IRIS painted by John Atkinson GRIMSHAW ...

Christie's Auction Notes

Fairies and fairy tales presented Victorian artists with an accepted vehicle to explore taboo subjects such as sex, nudity, violence and even drug addiction, and in return the Victorian audience was a ready consumer of these fantastical images. This specific imagery provided the Victorian sensibility with an escape from the materialistic realities of the ever-growing industrialist society in which they lived. As Christopher Wood states, we ‘tend to think of the Victorians as stern and moralistic, staring grimly out at us from early photographs, in their black top hats and frock coats. But Dickens was right in his perception that underneath that deceptively utilitarian surface, the Victorians yearned for some ‘great romance.’ In their art, their literature and their architecture, they were arch romantics and dreamers, the true heirs to the Romantic Movement. In art they gave us Pre-Raphaelitism, the greatest and most long-lasting romantic movement in English art. They also gave us some of the most extraordinary fairy paintings ever produced in any country at any time’ (C. Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2000, p. 8).

Midsummer Night or Iris is a study in iridescence, the effect of light the artist loved best. He loved to experiment with prisms to catch the effect of seeing colored light, and used such effects in this series of pictures. His daughter, Elaine, wrote, ‘My father was always fascinated by colour-iridescence. He would study the prismatic range in the beveled mirrors of candelabra; and if we children found in the big garden a bit of old glass, oxidized by age and weather, we would proudly take it to him, to add to his collection a box which lay open on a table beside his easel (Quoted in J. Sellars, ed., Atkinson Grimshaw. Painter of Moonlight, exh. cat., Harrogate, Mercer Art Gallery, 2011, p. 64).

Grimshaw produced several versions of this subject, one of which is currently in the Leeds City Art Gallery. Iris was a messenger of the gods sent to wither flowers in the autumn but when she hesitated in her appointed duty to admire a pool of waterlilies, she was turned into a rainbow for her disobedience. Iris depicts the moment she pauses to hover over the flickering pool at dusk and is absorbed by the beauty of the flowers covering the shimmering water. She appears to be lit from within, with her body covered with a very thin veil emitting its own a silvery glow and her opalescent wings containing all the colors of the rainbow that she eventually becomes. Wood states that Grimshaw’s few fairy pictures are ‘remarkably effective and haunting…, and one can only wish Grimshaw had painted more of these, and fewer versions of the Liverpool docks’ (Wood, ibid., p. 129).

Grimshaw also loved to experiment with technique and in Midsummer Night or Iris the artist uses the opportunities presented by the subject matter to joyfully exhibit his mastery of new and innovative ways to apply paint to canvas. The cross-hatchings and use of the back of the brush to add texture and interest to the dead and dying marshy reeds in the foreground are in direct contrast to the misty, layered tones with hints of leafless trees and the surface of the pond itself. This layering of thin washes of color in the sky and middle distance resemble the effects achieved by Turner and the interaction of differing techniques of oil and watercolor with layers of pigment generalized and thinly applied in some areas and more precise in others, brings to mind the works of James Whistler.

The model for the fairy is Agnes Leefe, who was an actress at the Leeds Grand Theatre. She was the model for a significant number of paintings in the artist’s oeuvre, and the only model for his nudes, which were all painted at a time when Miss Leefe was living with and modeling for Grimshaw in London. The young woman seems to have been an accepted part of the Grimshaw household, more a ward, with the nickname ‘Little Orphan Annie’, and she died young of consumption in the care of Grimshaw’s wife at their home in Leeds.

The Victorian Leeds curator, George Birkett, eulogized the composition in 1899 thus: ‘Iris, though there is a suspicion of gauze about her, is practically nude, flits gracefully over the surface of a woodland pool. She bends towards some waterlilies, and seems to hesitate about destroying them. Round her head and in a less degree around her whole body is a bright golden halo, and her wings reflect all the gorgeous colors of the rainbow….The weeds, flowers and grasses on the inner pool are already dried up and dead. On the further bank is a wood, through the branches of which one gets glimpses of a sparkling sky of blue and green and gold, contrasted with burning specks of orange in the foliage. The picture is a characteristic specimen of the artist’s best work – strongly individual, and unlike that of any other artist…Iris is perhaps in every way his masterpiece’ (Leeds City Art Gallery Catalogue, 1899).

