In my two previous articles on Richard George Hatton (1864-1926) I have provided some background to Hatton’s life and accomplishments. In the first article I described aspects of his journey from his beginnings as a student and teacher in Birmingham through to his final years as Durham University’s first Professor of Fine Art. The article set out some of his achievements as an art educator, delivered through his own teaching and writing and through his vision, management and direction, steering the Newcastle Art School into a university fine art department with degree-awarding status.
The second article considered the types of resources and art works that existed in the Art School at the time of Hatton’s arrival and his subsequent efforts to help facilitate and augment its collection of objects to support the developments in its teaching. This collection was ultimately to take on Hatton’s name and has continued to expand and develop over the century since his death.
In this final article I am focusing on Hatton’s own creative practice, evidence of which is rather scattered across the public domain. A search for “Richard George Hatton” on www.ArtUK.org produces only two art works, one an atmospheric, small, undated oil painting of Jarrow Slake, the other, Lucker War Memorial in Northumberland, a carved stone memorial cross of 1920, designed by Hatton and executed by stonemason and monumental sculptor, Edwin Smyth (1885- circa 1957). Jarrow Slake and Lucker Memorial might be seen as two examples of the range and media in which Hatton demonstrated his own creativity and how it was manifested. The portrait of Richard Hatton in the Hatton Collection that accompanies these two works on Art UK has only recently appeared in its rightful place alongside them. Its story will conclude this article as the centenary year of Hatton’s death also draws to a close.
I will begin by considering the type of work represented by the Lucker Memorial, probably the largest example of Hatton’s design work carried out across the first two decades of the 20th century. From Hatton’s early years as a Birmingham Art School student, it seems that design related subjects were his forte. In the Birmingham Daily Post of August 1884 his name appears numerous times in the list of prizes and awards in the Science and Art Department National Competition. He is specifically commended for his excellence in design in the local advanced art examinations, alongside which, it should be noted, his future wife, Gertrude Young, was also named, for her excellence in ‘Advanced Perspective’. Hatton’s career on moving to the Newcastle Art School in 1890 predominantly steered a course teaching and promoting design disciplines and principles, first as its second master and then directing it into the 20th century with an Arts and Crafts ethos, as well as managing the Handicrafts Company and supporting the activities of the Northumberland Handicrafts Guild, mentioned in my article in the Spring Bulletin.
Examples of Hatton’s design expertise can be found spread across Northumberland and Tyne and Wear in the work he undertook for the Handicrafts Company and for the Handicrafts Guild, His designs range across two and three dimensions and many different materials. These include the design for the embroidered altar frontalat St Andrew’s Church Corbridge, for the stained glass in the 1920 east window of St James Church, Shilbottle, Northumberland and for a brass, copper and enamel processional cross for St Chad’s Church, Bensham, of circa 1903. In Christ Church, Walker there is a 1903 carved oak altar and a silver memorial tablet for Charles Mitchell, who worked so closely with Hatton to establish the Handicrafts Company to provide opportunities for the artists who executed so many of Hatton’s designs. In contrast to these ecclesiastical objects, the Laing Art Gallery has examples of his secular designs: a 1901 silver fruit bowl with enamel panels and a 1902 silver cup and cover depicting mermaids.
Many of Hatton’s designs and the resulting objects produced under his direction by the Handicrafts Company and by members of the Northumberland Handicrafts Guild can be found catalogued and photographed in Barrie and Wendy Armstrong’s handbook, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the North East of England. The book evidences the extent and diversity of Hatton’s design work and his empathy, understanding and support of the high level of artistry and skills required by the people who executed these designs in such a range of materials and scale – from the two-dimensional embroidered altar piece and stained-glass windows to the three-dimensional memorial stone cross and silver fruit bowl. A particularly fine and extraordinary example has warranted a place in the Victoria and Albert Museum – a silver, gold, enamel and semi-precious stone casket designed by Hatton and executed by members of the Handicraft Company in 1906-1907, for presentation to Queen Alexandra on the opening by King Edward VII of the King’s Hall of Armstrong College, collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O95011/casket-hatton-richard-g/ The V&A notes that the artists involved in producing this object to Hatton’s design are all listed on its base. All but one of them are women, a possible indication of the respect and encouragement Hatton gave to his female students, fellow artists and craftspeople, and the opportunities given to them for their practice through Mitchell’s and Hatton’s vision and management of the Handicrafts Company.
