For two years in 1958–59, the Australian newspaper owner Rupert Murdoch sponsored an annual Murdoch Prize for a Genre Painting, held at the Skinner Galleries, Perth, which granted awards of £200 (open category) and £50 (for a Western Australian artist).1Alan McCulloch, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1968, p. 396. Ostensibly intended for local artist and audiences, the Murdoch Prize attracted the attention of a number of young British artists who submitted works to its first exhibition in October 1958. These included Kenneth Walch, an artist born in Wimbledon who had studied at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne, before returning to England in 1953; Anthony Whishaw who had won the Royal College of Art’s Drawing Prize, London, in 1956; and Roland Jarvis, a painter, sculptor and printmaker who was then teaching ‘General Design’ one day a week at the Watford School of Art, Hertfordshire. The West Australian’s art critic C. G. (Charles Greenlaw Hamilton) noted how:
The 50 paintings in the exhibition show many aspects of genre painting. Whishaw, Jarvis and K. Walch represent the British outlook in striking ways which at times strain the limits of the subject.2‘New art gallery opened in Perth’, The West Australian, 15 Oct. 1958, p. 19. This article was repeated in its entirety in this newspaper on 16 Oct. 1958, p. 18.
Jarvis sent two paintings across to Perth, Man reading a newspaper, c. 1957, and Man putting on his boots (date unknown, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane).3The Murdoch Prize for a Genre Painting, Skinner Galleries, Perth, 14 Oct. 1958, Nos 36, 37. Although exhibited here as Man putting on its boots, the title now given to this work by the Queensland Art Gallery is A man tying his boots. The first of these was awarded the 1958 Murdoch Prize (open category) and subsequently was acquired by the NGV for 88 guineas, while Brisbane purchased the latter painting. Capping off a successful year for the artist, Jarvis was also awarded a third prize of £30 in the Giles Bequest competition for contemporary colour woodcuts and linocuts, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in December 1958.4‘Giles bequest show’, The Times, 28 Nov. 1958, p. 8. Jarvis was little known to Australian audiences at this time, The West Australian newspaper remarking that ‘apart from his sending paintings there had been no other word from Jarvis’.5‘Gallery buys prize painting’, The West Australian, article from Oct. 1958, in Jerome Lawler, Art Gallery of Western Australia in letter to Annette Dixon, former Curator, National Gallery of Victoria, 9 Jan. 1989, NGV research files. Noting Jarvis’s award, The Bulletin remarked that Man reading a newspaper was ‘a sombre but powerful study in off-blacks and greys’.6‘New Perth galleries’, The Bulletin, vol. 79, no. 4107, 29 Oct. 1958, p. 26.
The Murdoch Prize was the inaugural exhibition held at Perth’s Skinner Galleries, which opened on 14 October 1958. When informed by gallerist Rose Skinner of his award and paintings sales, Jarvis replied:
It is very pleasant to find your very complimentary letter amongst the usual heap of bills; I am overjoyed at the result, and hope that the Victorian and Queensland Art Gallery Directors appreciate my paintings as much as you do.7Roland Jarvis, letter to Rose Skinner, postmarked Notting Hill, 29 Oct.1958, NGV research files.
He then belatedly provided her with some biographical details.
Roland Jarvis was born in Hull, Yorkshire in 1926.8Jarvis incorrectly stated his birth date as 1927 in his letter to Rose Skinner, postmarked Notting Hill, 29 Oct. 1958, NGV research files. His childhood years were spent in France, where he lived until he was twelve.9Roland Jarvis, Watford School of Art, Hertfordshire, 1974, n.p. His initial interest in life was mechanical, the gift of a Meccano set when he was a young boy having inspired in him a love of engineering.10Roland Jarvis, , date accessed 24 Jun. 2020. He was first educated as an engineer at King’s College, London, and he worked in this profession until the age of twenty-four. He was later to recall that engineering always brought an element of structure, logic, shape and form to his work.11Roland Jarvis, interviewed in the 2009 documentary film Timelines directed by Mark French, <vimeo.com/33011494>, date accessed 24 Jun. 2020.
Around 1950 a visit to an art exhibition made an irrevocable impression on Jarvis and he decided to abandon his engineering career and devote himself to the study of art, much to the chagrin of his father.12Information drawn from the Roland Jarvis website and the documentary film Timelines. There is confusion around the date of Jarvis’s conversion to art. The Roland Jarvis website states that this was in 1954, but in his October 1958 letter to Rose Skinner he, himself, states that this occurred when he was twenty-four, giving a date of 1950. He spent a year at Chelsea School of Art, where his teachers included Henry Moore in the sculpture department and Ceri Richards, who became his tutor. Richards, he recalled, was a great draughtsman who impressed upon his students the need to draw constantly. Jarvis now felt a natural kinship with printmaking, the many involved steps of which he related to his engineering past.
Following his time at the Chelsea School of Art, Jarvis was awarded a scholarship that allowed him to live in Paris for three years. He studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, and was influenced by School of Paris artists working in the first half of the twentieth century whose visual language engaged with Cubism and the after-effects of Cubism, in particular Surrealism. While in Paris, he held a solo exhibition of paintings, woodcuts and sculptures at the Galerie Breteux and showed work at the Salon de la jeune peinture.13The timeline is again unclear, here. In his interview in the documentary film Timelines, Jarvis stated that his years in Paris were 1956–59. In October 1958 he is living in London, however, in his letter to Rose Skinner of that date he states that he returned to London in 1955 (meaning that he was in Paris from 1952/53 to 1955), a date that must have been fresh in his mind in 1958. Returning to London in 1955, he undertook textile and tapestry designs for the Edinburgh Weavers. Around 1958 he participated in a documentary film on printmaking, Artist’s Proof, sponsored by London’s St George’s Gallery.14‘Films of British graphic art’, The Times, 25 Sep. 1958, p. 14. He also taught part-time at the Watford School of Art in Hertfordshire.
In the 1960s and 1970s Jarvis lived in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and taught printmaking at the Camberwell School of Art. After his studio burned down, destroying most of his early work, Jarvis relocated in 1982 to Hastings on England’s south-east coast, where he taught part-time at the Brighton Polytechnic. Here, he continued to paint, draw and make prints until his death at age ninety in 2016. In his later years, he created many sculptural works and experimented with making videos of his small-scale sculptures in motion. These often resembled the interior workings of clocks, which is not surprising as Jarvis was also a passionate horologist, and constructed numerous intricate clocks alongside his art practice.
An intimate, introspective painting executed in a restricted colour palette, Man reading a newspaper reflects both Jarvis’s absorption of Cubism in Paris and the contemporaneous interest in Social Realism in the British art world, analogous with the Angry Young Men literary movement.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
