James Torrington Bell lived in Leven and Carnoustie for most of his life, had no full-time formal training as an artist and didn’t really pursue it seriously until he was in his forties. He was a career banker, and a golfer who played off scratch for over 50 years. He’s always stood a step away from the art establishment, and there’s no substantive biography, so much so, that his date of birth is stated eight years apart in a range of places. Roger Spence pieces together, as best he can, the artist’s story.  He’s seen much of what’s available in the public domain, but there are huge gaps. We hear what he knows and what he’s guessed.

The Yard in Forfar is an unprepossessing 1960s Council depository, occupied by Angus Alive and currently holding artefacts and art works for their Museums and Galleries. I arrived there late last year to look at the paintings and archive material they had been donated from James Torrington Bell’s estate. Emma Gilliland and Jen Falconer, who manage the collection, showed me into the store room where two long lines of unframed paintings were stacked and four or five boxes were neatly archived with watercolours, photographs, prints, sketchbooks, copper plates, a folder of cuttings, papers and catalogues, and a notebook. The artist would have approved of the neat wrapping and knotted ribbon ties. I knew very little about Bell, but I soon got a flavour.

James Torrington Bell: five untitled/unidentified paintings; Loch Assapol, Mull (top right) (Note 1), ©ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries

James Bell (1892-1970), mostly known in the art world as James Torrington Bell (“JTB”), painted pictures that were always sunny (Note 2). He was a navy man and he lived in the golden glow of Empire Britain, the one where the sun never sets. His paintings reflected the views that motivated people to be aspirational, to see the world as a big opportunity, but also to fall into line, and even to fight and die, knowing that the British ideal was deep-rooted, settled, secure. Bell’s paintings are important documents of an age when community, morality, mutuality, respect, and social certainties were the bedrock of British life.

Bell is not an artist who features in the indexes of Scottish art histories.  He might be viewed by the art history profession as a mid-twentieth century landscape painter defined by his “ordinariness”. He followed rather than broke rules. He copied rather than challenged. He painted what he, and what he imagined the people around him, saw - or, rather, wanted to see. And, as he lived the life of a conservative, suburban banker, that’s the way he framed his painting.

It’s fascinating to consider Bell, who adopted ‘Torrington” in the 1930s, not only to shed some light on his own abilities, but to contextualise Scottish art through the mid-century, from 1935 to 1970, when he was active.

JTB’s father, also James, was a bank manager in Leven: “efficient and conscientious… Mr Bell is one of the best known gentlemen in Leven, and none is more highly esteemed.” So said the Leven Advertiser on his retirement in 1926, noting his renown on the links as well. These were all traits that JTB followed.

And he took some from his mother, too. She came from a family with more historic wealth, but she was always busy contributing to many community engagements. She was a pillar of the local church.

The family were to be found at all the social events that mattered. JTB would be dressed to represent his parents, bundled into a brake and driven off to a flower show or a bazaar, a fund-raiser or a fun-raiser. The town band would play a nice selection and give dance music in the evening; there might be a troupe of Highland dancers; and the newspapers would report not only on who was there, and who won the many, many competitions (“best four scones”, “largest collection of native grasses” etc.), but also what the ladies wore. Even at meetings of the Temperance Society and Christian Union, there were notes on, for example, “Mrs Balfour Graham, Leven, in cream serge worn with stylish hat and waistband of heliotrope”.  Mrs James Bell was more modest, but JTB never let himself down sartorially. He went to Church, he attended the gatherings and meetings where middle-class society cohered, and in later years he sat on and chaired committees.

He was drilled in the etiquette, the values, and the benefits of full membership of Edwardian middle-class society.

JTB grew up with a brother and three sisters in one of the best-known coastal addresses in the Fife town, Marine Cottage. You would be hard pressed to define the look of the Fife ‘middle class’ better than to see the family picture, taken around 1913. JTB is top right.

James Bell and family, c. 1913

At this moment, he had already followed his father’s footsteps into the bank and on to the golf course. His character was formed, and would be even more strongly set through his experience in the war.

A banker from a Fife port would easily fit into the role of a Royal Navy paymaster’s department, and that’s where JTB ended up, a long way from the engine rooms or the trenches where many of his peers ended their young lives. He could probably sense how his luck was linked to his position. He would see how the middle class could cushion themselves from the worst.

And he fitted in perfectly, carrying off the roles, the uniform, the codes and practices, such that he became secretary to a Rear Admiral and his staff, and spent the latter part of the war enjoying the relatively splendid surrounds the empire offered to senior officers and their teams in Alexandria, Egypt. He managed the administration, and dealt with correspondence and accounts. He probably had a hand in ensuring the Rear Admiral’s comforts were assured, against a backdrop of violence, discontent, and repression of the Egyptian Revolution.

James Bell in Alexandria, 1919

Whilst the British found resistance in Egypt, his family and friends in Leven would have watched with some pride the massing of the German fleet in the Firth of Forth as they surrendered en masse. This was a sight for Eastern Scotland that would perpetuate the aura of British world power, the status of King, Empire and all the underpinning socio-economic structures.

