13.5.    John Farleigh: Late Work

In line with the trend towards abstraction and surrealism amongst British artists in the mid-1930s,⁸⁸ John Farleigh began to develop a more subjective, metaphysical approach—one which, in some respects, was allied to Leon Underwood’s philosophy. Yet, unlike the Brook Green artists, he stressed the value of wood-engraving for book illustration, combining creative imagery and modernist styles with a sound knowledge of typography and a sensitivity towards the authors’ intentions. This can clearly be traced in his later book illustrations which are among the more unorthodox of the period.

As mentioned in an earlier chapter,⁸⁹ Farleigh was fortunate to work with some of the most distinguished typographers and printers, in particular Maxwell and Mason, to whom he frequently acknowledged his debt.⁹⁰ Both men were concerned for a sense of unity between type and illustration and, according to Farleigh, worked in a similar way, using word pictures to evolve their final designs.⁹¹ Mason took a new typographic direction with his remarkable title-page for D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died (Heinemann, 1935) displaying a narrow column of red capitals broken up with lines of black Gothic titling inspired by early psalters. Farleigh’s illustrations were designed to enliven Mason’s solid page of even grey type without paragraphs or quotation marks.  Of the ten illustrations, seven of them full page, nine have a second block overprinting the black with red.⁹² Farleigh describes how the ‘story is of the struggle from death to life—a breaking free from restrictions. As an illustrator, what better use could I make of  Mason’s static format than by breaking free into the generous margins, allowing each design to create its own flowing vignette’.⁹³ The red block symbolizes the surge of returning life.

Farleigh’s imagery is in keeping with the intense and sensual nature of Lawrence’s text. There is a monumental quality about the figures which become progressively more futuristic and faceless, foreshadowing his illustrations for Back to Methuselah. A sense of movement is achieved in the curvaceous outline shapes as exemplified in Farleigh’s depiction of the lovers, arms encircled, their torsos joined as one. Mason wanted light blocks with plenty of white and grey and the minimum of black. In the preliminary drawings⁹⁴ Farleigh experimented in simple wash with broad sweeps of the brush, hence the lack of texture in the engravings, with plain blacks and grey areas contrasting with open parallel-line shading. The illustrations, together with Mason’s unconventional typesetting, were impeccably printed by Lewis at the Cambridge University Press. These elements combine to create one of the more visually startling books of the period. Farleigh was right to consider it one of his ‘best jobs’, the publication of which he was entirely responsible for arranging with Frere Reeves of Heinemann.

In the same vein but less original were his illustrations the following year for Margaret Goldsmith’s St John the Baptist—a more mundane commission from the publisher Arthur Barker. The figure style is handled in a similar manner to that in The Man Who Died but the rectangular format and crowded picture space lack subtlety. Farleigh progressively altered his style and technique depending on the nature of the commission, his urge to experiment, and his growing introspection. For him technique was ‘not a thing separate from feeling’.⁹⁵ Two further books in 1936 required different treatments. Scenes for A Country Garden, published by Country Life and discussed earlier, he depicted naturalistically.⁹⁶ For W.J. Brown’s The Gods Had Wings, a Constable publication, he produced fifteen full-page illustrations as openings to each chapter. He used the textual symbolism as a basis for his abstracted images of birds which, in turn, grew out of natural forms. He discovered ‘how important a part texture will play in the significance of motive. A vulture is a loathsome animal and I had to find a loathsome texture’⁹⁷—in this instance wiry, scratched lines. Some prints are more loosely engraved, others hard-lined. No blocks are uniform in shape: beaks, wings, and claws appear to break through the frames. A boldly surreal frontispiece faces an abstract title-page design. These curious compositions disclose Farleigh’s sardonic humour and assured decorative sense.

In 1937 his illustrative style changes yet again. Two headpieces and six small rectangular engravings adorn Herbert Marks’s Pax Obbligato (Cresset Press). Grimacing mask-like heads and seething figures are freely sketched in white line, with prominent scorper marks, and signs of the vélo and a rocked tool for certain finer textures. Figures in the three full-page illustrations to William Lamb’s The World’s End (Dent) are more modelled and monumental, the background details yet more scrawled.

