Thomas Batterbury caricature: C.5D-1949

Titles

Thomas Batterbury caricature

Maker(s)

Decorator: Barnard, Frederick

Entities

• Tile

Categories

• Lead-glazed earthenware
• Art Pottery

Description

Square, white earthenware tile with over-glaze image painted in brown enamel.

A bearded man sits on the floor, clasping his knees and blowing bubbles from a pipe. In a large bubble sitting on the pipe is a castle, with a crowned figure in front. The man is identified by a monogram of the initials 'TB' and a pair of dividers, top right. At bottom left is a smaller man, with long hair, a beard and a prominent nose, who looks up at the other in apparent astonishment; he appears to have backed into a suit of armour and dropped a plate. In the bottom left corner are his initials: ‘J.D.L’. At top left is a small bird with a human face, initialled 'SL' above. The tile is industrially produced from pressed dust; on the reverse is an impressed diamond pattern. It is fixed in a (later) wooden frame and stand.

Notes

History note: Bequeathed by Miss Dorothy Barnard, 1949

Legal notes

Bequeathed by Miss Dorothy Barnard, the artist’s daughter

Place(s) associated

• London ⪼ England

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Bequeathed (1949) by Barnard, Dorothy

Dating

19th Century, Late#
Production date: circa AD 1880

Note

Fred(erick) Barnard (1846-96), the son of a silversmith, was an illustrator, caricaturist, genre painter and portraitist. After training in Paris, he contributed to journals, such as 'Punch', ‘Harper’s Weekly’ and the 'Illustrated London News' and became known as an illustrator of Dickens and Bunyan. He also showed large-scale canvasses at the Royal Academy which commented on urban social conditions; a reviewer greeted his ‘Saturday Night in the East End’, 1876, as amongst ‘the most remarkable illustrations of London low-life […] full of grime and flare, and of human uncouthness’. He settled for a time in Broadway, Gloucestershire, where John Singer Sargent painted his wife Alice Faraday (‘Mrs Frederick Barnard’, 1885), and his two daughters Polly and Dorothy (‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, 1885-86) [Tate, nos. N05901 and N01615] , and his neighbours included Henry James and Edmund Gosse, the latter recording him wearing an ‘enormous stage slouch hat’. The Fitzwilliam Museum also holds a portrait of Dorothy Barnard, the donor, painted by Sargent in 1889.

One of a series of seven tiles, each depicting a fellow contemporary artist, here a caricature of the architect Thomas Batterbury. The small man is Sir James Drumgole Linton (1840-1919), an academic watercolourist who fought for the recognition of British art and for watercolour as a medium. Linton was one of the first to occupy artists’ studios built by Batterbury in Hampstead in 1872. His son James Walter Robert Linton (1869-1947), here depicted here as the tiny bird-man, trained with Batterbury before emigrating to Australia where he became known as an Art Nouveau silversmith and an advocate of craft skills. Here Sir James looks on in astonishment as Batterbury’s pipe-dreams entice his son to fly away. The image in the bubble perhaps also alludes to Batterbury’s recent illustrations for Dudley Elwes’ ‘A history of the castles, mansions, and manors of western Sussex’.

School or Style

Arts and Crafts (movement)