JTB didn’t return to Scotland until 1920, 27 years old, and doubtless even more self-confident, socially capable, and motivated towards upward mobility than he had ever been. Being a champion on the golf course would help his self-esteem, but being a teller at a bank was the start, rather than the end of his civvy career.

The National Bank sent him to work in Edinburgh, and over the course of not much more than a year, he worked in the Leith, West End and Newington branches. But that was just the day job.

In his spare time, he studied banking at Edinburgh University and gained a “merit certificate”, and he attended evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art.

Later in life, he suggested that one of his father’s cousins was responsible for introducing him to art, but I don’t know when and whether it was manifested in any activity prior to 1921. The first evidence of activity and ability in all the publicly accessible material are dated sketchbook entries from 1922.  He appears to have commenced artistic action at the point when he was turning 30.

He studied painting and drawing with David Foggie, and etching with Adam Bruce Thomson. His biographies also note the study of tempera with John Duncan. This could have been at the same time at Edinburgh College of Art because Duncan was there until 1925, but it could have been later – he was corresponding with Duncan on the subject in 1941.

Momentum arrived, but took him away from artistic study. In June 1922 he was promoted to be in operational charge of the new National Bank branch in Methil, and he was back in the family home, champion of the Leven course that year and the year after, and seemingly maintaining an interest in art without producing a great deal.

James Bell and colleague outside the National Bank of Scotland, Methil, 1924

The sketchbooks start to show a gradual evolution in JTB’s engagement in art. Working men in suits and caps, faces, and self portraits feature, but access to nature and countryside quickly dominate: a month after his Methil appointment he’s sketching in Ceres and soon tree studies become one of the main features. He tried copying etchings, including a Blampied drypoint and a reproduction of a Brangwyn still life, but there are limited examples compared to the flow of work that arrived in Summer, especially on trips and holidays. He was sketching on a trip to the South of England and Boulogne, and then again in Glen Dochart in the Autumn of 1922.

The pages start to fill more in 1925: finely detailed landscapes, often in pen and ink; sketches from Anstruther, around Leven (Durie Park, Kennoway); and then his first images from the Alps, where he went on holiday in September.

James Bell, Sketch from Alps, c.1925, © ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries

The earliest example of artwork produced for public consumption, that I’m aware of, is an etching from some point in 1925: “A Kennoway Cottage”, signed “James Bell”.

James Bell, A Kennoway Cottage, etching, 1925, © ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries

JTB clearly had graphic skills. This wasn’t a first attempt. A small box of copper plates are in the archive, awaiting study. Throughout this period, there’s a sense of limited self-improvement, maintaining an art practice without having the time, confidence, commitment or wherewithal to take it beyond an occasional pursuit.

He was probably reading books and magazines, especially of the self-improvement variety. In the inside front page of the earliest sketchbook extant, he wrote in his fast scrawl: “ Sir Alfred East RA made the pattern of trees his own. They are set in an atmosphere of poetry, and we feel their dignity and reserve.” East wrote “The Art of Landscape painting in Oil Colour” in 1906. Study some paintings by East and you can quickly see an influence on JTB’s future approach.

He wasn’t engaged with any of the notable students who emerged from the full time course at Edinburgh School of Art after the war, including those who formed the 1922 Group (Gillies, McTaggart, Geissler, Crozier etc.). There’s no evidence of engagement with Kirkcaldy Art Club, when it was launched in 1922, with the new Galleries committed and in construction in 1924. Perhaps golf continued to be the overriding passion. Perhaps the arrival of Winifred Thorburn, as a primary teacher in Fife, had something to do with it.

In 1926, he really got his banking career moving, and he was establishing an independent life. He moved to Carnoustie to take up the role of Assistant Manager of that branch of the National Bank. The locals were pleased to have a top golfer joining their ranks. He joined the Dalhousie Club, but carried on playing in Leven too.

There was a little house tucked into the bank on the west side of the town, Agra Bank, and that’s where JTB tried to call his new home.  He was still trying to find his creative place, and from the moment he moved into Agra Bank, he committed himself to writing – poetry and short stories – and took the “Short Story Course” run through correspondence by the London School of Journalism.

The ambition must have been to write for the popular magazines of the day, and earn a little. The stories are hackneyed; the poetry, not far from the McGonagall school. He fired them off to his tutor, who sent them back critiqued. A neat pile started growing, and going nowhere. There’s no evidence that any made their way into the public domain, which was probably just as well.

Meanwhile, his relationship with Winifred Thorburn (Note 3) firmed into marriage and house plans. The couple were married at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh on the 3rd September 1929, and they issued December “At Home” invitations to the spanking new house, “Woodlands”, built for them to the west of Carnoustie House in the rich agricultural and wooded land on the flat plain above the town. It was practically in the country, up the lane from Agra Bank. Adding to JTB’s momentous year, he was appointed Manager of the Bank.

Woodlands, Carnoustie, date unknown, pre-1960s

JTB made sketches when they honeymooned in the south of France, and again, the following year, when they were in the Alps, but golf continued to be his main pastime, and he played in the Scottish Amateur Championship in 1930 (Note 4).

