Forthcoming
Richard Carline
(1896 - 1980)
Sacred Hindu Cows, India, 1920
Forthcoming
Richard Carline (1896 - 1980)
Size:
Height – 45.7cm
Width – 55.9cm
Richard Carline exhibited works based on his Middle East and aerial sketches from his Imperial War Museum commission alongside his brother Sydney after World War I.
Carline’s Groupil Gallery show in 1920 also included works from his Middle East and related travels —given its date there is a strong possibility Sacred Hindu Cows was included in this pivotal show.
During the First World War, Carline served on the Western Front, as an aerial gunner, flying Bristol fighters. In January 1919 he and his brother Sydney were sent to the Middle East by the Imperial War Museum, as official war artists for the Royal Air Force, with a brief to depict aerial combat.The brothers arrived in Port Said in January 1919 and then travelled to Ramleh where they were based with No. 1 Squadron of the Australian Flying Corps. From there they moved to Jerusalem and began to travel around the region to visit other historical and archaeological sites, alongside their military duties. Near Aleppo they sketched the results of the RAF bombing raids on the Turkish airbase at Rayak. After some time in Beirut they returned to flying duties, with Richard making several flights over Jerusalem and Gaza which became the basis for his painting Jerusalem and the Dead Sea From an Aeroplane. In several of his aerial paintings, Carline showed the influence of the Cubist artworks he had seen in Paris before the war as he adopted unconventional perspectives to depict the ground below as two-dimensional and abstracted.
The brothers stayed in Cairo before moving to Baghdad where they remained until the middle of July when they went to Mosul from where the RAF were planning bombing raids against the Kurdish uprising. However, before that action, they were recalled to England for demobilisation and arrived home in November 1919.[8] Although between them the brothers had enough sketches for twenty-five large paintings the RAF Section of the IWM had no funds left to acquire new paintings. Eventually the Museum paid Richard for three finished paintings and bought four from Sydney. The brothers were allowed to keep the 300 plus sketches they had made in the Middle East and these formed the basis of their successful Groupil Gallery exhibition in March 1920.
Carline travelled through India shortly after World War I, when he was still in his early twenties.
His Indian works tend to show a move away from strict academic realism toward a more modern, simplified, and expressive style, influenced by Post-Impressionism, evident here in the lilac shading of along the contours of the of cows.
The India period helped shape Carline’s later interest in modern European painting, especially artists like Cézanne and Picasso.
His exposure to Indian color, scale, and spatial composition contributed to the structural clarity seen in his later work.
In 1920 Richard was elected to the London Group. Between 1921 and 1924, Carline studied part-time at the Slade School of Art.
Painter, writer and administrator, Carline was born in Oxford. His father, George Carline, his mother, Anne, and brother Sydney, his sister Hilda (Mrs Stanley Spencer) and his wife, Nancy, were all painters. Carline in 1913 attended Percyval Tudor-Hart’s Academie de Peinture, in Paris. After a short period teaching, Carline served in World War I and was appointed an Official War Artist. With his brother he became noted for war pictures from the air. He was elected LG in 1920, at which time the Carlines’ Hampstead home became a centre for artists such as Henry Lamb, John Nash and Mark Gertler. During this period Carline was clearly influenced by Stanley Spencer, transforming everyday scenes into something monumental. Carline achieved this, however, without exaggerating form or gestures to the degree that Spencer did. Between 1924 and 1929 Carline taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford. He had his first solo show at Goupil Gallery in 1931. The mid-1930s saw Carline involved in Negro art, organising a show at Adams Gallery in 1935, and contributing the main text to Arts of West Africa, edited by Michael Sadler. During World War II Carline supervised camouflage of factories and airfields. He was involved in AIA, helping to found the Hampstead Artists’ Council in 1944. In 1946-47 he was appointed as the first Art Counsellor to UNESCO, and from 1955 to 1974 was chief examiner in art for the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. His books include Pictures in the Post: the Story of the Picture Postcard, 1959; Draw They Must, 1968; and Stanley Spencer at War, 1978.
In 1975 the D’Offay Gallery held a Richard Carline exhibition for which the artist wrote the foreword. Carline died in Hampstead and in 1983 Camden Arts Centre organised a memorial exhibition. The Imperial War Museum holds his work, including the outstanding and pioneering series of paintings, from World War I, based on observations made from aeroplanes.
Selected Literature: The Spencers and Carlines in Hampstead in the 1920s, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, 1973. Richard Carline, D’Offay Gallery, 1975. Elizabeth Cowling, Richard Carline, Camden Arts Centre, London, 1983. The Art of Hilda Carline, Mrs Stanley Spencer, Lincolnshire County Council, 1999, pp. 15, 22 and 23.
