To celebrate the hundredth contribution for 'Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon', J.G. Paul Delaney wrote a guest blog about their friend Francis Ernest Jackson:
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| Francis Ernest Jackson |
Among
Ricketts’s closest friends in his later years was the artist F. Ernest Jackson
(1872-1945). It was in some ways the attraction of opposites. As opposed to the
aesthetic Ricketts, with his passionate collecting and his extravagant
purchases of flowers to decorate his house, Jackson was a down-to-earth
Yorkshireman, who was very sensible and could be a bit gruff. However, they
shared important values. Ricketts had been partly brought up in France and had
an attitude to art that was more European than British, while Jackson had
trained in Paris, could speak excellent French and remained a strong
Francophile all his life. In France, he had come to see lithography as more
than a reproductive medium, and, as both artist and teacher, he had become a
founder of the revival of artistic lithography in England. Indeed, it was
through lithography that he met Shannon, who was also involved in reviving this
medium, and thus came into the Ricketts and Shannon circle.
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Charles Shannon teaching at the Byam Shaw. Students left to right: Richard Finny, winner of the Prix de Rome,
Stephanie Cooper, Nancy Brockman, CHS, Unidentified, Francis Cooper
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More importantly, Jackson, who was professor of drawing at the Royal
Academy Schools, was considered by many to be the finest draughtsman, and the
best teacher of drawing of the human form, of his generation. He was a strong
supporter of the Classical Tradition in art. Despite his years in France, he
had not been ‘tainted’ by modern movements in Art, like Post-Impressionism,
that Ricketts so detested. What’s more, Jackson was a competent administrator,
and in 1926 became Director of the Byam Shaw School of Art, which under his
leadership became one of the leading art schools of its time in Britain,
producing between 1926 and 1945 two winners of the Prix de Rome and two
runners-up for this prestigious scholarship as well as a winner of the Abbey
Scholarship.
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| Jackson teaching at the Byam Shaw |
No doubt
it was this competence as an administrator that led Ricketts to name Jackson
one of his executors. This role had always unofficially belonged to Thomas
Sturge Moore, one of Ricketts’s oldest friends and disciples. However, with the
years Sturge Moore had become rather vague and muddled, and with Shannon having
suffered brain damage in his fall from a ladder in 1929, the estate needed
someone who was efficient and strong-minded. His choice proved to be right, as
in administering Ricketts’s estate, Jackson did his best to do what Ricketts
would have wanted, in both preserving his and Shannon’s collection as much as
possible, while at the same time selling some things to make sure that Shannon
received the best care possible. In doing this, he had to put up a great deal
of interference both from Sturge Moore and from the Master in Lunacy, who had
legally become involved in Shannon’s care, but who knew nothing of Ricketts and
Shannon and their values.
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| F. Ernest Jackson |
In the
years after Ricketts’s death, the Byam Shaw School under Jackson’s direction,
remained one of the few places in London where the names of Ricketts and
Shannon were still revered. Shannon had taught there for a time, and Ricketts
had made a practice of having a weekly lunch with Jackson. Jackson often spoke
of them to the students, some of whom like Brian Thomas, winner of the Prix de
Rome, and George Warner Allen, became devoted to Ricketts and Shannon and to
the artistic values that they represented. Jackson gave each of them a postcard
that he had received from Ricketts. Warner Allen, who knew whole sections of
Ricketts’s books on the Prado and on Titian by heart, continued to paint in the
manner of Titian, while Thomas, who realized that there was no money in such
painting, became a leading decorative artist for churches and older buildings,
one area where the classical tradition still survived. Thus it was partly
through Jackson that Ricketts and Shannon were able to pass on their artistic
values, however unpopular and old-fashioned they seemed to the artists of the
modern movement, to the new generation.
J.G. Paul Delaney
