Two English Artists in Grasse

Recently, while researching a future post, I happened to look (online) at a list of inhabitants in 1911 in the part of Grasse (Les Ribes-St François) in which I live.  In amongst the French and many Italian names in the census, I found a surprising entry.  It reads (in English) as follows:

Family name	Rothenstein
Given name	Albert
Year of birth	1882
Place of birth	Yorkshire
Nationality	English
Situation	Head of household
Profession	Artist-painter

Naturally, I had to look Albert up, and I found a summary of his life on the Tate Gallery website in London.

Albert came from Bradford, the son of a successful and rich immigrant German-Jewish wool merchant. At the time of his birth, Bradford, then nicknamed ‘Worstedopolis’, was the wool manufacturing capital of the world, and it had a thriving quarter which was known as ‘Little Germany’. It seems that Albert didn’t need to work much for a living, at least when he was younger.

Albert Rothenstein in a 1910 photograph, the year in which he came to Grasse

Albert studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London’s most prestigious art school, and worked with some famous painters, including Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. In January 1910, reportedly after some kind of nervous breakdown, he came to Grasse to meet friends, Gerard Chowne and his wife, Henrietta.

That’s where the trail becomes a little peculiar. Further down the census records, the Chownes are indeed listed, but as in a separate home. A Mrs Henriette Chowne, born 1849 in Ireland, is listed as head of a household, living with her son, Gerard, who is identified as born in Bradford and being a painter. They have a guest, Charles Rothenstein, who is a merchant, born in 1866 also in Bradford.

Perhaps, to be polite, there was a language problem! Gerard’s wife is listed as his mother and made out to be 61 years old, and Charles was Albert’s brother, so surely would have been living with him, not the Chownes. Furthermore, all the artistic biographies of Gerard Chowne state that he was born in India.

The rather confusing 1911 census entry for the Chowne family.

But in any case, Gerard Chowne’s presence was what brought Albert to St François. Although Gerard was six years older, we can assume that they knew each other from childhood: certainly they both attended the Slade in London.

Albert worked in a number of genres and he painted several landscapes of our region. They are signed with various dates between 1910 and 1914, so it seems that he returned to Grasse several times during that five year period. This attractive image, which shows Grasse from the Grand Hotel, hangs in Manchester Art Gallery in the UK:

Grasse from the Grand Hotel, 1914, Manchester Art Gallery

It was given to the Gallery as part of the collection of Charles Rothenstein, the brother who was supposedly Mrs Chowne’s guest in 1911. As the census entry shows (he's described as 'patron'), Charles ran the family business. He collected nearly 600 works of art, donating them to the Gallery in 1925 saying that he was impressed by its reputation for being ‘public spirited'.

Another landscape, ‘View from the Plateau Napoleon’ is also easy to identify – here it is compared to a photo from the Chene de l’Empereur’ on the Route Napoleon today. There are more trees now:

View from Plateau Napoleon, about 1914. This painting (lower) is in the National Gallery of Greece, to which it was donated by Albert.

Another landscape shows the Gorge du Loup in 1914. The Chemins du Sud railway was operating at the time, and the viaduct is intact:

La Gorge du Loup, 1914, British Museum collection

Albert's friend Gerard also painted landscapes. I can’t work out where this one was painted from, but it’s dated 1911, and it’s in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford:

Landscape at Grasse, Gerard Chowne, 1911

Albert obviously kept it, because he presented it to the museum in 1938.

As with almost all men of their age (33 and 39 respectively in 1914), Albert's and Gerard’s lives were upended by the outbreak of the Great War. In 1915, like many others (including the royal family), the Rothensteins changed their names to sound more English. They called themselves Rutherston, and that is how Albert and his siblings are known today. Albert served in Egypt and Palestine and survived the war, becoming a theatrical designer, a teacher at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford University and a book illustrator before dying in 1953.

Albert’s relations are better known than him in the art world. Apart from Charles the collector, there was brother William, a more distinguished artist than Albert, and nephew John, who was director of London’s Tate Gallery for over 25 years. Both were knighted for their services to art.

Unlike Albert, Gerard Chowne did not survive the war. He had the misfortune of taking part in one of the Great War’s least successful campaigns, when a Franco-British army attacked Bulgaria via Thessaloniki in 1917. He was killed in a forlorn front-on charge at enemy fortifications.

Works by Albert and Gerard are held in various British galleries, but to my mind the nicest is actually by Gerard:

After Lunch, Gerard Chowne, 1910

It’s in the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, which is appropriately the friends' mutual childhood home. The male figure is clearly Albert – he seems to be wearing the same hat as in the photograph from 1910. The lady on the right is Gerard’s wife, as two portraits of her from 1909, one of them by Gerard, confirm.

The census records don’t identify the exact locations where Albert and Gerard lived (they only say ‘Les Ribes’), but it’s certainly possible to see the sea from the higher parts of Les Ribes. So I think it is clear that this image was painted on a summer’s day on a balcony on the upper slopes above where I live, with the Mediterranean glowing in the distance.