Rather poignantly there is only one example of Hatton’s design work on view on the campus of the institution in which he spent more than half his life and no doubt expended most of his energy, thought and commitment; this is the set of three stained-glass windows titled ‘Science’, ‘Thought’, and ‘Practice’ of circa 1922, in the staircase of what was the Armstrong College Agriculture Building, now part of Newcastle University School of Architecture. Hatton, by now Professor of Fine Art, produced these designs at a time when he was working to establish a fine art and design curriculum that warranted degree-awarding status so that its courses could be opened up to the general Bachelor of Arts students andits own fine art students could gain access to other areas of study, enabling students across the sciences and arts to broaden their minds and benefit their own development and practice.
These rather angular designs are similar to a drawing used by Hatton in his 1905 book Figure Composition to illustrate the use in architecture of design elements sympathetic to the deployed materials, in this case glass, and it is in his educational publications that Hatton’s diverse graphic abilities are most prolifically evident.
Between 1893 and 1925 Hatton produced many books and revised editions, some reaching several hundred pages, on the principles of elementary design, figure drawing, composition, perspective, pattern making and decoration. They each have numerous illustrations executed by Hatton to describe and depict the methods, concepts and principles of the subjects covered. They range across geometric and perspective diagrams, anatomical studies, patterns and lettering, pen and ink wash drawings and highly worked line compositions. His 1909 TheCraftsman’s Plant-book is a tour de force of a compendium of plant illustrations compiled from early herbals to provide a decoration and design resource for artists, designers and craftsmen, but this too is interspersed with many of Hatton’s own detailed plant drawings.
The work that resulted from Hatton’s designs indicates that he exercised diligent control of proportion and scale, and concern for the materials in which they were to be executed by their makers. His drawings for these objects do not now seem to be extant, except for one unsigned chalice design in the Hatton Collection, which may be a copy of an object done for reference purposes rather than an original work.
Another, highly worked, signed image of a man holding a glass provides a contrasting display of intensity and control over his medium in what may be a private drawing exercise or for potential use in one of his text books, as it is similar to some that can be found in his book Figure Composition, mentioned above. These two works are part of what appears to have been Hatton’s personal collection as it also includes work by and of his wife Gertrude and his daughter Phyllis, together with family ephemera.
That there is so little of Hatton’s own work to be seen or found other than in the publications and designs he produced to support the creative practice of others, can possibly be explained by a tribute to him, published in the Armstrong College Northerner Magazine, of March 1926, which states:
“It is unfortunate that Professor Hatton was unable to play the part of a practising artist, as the work that he did, in snatches and odd time, -he lived in the oft expressed hope that some day he would have time- showed great originality and imagination, was always distinctive and virile and was full of the beauties of line and colour.”
Perhaps, therefore, the landscapes by Hatton and his family in his personal collection, provide a touching insight into those rare opportunities of personal time, a small watercolour of a boat in a harbour hinting at moments of relaxation on a holiday at St Abbs. The charcoal and crayon sketches of
Jesmond Dene, of 1919, were maybe done in a few snatched moments of odd time and freedom, on a walk not far from his home, taking a break from the demands of lecturing, teaching and making plans for the art school and his students. The small oil painting of Jarrow Slake on Art UK may also be the result of brief episodes away from the Art School, spending time along the Tyne, capturing aspects of peoples’ lives on the river.
It is tempting to wonder what other of Hatton’s works might have been able to tell us about different aspects of his own art practice if their location or image could be found or his life had not been unexpectedly cut short. A tantalising note in his Newcastle Daily Chronicle obituary of 20 February 1926 refers to “one of Professors Hatton’s best known paintings”. This is described as “a mural decoration in oils in the private dining room of Messrs. Armstrong, Whitworth and Company, at their Walker Shipyard”, a work for which there does not now seem to be any visual record.
