A most unlikely Ambassador

The same generation as Sir Horace Phillips, painter Josef Herman is best remembered for his depictions of British working classes. Like Phillips, Herman found a place of refuge and a home in Glasgow.

In Dusk (pictured here), three labourers return home with their donkey after a long day at work. In the lithograph In the Mountains we see a man, probably a miner, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and riding a donkey cart. He seems burdened with a general air of exhaustion, as if he is returning from a hard day’s work.

Josef Herman was born in Warsaw in 1911, the eldest of three children in a poor Jewish family. He left Poland for Belgium in 1938, where he met and was greatly influenced by the artist Permeke. When the First World War broke out, Herman travelled to France and then Scotland, arriving in Glasgow in 1940. There, he frequented the circle of other artist émigrés, Jankel Adler and Benno Schotz. Tragically, all of his family members were killed in Nazi concentration camps in 1943 and 1944.

Michael Rothenstein’s print Diamond is an illustrative example of the type of art produced in England in the 1960s, a time Sir Horace Phillips spent as ambassador in Iran, Indonesia and Tanzania.

A diamond-like shape in red against a dark yellow background occupies the centre of this abstract composition, one of 30 edition prints published by Editions Alecto Ltd. Linocutting allowed artist Rothenstein to explore form and pattern. This technique reminded him of carving names into a wooden school desk, as well as the drawn marks made on prehistoric cave walls.

He was born in London, the son of German-Jewish celebrated painter Sir William Rothenstein and Alice Knewstub. In 1950, Rothenstein studied briefly at Atelier 17 in Paris. On his return to England and inspired by his experience in Paris, he set up his own print studio at Great Bardfield in 1954. The community of artists who settled and worked in the area included Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. These artists were particularly interested in depicting the contrasts between traditional ruralism and the increasing industrialisation of post-war Britain. Rothenstein developed into one of the foremost printmakers of his generation.

Between 1966 and 1968, Sir Horace Phillips served as the British Ambassador to Indonesia. He recounted this experience with a touch of humour in an interview he gave in 1997:

For me it was epic in that here I was at the age of forty-eight looking back to when I was eighteen with hardly a hope of anything like this; and now I seemed to be getting somewhere. Why Indonesia? Well, cynically I reflected that it was a 3,000-mile archipelago 7,000 miles away, and the Foreign Office must have thought I couldn’t do much damage there – so let’s try him!

Krakatoa is the famous Indonesian live volcanic island that sits in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra. It erupted with disastrous consequences between 26 and 27 August 1883, resulting in the deaths of over 35,000 people, and the destruction of hundreds of villages.

Resembling the pocked surface of a piece of wood or stone, the bubbles and contours depicted in this print by Yannick Ballif- Swinnen perfectly capture the volcanic nature of its subject. Boulders are smothered in encrusted lava, while the strong diagonal lines running across the composition from left to right reveal an earlier moment in time when molten lava oozed across the surface.

In 1968, Phillips was appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia; however, in a dramatic turn of events, the Saudi government withdrew the agreement and rejected the appointment upon learning of his Jewish heritage.

This is one of several works on paper that Edward Bawden made while on duty as Official War Artist in the Middle East in the 1940s. It shows the panorama of the city of Jeddah from the British Consulate building. Bawden described the city as ‘a hard, white, shape against the tawny colour of the desert, no greenness of gardens or fields softened the contrast… in the harbor [sic] were many small boats, and the minaret of a mosque drew attention by its similarity to a lighthouse’.

The artist’s striking, elevated view allows us to observe the buildings of the Saudi Arabian city, along with the silhouettes of people below. In the distance are the white sails of boats bobbing on the Red Sea. This is a view that Sir Horace Phillips would have been familiar with, as he served as first secretary in Jeddah between 1953 and 1956. In this capacity, he frequently acted as chargé d’affaires and spoke fluent Arabic.

Sir Horace Phillips’s last posting was in Turkey between 1974 and 1977, where he took an active part in teaching on international relations at the University of Ankara and perfecting his language studies. This print has been chosen as an homage and a point of reflection on Sir Philip’s rich and inspiring diplomatic career.

Margret Kroch-Frishman’s finely etched lines of this print vividly detail the petals and stems of a bunch of tulips in full bloom. With expressive strokes of deep red and dark green, the artist created a beautiful floral still life, while also conveying the transient nature of the flower. Originating in Central Asia, tulips were introduced to Europe via Istanbul in the 16th century.

Printmaker and sculptor Margret Kroch-Frishman was born to a Jewish family in Leipzig, Germany in 1897. She lived in Berlin, Copenhagen, Brussels and Melbourne before immigrating to England in 1951, where she exhibited drawings, watercolours and sculptures in London and Manchester.