Henry Tonks

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• Henry Tonks
• Henry Tonks, photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1902
• Henry Tonks, photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1902
• Born 9 April 1862
• Solihull, England
• Died 8 January 1937 (aged 74)
• Chelsea, London
• Occupation British artist

Henry Tonks, FRCS (9 April 1862 – 8 January 1937) was a British surgeon and later draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist. He became an influential art teacher.

He was one of the first British artists to be influenced by the French Impressionists; he exhibited with the New English Art Club, and was an associate of many of the more progressive artists of late Victorian Britain, including James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent and George Clausen.

Early life and career as a surgeon

Tonks was born in Solihull. His family owned a brass foundry in Birmingham. He was educated briefly at Bloxham School, followed by Clifton College in Bristol, and then studied medicine at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton (1882–85) and the London Hospital in Whitechapel (1885–88). He became a house surgeon at the London Hospital in 1886, under Sir Frederick Treves. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1888 and moved to the Royal Free Hospital in London. He taught anatomy at the London Hospital medical school from 1892.

Artist

From 1888 he studied in the evenings at Westminster School of Art, under Frederick Brown. He exhibited paintings with the New English Art Club from 1891 and became a member of the Club in 1895.

Brown became Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College, London in 1892, and Tonks started to teach at the Slade School of Fine Art. Tonks became "the most renowned and formidable teacher of his generation".[1] Pupils of Tonks at the Slade included David Bomberg, William Lionel Clause,[2] Mukul Dey, Ian Fairweather,[3] Mark Gertler, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Edna Clarke Hall, Augustus John, Gwen John, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Hyam Myer, William Orpen,[4] Isaac Rosenberg,[5] Stanley Spencer, and Rex Whistler. His sarcasm there drove F. M. Mayor's sister Alice to leave before completing her training.[6] His student Paul Nash recalled Tonks’ withering manner:

"Tonks cared nothing for other authorities and he disliked self-satisfied young men….His surgical eye raked my immature designs. With hooded stare and sardonic mouth, he hung in the air above me, like a tall question mark, moreover… of a derisive, rather than an inquisitive order. In cold discouraging tones he welcomed me to the Slade. It was evident he considered that neither the Slade, nor I, was likely to derive much benefit."[7]

First World War

Tonks resumed his medical career in 1914, first at a prisoner of war camp in Dorchester, and then at Hill Hall in Essex. He made pastel drawings of Auguste Rodin and his wife, who were refugees. He served as a medical orderly at a British Red Cross hospital near the Marne in France in 1915, and joined an ambulance unit in Italy. He became a lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1916, and worked for Harold Gillies producing pastel drawings recording facial injury cases at the Cambridge military hospital in Aldershot and the Queen's Hospital, Sidcup[8][9] – a contribution recognised in the exhibitions Faces of Battle at the National Army Museum in 2008 and Henry Tonks: Art and Surgery at the Strang Print Room of University College London in 2002.[10] There is also information on him at Will Self's "Kafka's Wound".[11]

Tonks became an official war artist in 1918, and he accompanied John Singer Sargent on tours of the Western Front. In August 1918, they both witnessed a field of wounded men near Le Bac du Sud, Doullens, which became the basis for Sargent's vast canvas, Gassed.[12] Tonks went to Archangel in Russia in 1919 as a war artist with a British expeditionary force.

Later life

He succeeded Frederick Brown as Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1918 to 1930, although he initially turned down the appointment in favour of Walter Sickert, only taking it up when Sickert declined the position. Further post-war students included Thomas Monnington, William Coldstream, Helen Lessore, Lesley Blanch and Philip Evergood. Lessore, who founded the Beaux Arts Gallery with her husband Frederick Lessore in 1923, described him as "a towering, dominating figure, about 6ft. 4in. tall, lean and ascetic looking, with large ears, hooded eyes, a nose dropping vertically from the bridge like an eagle's beak and quivering camel-like mouth".[13]

He retired in 1930, and declined the offer of a knighthood. An exhibition of his work was held in London at the Tate Gallery in 1936, only the second retrospective at the Tate for a living British artist. He died at his home in Chelsea.

