During the 18th century Bath was the smartest watering place in Britain. It made nearby Bristol, just 12 miles farther down the Avon, seem by comparison a rather shabby commercial seaport, where merchant venturers were more concerned with counting their money than leaving any noticeable cultural legacy. The gentry and polite rakes such as Beau Nash would be borne down the steep streets from Royal Crescent, urgently seeking relief from gout, gaming losses, and other forms of overindulgence in the Roman baths and elegant Assembly Rooms.
Most of the old Georgian houses have been restored and put to other uses, but their facades remain unchanged, overlooking immaculately landscaped parks and gardens. One old coach house in Queen’s Parade Place now contains the offices for several family enterprises run by art publisher and entrepreneur Pat Ramard; among them is the Military Gallery. A small back room holds about two dozen canvases of aircraft and ships by Robert Taylor, a local artist whose phenomenal success in little over a decade is the envy of many of his struggling contemporaries whose work is hung, but often left unsold, in fashionable galleries in the West End of London.
The visitor entering Pat’s office is immediately confronted with a striking lee-bow view of a full-rigged ship flaunting her entire wardrobe of sails over a rough cobalt sea, the wind seemingly close to the limit for furling those royals and stunsails. It is the Mount Stewart, by Montague Dawson, a prolific and fashionable marine artist.
“I put that on show twice in London,” explains Taylor, “once at the Royal Society of Marine Artists’ exhibition and also at the Boat Show. It didn’t fetch my asking price of 1,700 pounds, so I took it back and it’s now not for sale at any price. Well, nearly. It reminds me of my having broken with the establishment of marine artists when they turned down my application for membership of the Society, even though I was proposed by John Worsley.”
Casually dressed in jeans, an open-necked shirt, and windbreaker, Taylor speaks with the soft burr of a West Countryman, born and bred in Bath. In his relaxed manner, with a ready dimpled smile, he settles in for our talk.
Bath has traditional links with master craftsmen in many trades, he explains, but can claim few graphic artists. Perhaps that is why the local School of Art closed down soon after Taylor left it. He was born to a family whose father took off before Taylor’s arrival. Every penny had to be counted, and his mother gratefully accepted an offer of a free general education for her son, starting at age 11 with 120 other children who showed early artistic promise. Taylor had already begun a lifetime fascination with the sea, developed mostly from reading heavily illustrated books. He greatly admired the work of Montague Dawson. Today he also looks for work by John Stobart, an expatriate Englishman based in Boston, who specializes in recreating early 19th- century American maritime scenes.
One expects Taylor to have spent time on the old docks in Bristol or on the Severn estuary, but he never did. Any idea of going to sea was quickly put aside when his family took a holiday at Beer on the South Devon coast and treated him to a day out in a sea-angling excursion launch. There was no escaping the immediate symptoms of chronic seasickness when the skipper told him that he was stuck there for eight hours. He has avoided traveling by sea ever since and also suffers from airsickness.
Taylor was the only member of his family to grow up with a natural talent as a draftsman; he believes he might have inherited it from his unseen father, who liked to paint on glass, sometimes embellishing pub mirrors with floral designs. At 15 Taylor had to leave school to help with the family budget. He applied for an apprenticeship at a prestigious local shoemaking factory, whose personnel manager realized that his talents and aspirations would be wasted there. The job center downtown then came up with a vacancy at Harris’s, a family business in picture framing and restoration since 1821. Taylor soon graduated from frame making and moved up to the top floor, working with Mr. Harris himself on restoring old or damaged paintings, some of great value from houses like Longleat, home of the Marquess of Bath.
At 16 he sold his first picture, which depicted one of his workmates in action on a cross-country motorcycle scramble. This netted him three pounds and sowed the seed: others might one day pay for his work. In his 20s Taylor was being groomed to take over the business, since Mr. Harris had no heir. This offered the level of security he needed to marry his girlfriend in the framing department. He was to do even better financially, though, when he threw in his lot with Pat Barnard, a shrewd and enthusiastic producer of glossy albums and fine art posters, mostly with a military theme.
