Cover images:
Front: Clifton Suspension Bridge
Back: Venice
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This is the second part of a two part biography of William Holt Yates Titcomb
(1858-1930), produced to accompany the 2003 Titcomb Retrospective at Penlee
House Gallery & Museum, Penzance. Titcomb was an acclaimed figure painter, who
had 44 works hung at the Royal Academy and whose work is represented in Public
Galleries in Toronto, Nottingham, Bristol, Truro, Doncaster, Oldham, Southport,
Dudley and the V & A.
This second part covers the years 1909-1930. In 1909, Titcomb and his family
returned from Germany and settled in Bristol. A distinguished figure, such as
Titcomb, was warmly welcomed into Bristol art circles, and the Bristol Academy
was keen to use his contacts with the Cornish artists to persuade them to
exhibit more regularly at Bristol. He seems to have had some success in this
regard, for the number of Cornish exhibitors increased significantly at this
time, so that when a royal charter was obtained in 1913, the Academy was
re-named the Royal West of England Academy. Titcomb also joined the Bristol
Savages, becoming President in 1917, and held painting classes in Clifton.
Up until this juncture, Titcomb had worked almost exclusively in oils, but a
commission to illustrate, for his friend, the writer, Charles Marriott, a book,
The Romance of the Rhine, not only inspired him to work more regularly in
watercolour, but also tempted him to consider producing his own book on the
buildings of Old Bristol. Accordingly, his subsequent exhibits at the Bristol
Savages contain a number of watercolour drawings clearly intended for such a
book, such as of the Old Blind Institution at the top of Park Street, or the
Merchant Tailors' Almshouses on Merchant Street (Bristol Art Gallery), albeit
the project never came to fruition.
During his first decade in Bristol, Titcomb still produced for the Royal Academy
a number of significant oil paintings. Initially, he was fascinated by the
quaintly-attired inmates of a number of the philanthropic institutions in the
town, such as the Muller Orphanages at Ashley Down and the Blue Maid Orphanages
at Hooke's Mills, where the girls were trained for domestic service. With his
interest in faith, other churches in the city caught his attention and, again,
it was the Anglo-Catholic ritual practised in St Stephens by the Reverend Ernest
Houghton, which was the subject of another work, The Reading of the Gospel :
Old Bristol Church (RA 1916) (St Stephens).
Titcomb also depicted the local boy scout group on various occasions, perhaps
because Frank (and other Clifton boys) had joined, and showed at the Royal
Academy in 1913 a major work, Cheering the Chief Scout, showing the boys
welcoming Baden-Powell in Dowry Square, Hotwells - most probably during his 1910
visit.
With the outbreak of War in 1914, the art market unsurprisingly died and art
concerns seemed trivial alongside the horrors being reported. Titcomb's scout
painting was seen as having good propaganda potential and was re-named Send
Us!. With outdoor sketching restricted, Titcomb turned his attention to
historical reconstructions and imaginative work, including several war-related
subjects, of which the fine The Soldiers' Communion, showing a group of
soldiers kneeling before a makeshift altar set up on planks just behind the
firing line, now hangs in the Ante-Chapel at Clifton College, for many of the
models for the painting were boys at the School, who subsequently lost their
lives in the War. Titcomb's son, Frank, was one such casualty, crashing in 1917
in thick fog during his first solo flight with the Royal Navy Air Squadron.
The loss of their son and heir, who had shown great talent as a musician,
devastated the Titcombs. He forced himself to finish one of his largest and most
impressive works - a historical reconstruction of John Wesley preaching in the
Lord Mayor's Chapel in 1788 (RA 1918 - Lord Mayor's Mansion House, Bristol),
but, thereafter, gave up painting large oils almost entirely, spending the last
decade of his life working in watercolours and leaving Bristol for extended
tours of the Continent, finding Venice a particular inspiration. In 1925, he
staged an exhibition of 89 watercolours at Walker's Gallery in New Bond Street
in 1925, which was well received and visited by the Queen. After a spell in
Menton in the South of France, he died in Bristol in 1930.
A humble man, uninterested in self-publicity and art politics, Titcomb's art has
been sadly neglected, but the 2003 Exhibition received rave reviews (see St Ives
Art Exhibitions).
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