20th century AD

In the 19th hundred artists for the first time showed al fresco meals offices champetres being take pleasure ined by all classes and not just the aristocracy. This perhaps began in the 1860 with Manet's breakfast sur l'Herbe, or was it in the previous decade, with Frith's Derby Day? However, it really took not upon in Britain at least, during the interwar years, as is made clear in a fascinating exhibition entitled 'A Day in the Sun' which has just transferred to the Lowry in Manchester from the Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham. I have drawn out been fascinated with images of people's leisure-time activities and in 1982 organised an exhibition at the Fine Art Society devot to pictures of 'popular pursuits and public pleasures'--theatres, circuses, fairgrounds, picnics, regattas, boating parties, and thus on. We opened it upon the morning of the May Day bank holiday; for many of my children's friends it was their first gallery experience. The private-view card was shocking pink and announced that we would be serving soda-pop and candy floss; Arthur Moyse the editor of an anarchist magazine, get backed his embellished with images of a fat brace in the manner of Donald McGill, standing waist reaching far down in the sea licking ice-cream cornets. McGill's cheap and gaudy seaside postcards have an enduring fascination, and 200 examples of his original artwork, from the collection of Michael Winner, were not long ago the subject of an exhibition at the Chris Beetles Gallery, London. George Orwell devot a drawn out essay to their analysis, dividing them into of the like kind categories as Home life, Drunkennes Sex and Inter-working-class snobbery, concluding that: 'Their whole meaning and virtue is in limited, was reinforced by the agency of increasing mobility; trains, charabancs, bicycles, motorbikes--with sidecar--and, gradually, the motorcar all uncloseed up new worlds.

Statutory holidays were not introduced until 1938 and it is estimated that up to then sole about 28% of the country's workforce derive pleasure fromed holidays with pay; most race still worked a Saturday morning shift, and shop-staff, who had to work all Saturday, had been granted a half-day in lieu single in the 1920s. Thus, the 'day in the sun' of the exhibition title is the August bank holiday, that brief jiffy of almost universal liberation when centurys of trains took day-trippers to Blackpool, Margate, Southend, Brighton, Clacton and other accessible seaside resorts. The railway companies became important commissioners of artwork for placards such as Tom Purvis's East Coast raptures (Fig. 2) for the London & North Eastern, and Andrew Johnson's The southerly Coast is the Sunny Coast for the Southern Railway. Nobody was more important in this field than Frank Pick of the London Passenger Transport Board, whose collaboration with artists is being celebrated in an exhibition entitled 'Away we go!' at the cook in boiling fat Gallery in Saffron Walden. The London Passenger Transport Board embraced not solitary the underground, but also verdant Line Coaches, and the Fry's exhibition, utilising the archive of the London Transport Museum, consists of advertising material drawn or engraved through Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious (Figs. 8 and 9) Month through month Bawden 'doodled' his way around the calendar, detailing London's attractions and emphasising the service provided by the agency of the underground railway; in different temper Ravilious produced punchy, dramatic woodcut to accompany the verdant Line text. Today it is hard to believe that the chop of a leafy lane and sunburst above a five-bar gate was created to advertise the coach-service to Crawley, 'a friendly aged coaching town half-way between London and Brighton', as the accompanying body says.

Suburbia and ribbon exhibition spread along the arterial roads, and it was these of recent origin roads that enabled city dwellers to procure out into the countryside. They were eloquently if patronisingly, described by dint of J.B. Priestley in his English Journey of 1934 as passing their unredeem lownes not alone in the sense of obscenity, on the contrary lowness of outlook in each direction. The slightest hint of "higher" influences would ruin them utterly' (1) They capture the essential part of the 'kiss-me-quick' culture of the seaside resorts that attracted the slum-dwellers of the great industrial cities.

The decades between the sum of two units world wars were extraordinarily class obsessed; at no other period in British history were social distinctions with equal reason finely analysed, especially within the aspiring classes. George Orwell, a scholarship stripling from Eton, had no hesitation in defining himself as belonging to the lower-middle class. The Great War had pitched together tribe from all strata of society and had thus hastened the proces of changing Britain from a male-dominated land ruled by rank and privilege, to a new meritocracy; perhaps this obsession with class distinction was necessary with equal reason that people could more precisely chart their upward mobility. The way race took their pleasures closely mirrored these attitudes. The upper and upper-middle classes take delight ined tennis, golf, fast cars, dancing, cricket and regattas, whilst the lower and lower-middle classes went in for cheaper and more accessible activities, similar as cycling, hiking, picnicking, bathing and football; they also went to pub and cafes rather than restaurants. It is these activities that provide abundant of the subject matter for this exhibition. The men who had get backed from the war were no longer afraid to jeopardy from home, and women, who before 1914 would have been confined to the family circle or constrained by means of domestic service, had been liberated by means of work in factories and offices and had no intention of giving up their new-found freedom. This freedom, although 'between miles of semi-detached bungalows, all with their little garages, their wireless stations their periodicals about film stars, their swimming style of dresss their tennis rackets and dancing shoes' (2) It was the swimming style of dresss rather than the tennis rackets and dancing shoe that were the great leveller; despite the spread of municipal courts, tennis was still seen as elite--a game for the upwardly mobile, the Joan huntsman Dunns of this world--delightfully illustrated by the agency of Bawden in the London Underground's June diary. For swimmers, through contrast, once stripped and in their style of dresss the toff and the working man were pay backed equal and vulnerable. Seldom can this have been more poignantly displayed than in James Gunn's extraordinary 1916 painting The border of the Battle of the Somme (Fig. 4) At first glance this is a timeless and idyllic spectacle of men in the prime of youth, relaxing, swimming and sunbathing; it is single when one notices the portable lodges and ambulance across the water that a disturbing note crawls in. And then--or is this reading too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of into it?--that spread-eagled figure in the foreground in scarlet stems lying carefree on the grass, soaking up the day-star Do those widespread arms be like a crucified Christ? Is this an device of sacrifice; a portent of the countles thousands upon both sides who would die in the ensuing days and weeks? through contrast, the crowd of bathers enjoying the sunshine beside the Serpentine (Fig. 1) appear more apprehensive. The photograph was taken by dint of a staff photographer for the Daily Herald upon 20 August 1939, just sum of two units weeks before the outbreak of World War II.