Notes and references

Jump up ^ "Tonks, Henry" The Oxford Dictionary of Art. Ed. Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press, 2004. Jump up ^ CLAUSE, William Lionel in Who Was Who 1920–2007 online, accessed 6 May 2008 Jump up ^ Catalogue, National Library of Australia Jump up ^ Upstone, Robert (2005). William Orpen, Sex, Politics and Death. London: Philip Wilson Publishers. p. 9. Jump up ^ Lynda Morris, "Tonks, Henry (1862–1937)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 23 Aug 2007 Jump up ^ Janet Morgan in The Rector's Daughter by F. M. Mayor, reprinted 2009 p xiii Jump up ^ Anthony Bertram (1955) Paul Nash, the Portrait of an Artist (Faber and Faber) p.39. Jump up ^ VH Ward, 'Henry Tonks - The Facial Injury Artist', British Dental Journal, Vol. 187, No. 8, October 23, 1999 Jump up ^ S. Biernoff, ‘Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery,’ Visual Culture in Britain, 11,1 (Mar. 2010): 25-47. Jump up ^ "In Conversation: Repairing the Wounds: Art and Surgery, Then and Now", npg.org.uk, retrieved 7 June 2014. Jump up ^ Kafka's Wound: WW1 Veterans: The portraits of Henry Tonks. http://thespace.lrb.co.uk/article/wwi-veterans-the-portraits-of-hen... Jump up ^ Paul Gough (2009) ‘A Terrible Beauty’: British Artists in the First World War (Sansom and Company) pp.198-199. Jump up ^ Lynda Morris, ‘Tonks, Henry (1862–1937)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 9 April 2013

Further reading

E. Chambers, 'Fragmented Identities: Reading Subjectivity in Henry Tonks' Surgical Portraits,' Art History, 32,3 (2009), 578-607. David Boyd Haycock, "A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War" (2009) J. Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks (1939) L. Morris (ed.), Henry Tonks and the 'art of pure drawing' (1985) New English Art Club, One hundred and fiftieth annual open exhibition, featuring a selection of work by Professor Henry Tonks ... from the Royal College of Surgeons and the Imperial War Museum (1997) J. Rothenstein, 'Henry Tonks 1862–1937', in J. Rothenstein, Modern English Painters Sickert To Smith (1952) Tate Gallery, Exhibition of Works by Professor Henry Tonks [exhibition catalogue] (1936), 7p.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Henry Tonks. Henry Tonks pastels - collections of the Royal College of Surgeons, London and the Slade School, UCL The Portraiture of Loss – Dr Suzannah Biernoff in Ampersand magazine on Tonks' work and its impact on medical study and portraiture

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From Spartacus:

Henry Tonks, the fifth among the eleven children of Edmund Tonks and his wife, Julia Johnson, was born in Solihull on 9th April 1862. His father owned a brass foundry in Birmingham.

Tonks attended Clifton College (1877-1880) and then studied medicine at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. In 1887 he was the house surgeon of Frederick Treves and the following year was appointed as senior medical officer at the Royal Free Hospital. In 1892 he became a teacher of anatomy at the London Hospital Medical School.

In his spare time he attended drawing lessons at the Westminster School of Art. After his teacher, Frederick Brown, became principal of Slade Art School, he convinced Tonks to give up medicine and become one of its teachers. According to his biographer, Lynda Morris: "Tonks used his anatomical knowledge to teach life drawing as a swift and intelligent activity. He referred his students to old master drawings at the British Museum and taught his pupils to draw the model at the size it was seen, measured at arm's length (sight size), which enabled them continually to correct the drawing for themselves, against a physical object."

A friend, the novelist, George Moore, later recalled: "He read everything that was written about drawing; he listened to all that his friends had to say; he thought about drawing, and he practised drawing, praying that the secret might be vouchsafed to him, for art has become Tonks's religion." One of his students described Tonks as a "towering, dominating figure, well over six feet tall, lean and ascetic looking, with large, hooded eyes, a nose dropping vertically from the bridge like an eagle's beak and a quivering, camel-like mouth. There was about him an aura of incorruptible nobility of purpose and he was... respected by all the students and feared by many."

Gilbert Spencer, the brother of Stanley Spencer, was another of his students. He later wrote how Tonks "talked of dedication, the privilege of being an artist, that to do a bad drawing was like living with a lie, and he proceeded to implant these ideals by ruthless and withering criticism. I remember once coming home and feeling like flinging myself under a train, and Stan telling me not to mind as he did it to everyone."

Tonks later admitted: "I certainly cannot draw, though I have a passion for drawing; I am uncertain about the direction of lines; I have no skill of hand, and to express myself at all I have the greatest difficulty. Perhaps it is that being so deficient myself, I have enough honesty to urge my students to strengthen themselves where I am weak."

Tonks developed a reputation for being very harsh with his students. Randolph Schwabe has argued: "Once I witnessed an odd scene. A new student had come into the Antique Room, a very tall, heavy man, in private life an amateur pugilist. He sat as others did on a low seat near the floor, doing his untutored best to render the cast in front of him. Tonks, from his great height, bent over him and said cuttingly - I suppose you think you can draw. The student collected himself, rose slowly to an even greater height than Tonks and, looking down, replied with suppressed fury (but perfect justice) - If I thought I could draw - I shouldn't come here, should I? He had the better of the encounter. Tonks had nothing to say, and left the room."

