The Artist Helen Coombe (1864–1937)

Addenda

 

 

 

Martin Ferguson Smith

 

In memory of my friend Tony Bradshaw (1939–2026) 

 

 

 

 

1 Roger Eliot Fry (designer) and Helen Fry (decorator), Trevelyan Cabinet. Oil on wood, 120.5 x 56.5 x 53.5 cm, c1900.
Art Gallery of South Australia, accession no. 8711F9, South Australian Government Grant 1987.
© Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA)

 

 

 

Artwork in Adelaide

Since the publication of my biography of Roger Fry’s wife, Helen Coombe (1864–1937), in October 2023,^[1] three additional items of significant interest have come to my attention.^[2] One is the decorated Trevelyan Cabinet in the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) in Adelaide (Pl 1). It is discussed and illustrated by Robert Reason, AGSA’s former Curator of European and Australian Decorative Arts.^[3] I gratefully acknowledge my debt to him, and also to Rebecca Evans, present Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, with whom I have had several fruitful exchanges about the piece’s provenance. It is to AGSA that I owe the photographs of the cabinet and the kind permission to reproduce them.^[4]

The cabinet, said to have been designed by Roger Fry and painted by Helen Fry c1900, is called after its first owner, the poet Robert (‘Bob’) Calverley Trevelyan (1872–1951). Bob was a close friend of the Frys. He got to know Roger first, and on 27 May 1895 introduced Helen to him. He was to be the best man at their wedding on 3 December 1896 and met up with them in Sicily during their honeymoon. Although he never had or craved any sort of romantic attachment to Helen, he had an enormous admiration not only for her artistic talent, but also for her good looks, personality, and intellect.

The date 1900 is plausible. It was the year Bob married Elizabeth (‘Bessie’) des Amorie van der Hoeven (7 June) and also the year Roger carried out interior decorative work in Bob’s house – Mill House in the village of Westcott near Dorking (January–February). Reason is mistaken in placing the work in The Shiffolds, the house near Dorking which the Trevelyans occupied later.^[5] Even if the decorated cabinet was connected with Bob’s marriage, it is unlikely that it was a gift from the Frys. Probably it was a commission from Bob, whose ancestry it celebrates, and an extension of other work Roger had done for him.

How exactly the two artists divided the work between them cannot be known, but it can be assumed that Roger suggested the broad lines of the decoration, and that Helen refined it in close consultation with him. Reason recalls the way they worked when she was decorating Arnold Dolmetsch’s Green Harpsichord in the summer of 1896, and Roger assisted with the designs for the medallions which she painted. As for the Trevelyan Cabinet, she probably worked on it in the early months of 1900. Bob had told them of his engagement on or about 19 November 1899, when they were in Italy. They returned home three weeks later, and a start on the cabinet before January 1900 is unlikely. It may have been the first significant work Helen undertook since she completed her exquisite decoration of Dolmetsch’s clavichord no. 8 for display at the Sixth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at the New Gallery, Regent Street, from 9 October to 9 December 1899. The instrument, highly praised by critics and by Bob, was presented to the Trevelyans on 14 July 1900, the donor apparently being Bob’s aunt Margaret Price.^[6] That brilliant work of Helen’s should make one wary of supposing that the cabinet and its stand owe most to Roger’s inspiration and artistic experience. Helen’s talent outclassed his, and it would be very surprising if she did not deploy it to good effect in this case.

The Trevelyan family had its roots in Cornwall, and the paintings on the four sides of the cabinet are inspired by, and imaginatively developed from, its coat of arms and the varied legends of its origins (see Pl 1). The front side, the door, shows a spirited green-tailed horse or hippocampus (the mythological sea-creature) emerging from the sea, ridden by a boy whose red hair matches the colour of the cloth which is draped over the lower part of his body and billows up above and behind him (Pl 2).

 

 

2 Trevelyan Cabinet, front panel (door). © AGSA

 

 

The boy is of course a Trevelyan ancestor, triumphantly making it to land, perhaps after accepting a wager to swim on horseback from St Michael’s Mount to the mainland. The hippocampus symbolises dominion over the sea. The marine objects in the border include sea horses, shells, and blue and white lunate shapes representing sea waves.

