In the Spotlight: Mid-Century Women Artists from the Charles Hasler Collection

In this post we would like to take the opportunity to spotlight and celebrate the work of three women artists who feature in the Charles Hasler exhibition, currently on display in the staircase hall at the University of Reading Special Collections. All three artists were very active in the mid-twentieth century, and are notable for developing their own original and innovative styles and interests, and applying their creative talents to a wide variety of different art forms. We are very fortunate to have a number of examples of their work in other parts of our Special Collections and to have discovered a few links to The Museum of English Rural Life along the way …

Eileen Mayo

Amongst the eye-catching covers of Shelf Appeal magazine on display in the exhibition is a cover design by the artist Eileen Mayo [see image below]. Eileen Mayo DBE (1906-1994) was a very talented and versatile, but little-known, artist, although her work has been more recognised in New Zealand where she lived from 1962. She worked as a painter, printmaker, illustrator and tapestry designer, and produced artwork for a range of purposes from large-scale murals to postage stamps.

She developed an early interest in nature, and wrote and illustrated Little Animals of the Countryside (1945) and Larger Animals of the Countryside (1949) [see image below]. She trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and later at the Académie Montmartre, Paris, under Fernand Léger. Her artwork is notable for its bold and lively style, and her figures have a sculptural quality, with a strong sense of form. 

Mayo also wrote and illustrated Animals on the Farm, a title in the Puffin Picture Books series, published in 1951 and photolithographed by W.S. Cowell Ltd. Puffin Picture Books played an important role in transforming the children’s book market of the mid-twentieth century. Although they don’t quite have the iconic status of Ladybird Books, they were influential in the development of picture books for children. The story of Puffin Picture Books begins with Noel Carrington (1894-1989), who produced books for Country Life magazine. Inspired by educational Russian books and by the beautifully illustrated French Père Castor books on animals, Carrington came up with an idea for a new kind of children’s book. He aspired to create a series of well-illustrated, informative, easy to read and inexpensive books for children about nature, history, geography and hobbies, with a few story titles. Books for children with a combination of these features had not really been seen before.  

The first Puffin Picture Books appeared in 1940, under Carrington’s editorship and published by Penguin. The series was notable for the high quality of its illustrations and their well-researched textual content. They featured work by talented artists of the time including Paxton Chadwick, Edward Bawden, Kathleen Hale and C.F. Tunnicliffe. Allen W. Seaby, an ornithological painter and printmaker, and Professor of Fine Art at the University of Reading, was also a contributor. The series was widely praised and was commercially successful for many years.  

One of the distinctive features of the Puffin Picture Books series was their strong visual impact, with very fine, bold, colour illustrations and Mayo’s Animals on the Farm is no exception, with its richly illustrated pages. The book is a work of craftsmanship, with neat calligraphy script used to label different species of animals, birds and insects.  

The book takes the reader on a visit to a ‘mixed farm’ and begins by introducing the reader to some of the smallest creatures – the bees in the orchard – before visiting the horses, poultry, goats, pigs, cattle, sheep and rabbits. The book concludes with an overview of some of the wildlife found in and around farms, including owls and bats that help the farmer to control vermin and insect pests. The text points out changes in farming practices – the increasing use of tractors instead of horses – significant events in the farming calendar, such as lambing and sheep shearing, and the different yet interconnected roles that the animals play in the life of the farm. There are lively descriptions of their characteristics and habits, conveying much of their charm, such as the observation that “the contented quacking of … ducks is one of the pleasantest sounds on the farm”. The book describes the demands but also the rewards of a farmer’s life which can be “full of interest and satisfaction”. 

Barbara Jones

Charles Hasler’s collection of books, catalogues and other published materials includes a copy of the catalogue for the Black Eyes & Lemonade exhibition, with Hasler’s invitation for the private view at Whitechapel Gallery tucked inside (CH/5/3/4/3/1 – see image below). This catalogue listed the contents of a quietly influential exhibition held as part of the Festival of Britain of 1951. An eclectic range of items was assembled by the artist and writer Barbara Jones, the creative force behind the show. The displays made a powerful statement about the importance and vitality of ‘popular’ or ‘vernacular’ art. They highlighted the cultural value of everyday items and amateur-made things not ordinarily celebrated by museums or galleries. Jones lent material from her own collection and, along with her fellow curator Tom Ingram, travelled throughout the UK in a converted taxi cab to borrow and acquire further items. From decorative cakes and biscuits produced by Huntley & Palmers to corn dollies made by straw craftsman Fred Mizen, and materials to market Carter’s Seeds, there are many links to Reading and the interests of The Museum of English Rural Life, the wider craft community, and to other aspects of country life.

Barbara Jones was born in Croydon on Christmas Day 1912. She studied at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1937 as a trained mural artist, and soon established herself as a jobbing artist working across a variety of disciplines. She illustrated books, wrote guidebooks, designed dust jackets, contributed essays to the Architectural Review, and produced a great number of murals.

