Claughton pellew biography template

Claughton Pellew Prints

About Claughton Pellew Prints

Limited edition highest quality Giclée Prints, hand-numbered and hand-embossed. These are modern Giclée reproduction editions of an original print. Images protected by Bookroom Art Press.

Publisher - Bookroom Art Press. Recognized as one of the finest print publishers in the UK. Winner of Digital Printer of the Year 2014. Process: Giclée process to create limited edition prints - high resolution, high-fidelity process considerably surpassing in the quality of photo-lithographically produced images. Poduced to the highest of Fine Art Trade Guild Standards using 310gsm thick acid free rag, 100% cotton. The pigments are archival eight-colour Ultra-Chrome.

Framed and/or Mounted option - Mounted using plain white ph neutral conservation board. We frame specifically for your needs. Our standard and preferred frame is a plain oak with a square profile. Please enquire if you would like further details.

In the autobiographical Outline, Paul Nash, a friend and contemporary at The Slade, writes of Claughton Pellew’s ‘devotional approach’ to the natural world. Nash also acknowledges Claughton Pellew’s influence in teaching him to look – to attend properly to that which surrounded him. This looking and attending, minutely and yet not with accuracy only but with the kind of passionate intensity which accompanies a deep feeling for, even love of, the natural world, is clearly apparent in Claughton Pellew’s work. 

Born in Redruth, Cornwall, on April 11th 1890, Claughton Pellew’s father, William Pellew-Harvey, was a mining engineer and his mother, Elizabeth (née Hitchins) was an artist. Soon after his birth the family moved to Canada. There they travelled on the Canadian Pacific Railway - on journeys, Claughton Pellew would recall, through landscapes of mountains, lakes and huge forests, before they returned to London where William Pellew-Harvey would set up a mining consultancy.  

After attending Merchant Taylor’s School (1902-1906) Claughton Pellew started at the Slade (1907-1911) where his tutors were Henry Tonks and Wilson Steer, and his contemporaries included Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. Just after his training Claughton Pellew visited Italy. Here the art of the Florentine Quattrocento would impress him deeply – not only as art, but for its religious symbolism too. Prior to the journey to Italy he had felt himself drawn to Roman Catholicism, but his visit there, particularly the time he spent in Assisi (1913), undoubtedly influenced his decision to convert to Roman Catholicism.    

His Catholicism, would, in turn, influence his position on the 1914-18 war. Claughton Pellew was received into the church in early 1914, just before the outbreak of the War, and during the latter part of the war (conscription was introduced o

The artist was born in Redruth, Cornwall, the son of a mining engineer who emigrated to western Canada with his family soon after he was born. The whole family returned in 1901, and Claughton attended the Slade from 1907-1911, making there a life-long friend in the artist Paul Nash.

In 1912 he visited Italy for the first time, and was greatly influenced by Fra Angelico and other Florentines, thereby positioning himself differently from the on-going developments between Pre-Raphaelitism and the modernists  progressing in Britain (Roger Fry's Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition that same year). Imprisoned due to his declared Conscientious Objection to WWI, he and his wife, Marie 'Kechie' Tennent, also an artist, moved to Overstrand on the north coast of Norfolk upon release in 1919, and then in 1927 to Southrepps nearby, where they remained for the rest of their lives.

Pellew began wood engraving in 1923, exhibiting with the newly founded Society of Wood Engravers, and his subjects, based on the revival begun by William Morris and inspired by Thomas Bewick, were country images. In 1925 he exhibited The Return, featuring a village which is probably Mousehole in Cornwall, which indicates at least a further visit to his native Cornwall. Portrait of a Shy Norfolk Artist is a sensitive and loving pen portrait of an extraordinarily skilled artist, who is less well known than he should be.