The painting on the left panel is of a red-headed mermaid looking over her right shoulder at a golden-haired winged cupid, who faces right and looks to be in a water-skiing pose, in which he is supported by placing his feet on the mermaid’s ‘skirt’ and holding on to her outstretched right arm (Pl 3).

 

 

3 Trevelyan Cabinet, left side panel. © AGSA

 

 

The panel on the right is very similar, being partly but not completely a mirror-image of the one on the left and depicting the mermaid looking to her left and the winged cupid, seen in profile, facing left (Pl 4). What the mermaid-and-cupid depictions symbolise above all is the supremacy of love, which can overcome even the wildness of the sea.

 

 

4 Trevelyan Cabinet, right side panel. Exhibition view, AGSA

 

 

The back panel portrays a red-headed boy standing on rocks with his back to the viewer, with his left arm raised to grasp the left horn of a Capricorn sea-goat whose rear legs are under water, but whose forelegs are raised as if prancing. A piece of red drapery like that in the front panel ineffectively clothes the boy and is attached upper right to the green tail of the beast (Pl 5). The Capricorn symbolises a combination of ambition, practicality, and spirituality.

 

 

5 Trevelyan Cabinet, back panel. © AGSA

 

The top of the cabinet shows a chunky galleon with billowing white sails and green pennants (Pl 6). As well as continuing the marine themes of the other decorations, the painting may be interpreted as symbolic of strength, passion, positivity, prosperity, discovery, and adventure.

 

 

6 Trevelyan Cabinet, top. Exhibition view, AGSA

 

 

The four-legged stand is solid and simple. Its floor is painted yellow, the legs have narrow vertical stripes of red, white, and black. The four horizontals on which the cabinet rests are decorated with waves and shells, so that they are visually merged with the base of the cabinet. What the piece was used for is not recorded. The floor of the stand could have accommodated all sorts of items, including music. Bessie was a fine violinist, whom Arnold Dolmetsch soon recruited into his early music ensemble. In a letter to Bob dated 5 April 1900 she mentions the space she will need for her music. One possibility, she says, is to store it ‘perpendicularly [in] … a pretty box’; alternatively to place it ‘in the bottom part of your nice cupboard in the dining room’.^[7] The matter cannot be proved, but the ‘nice cupboard’ must be a strong candidate for identification with the Trevelyan Cabinet.

After the deaths of Bob in 1951 and Bessie in 1957, the cabinet’s ownership will have passed to their surviving son, the artist Julian Otto Trevelyan (1910–1988). Julian’s son, Philip Trevelyan (1943–), does not remember ever seeing the cabinet, although his parents’ marriage was dissolved when he was about seven, after which he lived with his mother. Despite the paintings being based on legends of Trevelyan ancestors’ origin, he does not think that they would have been to his father’s taste, and it is fair to say that painted furniture had gone out of fashion. One indication of this is the lack of interest in the cabinet when it was put on the market in the 1980s.

The absence of any record of the cabinet’s passing outside the ownership of the Trevelyan family for about a quarter of a century after Bessie’s death may mean that Julian held on to it, keeping it out of sight either at home or in his studio at Durham Wharf, Hammersmith, or it may be that it was sold or given away in the late 1950s. According to Reason, it was acquired in 1987 by AGSA ‘via Paul Reeves, London’.^[8] That sounds straightforward, but the story is quite complicated, as Rebecca Evans and I discovered when we went exploring.

