Charles Mahoney
(1903 - 1968)
Set Design, c.1926-30
Charles Mahoney (1903 - 1968)
Size:
Height – 30cm
Width – 51.4cm
Literature: Christopher Campbell-Howes: Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting (Romarin 2016), p147/8.
In 1932 Charles Mahoney initiated a project to decorate the hall and adjacent areas of Brockley County School for Boys (now Prendergast – Hilly Fields School 6th Form centre) with murals illustrating the fables of Aesop and others. The work, begun in 1933 and completed in February 1936, was divided between Mahoney himself and three of his recent Royal College of Art graduates, Evelyn Dunbar, Violet Martin and Mildred ‘Elsi’ Eldridge.
The available spaces on the underside of the gallery at the back of the hall consisted of three ceiling areas, a lunette at each end, and 24 spandrels, of which Mahoney painted the two featured here, The Clock (left) and The Dial (right). In the fable the two timepieces argue for supremacy, the sundial losing out because it cannot record passing time at night. The church tower on the left is unmistakeably that of St Mary’s, Great Bardfield, the Essex village where Edward Bawden and (for a short while) Eric Ravilious lived, and where Mahoney and Dunbar used sometimes to go and stay. In her autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield (ed. Anne Ullmann: Persephone Books, 2016) Tirzah Garwood, Eric Ravilious’ widow, wrote ‘The church had a very nice square clock made of wood painted blue and stuck up diagonally on the tower, where it was invisible to the major part of the village’. The tower on the right, carrying a sundial, has yet to be identified.
A tiny figure on the Great Bardfield church parapet may be Mahoney himself. In the finished mural he is looking down into the semi-circular lunette below and between his spandrels, which he decorated with another fable, The Butterfly and The Rose. The completed The Clock and The Dial was Mahoney’s final contribution to the Brockley Murals; it is signed and dated ‘CM 35’ at the foot.
We are grateful to Christopher Campbell-Howes for assistance.
In his memoir Since 50, Men & Memories 1922-1938 (New York,1940, p. 236) the first two names that appear on William Rothenstein list of top Royal College of Art students were Henry Moore and Charles Mahoney – the list continues with the names of luminaries such as Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman Edward Le Bas, and Evelyn Dunbar. The process of reassuring Mahoney’s place in 20th century British Art has had several important milestones including the 1975 Ashmolean exhibition, the Liss Fine Art/Fine Art Society touring show (2000) and Mahoney’s predominant feature in Tate Britain’s The Art of the Garden, (2005) – but the process of reassessment still has a long way to go.
Painter, muralist, draughtsman and teacher. Born Cyril Mahoney in London – his fellow-student Barnett Freedman re-christened him Charlie at the Royal College of Art, which he attended 1922-6 after a period at Beckenham School of Art under Percy Jowett. Early on, Mahoney established a reputation as a conscientious teacher. He was at the Royal College 1928-53, from 1948-53 as a painting tutor, and was noted there for his concern for academic discipline. His portrait is included in Rodrigo Moynihan’s celebrated Teaching Staff of the Painting School at the Royal College of Art, 1949-50. From 1954 to 1963 he taught at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting and from 1961 to 1968 at the Royal Academy Schools. He painted murals at Morley College 1928-30 with his colleagues Eric Ravillious and Edward Bawden. Unfortunately these murals were destroyed during World War II. The work led to further murals: at Brockley School, Kent, with Evelyn Dunbar; and at Campion Hall Lady Chapel, Oxford. His oil paintings are frequently of a religious nature. He was a skilled botanist, and many of his drawings depict his garden at Wrotham, Kent. He exhibited at NEAC and the RA, being made an RA elect in 1968. He is represented in the Tate Gallery and other public collections. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, held a memorial exhibition in 1975. Exhibitions were held in 2000 at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, Royal Museum and Art Gallery, Canterbury, and the Fine Art Society plc in association with Liss Fine Art.
