In Search of Rex Whistler

Lucindaville loves Rex Whistler.   For some time, this love has led us grasping and searching for info and images but today we have a Christmas miracle!  OK, maybe not a miracle, but thanks to the work of Mirabel and Hugh Cecil we now have a concentrated and easily accessible font of Rex Whistler info.

We are overjoyed to find that Rex Whistler (@RexWhistler) is tweeting from beyond the grave...who knew twitter has such reach!   Truthfully, Whistler is not actually tweeting but the tweets are coming from a company that is reproducing his famous 'Clovelly' Toile de Jouy.   Needless to say, we want a lovely chair covered in this. 

This book is just an embarrassment of riches, so grab your copy now.  Go ahead, buy it for yourself for Christmas or  Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or just because it is Wednesday...one of our favorite gift getting holidays.

Decoration

While moving books around, as we so often do, this lovely Rex Whistler cover popped out at us. A comfy chair, a window open to the courtyard, some books and a banjo for our knee.

I believe the best thing about this book might just be Rex Whistler's cover art, buy Mrs. Lockwood offers us a brief and concise history of house types from ancient Egypt to those available to the future homeowner of the early 1930's. She seems most at home with the Colonial period. The book is a fine little primer on style through the ages. Her introduction to Decoration and beauty are as modern as anything one might fine in any coffee table book of in this century.

Mrs. Lockwood tells us, "Details are the stuff that dreams are made of."


There is not a decorator out there who could have said it better, and she seems downright modern and quite to the point in her introduction to why we decorate. Why do we decorate?

"We are born that way. fundamentally, it is the universal impulse to express the things of the spirit in visible form, the divine urge( or its devilish perversion) that sets mankind apart from his fellow creatures on this earth and denies him their peaceful existence."

Here's to opposable thumbs.

Edith Olivier at the Persephone Post

The Persephone Post is a great blog run by the Persephone Press in London. We have mentioned them before in our post on Daisy Ashford. At Cookbook Of The Day we have posted about several of their cookery books including; Good Food on the Aga, Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll, and They Can't Ration These.

The blog features a picture an a blurb about it. Quite simple but always thought provoking. They very often feature something near and dear to the hearts and minds of Lucindaville.

This painting of Edith Olivier is one of them. Not only is it Edith Olivier but it was painted by Rex Whistler. And in the painting Edith Olivier is surrounded by books and we love images of women reading!

Enjoy.

Rex Whistler

Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, Georgia Sitwell, William Walton, Stephen
Tennant, Teresa Jungman, and Zita Jungman. Photographed by Cecil Beaton.

Andrew Graham-Dixon set the stage in his Sunday Telegraph review of the 2006 Rex Whistler exhibition at the Brighton Museum.

"October 1927 Cecil Beaton contrived a photograph of “the bright young things”, as they styled themselves, to which he gave the laconic title On The Bridge, Wilsford. Seven young men and women pose for the camera, all dressed up, in ruffs and frills, patterned silk waistcoats and faux-rustic breeches, as courtly versions of the shepherds and shepherdesses of Arcadia. Beaton himself is there, along with Georgia Sitwell, Zita and “Baby” Jungman, Stephen Tennant, the composer William Walton and the painter-illustrator Rex Whistler. Soon afterwards Osbert Sitwell took the whole group to visit Lytton Strachey at nearby Ham Spray. In characteristically acerbic fashion, Strachey pronounced them “perfectly divine … strange creatures with just a few feathers where brains ought to be.”

Zita Jungman, William Walton, Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Georgia
Sitwell, Teresa Jungman, and Rex Whistler. Photographed by Cecil Beaton.

Rex Whistler by Cecil Beaton

Rex Whistler showed a knack for art as a child. At age 8, he produced this silhouette of his brother, Laurence, aged 2.

Finding the Royal Academy too stifling, he moved to the Slade School and came into his own. Unlike many of his generation, Whistler was never taken by the burgeoning avant-garde. He preferred the Arcadian landscapes of England. He took great pride in providing the art that adorned the jackets of many of his friends works including Cecil Beaton, Edith Olivier, Beverley Nichols and Laurence Whistler.

