St. Paul's Cathedral from Cannon Street

Sir Henry George "Harry" Rushbury (1889-1968) was an English painter and etcher. Born the son of a clerk in Harborne, then on the outskirts of Birmingham, Rushbury studied on a scholarship under Robert Catterson Smith at the Birmingham School of Art from the age of thirteen. He worked as an assistant to arts and crafts artist Henry Payne, chiefly as a stained-glass artist, until 1912 when he moved to London, where he shared lodgings with fellow Birmingham student, Gerald Brockhurst, who is well represented in Te Papa's collection.

Rushbury was an official war artist during World War I, and took up etching and drypoint under the influence of Francis Dodd before studying briefly under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art in 1921.

He was elected a member of the New English Art Club in 1917, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in 1921, the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1922, and the Royal Academy in 1936. In 1940 he was again appointed an official war artist until 1945. In 1949, he was elected Keeper of the Royal Academy and Head of the Royal Academy Schools,  a post he held until 1964. He was knighted in the same year.

The greatest influence on Rushbury's work was Muirhead Bone. He produced consistently technically excellent works, using diamond-point, burin and burr, of carefully observed and studied architecture, a genre made famous by Bone and to a lesser extent Dodd. With a few minute grooves and flecks cut in the surface of a copper plate, Rushbury could conjure extraordinary effects of mood and atmosphere.

This drypoint is a fine example of Rushbury wearing his war artist's hat. The tragically bomb-damaged City of London is evident in St Paul's Cathedral from Cannon Street, where the foreground  is dominated by ruins. The main bombing dated from the previous year, 1941, and from the traffic, London life has certainly returned to some normality. St Paul's Cathedral appears to have suffered only slightly. Surely the irony of Rushbury's 1930 etching commemorating a thanksgiving service for the preservation of St Paul's must have occurred to him when he now depicted Wren's great cathedral in very different circumstances of the Blitz 12 years later.

See: Wikipedia, 'Henry Rushbury', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Rushbury

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   May 2018