Another work by which Hatton might have been judged can only be speculated on because of his early death. This may have been one of the paintings in the series of lunettes that decorate the Laing Art Gallery. In October 1925, to celebrate its twenty-first anniversary, the first two of these were unveiled. These were depictions of local historical events by Alfred Kingsley Lawrence (1893-1975), The Building of Hadrian’s Bridge, and by Thomas William Pattison (1894-1983), The New Castle. Both Lawrence and Pattison had studied at the Art School and Lawrence was, by this time, a distinguished, prize-winning young artist. In September 1927, more than a year after Hatton’s death, the Newcastle Daily Chronicle of 20 September reported that two more lunettes were in progress: Newcastle upon Tyne from Gateshead, the Great Flood 1771 A.D, by the Art School’s Master of Design, Robert John Scott Bertram (1871-1953) and The Entry of Princess Margaret into Newcastle, 1503 A.D, byits Master of Painting, Ralph Bullock (1867-1949), while Byron Eric Dawson (1896-1968), an assistant art master and former student had submitted a cartoon to the Art Gallery Committee, portraying Balliol, King of Scotland paying homage to King Edward I in Newcastle, 1292 A.D. It seems that Hatton oversaw this ambitious project, advocating for the involvement of his former pupils and fellow staff, which showcased their work, and which would have also been an opportunity for Hatton to do the same, had it not been for his untimely death. Hatton may have been expected to undertake one of the subjects that other former students then went on to complete in the 1930s: Charles I in Newcastle upon Tyne, 13 May 1646, byJames Tucker (1898-1972), Ascension Day on the Tyne in the Eighteenth Century, by John Henry Wills (1887-1989), or Corpus Christi Day in Newcastle upon Tyne, c.1450, byLouisa Hodgson (1905-1980). Sadly, Hatton did not have the chance to take his place in the Laing Art Gallery among the work of the many distinguished and successful artists he had encouraged or supported.
It seems, too, that Hatton did occasionally exhibit at the Northern Counties Art Exhibition and at the Laing Art Gallery, so it is possible that the painting, Jarrow Slake, purchased by the gallery from a Mrs Mitchell in the year of Hatton’s death was one of those. Others, therefore, may exist in private collections or even in public collections, unattributed and hidden in plain sight, a circumstance that was, until recently, the case of Hatton’s own portrait.
The search for Hatton’s portrait
When I began researching the history of the Hatton Gallery and the Art School and learned more about the significant role Richard Hatton played in its development, I expected that his contribution would have earned some recognition or acknowledgement in the form of a portrait. That there did not seem to be any, either by his colleagues or students, in the Hatton or the Newcastle University Art Collections, both of which hold portraits of other professors, was perplexing. This set me on a quest to find one. My curiosity was also prompted by the portraits in both collections of unnamed men and professors by unknown artists, which offered up the prospect that one might of these might be of Hatton.
My search was further encouraged by finding records in the Art School’s Committee Minute Books in the Newcastle University Archives which gave further weight to this possibility. After Hatton’s death, the minutes of July 1926 recorded the decision to rename the gallery in Hatton’s memory and that “Mr Bullock be asked to paint a portrait of the late Professor Hatton to hang in this room.”
A couple of months later the Newcastle Journal reported that a drawing of Hatton by Alfred Kingsley Lawrence was to be loaned to hang in the art school library, with its presence there confirmed in December 1927, when the Journal announced the success of an appeal to raise funds for a Hatton Scholarship in his memory. Then, in 1933, the Art Committee recorded that its Chairman, Mr Temperley, wished to present a portrait of Professor Hatton by Alfred Kingsley Lawrence to the School which he had loaned for some time. Lawrence by this time had gained a significant reputation and was the first of the Art School’s students to be elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Art. It may also be that Lawrence was the unnamed former student who wrote a moving tribute to Hatton in a letter sent to Temperley and published in the Newcastle Daily Chronicle on 24 February, describing him as “a great little man” and “a distinguished creative artist”, and lamenting that “he was not more free to produce” and that “there were years of great work in him”.
Ralph Bullock was the logical choice for Hatton’s portrait commission as he was the School’s Assistant Director and its Painting Master, He had worked for many years alongside Hatton and had continued the work of the Art School since Hatton’s death. He was also the painter of other portraits of professors belonging to the Hatton Gallery and Newcastle University Art Collections, for example, Peter Phillips Bedson, Professor of Chemistry, which now hangs in Newcastle University’s Bedson Building, and Henry Louis, Professor of Mining, in the Hatton Gallery store. It seems Bullock did fulfil his commission as an article in the Newcastle Daily Chronicle in December 1927, referring to the Northern Counties Artists’ Exhibition, commented on his “excellent portrait of the late and revered Professor Hatton”.
