Lot 142
LUCIE ALDRIDGE (BRITISH 1889-1974) §
'GARDEN' RAG RUG
£2,142
Auction: Day Sale (Lots 52 to 481) - 26 April at 10am
Description
cotton, mixed textiles
Dimensions
176cm x 118cm (69 ¼in 46 ½in)
Provenance
The Artist, from whom acquired by the present owner.
Footnote
Exhibited:
Primavera, Cambridge.
Literature:
Aldridge, Lucie and Robjn Cantus, Before & After Great Bardfield: The Artistic Memoirs of Lucie Aldridge, Inexpensive Progress, Cambridge, 2021, pp. 175, illustrated.
John Aldridge met Lucie Brown (née Saunders) in London in the early 1930s. Having studied at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, the self-taught Aldridge was emerging as an artist of promise in the capital’s art scene, showing with the Seven and Five Society from 1931, at the invitation of Ben Nicholson and receiving a solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries two years later.
Brown trained at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and had established a dress-making studio. In 1933 they moved to Place House in the Essex village of Great Bardfield, where they became central figures in the informal gathering of artists based there, headed by Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, along with their wives Charlotte Epton and Tirzah Garwood.
The group of works presented here cover forty years of Aldridge’s career, from 1930 and one of the first of many visits to his friend Robert Graves in Deià on Majorca, to a pastoral scene near Great Bardfield of approximately 1970. It ranges across genres from landscape to still life and the interior in paintings and works on paper. A rare surviving example of Lucie’s rag rugs, Garden of c.1935, completes the collection.
Aldridge and Brown married in 1940, so that she would inherit his pension should he die whilst on active service during World War Two. He joined the Intelligence Corps and was stationed in the UK, Africa and Mediterranean. He painted and sketched when circumstances permitted, as can be seen in San Severo of 1945 and Grotto in the Boboli Gardens, Florence of 1944-45. Lucie’s sister Agnes and their nanny Ninnie, moved in with her at Place House for three years whilst John was away on war duties. Ninnie taught Lucie the art of hooked rug weaving and, as can be seen in Garden, she ’transformed a humble popular craft into a rich and original art form’ (Olive Cook quoted in Robjn Cantus, Before & After Great Bardfield: The Artistic Memoirs of Lucie Aldridge with a Postscript by Robjn Cantus, Inexpensive Progress, Cambridge, 2021, p.176). Following his demobilisation, John joined in the pursuit and a jointly made carpet of 1953 is in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (CRIC.529-1953).
The decorating and furnishing of the artists’ houses is a key aspect of the Great Bardfield art historical legacy, as captured in The Place House: The Artist’s Drawing Room, Great Bardfield. The historic property was in a state of neglect when purchased by Aldridge and he and Lucie worked hard to renovate the house and its overgrown garden. Cantus has explained how:
‘Colour started to come in as the walls were painted; John decorated one room red with a fantasy mural of exotic plants. They changed the wine-red sitting room carpet for a yellow one... The sitting room had the Moss wallpaper [designed by Aldridge], a blue and white striped sofa much like a butcher’s apron and Victorian furniture. There was a curious selection of china throughout the house… Lucie made the house a home, arranging furniture and the crafted items John loved. She was an excellent arranger of floral displays, using flowers from the garden of Place House. Visitors commented on how it made the house feel more alive.’ (Robjn Cantus, ibid, p. 176)
Paintings by artist friends including Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer and Frances Hodgkins hung on the walls, but Olive Cook was especially drawn to Lucie’s creations, writing: ‘The interior of The Place was…striking, with its bold wallpapers, draped mantelshelves, Victoriana, opulent flower arrangements and cottage furniture. The rugs above all caught the eye. They were rag rugs designed and made by Lucie.’ (Olive Cook, ‘The Fry Art Gallery’, Olive Cook and Andrew Lambirth, Artists at the Fry: Art & Design in the North West Essex Collection, Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, 2012, pp.9-10)
Following Lucie’s departure in 1960, she and Aldridge divorced and he married Margaret ‘Gretl’ Cameron. With the death of Ravilious in 1942, Bawden’s move to Saffron Walden in 1970 and the dispersal of the generation of artists who had arrived in the village after World War Two, Aldridge became the sole survivor of the glory days of Great Bardfield’s artistic chapter, remaining in Place House until his death in 1983; Lucie had pre-deceased him in 1974.
We are grateful to Jovan Nicholson for providing the following additional information about this Lot:
Lucie Aldridge began making rag rugs during World War Two at a time of make do and mend, probably partly inspired by the rugs she saw being made locally in rural Essex. A simple technique, essentially darning a piece of hessian, Lucie Aldridge went on to make a number of rag rugs often drawing on motives such as Roman paving, mosaics, the carving on the front of a church, a medieval glass window, or a Celtic cross (there is one example in the Fry Art Gallery and one in the V & A collection, circ.529-1953), writing “Sometimes an idea for a rug comes almost unconsciously, perhaps when rummaging through the materials I have available, something in their colouring will start off a train of thought. But when the design has been executed, I generally find that it relates in some way to something I have seen which has made a deep impression on me” (see Lucie Aldridge, Hooked Rugs in Handbook of Crafts, ed. Griselda Lewis, Edward Hulton, London 1960, pp. 91-94, 168-17). There is an engaging portrait by her husband John Aldridge in the Fry Art Gallery of Lucie making a rug with it draped over her knee, rather than on a frame as is more usual. For Lucie Aldridge ‘rug-making can be very absorbing, and an outlet for creative energy not very different from painting’ (op. cit.).
See the forthcoming book, Winifred Nicholson and Cumbrian Rag Rugs, Jovan Nicholson, Paul Holberton Publishing, for a discussion of Lucie Aldridge’s rugs.