One sure fact is that Reeves was the owner on 27 September 1983, when Roger Fry’s daughter, Pamela Diamand, wrote her statement of authentication, beginning: ‘I have this day seen the painted cabinet on a stand, owned by Mr Paul Reeves.’^[9] But in about 1984 Reeves sold it to Timothy Prus, then a young art dealer, later Founder of the Archive of Modern Conflict.^[10] By 1986 the ownership seems to have changed again. Tony Bradshaw, who that year opened his famous Bloomsbury Workshop, recalls that ‘the Trevelyan cabinet was brought to me not long after I opened my gallery by a young man called Dawson. I failed to sell it and Dawson took it away and sometime later I learned that it had been acquired by the South Australia art gallery. And I saw it there myself a few years later’.^[11] Dawson’s first name was David, and so he is probably the London-based landscape painter and portrait photographer who worked with Lucian Freud and is Director of the Lucian Freud Archive. According to Reeves, Timothy Prus sold the cabinet to Mark Brindley of Millswood, a suburb of Adelaide, who then sold it to AGSA in 1987.^[12] AGSA’s records state that ‘it was purchased from an Adelaide private collection through a government grant’.^[13] There are some inconsistencies and uncertainties in the accounts Rebecca Evans and I have been given, and it has not been possible to make contact with Timothy Prus or David Dawson, but the general picture of what happened between 1983 and 1987 is clearer than it was.

 

 

Helen and Roger Fry’s paintings of Chartres Cathedral

In my book I illustrated and discussed a watercolour that Helen painted of part of Chartres Cathedral, viewed from rue Saint-Yves through the Porte de l’Officialité. The picture itself has disappeared, but is known from a black-and-white photograph in the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute in London (Pl 7). I wrote:

 

Given that the Cathedral is acknowledged to be one of the finest architectural and artistic treasures of Europe, Helen’s painting of it is unusual, for much of it is hidden behind an almost blank wall that occupies nearly half of the space. The sky is dominated by dark clouds… The picture is a sombre one, as Beaune apparently was.^[14]

 

 

7 Helen Fry, Chartres: Porte de l’Officialité. Watercolour, 25.4 x 17.1 cm, June 1906. Photograph courtesy of The Witt Library, The Courtauld Institute, released under a Creative Commons CCBYNC license

 

 

What I failed to mention is that Roger Fry painted the same scene on the same occasion (Pl 8). His picture, also a watercolour, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to which it was gifted in 1952, under the will of Elizabeth Gould Robinson, widow of Edward Robinson. He had been assistant director of the Museum at the time that Roger gave him the painting as a personal gift.

 

 

8 Roger Eliot Fry, Façade of Chartres Cathedral. Watercolour, pen and green ink, over graphite, 29.5 x 20.6 cm, June 1906.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession no. 52.126.3. Gift of the Estate of Mrs. Edward Robinson, 1952

 

 

Roger’s picture, signed by him on the verso ‘R.E.F. Chartres’, is illustrated and discussed by Christopher Reed in an essay published in 2008.^[15] According to him, it is inscribed by the artist ‘To E. Robinson from R.E. Fry 1905’. However, the Museum dates it 1906, and the Museum is right. Constance C McPhee, curator in its Drawings and Prints Department, most kindly examined and scanned the inscription for me, and it is actually visible at the foot of the recto. Although one can see that it would be possible to misread the date, comparison with other examples of Roger Fry’s handwriting leaves no room for doubt that 1906 is correct. One may add that, for the execution of Roger and Helen’s Chartres pictures, 1905 would have been an unlikely date, because that year they were only in France together for a late-summer family holiday at Asnelles, Normandy, a long way from Chartres, whereas in early June 1906 they travelled widely in France without their children, before going on to Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Germany.^[16]

Although the two pictures are recognisably of the same view, there are big differences between them. Helen’s is empty of people, whereas Roger’s has a female figure in the doorway and two conical-hatted priests watching a group of girls, robed in white, processing with a banner to which long streamers are attached. The procession is undoubtedly one marking Pentecost, which in 1906 fell on 4 June, so enabling one to date the picture, with a fair degree of confidence, to that day. In place of the almost blank wall which Helen showed, with one small window, seemingly closed, and an even smaller one high up in the gable end, Roger has four windows, at least two of which are open. He does not include any sky, and his scene is not in the least sombre. In 1910 he was to introduce what he called Postimpressionist artists to the British public, including Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin, launching his exhibition at the Grafton Galleries on 8 December. This was the day after Helen was admitted to The Retreat, the psychiatric hospital in York from which she was never to be discharged. However, at the time he painted the Chartres picture, Roger was less developed than Helen with respect to the sort of artistic styles and tastes which he was to go on to champion. One can also see how ‘advanced’ Helen was in her undated oil painting Field with Crows, which by chance (she cannot ever have seen his painting) has similarities to van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows.^[17] Given the processional activity taking place on the occasion she painted her Chartres, its restraint and austerity are the more remarkable. It is perhaps the last dateable picture of hers known to us. Early in 1907 her mental health declined sharply, and on 16 July she was sectioned under the Lunacy Act (1890).

