Lionel Bulmer, 1919 - 1992

Lionel Bulmer’s work is compelling, experimental, changing – and always distinctively his. It invites close attention; it prompts questions; it suggests love and friendship; it celebrates light and colour; it offers slices of mystery. It reveals an intense negotiation with the business of human relationships.

As the son of an architect, Bulmer was probably encouraged in his interest in art and he attended Clapham School of Art for a couple of years just before the War, from the age of 17. There, the Principal was Leonard Charles Nightingale, already getting on in age (b.1851), a very experienced teacher – and, I have to admit, an artist about whom I knew nothing at all. There is, however, some brief information about Nightingale available on the web: and, at first sight, his paintings appear to offer a compendium of popular late-Victorian / Edwardian taste. Languorous young women, reclining or statuesque, always elegant; cherry blossom, roses; gardens and rustic countryside; sunshine, children and animals. They suggest a close study of the work of Lord Leighton or Alma Tadema. They are highly competent and even charming. And - for example, in the rather lovely picture in the Southampton Art Gallery, The Dipping Place, shown on the ART UK website - they have a warmth of colour, a closely-textured touch and a degree of subtle enchantment which does - to my surprise - suggest that some of the roots of Bulmer’s own art found their nourishment here.

Bulmer’s education was then interrupted by his conscription into the army. But, after being demobbed, he was accepted by the Royal College of Art. At first, this entailed going to Ambleside, where the College had been located since December, 1940. His time there was short, before being transferred back to Exhibition Road, in London – but, for a young man from South London, recently returned from the War, his experience of the extraordinary Lake District landscape can only have been a very powerful, even a transformative, experience. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Bulmer’s work is his ability to capture the atmosphere and light of a place, whether that be a suburban road, an empty beach or a luscious garden. For anyone, their first visit to the Lakes - the horizon, the skies, the atmosphere, the colours - is an unforgettable experience, alerting one to the distinctive identity of any place. Furthermore, the staff in the Drawing and Painting School, from the Professor, Gilbert Spencer, to the tutors, Percy Horton, Francis Helps and Charles Mahoney, were, themselves, outstanding artists, several of them steeped in the style of learning developed in the Slade, where for decades, the emphasis had been on studying, sketching and recalling the ways in which the line and movement of the subject could capture and convey the distinctive personality and expression of any individual or place. And – perhaps most important of all, it was at the RCA in Ambleside that Bulmer met his life-long partner, fellow student, Margaret Green. Looking at the ways their work developed over the following years, each prompting, challenging and responding to the discoveries of the other, provides never-ending reward.

Back in London, his tutors now included Carel Weight and Ruskin Spear, and the impact of their work - often focused on urban scenes, hinting at isolation and a sense of melancholy, often composed as if from a bird’s-eye view, often sombre and subtle in colour, often with a hint of wit and even irony - can be seen in Bulmer’s early paintings. After leaving the RCA in 1947, and benefiting from a travelling scholarship which had been awarded to Margaret Green, the pair spent a year touring France and Ireland; given their history, it is not surprising that exploring different parts of Europe and the British Isles was always an important part of their lives. On their return and until the mid-1950s, the couple lived in Chelsea. Their subject matter during these years was very various: interiors, figure drawings and paintings, portraits and many studies of local sites, including Battersea Park and the Chelsea Embankment. Sketch books of the period also confirm their continuing travels to the countryside and, especially, to the coast – Sussex, Essex and East Anglia. Both artists were also employed as part-time teachers, Lionel at Kingston Art School and Margaret first at Walthamstow and then at the Royal Academy Schools.

The pull of the coast became irresistible. First, Sussex; shortly afterwards, in the late 1950s, they found a house, near Stowmarket in Suffolk, where they lived for many years, restoring the decayed, historic hall house and creating an extraordinary garden, with flowers, fruit and vegetables. In fact, they lived just fifteen miles or so away from Benton End where, since 1940, the painter and gardener, Cedric Morris and his partner, Arthur Lett-Haines, had established a highly original and important art school and garden. Amongst the students and visitors were David Kentish, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and John Nash. There were also several women artists who visited and studied there, including Kathlen Hale and Bettina Shaw-Lawrence. I find it hard not to think that, in their early years in Suffolk (Benton End was in its hey-day in the 1950s and ‘60s and Morris died in 1982), Bulmer and Green must have visited Benton End; at the very least, they must have been beguiled by the promise of Cedric Morris’s garden. Perhaps they even grew some of the beautiful irises Morris was famed for breeding? That, of course, is nothing but speculation. But it reminds us that Suffolk was a place full of inspiration and became - especially the coast at Aldeburgh, Walberswick, Southwold - a primary focus of Bulmer’s paintings for the next decades. These are works in which a celebration of light, delicious colour, delight and life reached a kind of fever-pitch. Small, repetitive, insistent, marks of the brush cover the canvases of these years, suggesting nothing less than a continuing, unrelenting, exhilarating search to find the most intense impact of colour, the most evocative discovery of light and the most profound expression of human emotion.

© Dr. Hilary Taylor, 2025