In October 1936 Farleigh had accepted George Macy’s invitation to illustrate Shaw’s Back to Methuselah for the Limited Editions Club with Mason as typographical adviser. He became seriously involved in this ponderous ‘Bible for Creative Evolution’ in which, according to the preface, Shaw exploits ‘the eternal interest of the philosopher’s stone which enables men to live for ever’. Farleigh felt that the deep underlying motive of the play could not be represented on the stage and hoped that his compositions might help to illuminate it. He was prompted, having read the play and made notes for the illustrations, to engrave a large allegorical single print of Lilith. It evolved over a period of time from a vaguely scribbled drawing to a complex and, in his words, ‘elusive’, print completed in 1937. Farleigh’s conception of Lilith is an entirely Shavian one. He saw her ‘as the beginning and the end, and there emerged in my mind a vague image of this effort to live’.⁹⁸ More abstracted than the earlier print of Melancholia (1935), the vast body of Lilith is fragmented in a Cubist manner, a web of symbolistic patterning overall. This strange engraving forms the basis for his numerous illustrations to the book which moves from the mythological past, through the twentieth century, to 31,920 ad. Style and technique vary according to the mood of each scene; although most are representational, they are generally distorted in some way or other.

Farleigh took two years over this commission. He made a day to day diary of the first year’s work which, regrettably, he tore up. He refers to the book in Graven Image only briefly.⁹⁹ A series of pen-and-wash drawings were sent to Shaw for his comments.¹⁰⁰ The following letter accompanying some of them gives an insight into Farleigh’s conscious change of direction:

Lilith is not intended to have a face. I am aware that my work is very different now from the time when I did the Black Girl but apart from my own difference I find the play is such a very different problem. The imaginative range in your play needs all the imagination I can muster to do it as I feel it should be done. The drawings are a little bigger than the engravings will be; and I have made no attempt to imitate engravings as I did in the past. I can only ask you to criticize them as such. It might be easier for you to make your comments on the drawings themselves.¹⁰¹

Correspondence between the two men was scarce since, as Farleigh noted, Shaw ‘expressed himself always on the drawings—and very adequately’.¹⁰² The fact that he felt able to ignore some of the author’s advice, as the following observations reveal, shows the extent to which he had grown in confidence since his tentative suggestions for The Black Girl.

According to Poole, the semi-abstract scene, Lilith Gives Birth to Adam and Eve, for the frontispiece to In the Beginning represents the struggle ‘to produce the parents of the human race at one birth’.¹⁰³ Apart from the surface texture, Farleigh’s engraving is almost identical to his drawing, notwithstanding Shaw’s wry comments:

These tree ends, being all cut, suggest the stone axe: rather a late date for Lilith.

What is this?

This looks like a huge bass viol.

This obstetric enormity is a key subject, and ought to make a magnificent frontispiece.

  To a suggestion from Macy that he should do an engraving for the title-page, Farleigh replied: ‘The 1st big block of “Lilith” is to face it as a frontispiece & a small block opposite would look impertinent.’¹⁰⁴ On a drawing dated ‘37’ of Eve Brooding Shaw draws a little elephant and comments: ‘This is a lively design; but the unlucky suggestion of an elephant’s trunk on the left should be quite definitely and unmistakeably the serpent whispering to Eve.’ Farleigh heeds his advice in a further drawing dated ‘38’ to which Shaw adds: ‘Make the figure masculine and you have a perfect Adam brooding on the horror of immortality.’ The faceless female figure in the second drawing remains unaltered in the final print.

For Act I of In the Beginning Farleigh submitted two drawings for the little rectangular headpiece of The Garden of Eden. Despite the fact that Shaw preferred the figures in the second and though the receding hills in the first reminded Shaw of grave mounds in the Chinese fields, or molehills, Farleigh kept to his original idea. The disjointed snake and unearthly landscape possess a dream-like quality: one which recurs in his work at this time, as one of the few wood-engravers to attempt Surrealism in book illustration. His style alters again in his designs for Part II, The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas. These consist mainly of figures depicted representationally but fractured by geometric lines. His scribbled-line technique recurs in the blank, oral faces of the two automatons. The heads of Mrs Lutestring and the Archbishop in Part III are severer and more angular with tones more finely textured. On the caricatured drawing of Falstaff and Napoleon, Shaw remarks that Napoleon’s littleness should be suggested, that his whistle should be removed because it looks like a cigarette, and that Falstaff ‘should be laughing uproariously’, all of which Farleigh corrects in the final image. Part V takes place in 31,920 ad which accounts for the timeless figure of the Ancient.