In December 1931, the couple’s first daughter, Evelyn, was born, and she had cerebral palsy. Their world changed. There were no more foreign trips, and one assumes the stigma associated, and the lack of help – no social care, no NHS, Winifred’s parents dead and JTB’s elderly and quite a way off in Leven – meant there was a need for considerable parental commitment.

We’ve come a long way before engaging with any serious art, but that’s how the foundation for JTB’s painting, his experience and his social and economic surroundings – family, society, job, finances, beliefs - informed how he saw the world. He didn’t have four years training at an art school absorbing tutors’ and fellow students’ styles, as far as we know he hadn’t visited galleries and studied the masters. He’d made some etchings, done some sketching, pen and ink, and that’s it: an occasional hobby. However, his life experience was rich, he was confident, and a little frustrated. His writing had gone nowhere, his best golf days were probably gone (though he carried on playing off scratch handicap until he was 70), and so far his artistic endeavours had been unfruitful. Now his family life tied him down.

It was a strong will to succeed that seems to have driven him at this late stage of life to turn himself from a middle class, middle aged banker in a mid-level Scottish town, to an artist whose work might be seen nationally and internationally.

He had no set stylistic approach, and no experience of public presentation. What to do? He knew how to draw, and he knew that he could draw landscapes. He must have felt less confident about people.

There was an easy place to start, and one can only guess at the circumstances that brought it about, but in 1932 he commenced a project to decorate his bank with paintings of his own, and, of course, the subject matter would be the traditional businesses of the people who banked with him. There were places for three large panels of four feet square and his subjects were agriculture, fishing and sheep-breeding. He joined the newly established Carnoustie Art Club and exhibited the first panel, depicting Angus fisheries at the Annual Exhibition in November. The Courier said it was “imposing in its conception and clever in its execution”.

He was emboldened, and had completed and installed all three panels the following year, with many of the Bank’s customers taken aback on finding that they were painted by the Manager. Unfortunately, I can’t find any images.

James Bell, Sketchbook entry, Skye, 1933, © ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries

By the summer of 1933, JTB was sketching in Skye – I don’t know whether he was on holiday with the family or not – and he produced enough to exhibit “a number of excellent studies of Skye’s scenic beauty” at the Carnoustie Exhibition in October 1933, alongside his massive agricultural panel, loaned from the bank. The commitment to art was rekindled, and this time the application and motivation were at a level he’d never previously achieved or perhaps been allowed to achieve.

His confidence in his capability was enough to resolve to paint a substantial Skye oil and submit it to the RSA at the beginning of 1934. His “Glamaig” (the most northerly of the Red Cuillins) was accepted, and was one of the first paintings to sell at the RSA Exhibition in May. He submitted two pictures and both were shown. There is no public record of the images, so unfortunately we can’t review.

With confidence further boosted, his holiday sketchbooks were challenged in a way that they had never been before when he and the family drove in his stylish Hotchkiss car to North Devon and stayed for nearly two weeks in a small village near the coast called Georgeham. He could fill up to eight pages of different perspectives of the village and the nearby coastline around Croyde every day. One wonders how much time he had for his wife and daughter.

There are more sketchbook entries from this period than any other that I’ve seen. Georgeham is 13 miles from Torrington. There was a farm in Little Torrington called “Woodlands”. Georgeham was the home of the writer, Henry Williamson, and just to the north of where his book “Tarka The Otter” was set around ten years before.  Perhaps more pertinently, it was the setting for Williamson’s “The Flax Of Dream”, a hymn to the hefting of man to nature and old ways, a rootedness contemporaneously explored by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in “Sunset Song”.

Dan Richterich, JTB’s son-in-law, says that the family legend was that JTB felt he needed a distinguishing middle name and asked Winifred to put a pin in a map of Britain and see where it landed. Perhaps the trip to Georgeham was a voyage of discovery to the area that he’d adopted. Perhaps it was the trip that inspired him to take on the name.

His father was James Bell. He had died in January that year. There were at least two other prominent James Bells in Carnoustie at the time. And he would be aware that the most significant artists in the Dundee area were the double-barreled James McIntosh Patrick and John MacLauchlan Milne, and amongst the other key players were J. Milne Purvis, J. Calder Smith, and James Mackie Smith. From here on, in the art world, and often beyond, he called himself James Torrington Bell.

Frustratingly, there are no pictures that I’ve been able to access from before 1937, to show us what JTB was doing, and by then he could almost call himself an “established” artist (Note 5). And “An Angus Farmstead” shown at the RA in 1937, and presumably painted in the winter of 36/37, is an internet lift from an American auction site (apologies!).

James Torrington Bell, An Angus Farmstead

We see that, already in the first five years of his public exhibiting, he established much of what distinguished his paintings for the rest of his career. The raised vantage point with the sun in full glare behind him, and a subject matter that talked of timeless country life, harmony between man and nature, mature trees, and neat agricultural practices. Tiny people labour in huge sweeps of landscape, reduced to relative insignificance by the size of the trees and the scale of the horizon. He often offered a route into the picture, a track, a path, and then great masses of trees splitting foreground and background, arranged mostly left and right, steering you towards a long distance. Buildings are often seen through trees, a device that offered opportunity for contrasting backdrop and verification of shadow and intricate branch articulation.

