Cork's Robert Gibbings - engraver, writer, controversialist - is celebrated in biography and in exhibition, writes Mary Leland
'It is important that eight bells should be used, as that is the number in the Shandon chime," were the instructions Robert Gibbings gave publisher Martin Dent in 1951 about the design of his new book, Sweet Cork of Thee. The bells were to run (as indeed they did) down the spine of the cover; a little later Gibbings advised Dent that "I am sending you a new block of a water-lily for p 107; and as soon as ever I can manage it after this, I will send you yet another small one of a corn stook for p 186."
Bells, water-lilies and corn stooks seem small things for a big man publishing one more in a succession of books for which he had already become famous, but the biography by Martin J Andrews on which the exhibition at the Crawford Gallery in Cork is based makes it clear that it was in the minute, intricate and accurate details of his art as an engraver that Robert Gibbings took most pride. It's not that he didn't tackle large issues and events, some drawn from his experiences in the first World War, some from his fascination with the alternative world of his travels in the South Seas, especially in Tahiti. But his trademark had become his meticulous renderings of plants, animals, fish, birds, landscapes and - fewer in number but not in intensity - the human form, mostly female. As this worked out through his career it involved him in a philosophy of publishing that now seems almost a relic of the past. But it is a recent past, and the philosophy is at least commemorated and at most revitalised by institutions such as the University of Reading, where Gibbings lectured on woodcuts, engraving and book production.
"The advent of computer and digital typography has allowed cheaper production methods," says Martin Andrews, a teacher in the department of typography and graphic communication at Reading, "but it has also caused the loss of the tactile engagement, the punch of type onto paper - there is a romance to all that. At Reading we've kept all our letterpress equipment, our print techniques and forms and material dating systems. I never met Gibbings, but this department was established as a result of his time here. And when his colleague, Mary Kirkus, compiled his bibliography he handed over loads of material, so she established a Gibbings collection for the university."
Andrews, A figurative painter left isolated when his time as a fine art student at Reading coincided with what he calls "a cutting edge abstract phase" took refuge, like Gibbings, in etching and prints, and thus found his way to his biographical subject.
He had been close already, his wife Verity growing up in the village of Long Wittingham, where Gibbings lived before his death in January 1958. But now that he was immersed in woodcuts and printing techniques and typography he helped organise a Gibbings exhibition and met the artist's partner, Patience Empson, who was still living in Long Wittingham. By the time Andrews had become a lecturer, Patience had invited him to write the biography.
"It became my research project. We met every two weeks - she was a very acute critic - and although eventually she was blind, I was able, just before she died, to place the book in her hands. She had been happy to pass on masses of material, and earlier, while I was still a student, I had found Albert Cooper, the press man from the Golden Cockerel Press, whose attic was full of proof-pulls of prints from all the famous artists who had ever worked for the press. So Reading now also has an Albert Cooper archive, and will be lending some of those items for the Cork exhibition, with more coming from Clemency Wilkins, a grand-daughter of Robert Gibbings; some from American universities; some from my own collection; and of course more from the collection in the Crawford."
Gibbings was, to put it kindly, a bit of a goer. He was to have two wives, seven children and several relationships, the last with his long-term partner and amanuensis Patience, sister of his second wife Elizabeth Empson. He was born in Cork city in 1889 near his grandfather's house in Montenotte, but was reared in Kinsale, where his father became rector at St Multose Church. Later, when Robert was a teenager, the family moved to the rectory at Carrigrohane, a riverside village now almost taken over by the suburban town of Ballincollig. Despite this background of clerical learning - and although his mother was a daughter of Robert Day, antiquarian and scholar and founder of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society (as well as running a prestigious harness and saddlery business in Patrick Street) - school had few if any attractions for Robert, who later admitted that he was really educated in the snipe bogs and trout streams of Munster. "Up in the hills of Ballyshoneen and out in the Muskerry bogs; those were the places where I learnt anything that has been of value to me ever since" (Coming Down the Seine, 1953).
And among his first wood engravings were studies of the family cow, Spot, and a pair of local pigs. He never lost either his Cork accent or his affection for his home place - he made frequent trips back to visit friends such as the sculptor Seamus Murphy and the solicitor Gerald Goldberg. In London he met up with another Cork exile, the barrister and wine connoisseur Maurice Healy.
In his profusely illustrated biography, Martin Andrews manages to relate the many different characteristics of this physically and spiritually large man, beginning with this very conundrum: that a boy of such a conventional background should grow into an traveller, artist, writer, nudist, explorer and all-round controversialist, lover equally of good art and good rows, spiritual but devoid of religious faith, expansive and explosive yet closely dedicated to a medium with few practitioners and even fewer artists.
His family's hopes of a degree in medicine were disappointed: he lasted at UCC for two years. One despairing professor lamented his preference for the outside of a rabbit over the inside. Still, the necessary scientific work brought great precision to his later drawings.
He studied with the painter Harry Scully in Cork for a year before he was allowed go to London and the Slade School of Fine Art, where staff at the time included Henry Tonks, Philip Wilson Steer and Frederick Brown, with Roger Fry as a visiting lecturer. Fellow students included Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Ben Nicholson, Jacob Kramer and Paul Nash, while Dora Carrington was among the segregated female students. Not segregated, however, were the models for the life class, and it was here that the innocent 22-year-old Gibbings first found and fell for the naked female flesh he was to celebrate so happily in his life as an artist.
He also found etching and printing and the foundation of his artistic priorities, by now based not so much on the Slade training but on his subsequent work with Noel Rooke at the Central School of Art. The interruption of the first World War ended in serious injury at Gallipoli, followed by another engagement at Salonica and then by a desk job in London, where he renewed his studies with Rooke until he married Moira Pennefather in 1919.
He built up a good business in commercial contracts for products such as Eno's Fruit Salts, or Gold Leaf cigarettes, or Shell, or dust-jacket illustrations for publishers. But once he began to write and to publish himself he was obsessively determined to control every aspect of production. For this reason, in 1923 he took over the Golden Cockerel Press, founded by Harold Midgley Taylor and his wife Gay as a way first of giving young writers a chance of publication and then of printing high-quality limited editions of erotic texts. Housed in the Taylor's cottage, the press also provided a home for his wife and their children.
The couple separated in 1932 and divorced in 1936, the children going with Moira. Life was both lonely and crowded. Gibbings, founder of the Society of Wood Engravers and maintaining a demanding friendship and collaboration with Eric Gill, was pressured by the need to make more money to support a new wife and family. He had sold the press to fellow Corkman Christopher Sandford, who moved it to London (Cooper never worked as a printer again), and he settled at Waltham, near Reading, where an invitation from the university soon arrived.
These were still the years of pride in typography, in fonts and letterpresses and bindings and design, in calligraphy and in an almost sensuous perfection of presentation. Gibbings was art editor of Penguin's short-lived list of Illustrated Classics at a time when such coalitions seemed possible.
All the same, Penguin got it wrong, and the series was abandoned. But at Waltham there was the first of those books that were to make Gibbings's international reputation as writer and illustrator. These, beginning with Sweet Thames Run Softly and evoking an outlook in retreat from modernity and from war, sold in their tens of thousands to people who had just seen the atomic bomb.
A True Tale of Love in Tonga opens at the Crawford Gallery, Cork, on Thurs. The Life and Work of Robert Gibbings by Martin J Andrews (Primrose Hill Press, Bicester). The Wood Engravings of Robert Gibbings by Patience Empson (Dent, 1959)
