Aubrey Waterfield

Aubrey William Waterfield (born August 24, 1874 in Holdenhurst , Hampshire , † July 14, 1944 in Hampstead , County of London ) was a British painter and illustrator .

Life

Waterfield was the youngest son of Ottiwell Charles Waterfield (1831–1898) and his wife Ada Julia, née Candy (1842–1914). It is known that he lived in Saint Peter Port around 1881 .

The Fortezza della Brunella in Aulla

On July 1, 1902, in London, he married the historian and observer journalist Caroline Lucie Isabella Jane Duff Gordon, known as Lina Duff Gordon (1874–1964), co-founder of the British Institute of Florence , whom he had met while studying at Oxford . With her he had a daughter, the writer Kinta Beevor , and two sons named Gordon and John. Gordon Waterfield worked for the BBC World Service and was, among other things, head of the Eastern Service. One of his grandsons is the historian Antony Beevor .

Waterfield studied at the Slade School of Fine Art . He painted the writer RC Trevelyan around 1900 . The painting is in the National Trust Collection at Wallington Hall . He painted and drew a lot unofficially for the Imperial War Museum . His cousin Alfred Mond and later also the art historian and museum director Campbell Dodgson (1867–1948) recommended him to the museum on various occasions. In turn, he also recommended Guy Lipscombe and Elliott Seabrooke . Even if the Imperial War Museum could not officially appoint him, it offered him support where it could with regard to opportunities to paint and draw in Italy and was interested in his work at the same time.

With his wife he went to Italy, where in 1920 he first rented the Fortezza della Brunella in Aulla and then bought it. There he created u. a. important portraits , landscapes and flowers. He also illustrated his wife's publications. He had already visited the property for the first time in spring 1896, and again seven years later as part of his honeymoon. After discovering that during the Spanish occupation of the fortress, earth had been placed on its roof to dampen the recoil of the cannons, he decided to create a garden with a rose-covered pavilion on it, drawing inspiration from the Royal Pavilion . Today, the Fortezza della Brunella houses the Museo di Storia Naturale della Lunigiana .

The Villa di Poggio Gherardo in Florence

In the late 1920s, Aubrey and Lina Waterfield sold the estate in Tuscany and moved to the Villa di Poggio Gherardo in Florence district Coverciano , the Lina of her step-aunt, the historian and biographer Janet Ross (1842-1927), in front of their demise Lifetime was transferred. In order to cover the maintenance costs for the villa, they ran a boarding school for English art students on the property from 1930, where Waterfield gave drawing and composition lessons. In the immediate vicinity was the Villa I Tatti by Bernard Berenson , whose garden was mainly designed by Cecil Pinsent (1884–1963), while the forest side towards Poggio was designed by Waterfield.

In 1940 the couple lost their son John and returned to England. During the Second World War , Waterfield worked as an interpreter for Italian prisoners of war until this became too strenuous for him at an advanced age and he devoted himself more to painting again. Works from this period can be found in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum , for example . In 1944 he fell ill and died after a two-week stay in hospital. His body was buried in Nackington , Kent .

Before he fell ill, he organized a solo exhibition that took place posthumously. On October 25, 2015, the curator Viviana Foglianti from the Friends of the Florentine Museums ( Amici dei Musei Fiorentini ) gave a lecture at the Accademia "La Colombaria" on the subject of "Aubrey Waterfield (1874–1944), un pittore inglese e due castelli in Toscana "(" ... an English painter and two castles in Tuscany ").

literature

• Antonelli Francesca, Lamini Serena, Malatesta Beatrice, Soremekum Folasade Omolara, Terenzoni Alice: Artisti in Lunigiana: Aubrey Waterfield. (Italian). ( online )
• Kinta Beevor : A Tuscan Childhood. Viking / Penguin Books, 1993. ISBN 0-140-16673-4
• Waterfield, Aubrey. In: R. Terry Schnadelbach : Hidden Lives / Secret Gardens: The Florentine Villas Gamberaia, La Pietra and I Tatti. iUniverse, 2009, pp. 195-197. ISBN 1-440-13115-5
• Ben Downing: Queen Bee of Tuscany. The Redoubtable Janet Ross. Macmillan, 2013. ISBN 1-429-94295-9

Individual evidence

1. ↑ James Fergusson: Obituary: Kinta Beevor. Independent, September 4, 1995.
2. ^ Aubrey William Waterfield , Ancestry.com.
3. ^ Aubrey Waterfield (1874-1944) , Library Thing .
4. ^ Robert Calverley Trevelyan (1872-1951): Aubrey Waterfield (1874-1944) , www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk.
5. ^ [Aubrey] Waterfield , Imperial War Museum, September 19, 1918.
6. ^ Lunigiana's lost garden in the sky. ( Memento of the original from September 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Ciao Lunigiana.