It was a picture postcard from Angus. If he walked along the track out of town from “Woodlands” this is what he could see within two hundred yards. “An Angus Farmstead” shows a fertile plain that could be the one on which “Woodlands” sat on the edge as viewed from the higher ground to the north. JTB painted a very similar picture, “The Harvest” (recently sold at Lyon and Turnbull Auctioneers), with the same perspective, with a track leading to farm buildings, assembled in a comparable constellation, but in Autumn and in a Highland setting. These were studio confections, sweetened varieties of Scottish landscape beauties. Most of it, JTB had seen, sketched, and colour-notated, but that was just the starting point.

What JTB didn’t see was any of the hard realism or rural romanticism of recent Scottish art traditions. He didn’t have young women cutting cabbages, no sunsets behind the plough, no sense of noise, toil, and only a little dirt – all in the right places. He saw the landscape as though he had re-invented the paradises of medieval painting and tapestry with an Angus-between-the-wars perspective. He wanted to promote beauty in his world and filter out the mud, the waste, the litter, and the evidence of rural hardship. Every one of the thousands of leaves that have fallen from the four substantial deciduous trees in the foreground have been swept up. The tractor revolution that was about to change agricultural life was very close, but these fields were probably ploughed in the old manner with heavy horses. The work has always been done, finished beautifully, and the machinery tucked away neatly.

We should marvel a little at JTB’s polish too. “An Angus Farmstead” is the work of a painter who has good graphic skills, prized detail, understood colour tone and contrast and handled paint with a natural ease. His trump card was recognising how seductive the play of bright sunlight and shadow on rich surfaces was for most people. Also, by being able to produce it in views which suggested that, despite the relentless march of technology, industrial decline, economic challenges, and threatening political news, all was well in the countryside - the harmony of man and nature continued to produce a deep seated beauty and sense of well-being that had been settled practice for hundreds of years. Linking that with picture-making devices lifted from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries added to the potion.

James Torrington Bell, Braes of Downie, © ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries

“Braes of Downie” went further down the advertising poster route and steered even closer to McIntosh Patrick, in a way that Patrick, despite being 15 years younger, would probably regard as copying at that moment.  Patrick’s popularity was huge and his sparkling revisions of everyday reality hit a public wish to look on the bright side of life. JTB’s business and competitive sport world was based on looking out for advantages, large and small. He didn’t sign the “Braes of Downie”. It could have passed off as a Patrick. Was this intentional? We don’t know.

The specificity in the title gave extra weight to the idyll. JTB was offering his viewers the opportunity to see somewhere that was close to home. It featured a similar panorama with many of the same devices as “An Angus Farmstead”.  He was careful to articulate farms and houses in the distance and through the canopies of trees. Perhaps they were owned by his friends or potential buyers.

At this time, JTB was not only combining his artistic success with continuing strong engagement in business and leisure in Carnoustie, he was also cementing a religious position, as a lay reader in the local Episcopalian Church. The Church was yet another institution under attack from science, philosophy, and political systems – capitalism as well as communism. In 1937, JTB committed to working on a new altar piece (Note 6) for the Church of the Holy Rood in Carnoustie – the embedded Church amongst the rich Victorian mansions of East Carnoustie. He was thinking about the place of the Church, the importance of goodness. He had a young disabled child. Winifred was becoming a key contributor to the fund-raising, societies, fashion shows, events and occasions that stitched society into the status quo. JTB and his family stood for the old order, and the threat of modern society constantly challenged. When I asked Dan Richterich to describe JTB’s character, he had a one word answer, very strongly underlined: “moral!” JTB had no qualification. He decided on what was black or white and lived his life accordingly. The long-settled landscape he could see from the Braes of Downie, looking across the coastal plain to the sea, elided Carnoustie. It was a happy result of the town sitting below the bank above which “Woodlands” was built. This was his world of virtue and he was to spend the rest of his life expressing his advocacy for all it stood for.

What were the dark forces? At some point in the recent past, I took down a line written by John Berger about what the de Stijl movement rejected: “the aesthetic of the hand-made, the notion that ownership bestows power and weight, the virtues of permanence and indestructibility, the love of mystery and secrets, the fear that technology threatens culture, the horror of the anonymous, the mystique and the rights of privilege.” They wanted to smash the old order. I’m not sure whether JTB would have seen all of these values as the strongest pillars of his beliefs, but they would not be far off.  JTB expressed his beliefs through his pictures. He’d failed as a writer. He couldn’t emulate Grassic Gibbon or Williamson, but he could embed his views and his stories into his painting.

And his views were always supported by the gods of good weather. The view from the “Braes of Downie” could never look as good as the moment that JTB decided to paint it. The sun floods down over his right shoulder, a gentle breeze gives life and, importantly, vigorous reflective surfaces to the main characters of the piece, the huge deciduous trees. They stand guard over the unfolding scene like sentries at the gates of paradise.

