April 2025's Item of the Month is The Potteries, 1938 by Julian Trevelyan. This oil on canvas is on display in the ‘Ordinary Life’ section of A Very British Art Revolution, Julian Trevelyan has captured a snapshot of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, in the 1930s. Stoke was where most commercial pottery in Britain was made. He shows a town blackened by smoke from factory chimneys.
In the late 1930s, Trevelyan took part in a social experiment called ‘Mass-Observation’. It was started in Bolton, Lancashire in 1936 by Tom Harrisson with a group of students, artists, poets, filmmakers and ordinary people. They recorded everyday life in Britain, to make a ‘science of ourselves’ as they termed it. Trevelyan created artworks on the streets of Bolton and Stoke in full view of the people around him. These often dark and expressive works capture the Northern towns when Britain was in the grip of an economic depression.
Mass-Observation had a team of volunteers who recorded their own lives in diaries for one of the leaders of the group, Charles Madge. In Bolton, Tom Harrisson’s team observed people, often without their consent, at work, in the pub and on the street. They were also interviewed about all aspects of what the organisers described as ‘the routines and rituals, the paraphernalia and symbols of everyday life’.
Trevelyan was fascinated by Stoke, ‘the smoking kilns, like so many monstrous bottles, the canals, the gaping chasms from which the clay had been extracted’. He later said, how much the few weeks he spent there influenced his painting, ‘I think that it was in the Potteries that my Jekylls and Hydes finally clicked together, and I found that I was painting, almost for the first time, with the whole of myself. Those paintings of the Potteries … were painted at white heat’. People were fascinated by him, too. They would gather to watch him paint and make collages, although Trevelyan said, ‘it was awkward sometimes in a wind when my little pieces would fly about and I was shy of being watched’.
He had little art training himself, and was interested in the work of amateur artists like the Ashington Group, a painters collective of miners living in a town north of Newcastle, who gathered to paint every Monday evening. They’re often known as the Pitman Painters. Inspired by their work and that of other artists who hadn’t followed a traditional route to painting, Trevelyan and his friends put on an exhibition in Gateshead called Unprofessional Painting. It included work by St. Ives artist, Alfred Wallis, whose work you can see in Seriously... The artworks were for sale, with paintings by the Ashington Group priced at £2, the same as the average weekly wage for a miner. Trevelyan believed strongly that anyone could be an artist.
What did the Ashington Group think of the observers? William Feaver, the leader of the group, records that Harrisson and Trevelyan, both from relatively privileged backgrounds, made a lot of assumptions about the miners. For example, Harrisson brought beer as a gift not realising that many of the group were non-drinkers. Harrisson also forgot to pay for his bed and board while he stayed with a group member, not realising how much it cost the group to look after them on their low wages. Trevelyan later paid!
The Mass-Observation group was used during the Second World War to shape how the government interacted with people to get across what was needed in the war effort. Mass-Observation advised on propaganda posters, assisted with the Wartime Social Survey and worked on projects for the Ministry of Information. Trevelyan joined the Royal Engineers as a Camouflage Officer, working on desert camouflage in North Africa.
The Potteries, 1938
Julian Trevelyan (1910–88)
Oil on canvas
© Estate of Julian Trevelyan, purchased with the support of the Phelps Bequest
