Jane Greenham
Added 11 months ago
In a conversation about the merits of different kinds of oil painting grounds that the painter Edward Bawden was having with her husband Peter Greenham, Jane once told me she had ventured to offer her own opinion. ‘Dear lady’, said Bawden, ‘we are only interested in what your husband has to say on this subject’. This to a woman who was not only a distinguished painter in her own right, but one whose critical eye and scholarly knowledge of painting technique made her one of the outstanding teachers of her generation.
Jane’s own many layered paintings, whether in water colour, oil or tempera, though animated by an intense spiritual imagination were always underpinned by beautiful drawing, and it was this commitment to drawing that made her such an inspirational teacher. ‘A day without drawing is a day wasted’ was a favourite saying. She taught at the Byam Shaw, at Maidstone College (alongside David Hockney), at the Royal Academy and at the Ruskin School of Drawing. She and Peter were instrumental in setting up what has now become the Royal Drawing School, and even when ill health made it impossible for her to travel, pupils continued to come to her for help and advice.
Jane, the daughter of an English agnostic dermatologist and an Irish Catholic mother, was sent to convent schools where she did not find the nuns immediately sympathetic. In the last conversation I had with her a few days before she died, she told me that the Reverend Mother exercised a strict control on what the girls might read. Naively though she had allowed them access to a library donated by Lord Acton where Jane was riveted by a volume on ‘famous trials for sodomy’ – this followed by her delightful girlish giggle. Despite the nuns, Jane developed an interest in prayer, which would in time lead to her entering the religious life.
Having shown an aptitude for painting she had been intended to go to the Slade, but when she did unexpectedly well in exams, her father decided she should try for Oxford. She won a place at St Anne’s and went up in 1943, though continuing to study part time at the Slade.
Oxford in wartime offered students a chance of making some money by fire watching in the Bodleian (they slept on camp-beds in Schola Metaphysicae). Most of the male undergraduates were studying the sciences and the only available boyfriend had read nothing (‘so boring, he hadn’t even heard of War and Peace’). The compensation was that women undergraduates could take their pick of tutors and Jane successfully applied to be tutored by C.S Lewis who said in his report that whatever her degree she undoubtedly had a first class mind (I told her she ought to have kept this tribute framed on the wall).
Peter had attended the first meetings in the Eagle and Child of the group known as ‘the Inklings’ and claimed to have invented the name, but attending lectures by its members was a varied experience. Charles William’s cockney accent was a novelty in Oxford. Lewis’s lectures, which filled Magdalen hall, were spellbinding though on one occasion, having noticed that Jane (who had become fascinated by manuscript illustration) was decorating her lecture notes, he interrupted his flow to say that if his lectures became too boring students were welcome to bring in coloured pencils to wile away the time. Tolkien was a notorious mumbler, but on one snowy day when only six students turned up he read them a fairy story which he allowed them to take away and copy.
After Oxford to the dismay of her father, Jane joined a Dominican contemplative order where she remained for some seven years until a nervous breakdown made it clear that the life was not for her. Her time in the order was always something she valued but would rarely talk about. She was later distressed by a newspaper headline ‘Peter Greenham to marry ex-nun’ and resolutely refused to let galleries use her time as a religious for publicity purposes (she rather disapproved of my friend Sister Wendy Beckett, whose experience had not been unlike her own, and we tactfully avoided the subject). When she left the Dominicans Jane studied at the Byam Shaw and the Central School of Art and Design, and in 1964 married Peter, who had just been elected as Keeper of the Royal Academy Drawing Schools.
The Keeper’s House within Burlington House, where they began their married life, had some drawbacks. In 1926 a previous Keeper, Charles Sims, had tried to drown himself in the bath, since when the plumbing had been disconnected and never reinstated. Shortly after moving there they bought a cottage at Charlton-on–Otmoor which made it easier for Jane to continue her teaching at the Ruskin.
Over the following decades a series of joint exhibitions at the New Grafton Gallery, culminating in a touring exhibition put on by the Arts Council, evidenced an unusually balanced artistic marriage in which each brought something to the work of the other. Though both remarkable painters and teachers their styles of both painting and teaching were very different. Peter would do a wonderful drawing for you and mutter ‘like that’ but Jane was much more articulate, and while Peter had more success as an artist, Jane was perhaps in the end the finer teacher. Teaching alongside her at the Ruskin was an education. Though always gentle and encouraging with students she could be alarming to any who did not take their work as seriously as she did. It was though exactly this intensity of gaze that was valued by those who sought out her advice.
Though she had taught me at the Academy it was only after Peter’s death in 1992, that I really got to know Jane as a person and an artist. It was a joy for I and others to be able to include Jane in our exhibitions, it was a privilege to teach alongside her, and the long rambling telephone conversations with which we would both interrupt the work in our studios are something I will miss more than I can say.
In the 1950’s she and a group of fellow students at the Byam Shaw had been given a tour of Cookham by Stanley Spencer which left a lasting impression. Yet whereas Spencer’s finest work is monumental, Jane’s most powerful spiritual images often take the form of small watercolours. Her approach was the reverse of conceptual, ‘I wouldn’t know what an idea was if I met it coming down the street’, she once wrote. ‘What I have is experiences, and I talk about these in the wordless language of drawing’.