Throughout his painting life, JTB used mature trees as symbols of the power of establishment; and as bastions of order and stability. But there is no doubt that there was nothing he liked painting more than trees, mostly deciduous but native conifers too. Some painters run a mile from tackling them, but for JTB, he could get lost in the resolution of their characters, the balance of freedom and logic and the need for the painter to find equilibrium between their rigidity and the grace of their movement. He must have loved clouds too, and he rejoiced, Hopkins-like, in their dancing free spirited forms. There are few JTB paintings where the sky is flat, and none you could describe as heavy overcast. JTB worked in the bank when the weather was like that. He always painted in the full sunlight of heaven.

And in this paradise, the lucky tiny humans are all happily walking down the track, fixing a stone wall, swinging from a tree. They are bursting with pride for the landscape that they, and their Angus fellows, have created. Such a beautiful and harmonious scene!

The “Braes of Downie” went to the RA and was hung “on the line” in April 1938. The Dundee Evening Telegraph, still referring to him without the T, must have asked JTB to describe it, and paraphrased his response: “ “Braes of Downie," which is an oil, 40 inches by 36 inches, is an Angus study from The Law, Monikie, looking down on Downie, Panmure, Carnoustie, Gaa Sands, with the open sea beyond. Typical Angus farm scenery fills in the foreground, the sun streaming on well-filled stackyards, rich fertile fields and slated roofs, while groups of fir trees screen the distant view.” Readers who walked up the little hill south of Monikie would see the expansive vista, but not the dramatic perspective JTB took, nor the detail that he managed in the distance. His universal clarity would always be elusive. This was not produced en plein air; it was a painting that would have taken JTB weeks of concentrated effort. In the 1950s if you went through the Banking Hall where the panels depicting traditional Angus work still hung, the “Braes of Downie” was in the Manager’s office. It was clearly one of his favourites.

James Torrington Bell, Isle Of Skye, poster illustration for LNER

JTB’s office gallery was for the select few, but soon, railway offices and platforms all over Britain had a JTB picture on their walls. The 1939 railway poster editions included McIntosh Patrick’s “Dunottar Castle” and JTB’s “Isle of Skye” along with Samuel Lamorna Birch’s “West Highlands”. Stanley Cursiter, speaking at that year’s Annual Railway Poster Exhibition in Edinburgh, described their presentation as “The Picture Gallery of the Man in the Street”. Cursiter probably echoed JTB’s views when he said “the poster artist must understand his public, and even, to some extent, size up and understand his patron. The pictorial artist need go no further than an acute analysis of himself. The poster artist must not only know his subject material, but he must be able to see it with his patron's eye, or, to go a stage further; he must be able to see it as his patron believed his public would like to see it.” I’m not sure JTB would like to be called a “poster artist”, but Cursiter didn’t see the commercial/creative schism that we might draw today. He himself had worked in a marketing department.

Full sun, a path to lead you in, tall trees framing expansive vistas enfilading away to far horizons, detail defying distance; and look at how the track, stone dyke, the fences, the rocks, all chime with their recent applications in other pictures. The artist/illustrator divisions fizzle away.

Later, JTB was to describe his approach to “Braes of Downie” as using the Pre-Raphaelite technique.  Experiment and search were part of his art world for the next twenty-five years. He was constantly aware of paint mix formulae, brushes, the qualities of boards, canvases and preparations. He tried all kinds of approaches, without seeming to settle. And yet his pictures rarely showed signs of substantive change. I guess his painting was like his putting: methods being considered all the time, slight changes reflecting temperament and fashion being tried, but the general result remained the same.

As already mentioned, he discussed tempera techniques with John Duncan, and he regularly referenced Duncan’s recipes, but over the years he gathered and noted down information on many artists’ palettes, oil paint mixes, and other technical methods, and he kept notes on the relative ease of production and application, and the efficacy of the result.

The Second World War put a break on JTB’s art momentum. He handed in his Hotchkiss for the war effort, and the engine was used in a patrol boat. He was grounded, the opportunity for sunny outlooks on country life were limited.  The submissions to the RSA and RA continued to be successful and the notices placed him on equal footing with the best artists.  Carnoustie Art Society was wound up but JTB got closer to Dundee Art Society. He raised funds for the Red Cross and other causes. He considered Philip Wilson Steer’s skies and he cut out Rowland Hilder’s newspaper illustrations. He must have seen Hilder as a kindred spirit.

There were bright moments, especially with the birth of his second daughter, Pamela, in April 1942, and he kept on banking, golfing and painting, emerging into the post-war world with a status in the art world that was secured at a high level and seemingly more connected.

After the peace, he was quickly called on to give lecture/demonstrations on landscape sketching in Dundee, Arbroath and St Andrews. In Dundee, McIntosh Patrick presided on his talk and in Arbroath he presided over Edward Baird’s talk. He talked on the Church and Art, and Angus County Council famously commissioned him to paint Strathmore as a gift from the people of Angus to Princess Elizabeth on the occasion of her wedding.