 

 

 

Helen Coombe and the Crompton family

Important to Helen, especially in the years before she married Roger Fry in 1896, was her friendship with the sociopolitically progressive barrister Henry Crompton, his wife, Lucy, their sons, Paul and David, and their adopted daughter, Rosamond. Her relations with Lucy and Paul were particularly close, and both were witnesses at her wedding. Her friendship with the family was linked to her close association with the artist and architect Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and his circle, but it is not clear which came first. Something Mackmurdo and Henry Crompton shared was an interest in Positivism, and it may have been this which brought them together. In his late teens Paul Crompton was part of Mackmurdo’s Arts and Crafts group, as is shown by his signature on a letter to Mackmurdo from thirteen of his colleagues on 28 October 1889. Helen was another signatory. In the 1891 census Paul is described as ‘architect’ and his younger brother as ‘cabinet maker’, which suggests that their early ambitions were to follow in Mackmurdo’s footsteps. However, they were not to make their careers in architecture or joinery, but in international business, in connection with which they made frequent visits to the US. Returning from one of these, Paul had the misfortune to be aboard the Lusitania when she was sunk by a German torpedo on 7 May 1915. He, his wife, their six children and their nanny all perished. Helen’s friendship with him is confirmed by her inclusion of him in the cartoon of a stained-glass window which she designed, perhaps about 1895.^[18]

In the early 1890s Helen spent time in the Cromptons’ house at 42 Mecklenburgh Square. She was there when the census of 5–6 April 1891 was taken, and wrote a letter to the National Gallery from the Cromptons’ address on 6 April. No doubt she was pleased to have comfortable accommodation in Bloomsbury rather than having to travel to her mother’s house in Hammersmith, and one may conjecture that she was sometimes a childminder for Rosamond, born in 1882.

A few months after the appearance of my biography of Helen, I was contacted by Syra Sowe, a great-niece of Paul Crompton, with the welcome news that she had some family letters, two of which mention Helen. She very kindly sent me transcripts of both and gave me permission to publish them.^[19] The whole collection of original letters, which I have not seen, has been gifted to the British Library.

Helen’s marriage and career were to be badly interrupted by her mental illness, now recognised to have been schizophrenia. A possible first mention of it is contained in one of the two ‘new’ letters, written by Henry Crompton to Lucy on Thursday, 21 January 1892:

 

Dearest Wife,

I begin a letter to you. I shall not send it today unless I have an account of how Miss Coombe is.

Miss Gordon acted wisely and well in moving her at once and taking her to her mother’s, I fancy rather against the wish of both of them, but there was really nothing else to be done. A nurse cannot be got for love or money.

 

‘Miss Gordon’ is Helen’s friend Mary Louisa Gordon, a medical doctor, destined to become the first female HM Inspector of Prisons, outspoken advocate of judicial reform, and supporter of the suffragettes – a truly remarkable woman, for all Virginia Woolf’s sneering.^[20] Henry Crompton was a radical reformist and champion of women’s rights, which means he and Mary Gordon had much in common. Since the nature of Helen’s illness is not specified, there is no way of knowing if she had suffered some sort of mental breakdown. One can only say that it is possible. Another possibility is that she had just returned to London from what Mary Gordon elsewhere describes as ‘a starvation year in Paris’. That year cannot be exactly dated, but it was sometime between 1891 and 1894.

