Charles Mahoney
(1903 - 1968)
Set Design, c.1926-30
Charles Mahoney (1903 - 1968)
Oil on panel
Size:
Height – 43.8cm
Width – 30.5cm
Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.58.
During his years as a student Mahoney lodged at a succession of addresses – an inconvenience that his recurrent ill health coupled with financial hardship and unscrupulous landlords did little to relieve. It was against this background that Oak Cottage, his home from 1937, came to represent such permanence in his life and art. The cottage was too small for a studio, so weather allowing, Mahoney worked from a shed in the garden, or inside the cottage when it was too cold.
Acquired in 1937, Oak Cottage, in Wrotham, Kent, was very much Mahoney’s spiritual as well as actual home. It was also a home for his mother, Bessie, after she left Anerley in 1937. Charles lived at Oak Cottage from 1937-40, during which period he renovated it, and again from 1945 until his death in 1968. Once the garden that he planted had matured, he seldom worked anywhere else. For Mahoney, Oak Cottage had something of the quality with which Stanley Spencer imbued his childhood home, Fernlea; in both cases the frequent pictorial references to elements of the architecture and garden gives the location an almost mystical quality.
Oak Cottage.
Photo credit; with thanks to Fred Hohler.
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.