There was, therefore, evidence for the possible existence of two portraits, one by Bullock commissioned after Hatton’s death and another, a drawing by Lawrence, of an unknown date. There were also unattributed, unidentified portraits in the Hatton Gallery and University collections, offering the enticing possibility that unassigned ones among them might be of Hatton. What I did not have was any confirmed likeness of Richard Hatton with which to compare them. This changed following a chance conversation with Laia Anguix, a fellow PhD researcher, at Northumbria University, who was studying the early collection history of the Laing Gallery under its first curator C Bernard Stevenson. Laia had seen photographs of Hatton in obituaries in a newspaper cuttings book in the Tyne and Wear Archives at the Discovery Museum, which is where I finally came face to face with him. Two newspaper articles, each with photographs of Hatton in slightly differing profiles, showed an intense looking man with a moustache and receding hairline, in a round collared shirt. His features would not be difficult to identify in a crowd – or at least in a group of portraits in the University collections.
I eagerly scoured the portraits of professors in the Public Catalogue Foundation Directory but was disappointed not to find him among the portraits of these men. Rather disheartened, I then turned to the other portraits of unnamed men. This time, one did leap off the page, recorded as ‘unknown artist, Portrait of a Man’. With Niall Hodson, Assistant Keeper of Art at Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums at the time, we tracked down the painting in the Hatton Gallery store and scrutinised it under his mobile phone light. On the front of the painting there was no evident sign of a signature or title. The back of painting seemed equally unpromising until, under the raking light, some very faint white chalk marks on the top of the frame emerged to spell out “PRO HATTON”. And so, on 30 October 2019, a portrait of Richard George Hatton, the University’s first Professor of Fine Art, had finally been found hanging unrecognised and overlooked in the Hatton Gallery store for an unknown time. Its identification means that it now can be found when searching for Richard Hatton on Art UK, together with the subsequent Art Detective discussion that was prompted, but did not draw any definitive conclusion, about its attribution artuk.org/artdetective/discussions/discussions/is-it-possible-to-confirm-that-this-portrait-is-by-ralph-bullock-or-alfred-kingsley-lawrence.
The ongoing challenge is, therefore, to confirm its maker. Is this, as seems quite likely, Ralph Bullock’s “excellent portrait” commissioned posthumously to hang in the newly named Hatton Gallery, possibly painted from a photograph similar to one in the newspaper? Or could it even be that this is a painting done by Lawrence during Hatton’s lifetime, of which Temperley’s drawing (yet untraced) was a preparatory study?
Epilogue on a “great little man”
Sometime after tracking down Hatton’s portrait in the Hatton store, I came across the Armstrong’s book, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the North East of England, fromwhere a much clearer photograph of Hatton looks out, reproduced from the Armstrong College Northerner Magazine, previously quoted, and which features with further tributes, of which the following are extracts:
“No one else seemed to look at life in quite the same way, no one else could be so stimulating and entertaining.”
“Perhaps he was at his best when, after a cup of tea, he indulged in a few anecdotes of great artists of the past, and gave full vent to his sparkling witticisms which never failed to put the most backward of us at our ease. He was the most humane of men…”
And so, perhaps this photograph, rather than the painting, captures more of a hint of the character of the man who dedicated his life to the creative practice of others while, it seems, sacrificing the fulfillment of his own. The search for a portrait of Hatton has, I hope, also shone more light on the life, the achievements and the character of this “great little man”.
Dr Melanie Stephenson
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Further information
Richard Hatton’s publications: Editions of Hatton’s text books, Figure Composition, and The Craftsman’s Plant-book(Handbook of Plant and Floral Ornament) can be found on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/cu31924020551515/, archive.org/details/bwb_S0-BKP-403/
Hatton’s Art and design work: Examples of objects potentially created from Hatton’s designs, can be found online by searching ‘Handicrafts Co’ in the North East Museums Collection Search.
Armstrong, Barrie and Wendy. The Arts and Crafts Movement in the North East of England, A Handbook. Wetherby, UK: Oblong Creative, 2013.
Hatton’s Portrait: The Public Catalogue Foundation. Oil Paintings in Public Ownership in Northumberland, Tees Valley & Tyne and Wear. London: The Public Catalogue Foundation, 2009. Its contents are now catalogued on Art UK.
Friends of the Hatton 