes High Street
Bruce McLean
An internationally acclaimed Sculptor, performance artist, printmaker and painter living in Barnes. He was born 1944 in Glasgow and studied at the Glasgow School of Art 1961-3 and at St Martins School of Art from 1963–1966 where amongst his tutors were Anthony Caro and Philip King. In reaction to what he regarded as the academism of his teachers he began making sculpture from rubbish.
In 1965 he abandoned conventional studio work in favour of impermanent sculptures using water and performances of a satirical nature directed against the art world. Awarded a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1972 he opted for an exhibition titled mockingly ‘King for a Day’- lasting a day. Three of his conceptual art pieces were set in Barnes in 1969: Float around sculpture (on Barnes Pond); Half hour stand and walk about piece; and Taking a line for a walk (down Barnes High Street).
From the mid-1970s he increasingly turned to paint, sculpture and film work. He has had numerous one-man exhibitions including at the Modern Art Gallery in Vienna and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. In 1985 he won the John Moores Painting Prize.
Francis and Philippa Hoyland
Two artists who enjoy the green spaces of Barnes. Philippa is an authoritative draughtswoman; she sets down things on canvas or paper with great assurance. Francis has exhibited his work extensively as well as writing books on art and has had an impressive career teaching at Chelsea, Camberwell, Cardinal Wiseman Catholic Comprehensive and currently at The Princes School of Art in Shoreditch.
Ian Houston
Ian Houston is one of the great surviving twentieth century landscape painters. He is considered the sole artistic heir to his friend and mentor Edward Seago and has travelled in his footsteps from East Anglia to the Mediterranean and Hong Kong. Ian’s paintings are collected worldwide and collectors include HM The Queen and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh. We are enormously proud to be associated with an artist of Ian’s stature, a great living painter with a page in British paining history secured.
If anybody has any further information about artists of note who lived or live in Barnes please let us know. Any corrections or updates gratefully received.