Judgment on Taylor’s work is clouded by the professional jealousy of marine artists who have not had his touch in the marketplace. “They’re all right, 1 suppose,” said one, “but they are really just copies taken straight from photographs.” In fact, Taylor never uses photographs when he can make his own sketches, but he must when depicting scenes from World War II for the Falklands campaign.
He describes his work as “representational,” adding that there is always an expert quick to point it out if he gets the slightest technical detail wrong. One of his Battle of Britain scenes, for example, showed a Hurricane—“Wrong,” wrote a former Royal Air Force veteran, “the aircraft with those identification letters was shot down three days earlier.” Taylor was worried until he chanced upon the pilot’s log book, which confirmed that he had been right.
Neither ships nor aircraft lend themselves to abstract or other way-out interpretations. There have never been surrealist paintings of them, only inaccurate ones, such as the barges of William the Conqueror’s invasion fleet as shown on the Bayeux tapestry. Often the real thing is unbelievably ornate, such as the massive carved and gilded stems of 17th-century ships like Charles I’s Sovereign of the Seas, whose transom adornment cost many times more than that of the Sistine Chapel. There is scope for impressionism, though, in the sea and the sky. J. M. W. Turner’s immortal 1831 seascape of HMS Temeraire being towed up river to a breaker’s yard on the Thames is dominated by his subjective impression of the sea and sky with appropriate luminosity for the occasion. The principal subject of the painting—the second in line to Victory at Trafalgar— occupies a relatively small and blurred corner of the canvas.
The backgrounds in Taylor’s work are rarely tranquil. The sea in his painting of the destroyer HMS Cavalier on escort duty seems to slam the ship with each wave, sending a shudder through every compartment; all this is punctuated by the screws racing out of the water. The painting was one of his first steps toward international recognition. It was produced alongside one of HMS Kelly, Mountbatten’s old flotilla leader. Each print was signed by the admiral and sold to raise funds to put Cavalier on display as a permanent memorial to those who served in fleet destroyers. The proceeds not only produced enough to prepare the destroyer for her new role, but won Taylor an influential and enthusiastic patron.
Aircraft carriers always fascinated Taylor; hence his later obsession with aerial combat, starting with the brave pi" lots flying 135-mph biplane Swordfish aircraft with open cockpits, which were responsible for two of the turning points in World War II at sea. One was the complete tactical surprise achieved at Taranto on 11 November 1940, when the offensive power of the Italian surface fleet was destroyed; the other was on 24 May 1941, when a single hit by a Swordfish launched from HMS Ark Royal at the last moment hit the battleship Bismarck alt and left her rudderless and at the mercy oi the home fleet. The official report of the action described the conditions as appalling, with the cloud base below 700 fed and the flight deck’s round-down moving vertically through 50-60 feet. But for this official evidence, one might be tempted to consider Taylor’s painting an event five years before he was born grossly exaggerated. However, one officer who was present said simply, “That’s how it was.”
Many of his paintings hang in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton in Somerset, but his work is even better known in the United States. where over 60% of his prints are sold. The Naval Aviation Museum at Pensacola has on display the original painting off the light carrier USS San Jacinto, from whose deck George Bush flew Avengers in combat. Signed copies of this print raised over$500,000 for the Pensacola Museum.
In May 1988 Taylor had a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; it ran for ten months. Deputy Director Don Lopez said it was the most successful one-man show ever held at the Smithsonian. From painting carrier-borne aircraft it was a short step to the much wider field of shore-based military aircraft, culminating in a large commemorative collection to mark the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. In the process he met many of the great wartime pilots. Douglas Bader, the legless fighter ace immortalized as the hero of Reach for the Sky, became an immediate fan, as did most of the other top surviving combat pilots—among them Adolf Galland of the Luftwaffe and all five B-17 pilots who earned the Medal of Honor in Flying Fortresses. As with his paintings of ships, it is the combination of sky, cloud, and light that sets these paintings apart.
Taylor’s finished works are all in oils, but they start life as preliminary pencil sketches on a blank canvas. These also show a surprising amount of light, shade, and movement; they often appear as remarques (illustrative footnotes) alongside his oils.
Taylor is now working on his next commemorative album, which will take him back to his first love—ships and the sea. I, for one, cannot wait.