the HACK ... El Vino ... Geoffrey Van Hay and Stuart KUTTNER

January the 8th, 2010 ... Saint Katherine's Church at Merstham in Surrey ... i was driving my little truck back into london on a very cold and snowy morning when i spotted Saint Katherine's Church at Merstham looking rarther picturesque ... the old A23 was plenty wide enough to park on the unswept margin and i walked along the crunchy snowy path behind the dark trees to see if there might be a picture worth taking ... 

 

the outside of the church lacks grace and ornament so i tried the door because you often find something of interest ... and i did ... leaving behind the noise of the world and entering the stillness, i found this ...

i'd visited a lot of churches, but this was one of the best and unlikeliest discoveries ... yet there was no clue, apart from the flowers, to suggest a context or an identity ... i set my tripod low and quickly framed this shot ... the original image was lost in a disk crash long since, but i've rescued these images from the blog archive for that day ...

the church's silence was broken by echo of the door latch and i turned to find a pale man in a big woolly hat who might just have easily been photographed by roman vishniac in a polish synagogue before the german occupation ...

he approached me directly and inquired if i was here for the funeral ... i explained that i just happened to be a passing truck driver with a camera and was looking for a good photograph of the church

he then introduced himself as STUART KUTTNER of the NEWS OF THE WORLD

he explained that the man in the wonderful photograph was GEOFFREY VAN HAY, who ran a famous bar in Fleet Street, beloved by newspaper men, EL VINO'S ... and he told me it might be worth hanging around for an interesting occasion that was about to happen ... 

so i surmised that they must have been friends across several decades and OUT OF MISPLACED EMPATHY asked if he might like me to take the picture again, with him standing by the image of his old friend ... he declined, saying ...

"OH NO !  I am a VERY PRIVATE PERSON !"

the funeral was packed, the vicar said a few nice things about a man he'd hardly known

some journalists told some nice ( but self-congratulatory ) stories illustrating Geoffrey's wit and boldness

we went outside but i stood apart, having resented their smug self confidence, and having had just enough time to realize that Stuart Kuttner was the EMINENCE GRISE in a national scandal and that he appeared to lack ( at that time ) both humanity and humility

but i left wishing i had known Geoffrey forty years earlier

here is wally fawkes' little portrait that was re-printed on my order-of-service card

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25435194

ALBERT DECARIS ... illustrations for DON QUIXOTE ... rarther fabulous !

https://www.librarything.com/topic/227314

 

ALBERT DECARIS made three rarther splendid engravings illustrating the tale of EUROPA ABDUCTED BY THE BULL ...

 

Magritte ... La memoire ... Sotheby's auction notes ...

In a letter to Claude Spaak written during the opening days of 1941, René Magritte outlined the principle idea that had been driving his most recent work: “it is in short the ever more rigorous search for what, in my view, is the essential element in art: purity and precision in the image of mystery which becomes decisive through being shorn of everything incidental or accidental” (quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., The Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, no. 84). Created in 1945, shortly after the liberation of Brussels at the end of the Second World War, La Mémoire investigates this concept, exploring a theme which the artist found himself drawn back to on several occasions during the turbulent 1940s—the surprising appearance of a bleeding wound on the smooth, serene face of a plaster sculpture. Blurring the boundaries between inanimate object and living being, this simple intervention transformed the bust into a disquieting motif, infusing even the most banal, innocuous scene with a startling note of violence and the unexpected.