James Torrington Bell, the 1948 solo exhibition at Victoria Art Galleries, Dundee

In 1948, he was able to mount his first ever solo exhibition at the Victoria Art Galleries, Dundee. He was 56. There were 107 oils, 25 watercolours, and 8 drawings and etchings. The majority of the work was of Angus landscapes, particularly in and around Carnoustie. There was a block of paintings from west Cornwall, where presumably a post-war family holiday had been centred, with Richmond Castle visited on the way there or back; then there was a block from the Cairngorms and other small sets from a trip to the West Coast (Moidart, Loch Awe, Cruachan), to Loch Earn, and to Sutherland.

The Exhibition was opened by Arthur Woodburn, Secretary of State for Scotland, a measure of JTB’s standing and of the political support for post-war cultural renewal.  More than 7,000 people were reported to have visited the show, underlining the scale of JTB’s popularity. The catalogue introduction was written by JTB’s old navy friend; journalist and writer, Richard Williams-Thompson, whose book on “The Palestine Problem” had just been published.

“Torrington Bell’s work expresses the lyrical mood in painting. The aim is to charm, the movement in time is gentle and based on a contemplative mood. The wind in the trees, the fresh fields and the sunshine, give that note of happiness and the appreciation of the deeper beauty of things. A sensitiveness of touch and a command of technique are essential to convey the varying moods of nature and it is for this reason Torrington Bell’s research into the many methods of painting in oil has been extensive and profound.”

“Extensive”: yes, he was addicted to experiment, but only within the bounds of his house and personal reading. “Profound”: again, but only as deep as a one-person amateur experimental chemist with limited budget might achieve.

Not everything worked.

James Torrington Bell, Glamis, Image courtesy of Dundee Art Galleries and Museums.

JTB offered to donate a picture from the exhibition for the Dundee Art Gallery Collection and “Glamis” was chosen. It was one of the two most expensively priced pictures at the show (£300 in 1948: the equivalent of over £13,000 today) reflecting the scale, 1.22m x 1.37m, and the work involved in painting tempera on canvas stretched on board. All the classic JTB attributes are on show, but the medium seems to stiffen JTB’s natural easy flow, the tree foliage has the look of a permed hair-do, and the sky looks fixed, heavy and immovable. It wasn’t the best choice.

Tempera was a tiny element of his output, (there were just the two £300 paintings at this show), and the large bulk of the oils were well received and many sold.

But not enough to make him seriously consider the concept of changing profession. According to Dan Richterich, there was an ongoing tension between Winifred and JTB about the amount of time and money he applied to his art. She felt he should paint more still lives, especially of flowers, because she thought there was a market for them. JTB, according to Dan Richterich, apparently “hated” painting flowers. By this time, art was his passion and he would have liked to be able to go full time.

His investigations and analysis into techniques took up considerable time, on top of the drawing, sketching and painting.  A diary entry from 1949 gives us an insight: “R.W. brought new lot of B.O. (Black Oil). 3 hours cooking – slow fire – will allow a few days to settle, but have decanted it and corked closely to stop oxidation.” And then “made a jelly with very full spoon B.O. and even spoon of Pictus mastic which is 50/50 M.T. The jelly took a few moments to jellify, not seconds as the authority suggests, but account must be taken of modern turps and oil. They are not what the old masters used. Raw linseed was cold pressed not hot pressed as now…”. There are pages and pages of these kinds of notes, recipes used by Antonello de Messina, Giorgione, Velazquez; what Ruskin Spear thought Rubens did; what John Duncan had told him about Flemish painting. He transcribed from Max Doerner’s “The Materials of the Artist and their use in painting”. He studied El Greco’s approach. You can imagine that Winifred not only wondered about the time and money, but also about the smells and the health risks of having young children around a kitchen where litharge and turpentine were just as likely to be on the work surface as butter and salt.

Through the war years, closer to home and bringing up a small child, the immediate environs of Woodlands became a greater focus. Creating paradises in painting had been JTB’s way of expressing his feelings about beauty, but increasingly the garden at the house was evolving into a dynamic interaction between the Bells and nature: their own little paradise. It meant that from the 1948 exhibition onwards, the artist’s garden would be a familiar subject.

James Torrington Bell, The Artist’s Garden, © ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries

JTB could walk out of the back door of the house and set up an easel and he could walk across the track in front of the house and into Carnoustie House Gardens, where the mature parkland was dominated (and still is) by enormous mature trees. Just down the lanes he painted Shanwell, Pitskelly, Lovers Lane, MacNicolls Farm, Newton Cottage, and so on; an endless range of suburban, woodland, parkland, and countryside subjects immediately available to paint outside on a summer afternoon or early evening.  His speed increased and the volume of production too. Family, business and social commitments pressed him to work quickly. “October At Woodlands”, “Shanwell Woods”, “Carlogie Farm” and around forty or fifty other paintings in the 1948 show, priced from £10-£16, were probably painted outside in a single session.  The only difference between an oil sketch and an oil painting was probably whether he signed it.

The demand for sunny paintings to brighten the post-war years mirrored the post-First World War hankering for old ways, the countryside as a land of plenty, the country house and garden. Bell’s popularity was probably at its height.

