In November 1916, following the birth of his sister, Clifford rejoined his mother and family in Highbury to sit the Junior County Scholarship which enabled him to attend the Dame Alice Owens Boys’ School in Finsbury. He was by now what his later colleague and fellow teacher Colin Thompson described as ‘a voracious reader’, a habit he kept up all his life. He became a frequent visitor to London Zoo which he used as a kind of living reference library to study the way the animals moved and behaved. Throughout his life he enjoyed visiting zoos, exhibitions, galleries and museums, both at home and abroad, filing away perceptions and images in his mind. ‘Clifford was deeply interested in visual communication,’ recalled Charlotte. ‘His visual memory was extensive and nearly always deadly accurate.’ The jacket of British Seals, for example, was based on his memories of the postures of seals at London Zoo.
Clifford and Rosemary Ellis (1937), in their studio with the cartoon for the mosaic floor for the British Pavilion, Paris Exhibition of 1937. Photo: Kate Collinson/Norman Parkinson Studio (Kate Collinson was Rosemary Ellis’s sister).
After leaving school, Clifford attended two full-time courses in London art schools, first St Martin’s College of Art, then the Regent Street Polytechnic, before taking University of London postgraduate diploma courses in art history and art education – where he was particularly inspired by the innovative ideas of Marion Richardson. All this time his perceptions of art were expanding. From his family he had thoroughly absorbed the William Morris-derived notion of ‘art for all’ – the infusion of artistic principles in the arts and crafts, as expressed in commercial art such as posters and advertisements. As far as he was concerned, natural history, art, educational theory and graphic design were interlinked aspects of a whole. Visits to exhibitions by progressive artists like Paul Cézanne, or the opportunity of seeing Paul Klee paintings brought to lectures by Roger Fry, opened his eyes to their freshness of colour and the visual impact of forms reduced to their essentials.
Leaves from Rosemary Ellis’s scrapbook of c. 1944–5, made up of fragments of designs, collage and printed, in watercolour, pen and printing ink, double spread (23 x 37 cm).
Having been a student teacher at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in 1928 Clifford became a full-time member of staff there. He was placed in charge of the first-year students and taught perspective – a technique and skill he mastered with ease and whose historical development always fascinated him. One of his young students there was his future wife, Rosemary Collinson. Born in Totteridge, North London in 1910, Rosemary, like Clifford, came from a family of craftsmen and artists. Her grandfather was F.W. Collinson, a leading designer of art furniture and co-founder of the fashionably aesthetic firm of Collinson & Lock. Her father, Frank Graham Collinson, trained as an artist and cabinet maker before going into the family firm and subsequently founding his own furniture business, Frank Collinson & Co, Designs for Decorations & Furniture.
Rosemary was also related to a famous writer, her maternal uncle, Edward Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) – ‘Uncle Jack’ as Rosemary knew him – the leader writer and author of innovative modern detective novels, notably Trent’s Last Case, who, while still at school, had invented the ‘clerihew’, the humorous rhyming form of verse named after him. His subsequent published volumes of clerihews had great popular success and many eminent emulators.
Rosemary’s father had joined the Volunteers where he rose to become colonel, a rank he retained on their later absorption into the Territorial Army. He served in the Great War at that rank, initially in training but soon enough on service, first in France and then in Italy. There, having survived the war, he succumbed to the terrible worldwide flu epidemic in 1919. Rosemary, with her sisters and brothers, had been taken by their mother to live with her parents in their large house at Netley Marsh in the New Forest. Rosemary therefore had a similar, if lengthier, formative experience to Clifford’s, of a wartime country childhood. She, too, developed a deep fascination for nature and animals in and around the Forest, and always retained particularly fond and vivid memories of her grandfather’s pigs and rare-breed herd of Gloucester park cattle. After the war Rosemary and her younger sister moved with their widowed mother to London; their elder siblings had, by then, flown the nest.
PICTURES FROM THE THIRTIES
Clifford and Rosemary married in 1931. Rosemary brought to the artistic partnership an instinctive eye for colour, tone and composition; she had a quick mind and the ability to master a new medium at speed. They shared the same open, enquiring spirit, branching out at various times into sculpture, mosaic (including an important commission for the design and laying of the mosaic floor for the British pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1937), ceramics and modelling, needlework and mural painting. But their distinctive sense of colour and design is nowhere better seen than in the posters they designed in the 1930s. Posters in the 1920s and ‘30s were often designed with great care and dash, even those that were advertising a product. They became an art form pursued by progressive artists on both sides of the Atlantic in which an image was used to convey a powerful message. Successful poster art needed to say something clearly, simply and, above all, memorably. Distilling a sometimes complex idea into a single image exercised the brain quite as much as a large canvas or sculpture. In their day many leading artists designed posters in the prevailing spirit of ‘art for all’, as a means of bringing art centre-stage into the lives of ordinary people. Among the rising generation of British artists designing posters and book jackets at this time were Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Barnett Freedman, Paul Nash and the American graphic designer, Edward McKnight Kauffer – more or less a Who’s Who of contemporary British art. The 1930s were, arguably, the high noon of poster art in Britain. Every image, said the artist John Berger, ‘embodies a way of seeing’ (Bernstein, 1992). The artist’s job was to see something as if for the first time, and to communicate that insight.
Clifford and Rosemary designed many posters during the 1930s, for the Empire Marketing Board, for Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, for the great Frank Pick, inspirational Chief Executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, and for the Post Office, as well as lithographs for Lyon’s Corner House (‘the Teashop Lithographs’), all of them institutions that found reasons for persuading top artists to produce work for what one called ‘the art gallery of the street’. Paul Rennie described the Ellis’s poster style as ‘painterly’, effectively building up their designs as a succession of separate colour printings. ‘These combined the expressive style of the early design reformers with a Fauvist-inspired colour palette’ (Rennie, 2008).
BP Poster by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, 1932, printed lithographically by Vincent Brooks, Day & Sons Ltd (75.6 x 114 cm).
Some of their posters were intended for specific events, such as test matches, while others were part of a public service for educational and cultural establishments such as museums, galleries and gardens. One of their first major commissions, from 1932, advertised Whipsnade Zoo above a banner suggesting that BP Petrol was the ideal medium for your car journey to the zoo. Designed to catch the eye of a passer-by (the