In the 1890s Tonks taught Augustus John, Gwen John, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore. However, it was the generation that he taught at the beginning of the century that really made a mark on the art world. This included C.R.W. Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, John Currie, Dora Carrington, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Dorothy Brett, Paul Nash, John Nash, David Bomberg, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Wadsworth, Adrian Allinson and Rudolph Ihlee. Nevinson commented that the Slade "was full with a crowd of men such as I have never seen before or since." He also wrote that Gertler was "the genius of the place... and the most serious, single-minded artist I have ever come across." Tonks recognised their talent but found them too rebellious and later commented: "What a brood I have raised."

Tonks employed Roger Fry as one of the tutors at the Slade Art School. Fry took a keen interest in all forms of art. In May 1910 he wrote an article for The Burlington Magazine on drawings by African Bushman, where he praised their sharpness of perception and intelligence of design. David Boyd Haycock argued that "Fry was opening up his awareness to a wider sphere of artistic expression, though it was not one that would win him many friends." Henry Tonks remarked to a friend: "Don't you think Fry might find something more interesting to write about than Bushmen." Tonks was also highly critical of Cubism. Tonks declared: "I cannot teach what I don't believe in. I shall resign if this talk about Cubism does not cease; it is killing me." This attitude increased the view that he had become a reactionary.

Later that year Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Desmond MacCarthy went to Paris and after visiting "Parisian dealers and private collectors, arranging an assortment of paintings to exhibit at the Grafton Galleries" in Mayfair. This included a selection of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, André Derain and Vincent Van Gogh. As the author of Crisis of Brilliance (2009) has pointed out: "Although some of these paintings were already twenty or even thirty years old - and four of the five major artists represented were dead - they were new to most Londoners." This exhibition had a marked impression on the work of Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Spencer Gore.

Henry Tonks told his students that although he could not prevent them visiting the Grafton Galleries, he could tell them "how very much better pleased he would be if we did not risk contamination but stayed away". His views were shared by most of the art world. The critic for The Pall Mall Gazette described the paintings as the "output of a lunatic asylum". Robert Ross of The Morning Post agreed claiming the "emotions of these painters... are of no interest except to the student of pathology and the specialist in abnormality". These comments were especially hurtful to Fry as his wife had recently been committed to an institution suffering from schizophrenia. Paul Nash recalled that he saw Claude Phillips, the art critic of The Daily Telegraph, on leaving the exhibition, "threw down his catalogue upon the threshold of the Grafton Galleries and stamped on it."

On the outbreak of the First World War, Tonks returned to medicine and joined the Royal Army Military Corps on the Western Front. In 1915 he worked as an orderly near the Marne and with a British ambulance unit, organized by the historian G. M. Trevelyan. In 1916 he was commissioned lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps and began visiting the unit being run by Harold Gillies at Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot. As a doctor and artist, he was selected to join the team pioneering plastic surgery. His role was to make pastel drawings of facial war wounds. The unit proved inadequate and a new hospital devoted to facial repairs was developed at Sidcup.

Tonks was appointed principal of the Slade Art School in 1917. In 1918 Tonks and John Singer Sargent were both invited to become official war artists. They both witnessed men being treated for blindness after a mustard gas attack. Whereas Sargent painted Gassed, Tonks produced An Advanced Dressing Station in France. Tonks also completed another painting with a medical theme while on the Western Front, An Underground Casualty Clearing Station (1918).

Frederick Brown retired in 1918 and Tonks was offered the Slade professorship. The next generation of students included Thomas Monnington, William Coldstream, Helen Lessore and Philip Evergood. Lessore later recalled that Tonks "was a towering, dominating figure, about 6ft. 4in. tall, lean and ascetic looking, with large ears, hooded eyes, a nose dropping vertically from the bridge like an eagle's beak and quivering camel-like mouth".

After the war Tonks returned to the Slade Art School. He continued to paint and his most well-known work, Saturday Night in the Vale, was completed just before his retirement in 1930. That year Sir Harold Gillies's book Plastic Surgery of the Face was published. Tonks realistic drawings created a great deal of controversy. The drawings were later acquired by the Royal College of Surgeons.

Tonks was offered a knighthood on his retirement in 1930, which he declined. He wrote articles for The Times, and continued to paint and was only the second living British artist to be honoured by a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, in 1936.

Henry Tonks died at his home in Chelsea, on 8th January 1937.