Like his friend, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden was a war artist; in peace time he was a painter, illustrator and graphic artist.
Do you remember The Queen’s Beasts, a post from August 2020? If not you might like to do some revision because I don’t want to bore more attentive readers with repetition. Uncle George was not happy that the beasts were not coloured. He expresses his displeasure in his own inimitable way.
”The Coronation beasts were, save for their shields, not coloured. It was judged by those who had the placing of them that they would both gain in dignity and blend better with the general appearance of the exterior of the Abbey Annexe if they wore the neutral shades of their architectural surroundings. Whether this was wisdom or otherwise is a question which those who saw them in their setting may answer for themselves. Certainly those who have a liking for romantic heraldry, and they are more numerous than might be supposed, would have preferred to have seen them in the gaiety of their full heraldic tinctures. However, coloured or not, they took their posts most nobly.”
The beasts were illustrated in colour in this commemorative book. Uncle George takes up the story.
”Heraldry is some times called a little science; and an artist, however skilled in other spheres, who tries his hand at it without previous long experience in its complex and capricious ways, may be entering the realms of Trouble. His task is made no lighter by the fact that a great deal of artistic licence is allowed him where it might not be expected, and no licence at all where it might seem to matter least. Thus, though there is in heraldry plenty of room for original design and self-expression, which are two things which no true artist can or should be denied, his difficulty is to know the limits to which he may go without falling into most grievous error.
The artists to whom the task of newly portraying the Queen’s Beasts was offered, and courageously accepted, are Mr Cecil Keeling and Mr Edward Bawden, CBE, an Associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a Royal Designer to Industry. Neither of these very distinguished artists had ever before seriously entered the field of heraldic design, and it was my pleasurable privilege firstly to tell them something of the general principles of heraldic art, and then, with considerably more success than one should perhaps expect when trying to influence established artists who naturally have their own ideas, to guide them along the rather narrow paths of heraldic rectitude.
Heraldry in its infancy was little more than a system of personal identification in warfare by means of coloured patterns and forms. The things which were the most distinctive were generally speaking the most useful and those things which were not so readily recognisable were made more so by the manner of their representation on shield or banner or on whatever it might be. Thus a lion, for instance, which in nature is not a very distinctive object, was portrayed, for greater distinction, with its leonine attributes, its fierce expression, frightful claws, lithe and lissom body all vastly exaggerated, so that indeed it looked more like a lion than did ever any lion of nature. In this wise, by turning away from true representation and adopting a character all its own, was the ‘heraldic lion’ born, and with it came also the manner of depicting all the other beasts and forms and patterns which is so peculiarly heraldic.
Artistic style and treatment in heraldry is of course largely a matter of taste. Within certain rather elastic limits you can really choose and use what style you like. but it is a fact that those who have most knowledge of heraldry generally prefer the forms and styles of medieval times, and since knowledge must be respected, so also should this preference be given best.
The Queen’s Beasts, as newly drawn, have much of the medieval in them, and something quite original; and one can see traces also in some of them of the forms of the ancient world, curiously enough, give to them a somewhat modernistic air.
These ten new pictures of the royal beasts have about them nothing which can be criticised seriously on technical grounds. The red dragon is sufficiently red and unmistakably a dragon; the golden griffin is as much a griffin as anyone could want; the shields they hold bear the emblems which are proper to them. It may be there is some obfuscation of detail, and of colouring too, here and there, such as would not ordinarily meet with heraldry’s entire approval; but the beasts portrayed are in fact the Queen’s beasts, though they be in novel guise.” ( extracted from the foreword to The Queen’s Beasts by The Hon Sir George Bellew, KCVO, FSA, Garter King of Arms)