Even Aitken Dott couldn’t resist the market and JTB found himself with a solo show at their Edinburgh gallery in 1952. It was a one-off, so one can only presume that the gallery’s established clientele found JTB’s work a little out of step with the regular fare – that year their other solo shows were Gillies, Haig, Penelope Beaton, and Margaret Thomas. The subject matter of these more academic and metropolitan artists might have been the same, but the attitude is subtly different. Their work has less obvious enthusiasm, joy, and pleasure. JTB put a sparkle and a sheen into his worlds, a zeal for the life he loved. It looked like he felt what he painted, creating a sense that he was a little naive and less sophisticated. He could make Gillies and Beaton seem to be afraid of the brilliance he saw.

Beauty was for JTB a quality associated with conservative thinking. He was ever-conscious of the wonders around him and saw their preservation as important. He was a commercially driven man, a banker, but he baulked at the new commercial threats to the old order. His paintings avoided the advance of industrial agriculture, tarmac, post-war architecture… let alone the abstraction that he probably thought of as short-cuts, cheap shots, and lacking the beauty of the natural world and traditional skills.

James Torrington Bell, Carnoustie Bay, © ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries

By this moment in his life, JTB was a pillar of the Carnoustie establishment. He had been made a J.P. in 1951 (Note 7), and he was very friendly with the Provost and many of the older businessmen in the town. In 1955 he was persuaded to paint a picture for the Provost’s room in the Council chambers. He took the opportunity to lecture the Councillors on aesthetic values as he presented a painting of the town from the vantage of the beach:

“On the Scottish east coast from Aberdeen to Berwick on Tweed there is no more pretty bay than Carnoustie Bay.  A hundred years from now the conditions of the Town Planning Committee might be fulfilled. There would be rows of hotels along the Front. The trees would be all gone from the skyline. Shows and shooting galleries would be spread across the links. I hope the Council of that day might then glance at the picture and say "What a beautiful town Carnoustie was in 1955!" Please accept it as a gift from me, and whatever you do, gentlemen, keep our beach!”

Two years later, aged 65, he retired. It was a moment he must have been waiting for, because he could paint full-time, or rather for as much time as he could take away from family and social commitments.

The subjects remained the same, very close to home (“Shanwell Woods”, “Cornfield, Pitskelly”, “Braefoot”, “Monikie Hill from Barry”, “The Artist’s Garden”), the West Coast, the North, and flowers for his wife. Variation arrived with commissions. In 1956 he painted a cricket match at Perth’s North Inch for the Scottish Cricket Union to present to the M.C.C. in London.

James Torrington Bell, Sketch for Perthshire v Forfarshire, North Insh, Perth

Unusually, people are key characters, as they would need to be. When there was no specific demand, JTB preferred them to be context, close to stick figures. His 1961 show at the Victoria Galleries featured 33 paintings that had been produced in the four years since his retirement. They belittle people, dodge current society, celebrate traditional gardens, countryside, and old houses, and mostly worship the sun and its ability to transform the spirit through its reflection and shadow. Its play on tree foliage continued to be JTB’s favourite subject, and in addition to his traditional over-the-shoulder sunlight, the Sixties saw him starting to face the sun and enjoy it.

James Torrington Bell, The Road at Lundy, oil on canvas, private collection

Trees framing a lane, down which we can walk with him, with fields beyond, might have been JTB’s ideal subject. “The Road at Lundy” is a straightforward study in sunlight (this time from upper left), playing on the trunks and leaves of trees, and then in shadow and beam, on the lane and the field. In this idyllic world, there will never be delivery vans or even tractors, and no-one would consider dropping litter, because it didn’t exist.

James Torrington Bell, Cornfield, private collection

And if there was a second favourite it would be dancing clouds in a summer sky, here turning Angus almost Mediterranean, with a harvested field the backdrop to a single tree study, counterpointed by a distant double decker and a front left hedge. The sun’s radiant response to the yellow field is a stunning effect, emphasized by the dark green foliage of the tree.

From 1958 to 1968, when he held a final exhibition at Dundee Art Gallery, was a decade of outdoor pleasure, in which JTB freely and quickly painted multiple paintings of sun-kissed Angus, the garden from all angles, some holiday snaps from the west coast and from a boat (Note 8). The technical exploration continued with journal entries and the recipes. Sometimes the quantity of what he was producing was too much for the budget and the canvas got cheaper and rougher, and then there was board, and cheap muslin glued to board. He continued to send pictures to the Academies and he loved being accepted at the Salon de Paris. Locally, he dealt with Fraser’s Gallery in Dundee.

The world was changing fast, and JTB was still in love with the old one. The girls were probably sticking posters of Elvis or Cliff or even the Fab Four on their walls, Coronation Street had commenced, the public were being bombarded with the new aesthetics of cheap capitalism; the art world was ablaze with pop art and minimalist abstraction, plastic was beginning to take over the world; the Empire was going, going, gone.

JTB continued to challenge himself. He loved Impressionism and loosened his style, learned what Monet’s palette contained and how he applied paint and then did it, Angus-style. Dan Richterich recalls challenging him to paint like Cezanne, and near the very end of his life, he was inspired by a Bonnard exhibition, and the resultant pictures were amongst the strongest he ever painted. His powers were never dimmed. He painted off scratch handicap all the way, too.

