Who taught JRR Tolkien to draw and paint?

Rivendell, by JRR Tolkien  (Tolkien estate)

The other day, I found the above picture of Rivendell for a friend, and it struck me anew that J.R.R Tolkien was an accomplished illustrator. He could have worked as an artist had he not had an even greater facility with the written word. “Who taught him to paint?” I mused.

Turns out, it was his mother. After their father’s death in 1896, she moved young Ronald and Hillary to Sarehole, a hamlet that has now been absorbed into greater Birmingham. Mabel Suffield Tolkien was a capable artist and passionately interested in botany. “Ronald can match silk lining or any art shade like a true ‘Parisian Modiste,’” she wrote to her mother-in-law in 1903.

Those lessons ended tragically young, since Mabel died of diabetes when her young sons were 10 and 12. She entrusted his care to Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory. This put him within visiting distance of one of the most important collections of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters, that in the Birmingham Museum.

Fangorn Forest by JRR Tolkien was originally done as a Silmarillion painting in the late 1920s, and reflects the current aesthetic. (Tolkien estate)

That the medieval fantasies of the Pre-Raphaelites would appeal to an adolescent of Tolkien’s temperament seems obvious, but we have a scholar’s word for it. Humphrey Carpenter, author of Tolkien’s authorized biography, wrote that Tolkien associated his childhood gang, the TCBS (Tea Club, Barrovian Society) with the Pre-Raphaelites, indicating that he and his pals were certainly aware of them.

Tolkien began to make visionary pictures after he went up to Oxford in 1911. These included scenes that would later be expressed in words. For his story Roverandom, conceived in 1925, Tolkien made at least five illustrations. In the late 1920s or early 1930s he produced a picture book, Mr. Bliss, in colored pencil and ink. These pictures and others, however, were for his own and his family's amusement, not for print.

His illustrations for The Hobbit, however, were intended for publication. The first printing of this book, in 1937, contained eleven black-and-white illustrations and maps. Full-color plates were added to later editions.

Tolkien used drawing as a means of understanding the complex topography of his imaginary world. He made many sketches and drawings during the writing of The Lord of the Rings. These have subsequently been published, but his intention was not to illustrate the novel, but to aid in his writing.

Lamb's Farm, Gedling, (c. 1914) represents a real farm, owned by Tolkien's aunt. (Tolkien estate)

“In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature,” wrote Tolkien. “In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results.”

Tolkien continued to paint and draw all his life. His home was supplied with “paper and pencil and a wonderful range of coloured chalks, paintboxes and coloured inks. We knew as we got older that these things gave him particular pleasure, and they continued to do so right through his life,” his daughter Priscilla recollected.

His work was in the style of his times—realism with lashings of the Art Nouveau of his childhood and the Art Deco of his young manhood. 

To answer my initial question, Tolkien learned to paint from everybody and nobody. His initial instruction was that of a good, bright, home-schooled lad of his time. He then built on that as an autodidact, absorbing the architecture and art of the world around him. How he applied that to his own inner vision was, of course,  his own unique gift.

Forgotten sculptor of the Art Deco

Mowgli, by Raymond Delamarre, 1927, patinated plaster.

Those of us who were introduced to The Jungle Book through Disney think of Mowgli as a boy, but he was in fact a young man in Rudyard Kipling’s tales. In fact, when I first saw Raymond Delamarre’s bas relief of Mowgli, above, I took the figure for Adam. He is as perfectly-formed and self-possessed as his ursine and feline companions.  “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” asks the Psalmist, and the question resonates in this work.

Delamarre first met The Jungle Book in 1894. It was a lifelong love. He sculpted many versions of Mowgli in stone and bronze. 

Delamarre's preparatory sketch for Mowgli, above.

Delamarre's life spanned nearly a century of artistic and social upheaval (1890 to 1986). In his time, he was an important Art Deco artist with many commissions. 

Reliefs, Brest war memorial, Raymond Delamarre.

He is remembered for the sensitivity of his memorials. He earned this understanding the hard way. He began his studies at the age of sixteen, but they were interrupted by war. His general conscription at age 21 was followed by the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. Soon after the General Mobilization, Delamarre was taken prisoner. After two years in an enemy camp, he was released in a widespread exchange and returned to the Front.

It was not until the end of the war that he was able to resume his studies. At age 28, he won a Prix de Rome and headed to Italy.

L'Intelligence Sereine and La Force Sévère, from the Suez Canal memorial, Raymond Delamarre

In 1925 Delamarre and architect Michel Roux-Spitz won a competition to build a memorial to the defense of the Suez Canal in 1915 by British, Egyptian, French and Italian troops. Delamarre’s figures represent Serene Intelligence and Severe Force. They are the epitome of Art Deco styling.

Detail from the Suez Canal Memorial, by Raymond Delamarre

From 1961 to 1973, Delamarre managed the business end of the Ateliers d'Art Sacré in Paris. This group was formed by Maurice Denis and Georges Desvallières in an attempt to breathe new life into sacred art. Surprisingly, all three of these avant-garde artists were devoutly religious. The Ateliers were founded to train artists and craftsmen and to create art for churches, particularly those damaged in the Great War. They sought a 20th century language for faith, with emotional response triumphing over conventional symbolism. Perhaps Mowgli-as-Adam isn't just a trick of my imagination after all.

In 1963 Delamarre created the last of his great monuments, twelve bas-reliefs in stone for a hospital designed by his old friend Michel Roux-Spitz. He continued to work on smaller projects—busts, medals, statues and plaques—right up to his death in 1986.

Women's work

Baby quilt, Sonia Delaunay, 1912 

In 1980 I saw a show of Sonia Delaunay’s embroidered textiles at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. If I hadn’t been with a very rational friend, I’d think I imagined it, because I’ve seen nary a trace of that work since, online or elsewhere.

I was reminded of it yesterday when writing about Mary Delany, because both were attempting to bridge the gap between high art and women’s traditional crafts.

From La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, a collaborative artist’s book by Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars, featuring the Eiffel Tower.

Sonia Stern (Terk) was born in Ukraine in 1885. At a young age she was sent to live with relatives in St. Petersburg, where she had the benefits of affluence, ultimately culminating with an art education in Karlsruhe and Paris. There she entered a marriage of convenience until she eventually met and married the painter Robert Delaunay.

Rythme, 1938, Sonia Delaunay

The couple pioneered a form of painting called Orphism, which was the intermediary step between Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. While art critics ponder its roots in Fauvism and the writings of Paul Signac and others, I see it as based in quilting.

Bathing suit, 1928, Sonia Delaunay

There are historical grounds for that, as well.  “About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings,” Sonia Delaunay wrote.

Simultanéisme dress, 1913, Sonia Delaunay

The period between the World Wars was one of great invention for her. She designed fabrics, theater and movie sets and costumes, and opened a fashion studio. She lectured at the Sorbonne and had a pavilion at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris (which gave us the term Art Deco).

Printed silk satin with metallic embroidery dress, c. 1925-28, Sonia Delaunay.

Sonia Delaunay outlived her husband by decades. After his death from cancer in 1941, she continued to paint and design, eventually being decorated with the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur.

Still photo from Le P’tit Parigot, 1926, costume and set by Sonia Delaunay.

The textile embroideries I saw in 1980 combined two great interests of hers—words and needlework. It’s a pity they’ve vanished from modern consciousness. But that’s often the lot of women’s design—influential, intellectual—and ultimately forgotten.

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