Back to Methuselah was published in 1939. Macy was not entirely satisfied with the modernity of these illustrations feeling that some of them ‘seem to require a deal of explanation for even the most sympathetic of readers’.¹⁰⁵ In defence Farleigh sent him Shaw’s delighted response to the engravings: ‘Nothing more exactly right for a unique edition could be imagined. The 1500 copies will sell like Blake’s some day. G.B.S.’¹⁰⁶ Farleigh felt he had ‘never put so much into one book… it means a lot to me and has a lot of personal development in it’.¹⁰⁷ For British audiences, however, such complex and subjective interpretations had a limited appeal. Farleigh did not illustrate a book with wood-engravings again until 1944. By this time his innovative ideas in this field were spent. Yet through teaching, writing, broadcasting, and campaigning for crafts, he did much to keep the interest in wood-engraving alive.¹⁰⁸

⁸⁶  Quoted by David Brown in introduction to exhibition catalogue, Gertrude Hermes, RA (London: Royal Academy of Art, 1981). In New York she did a series of line drawings to illustrate P.L. Travers’s I Go by Sea I Go by Land (Harper Bros., 1941).

⁸⁷  A black key block with two colours added which she contributed to one of Faber’s Ariel Poem Series, T.S. Eliot’s Animula (1929), was a rare incursion into colour wood-engraved illustration.

⁸⁸  Oct.1935: First entirely non-representational exhibition held in England organized by Ben Nicholson for the Seven and Five Society. Feb.–June 1936: ‘Abstract and Concrete’ exhibition held in Oxford, Liverpool, London, and Cambridge, including works by Hepworthi, Nicholson, Moore, John Piper, and leading European artists such as Moholy-Nagy, Miró, Mondrian, Gabo, Calder, and Giacometti. June 1936: ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ held at the New Burlington Galleries, London, to which Paul Nash and Moore were the foremost British contributors.

⁸⁹  See Ch. 9.

⁹⁰  See, for instance, John Farleigh, Graven Image (London, 1940), 361, and Leslie Thomas Owens, J .H. Mason, 1875–1951,Scholar-Printer (London, 1976), 138–40.

⁹¹  Owens, J. H. Mason, 139.

⁹²  Progressive proofs to some of the illustrations are held in the VAM.

⁹³  Quoted in The Wood Engravings of John Farleigh, with text by Monica Poole (Henley-on-Thames, 1985), 10–11.

⁹⁴  Whereabouts unknown by the author. See Farleigh, Graven Image, 361.

⁹⁵  Ibid.194–5.

⁹⁶  See Ch. 9.

⁹⁷  Farleigh, Graven Image, 371.

⁹⁸  Ibid. 382.

⁹⁹  Ibid. 378.

¹⁰⁰  Some examples held in the Rare Books Department of New York Public Library (Arents Tobacco Collection).

¹⁰¹  John Farleigh to George Bernard Shaw, 9 Jan. 1938. Shaw Papers, BLMC.

¹⁰²  John Farleigh to George Macy, 25 Feb. 1939. LECA. A small undated [? 1940] booklet published by the Limited Editions Club entitled With the Advice of G. B. S. contains reproductions of the drawings and Shaw’s handwritten comments.

¹⁰³  See The Wood Engravings of John Farleigh, 12.

¹⁰⁴  John Farleigh to George Macy, 25 Feb. 1939. LECA.

¹⁰⁵  George Macy to John Farleigh, 15 Aug. 1938. LECA.

¹⁰⁶  John Farleigh to George Macy, 27 Aug. 1938. LECA.

¹⁰⁷  John Farleigh to George Macy, 10 Aug. 1938. LECA.

¹⁰⁸  For official positions held see Ch. 9 nn. 1 and 2. A selected list of his publications appears in The Wood Engravings of John Farleigh, 119.