By 1951, Barbara was renowned for her work, and her success gave her the opportunity to explore her eclectic interests. The support of the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner and the Architectural Review were integral to her established position in the art world. She had written regularly for the Review since 1944 on many subjects which interested her. Her first article for Pevsner was on rustic porches in the model village of Canford Magna in Dorset, and she followed it with pieces on roundabouts, food decoration, automata, funeral customs, and canal boats—all of these appear in some form or other in Black Eyes & Lemonade.

In 1951, the Architectural Press published Barbara’s book, The Unsophisticated Arts. This was a compilation of her pieces for the Review, and can serve as a useful companion to Black Eyes & Lemonade, with many of the subjects she explored in print, including taxidermy, funerals, toys, food, waxworks, and the seaside, resurfacing in the exhibition.

We hold a number of Jones’s publications including an additional copy of Black Eyes & Lemonade (GREAT EXHIBITION–12/06) and Design for Death (PRINTING COLLECTION–393-JON) [see image above], Jones’s study of the “beautiful, vulgar, frightening and propitiatory things that people make when confronted by that shocking and unwelcome reminder, the death of another”. Jones explores various features of the rituals and ceremonies of death and funerals, including the hearse, the floral tributes, the procession, the cemetery and the crematorium; the tomb, relics and mementoes.

The Black Eyes & Lemonade exhibition catalogue was one of the items featured in The Museum of English Rural Life’s 51 Voices online project – you can read more about the catalogue, the exhibition and Barbara Jones here.

Enid Marx

A small selection of ephemera from the Charles Hasler collection is featured in our display, including an advertising flyer for Enid Marx, a textile and book designer (CH/5/1/2/4). In 1937, Marx designed the moquette fabrics for London Underground train carriages. She also exhibited in the Royal Pavilion at the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Enid Marx (1902 – 1998) was a student at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, where women were very much in the minority, although
she failed her diploma in 1925. That year, Marx began a year-long apprenticeship with fabric designers Barron & Larcher and was still
working with them in 1927. She also worked from her own studio designing and printing textiles. In 1926 she received an important
commission from Warner textiles, who bought three of her textile designs. Marx showed her work in exhibitions from the late 1920s onwards, including the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1928 and at the Mansard Gallery in Heals in the early 1930s.

By 1937 Marx was designing woven textiles, first moquette fabrics for seating in London underground train carriages (along with fellow designers Marion Dorn and Paul Nash), and then textiles for the Utility scheme, run by the Board of Trade. Marx’s first designs for upholstery fabrics appeared in 1944, and at least thirty went into production, most produced by Morton Sundour fabrics in Carlisle.

She was one of the first women to become a Royal Designer for Industry in 1944, and applied her skills to a wide range of creative activities, including writing and illustrating children’s books, designing book plates, greeting cards and postage stamps and creating artwork for Shell calendars, packaging and posters. Her work included a number of book cover designs for the King Penguin series of books, including those shown in the image above from our Printing Collection.

As with Barbara Jones, Marx had a long-held interest in popular, or folk, art which lead her to produce two books with her friend Margaret Lambert. English Popular and Traditional Art was published by Collins in 1946 (and held in the library of The Museum of English Rural Life at MERL LIBRARY–9090-MAR) and English Popular Art by Batsford in 1951 (MERL LIBRARY–9090-LAM).

In 1958, similar ideas inspired a temporary exhibition held at our very own Museum of English Rural Life, also called English Popular Art, and curated in association with Marx who wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalogue with Margaret Lambert (the catalogue is held in the MERL archives – D MERL C5/55). Marx lent a number of items for display in the exhibition, including decorative mugs and clay pipes and a portrait of a cow, and these are listed under her name in the catalogue.

After the Second World War, Marx was increasingly involved in education, as a lecturer, and was head of the Department of
Dress, Textiles and Ceramics at Croydon School of Art from 1965 to 1970.

Other items in our collections relating to Enid Marx include further examples of her books such as An ABC of birds & beasts identified (with their diets) (PRINTING COLLECTION–372.412-MAR). Before Penguin Books published Eileen Mayo’s Animals on the farm, Enid Marx’s book for the series, A book of rigmaroles or jingle rhymes, appeared in 1945 as Puffin Picture Book no. 12 (CHILDREN’S COLLECTION–398.8-MAR). Other items include correspondence in several of our publishers’ archives including Chatto and Windus, posters designed by Marx in the Charles Hasler collection, book cover design artworks in the Chatto and Windus archive and a print entitled Sea Horses in the University Art Collection (UAC/11005).

You can access and view items featured in this post through the Special Collections Reading Room – for more information, click here.

The Charles Hasler exhibition is on display in the Special Collections staircase hall until 30 May 2025.

References 

Baines, Phil. Puffin by Design: 70 years of imagination 1940-2010. (Penguin, 2010). 

Peppin, Brigid and Lucy Micklethwait. Dictionary of British book illustrators: the twentieth century. (Cameron Books, 1983).