James Torrington Bell, Untitled, private collection

The retired naval officer, banker, golfer, had a good run as an artist, but his lovely sunny paintings were more and more out of step with 1960s fashion. They started stacking up around and about the house, firstly in frames, then unframed. JTB had always, like his mother, retained the common touch. He knew what excited and thrilled the man in the street, from a visual perspective, at least in his kind of street. He had never had to move with the fashions of academia, to keep up with the pressure of modernising colleagues or students, and he wasn’t going to start now. When the time came, he put on his naval uniform and sailed into the sunset, dreaming of the wonderful vistas he’d see beyond the banks of trees. (Note 9)

JTB was well-liked and well-respected. His Christmas card lists were extensive. He numbered each entry and they ran to over 200 names and addresses. Interestingly, only one was an artist (well, at least, a name I recognised) and that was probably a social contact. (Note 10) His 1930s paintings were very closely associated with similar ones by James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), but he seems to have had little or no relationship with the Dundonian, nor with MacLauchlan Milne (1885-1957), closer in age and also very active in Dundee in the 1930s. William Peters Vannet (1917-1984) and Colin Gibson (1907-1998) lived close by in Carnoustie and Monifeith, but had no close link with Bell.  Bell always just did his own thing, and apart from the last few years of his life when he became a Governor of Duncan of Jordanstone, he was never associated with a professional institution or any artist grouping. He wasn’t an “ordinary” artist. He met the standard at the RSA and RA from 1934 to 1969 alongside many ordinary artists, but he stood apart, in the sunshine.

Winifred died in 1978. The daughters sold “Woodlands”. Carnoustie House was bought by the Council, burned down, and is now the site of a primary school, a Council tip, and a caravan park.

Woodlands, from Carnoustie House Grounds, 2024

1. The top right picture is an internet lift from Maynards Fine Art, Richmond, British Columbia. The label on the back says “Loch Assapol, by Torrington Bell”. It’s not in his handwriting, but is almost certainly by Bell, and I guess from the 30s/40s, but I’ve not found records of him painting in Mull until later in life when he went there on sailing trips. The top left picture is probably inspired by his 1935 trip to Georgeham, Devon, and there are many sketches in this vein, although the Church is not the one in Georgeham. Mid-left and Mid-right are local scenes close to home in Carnoustie. My guess would be late 50s/early 60s. Mid-right could possibly be the lane outside the house, looking towards the town (Dan Richterich has subsequently confirmed this is West Path, the lane outside Woodlands). Bottom left is most likely to be the Garden at Woodlands, again early 60s, though I haven’t worked out the angle. Bottom right might be a copy JTB made of a French scene. It’s certainly from his Impressionist inspired mid-60s moment.

2. JTB was born at the family home, Marine Cottage, in Leven on the 8th October, 1892.  That’s what is on the birth certificate that Dan Richterich has. The Fifeshire Journal “Births” announcement says 23rd October. The Birth was registered in the parish of Scoonie on 25th October. References that put his birthday in 1898 were probably misguided by reports around JTB’s 1948 exhibition that he was 50 at that time.

3. Gertrude Winifred Thorburn’s parents address, 172 Braid Road, was on the Marriage Certificate. She was a teacher, but her parents had both died, her father (an engineering lecturer at Heriot Watt College) in 1926, her mother earlier in 1929. JTB called her “Winnie” and she called JTB  “Jimmy”. Dan Richterich told me that Winifred’s father died without leaving a will, and the entire estate went to Winifred’s brother, Bill, also a lecturer.

4. Where he was reported as “setting a fashion with his black beret”, not an everyday golfing style. He was a regular feature on the Carnoustie courses for forty years, playing off scratch handicap most of the time, and reaching the final of the classic amateur open matchplay competition, The Tassie, twice.

5. By 1937 his reputation as an artist was established with paintings accepted at the RSA, RA, and RGI; and at invitation exhibitions in Brighton, Bournemouth and Huddersfield.

6. The altar piece was completed and installed at the Church in 1939, and dedicated by the Bishop of Brechin in October of that year. The subject is Christ breaking bread at Emmaus, with the Cairngorms and Loch Morlich in the background, and Easter flowers, presumably for Winifred.

7. Along with Horace Bell, his long-term friend, golfing associate and owner of a yacht on the west coast on to which JTB was regularly invited and led to several paintings of Tobermory, Mull, Iona etc.

8. A solo exhibition of 35 paintings was held at the Victoria Galleries in 1961, and elements transferred to an exhibition in New York, which was set up by a friend, Gilbert Tomkins, who JTB had met golfing at Carnoustie Links.

9. JTB died on 14th May 1970 at Maryfield Hospital, Dundee.

10. “John Gray, PRSW, Craig Gowan, Broughty Ferry”.

11. These six unidentified paintings are all probably from the last decade of JTB’s life. All are © ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries

Thanks are due to Dan Richterich who kept the JTB flame alive and generously donated pictures and archival material to the public domain, and to Emma Gilliland and Jen Falconer of ANGUS Alive, who have provided access and insights.

All images are copyright of the artist’s estate.