A very funny thing happened as I was reading Summer in February by Jonathan Smith... the novel about the Lamorna artists.
It was a book that had been on my shelves for a while. I coudn't remember where I had heard about it, but on the balance of probability it had to be one of you here in comments, and a quick search of my own blog came up with a comment and link to her blog from Lizzy Siddal back in 2009.
It was the trip to Lamorna (more searching) in 2012 ...
and sitting on those very rocks...
that filled me with the sense of place and persuaded me to buy the book, because by then there was news of a film version too. As always it felt imperative to read the book first, rather than allow the film to infiltrate my imagination with characters and setting before I have had the chance to do it for myself.
I wonder if you have preferences about this??
Book first...
Film first...
Not bothered...
I'll bet some of you share my preference for avoiding film tie-in editions of books though don't you...
So I started the book...twice.
On the first occasion getting no further than Munnings's speech at the Royal Academy before being diverted.
Then the film was out there...
I had done some snippeteering and found the cuttings in the book when I opened it again in the summer of 2013. Everyone is telling me the film is fantastic... Carol goes to see it twice because she loves it so much (sorry to divulge that Carol!) and I think I must get a wriggle on.
I make another start (are you keeping up, by now this has taken me four years to get around to this read) and I am cracking along nicely. The brash, extrovert, gregarious artist Alfred Munnings is leaping irrepressibly off the page as are the Lamorna artists...Laura and Harold Knight and the sad and disconsolate land agent Gilbert Evans. The artistic community is revealed in all its eccentric glory and into its midst has arrived Florence Carter-Wood, a young London woman of privilege whose father, under duress, has agreed to fund some art lessons for her.
The beautiful Florence is nicknamed Blote.
Blote??
I am a little off-put by that...
By this time I am halfway through the book but, despite my best efforts at avoidance, news has seeped through the review pages that this story isn't going to end happily, and all of a sudden, and quite unheard of for me, I stop reading the book and decide I want to see all this unfold in the film.
The film stars Dan 'Downton' Stevens as a mild and gentle Gilbert Evans, Dominic Cooper as quite a menacing Munnings, and Emily Browning as a wide-eyed Florence, trapped in a love triangle and torn about her choices.
There's a wait for the DVD to come out of course, but when it does I buy a copy.
Then there's another delay while we find time to watch it, and that is eventually prompted by a talk at Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery as part of the Laura Knight 'Portraits' exhibition. The subject to be Love, Art and Tragedy – Close encounters in a Cornish Art colony.
I have to say the whole long-winded process has been duly rewarded by all three components, half the book, the entire film, the most brilliant and engaging talk by Catherine Wallace a few weeks ago, followed by the rest of the book.
The first half of the book had set the scene for the film which I really enjoyed (Carol, you are not alone, I will certainly watch it again) even though not filmed at Lamorna. The community springs into life, and having been there it's not hard to envisage how life in this remote little Cornish valley could know no bounds. Carousing and creativity going hand in hand and plenty of anything-goes behaviour. It does end in tears ( I won't give anything away for fear you haven't seen it) and the film plays to that strength with great drama towards the end... suffice to say I would have been blinking and sniffing unashamedly in the cinema.
Catherine Wallace painted (sorry) a much more varied picture of Arthur Munnings at the gallery talk which somehow balanced out that of both the film, the book and my imagination (which by now has Munnings sitting at the brutish end of unpleasant with the word 'dislike' hanging over his head) showing us a wonderful slide show of some of his lesser-known paintings. Famed for his horses, and indeed, in the context of Summer in February, for this picture Morning Ride, of Florence seated side-saddle on Merrilegs...
but I had been unaware of Munnings's Lamorna coastal paintings, all of which favourably compared with the best of the Newlyn school and many of which can apparently be seen at Munnings home Castle House at Dedham in Essex.
Of interest too, as Catherine Wallace elaborated, was the fact that all the artists painted each other..
Munnings painted Laura painting...
Harold Knight painted Munnings reading, this picture we learned, was found concealed behind another one, someone unwittingly bought a 'buy one get one free'...
This sorry tale became a period of his life about which Munnings neither spoke nor wrote in the years to come, leaving Morning Ride behind in Cornwall with Laura and Harold Knight, to be given to Gilbert Evans should he return from his self-imposed exile with the Royal Engineers in Africa. Gilbert had enlisted in April 1914 to flee the impossibility of his love for Florence, by this time herself in the loveless and unconsummated marriage to Munnings, and from which she desperately needed to escape. The source of the book's title to be found in an entry in Gilbert's diary written on 22 February 1914...
'Had early lunch with Blote in my room, and then for a walk over the cliffs to Penberth where we had tea, then back by the road in the evening. A summer day to be remembered'.
The whole Summer in February saga has a been a wonderfully extended reading, watching and looking trail which has unwittingly all fed nicely into my Crisis Of Brilliance Art & Literature Trail ( C.O.B.A.L.T... for short, it came to me in a flash) and has now segued into yet more Great War reading, Wilfred and Eileen, another book by Jonathan Smith to be re-published by Persephone Books in April.
More of that soon with accompanying diversions, meanwhile I would love to hear of your experiences with this book and film...
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