This life-like bust, with its elegant features and coiffed hairstyle, first appeared in Magritte’s painterly oeuvre in the 1941 composition Les eaux profondes (Sylvester, no. 491; Private collection). Sporting a stylish black coat and gloves, while an enormous bird of prey silently stares at its profile, the figure appeared to be a mysterious, ambiguous mix of statue and flesh. The sculptural element was directly modeled from a plaster cast of an unknown, Neo-Classical bust, several of which the artist purchased from the Maison Berger for his personal collection of objects. At some point in 1942, Magritte took one of these plasters and deliberately disturbed its pure white surface, adding a large, dramatic bloodstain to one side of the face. Originating from an invisible wound at the temple, the garish mark partially covered one eye and the majority of its cheek, dripping downwards in thick rivulets to the jawline. Known only from a photograph taken by Marcel Mariën in 1943, which he titled Au temps de la mémoire, this original altered plaster cast appears to have been lost or destroyed shortly after its creation, but may have provided the direct inspiration for the artist’s first painted versions of the bleeding bust, such as La Mémoire (Sylvester, no. 505; Private collection). The motif would become an important recurring subject in Magritte’s art over the ensuing years, appearing in various configurations and contexts, the shape and size of the bloodstain altering from one work to the next, while the rest of the face remained perfectly unblemished.

In an interview Magritte gave in 1962, he spoke at length about the relationship between the subjects and the titles of his works, making specific reference to the La Mémoire paintings: “The title is related to the painted figures in the same way that the figures are related to each other. The figures are brought together in an order that invokes mystery. The title is joined to the painted image according to the same order. For instance, the picture La Mémoire shows a plaster face with a bloodstain on it. When I gave the picture the title, I felt they went well together... when I painted the picture La Mémoire I wasn’t thinking about what I’m going to say now. I only thought about harmonizing the image and the title that names the image. Consequently, the picture is not the illustration of the following ideas. When we say the word ‘memory,’ we see that it corresponds to the image of a human head. If memory can take up space, it can only be inside the head. Then the bloodstain may suggest to us that the person whose face we can see is the victim of a fatal accident. Lastly, it’s a question of an event in the past that remains present in our minds thanks to the memory” (J. Walravens, “Ontmoeting met René Magritte,” in De Vlaamse Gids, Antwerp, November 1962; in K. Rooney and E. Platter, eds., René Magritte: Selected Writings, Richmond, 2016, p. 201).

As so often in Magritte’s work, the most potent source of inspiration for the La Mémoire paintings lay in the work of Giorgio de Chirico and in particular, the Italian artist’s famous 1914 picture Le chant d’amour. It was this painting, with its strange juxtaposition of a marble bust, a ball and a surgeon’s glove set in an urban landscape, that had sparked an artistic epiphany for Magritte when he first encountered it in the summer of 1923. Describing the impact of De Chirico’s strange, uncanny worlds, he wrote: “This triumphant poetry replaced the stereotyped effects of traditional painting. It represented a complete break with the mental habits peculiar to artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity and all the little aesthetic specialties. It was a new vision through which the spectator might recognize his own isolation and hear the silence of the world” (quoted in D. Sylvester, Magritte, Brussels, 2009, p. 71). Though it would take a full two years for the artist to process this revelatory experience, it fundamentally re-orientated Magritte’s painterly style, instilling his work with a feverish new energy that lead him to abandon the cubo-futurist vocabulary which had dominated his painting up to this point, and instead develop the disjointed and surreal visual world that would become his artistic trademark.

In La Mémoire, Magritte’s enduring fascination with De Chirico’s mysterious composition is clearly visible, memories of this revelatory work continuing to shape and inspire his mature Surrealist vision. Here, the artist explores a deceptively simple configuration of objects, positioning the injured sculpture alongside a glass of water and a single apple in a plain interior, the walls and table captured in subtle shades of cream, beige and gray. Rather than appearing as a simple still-life scene, however, Magritte imbues the composition with a heightened sense of the uncanny by allowing the sculpted head to appear weightless—this is the only iteration of the subject in which the bust is suspended in midair, floating above the table-top. As such, the painting appears to echo Le chant d’amour, in which the classical bust is placed half-way up a partition wall, anchored by an unknown force. In La Mémoire, the lifelike appearance of the sculpture combined with its distinct three-dimensionality generates a strange, ghostly atmosphere, as if the disembodied head is an apparition that has suddenly infiltrated this mundane, everyday moment.

