Circles and Tangents: art in the shadow of Cranborne Chase
 

This book brings together a unique collection of painters, potters and sculptors who, from the early 1930s to today, have found in Cranborne Chase, and its hinterland, a landscape of inspiration, seclusion and bare-bone beauty.

Cranborne Chase and the West Wiltshire Downs are today a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Covering three hundred and eighty square miles, the Chase bridges the counties of Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. It is not only a vast landscape but also an ancient one. H.J. Massingham (1936) described it as having ‘once [been] congested by humanity’ with its long barrows topping the crests of hills, ‘staring into space, the sphinxes of old England’; of round barrows ‘scattered like stars in the sky’, of ancient tracks and Roman roads. It has always had an air of isolation, of separateness from the rest of the world, and it is in part this, which has attracted an exceptional array of artists and writers.

The book contains images of work made just after WWI, to those fresh off the easel or potter’s wheel. There are paintings from the Nicholson family, including several by E.Q. Nicholson who was married to Ben Nicholson’s brother, the architect Christopher (Kit) Nicholson. It was Kit who designed Augustus John’s new studio at Fordingbridge. E.Q. (as she was familiarly known) painted solely in the late 1940s and Fifties. There are also examples of early paintings by John Craxton, and drawings by Lucian Freud (then two young students whom E.Q. welcomed to her home at Alderholt), and a fine portrait of Kit by his sister-in-law, Winifred Nicholson. Other work includes paintings and drawings by Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Nora and Gerald Summers, and Katharine Church (Kitty West) who ran the Hambledon Gallery in Blandford Forum, and had a celebrated circle of friends. Amongst these friends were John Piper, Ivon Hitchens, and the New Zealand born Frances Hodgkins, now regarded as the foremost painter of her country. Besides well-known national names, the book will also introduce a number of less well known artists who, though having studied at Goldsmiths or the RCA, never actively sought recognition for their work during their lifetime.

More recent artists include sculptors Elizabeth Frink, Peter Thursby, Ann Catherine Row and Ian Middleton, a sculptor who today challenges our everyday perceptions about life. There are also the artists Paul Jones, Ursula Leach, John Hitchens, John Hubbard, Brian Graham, Howard Pearce, Gabriel Summers and many others. Stained glass by Joseph Nuttgens, rugs by Louisa Creed and Roderic Hill, and pottery by Richard Batterham, Chris Carter, Jonathan Garratt, Lucy Yarwood and Leonie Summers.