The second ‘new’ letter, dated Saturday, 23 May 1903, was written by Henry to Lucy about ten months before his death. He is at their country home in Churt, Surrey, and is now an invalid, spending much time in bed and going for rides in a wheelchair pushed by a nurse. After giving other items of news, he continues:

 

Since writing this I have been washed and I am lying waiting for breakfast, with windows wide open, and another blue sky, cloudless day. The two Russells came in yesterday to tea and left before arrivals. They wanted all of us to go to tea on Sunday, but I refused, to meet the Frys. I most want to see Helen. So she promised to bring them over to see me. You will be sorry to have missed them.

 

1903 was not a good year for Helen. A move which she and Roger made from Dorking to Hampstead did not suit her. Both her physical and her mental health declined, and in the autumn she was admitted to a psychiatric home. ‘The two Russells’ are Bertrand and his first wife, Alys, sister of Mary Berenson and Logan Pearsall Smith. The Smith family had the lease of two properties on the Sussex-Surrey border, and it may be that the Frys were staying in one of them, as they did in the late summer.

Evident in both Henry’s letters is his affection for Helen and his concern for her welfare. She had lost her father in 1883, and her close relationship with the Cromptons was important to her. They were supportive of her as an artist too. Although I cannot prove it, it is highly likely that Henry and Paul involved her in the refurbishment and decoration of the Positivist church in Chapel Street, Bloomsbury, in 1893; in 1895 she was fulfilling a commission to paint Lucy’s portrait; and Rosamond was the likely model for the figure of ‘Music’ in the fine Martha-and-Mary stained-glass window she designed in 1895.^[21]

 

 

1. The Artist Helen Coombe (1864–1937): The Tragedy of Roger Fry’s Wife, London 2023. ↑
2. I warmly thank Robin Simon for his encouragement, and Lucinda Smith for her valuable assistance. ↑
3. Inspired Design, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide 2011, pp174–177. ↑
4. I am grateful to Shania Morgan, AGSA’s Copyright & Image Services Coordinator, for supplying the high-resolution images used for Plates 1, 3, 5. ↑
5. There are other inaccuracies in Reason’s chapter, some of them originating in Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography, London 1940. The Frys did not live ‘near Dorking’, but in the town, and so did not enjoy ‘a peaceful rural existence’; Roger and Bob shared a house in Beaufort Street, Chelsea, not in 1892, but in 1895–1896; Helen was not decorating Dolmetsch’s harpsichord when she and Roger first met in 1896: they had met a year earlier; at the time the Trevelyan Cabinet was decorated, she had not exhibited at the New English Art Club: that was not to happen until 1904; and the cabinet cannot have been authenticated by Roger’s daughter, Pamela Diamand, in 1987, because she had died in 1985: the correct date is 1983. ↑
6. Smith, pp204–206. ↑
7. Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, RCT 9.44. ↑
8. Smith, p174n1. ↑
9. AGSA records. ↑
10. Paul Reeves to Rebecca Evans, email January 2025. ↑
11. Tony Bradshaw to MFS, email 27 December 2024. ↑
12. Reported by Rebecca Evans to MFS, email 8 January 2025. ↑
13. Rebecca Evans to MFS, email 4 December 2024. ↑
14. Smith, p231. Beaune was a critically acclaimed watercolour by Helen, painted in 1902. Its atmosphere made some think of Maeterlinck, others of Ibsen. It was bought by Mary (‘Mariechen’) Berenson, but is missing. ↑
15. ‘Only Collect: Bloomsbury Art in North America’ in Nancy E Green and Christopher Reed, eds, A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 2008, pp59–60. I thank both editors for their kind interest and encouragement regarding my discussion of Roger and Helen’s Chartres pictures. ↑
16. Smith, p256. ↑
17. See Smith, pp227–231 and plates 59–60. ↑
18. Smith, p218 and plates 53, 55. ↑
19. For this permission I am very grateful to Syra Sowe and the Crompton descendants. ↑
20. See my essay ‘Virginia Woolf and “the Hermaphrodite”: A Feminist Fan of Orlando and Critic of Roger Fry’, In and Out of Bloomsbury, pp145–170 = English Studies 97, 2016, pp277–297.
21. Smith, p65. ↑