In December 1945, La Mémoire was reproduced on the front page of the Brussels communist weekly Clarté, with the caption “one of the superb pictures you can win in our great house tombola” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. II, p. 353). Magritte had formally joined the Belgian Communist Party in September of that year, embracing the revived spirit of political activity and freedom sweeping through Brussels following the end of the Second World War. As the artist explained: “Nougé and I thought we would be able, from within, to guide the artistic and cultural tendencies of the [Communist] Party in a direction more in keeping with our deep aspirations. We therefore attended the meetings of a section specializing in problems relating to the Fine Arts and Literature” (quoted in ibid., p. 113). Magritte donated La Mémoire to the tombola, or raffle, which had been organized to mark the exhibition Oeuvres offertes par l’Amicale des Arts plastiques, at the Galerie L’Ecrin d’art.

It is not known who the lucky winner in the tombola was—La Mémoire remained hidden in a private collection for more than twenty years following the raffle, until it resurfaced on the art market in 1968. However, Magritte’s affiliation with the Communist Party came to a swift end. “I was very quickly disillusioned…” he recalled. “We were talking to deaf ears. I was asked to submit one or two proposals for posters. They were all rejected. Conformism was as blatant in this milieu as in the most narrow-minded sections of the bourgeoisie. After a few months, I stopped attending and, from then on, I had no further relationship with the Party. There was no exclusion or break, but, on my side, total disaffection and permanent estrangement” (quoted in ibid., p. 116).

 

Art ... illustrations by Colin Forward from around 1960 ... this is a first draft ... I'm hoping Blaise Vyner will have more details in due course.

Some Flying Saucer Enthusiasts around 1960 … unexpected relics have recently come to light.

 

My friend, Dr. Blaise Vyner, surprised me in June 2025 with some interesting images, drawn by my father … and thereby hangs a short tale.

My father, COLIN FORWARD of Malmesbury, and Blaise Vyner’s father, JOHN VYNER of Little Somerford, became friends during the late 1950s … possibly when both had joined the local group of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in North Wiltshire … or perhaps whilst travelling to and from their workplaces on country bus routes.

For a long time, there had been a public fascination with the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life-forms visiting our planet, particularly in the imaginary craft called flying saucers. 

Fictional alien invasions were nothing new but, in twentieth century popular culture, the possibilities began to seem more and more like probabilities as time passed and as films and fictions proliferated.

Whatever.

John Vyner was fascinated by flying saucers to the point of obsession, archiving newspapers articles about rumoured sightings and encounters … and my father soon absorbed much of John’s enthusiasm.

 

Aged ten or eleven, I visited John Vyner’s farm cottage with my father and saw a large composite map on his wall with markings that charted possible sightings of “unidentified flying objects” across the counties of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.

John persuaded Colin to join him in a search for fresh evidence. 

They took a holiday in which they walked night-after-night, going north-east across a stretch of promising territory in the two counties, presumably in the hope of encountering visitors from other worlds.

I didn’t share their enthusiasm and I quickly forgot about the whole episode … until my school friend Blaise Vyner contacted me about sixty-five years later with news of this surprising discovery.

John and Colin were long dead by then, but Blaise’s mother had lived on into her nineties. 

And with Mrs. Vyner having passed on, Blaise’s younger brother, Merlin Vyner took on the task of going through the relics and souvenirs of her life.

Blaise then sent me photographs of several old and stained drawings discovered by Merlin, each drawing glued to a rough piece of card. 

Although they were never signed, it was immediately clear that they were by Colin’s hand.

Colin Forward, a Welsh man, had trained at Cardiff as an art teacher in the late 1940s.  He was a highly proficient technical illustrator and was a well-practised portraitist.  These drawings reflected some of that professional competence.

 

The drawings discovered by Merlin fell into two groups. 

The first group, were drawn upon the theme of the early Victorian “bogey-man” character, Springheel Jack, once the subject of several “urban myths” .  

Not instantly recognized by me but soon identified with the help of some internet searches describing these images and their “narrative” content. 

Searching for “a tall man in Victorian costume breathing fire” quickly led me to the subject matter of this first drawing. 

It illustrates Mary Stevens account in 1837 of being assaulted at night on a street in South London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-heeled_Jack

https://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/id/eprint/9059/

The second, third and fourth drawings in this group puzzled me … but not for long … my guess is that they fictionalized a chance encounter with the supposedly immortal Springheel Jack, perhaps in some country pub along the way to Northampton. 