Rex Whistler is believed to be the model for Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. He made many attempts at purging his underlying homosexual tendencies including losing his virginity to none other than Tallulah Bankhead.

A nude of Lady Caroline Paget

The great "love" of his life was Lady Caroline Paget. He met her at the home of Edith Olivier. Olivier wanted Rex to settle down into a stable relationship. Edith's candidate was actress Jill Furse who was mad for Rex. The feeling was not mutual. (In the kind of serendipity we love at Lucindaville, Jill Furse went on to marry or "settle" as some would say, for Rex's brother, Laurence. Jill died in childbirth and within a few years, Laurence married Jill's sister, Theresa. But I digress...)

Rex Whistler's masterpiece is considered to be the 60 foot mural at Plas Newydd, the house of Lady Caroline's father, the Marquess of Anglesey. Plas Newydd is the largest repository of Whistler's paintings and drawings. It also houses the proof editions of his famous illustrations for Gulliver's Travels.


Unlucky in love, Whistler joined the war effort. He was commissioned into the Welsh Guards as a Lieutenant.

Self-Portrait in Uniform, 1940

During his stay in Brighton, before his embarkation to France for the invasion of Normandy, he painted a cartoon now known as Allegory: HRH The Prince Regent Awakening the Spirit of Brighton. The painting depicts the Prince Regent, naked except for a blue ribbon of the Garter and the badge of the Order resting on his backside. He is kneeling before a sleeping figure with a pink sash emblazoned Brighthelmstone.

Allegory: HRH The Prince Regent Awakening the Spirit of Brighton

Forty-three days later, Rex Whistler died. It was his first day in action. He was 39.



Many years later his brother wrote a biography of Rex Whistler, The Laughter and the Urn.

More Edith

Edith Olivier at 54

There was a lot of response to the Edith Olivier post. Again, I can't believe that I never posted about Olivier before. I also failed to mentions some obvious or perhaps I should say, pertinent facts about Edith. The great thing about blogging is that you may leave something out, but your readers always remember. And we are all better for our collective knowledge.

Home Before Dark pointed out that "Olivier" was not only Edith's family name, but one she shared with her distant cousin Larry. A quirky detail I left out but HBD caught: "Edith Olivier was distantly related to the actor Laurence Olivier. I think Edith’s uncle Henry was Sir Laurence’s grandfather. "

Just the type of weirdness I love and left out! Shame on me.


Edith Hope who has a wonderful blog wrote to point me toward her recent post on lunching at the Tate Gallery and visiting "Epicurania" a world created in a 1927 trompe-l'oeil mural by Rex Whistler. The mural was a collaboration with Edith Olivier depicting the story of seven people on an "Expedition in Search of Rare Meats." The Tate, Olivier, Whistler and Rare Meats, what could be more fun!

I was not obvious enough in my post. While Edith Olivier was closely connected to the "Bright Young Things" of Britain's 1930's, she was a bit older than that group whose exploits occurred largely in London. As I pointed out in my somewhat rambling post on Ashcombe, it would seem that much of the BYT's came to Wilton.

Cecil Beaton in the bathroom at Ashcombe

The young Rex Whistler became Edith Olivier protégé.

Handmade "monogrammed" envelope from Rex Whistler to Olivier

It was Olivier who first found Ashcombe for Cecil Beaton. She was a kind of den mother to this passionate and artistic bunch that came to Wilton for their weekends. The guests who came and went are a cavalcade of characters from Harold Acton to Elinor Wylie with a sprinkling of Guinness, Sitwell and Huxley thrown in for good measure. Penelope Middelboe, Edith's great great niece, edited selections from Edith's journals.


The cover features a painting of Edith by Rex Whistler. The journal entries are a fascinating counterpoint to books written during this period. As I said, most of the books about Britain in the 1930 are based in the cities, but Olivier remained in the country. While she was entertaining Oliver Messel and Stephen Tennant she was active in Women's Institute. The journals offer incite into the English countryside juxtaposed against a who's who of the artists that became household names.

Before I got any comments on Edith, I realized I had posted on Ashcombe, who's jacket was done by Rex Whistler and then on Olivier. I thought my next post should really be about Rex Whistler. And maybe it will.