John Vyner may have believed that Springheel Jack was a lost spaceman who could not find his way home and now walks the Earth disguised in human clothing … a bit like “The Man Who Fell To Earth”.

Can you see his alien ears in the drawings ?  Is his expression one of alarm at being recognized ?  Remember ... there was still a reward available for his capture.

Having studied these ( un-titled, un-signed ) Spring Heel Jack drawings, it seemed to me that John Vyner must have written something fictional, or had at least imagined it, and then Colin Forward had made these drawings, probably intending them for publication. 

But where might they be published ?   And when ? 

Perhaps John’s work had been published without Colin’s drawings.  

That seemed more likely but how could I find out ?

More internet searches followed.

The Wikipedia article on Spring-heeled Jack had provided a helpful bibliography, but it didn’t point to an obvious source for an article by John Vyner, and Blaise said that he was never aware that his father had ever published something. 

Not a thing.  Never, ever, ever.

And of course, in the back of my mind, I was still hoping to find a drawing by my father had been published ... somewhere.

I carried on searching for a while and eventually The Internet Archive, a kind of global digital library, miraculously turned up something unexpected whilst I searched for J Vyner and for Spring-heel Jack.

Lynn E. Catoe’s UFOs BIBLIOGRAPHY was and is a treasure trove.

https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1862572A/Lynn_E._Catoe

So, now we knew that John Vyner’s article about Springheel Jack had first been published in THE FLYING SAUCER REVIEW in the UK in May of 1961, and that article was re-printed in the US in another pulp magazine named FATE in October 1961.

I wasn’t able to track down the copy of the Flying Saucer Review at that time, but eventually discovered that a surviving issue of FATE magazine was for sale … from Bloomsbury Books … a dealership based in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

I flourished my credit card, virtually, on the 10^th July, and was promptly supplied with the goods, at a very decent price, especially when considering Lloyd the vendor’s own efforts and expenses. 

The carefully packaged little book arrived in Tenby on Friday 18^th July.

 

 

Not the greatest thing you ever might read, but informative and entertaining ... and it seemed worth every cent to me …

There were two more drawings amongst Merlin Vyner’s discoveries, although neither was directly connected to that published article.

Each drawing showed a close encounter between a small training aircraft of the Royal Air Force, and an even smaller-looking flying saucer. 

Each close encounter was shown from the same standing-point in Malmesbury, looking up and across from the lower corner of the old cattle market towards St. Denis Lane and towards the High Street beyond.

 

( Yes !  There are topographical inconsistencies ...  and No !  I haven’t the faintest idea why and how ! )

In those days the skies around Malmesbury were busy with multitudes of different aircraft from the Royal Air Force stations at Kemble, at Hullavington, and at Lyneham … and also from the USAF bomber base at Fairford.  Trainers flew over daily.  The planes that flew from Hullavington were only there for brief periods, both De Havilland Chipmunks, and the early Percival Provost.  But they were there just long enough to become a familiar sight for excitable schoolboys to embed in their long-term memory.

It is possible that John Vyner had written another article about such an encounter, and equally possible that Colin Forward simply dreamed up this scene … the fact that the drawings had remained in Mrs. Vyner’s possession suggests they had been commissioned by her late husband.

 

After a busy summer, Blaise and I were able to meet in a Yorkshire pub on a sunny Sunday evening, 7^th September 2025, and we exchanged the little magazine and the drawings. 

Hurrah !  Hurrah !

I've ordered some archival paper for interleaving the drawings, but I could use some professional advice about long-term preservation.

My gratitude to Blaise Vyner, and to Merlin Vyner, and to the late Mrs. Vyner, is enormous and will last forever and a day.

POST SCRIPT ... 

NB. I have belatedly discovered there is, after all, a PDF of the Flying Saucer Review that can be found online ...

http://noufors.com/Documents/Books,%20Manuals%20and%20Published%20Papers/Specialty%20UFO%20Publications/Flying%20Saucer%20Review/FSR,1961,May-Jun,V%207,N%203.pdf