Rowland Wright ALSTON [3912]

  General Notes:

Rowland was a pupil at Felsted School Essex.
Alston Rowland Wright, Elwyns Hse, May 1909 to Jul 1914. C/o the Galleries Compton Guildford, student at the Slade School of Art. 1914-1918 Capt. Lincoln Regiment, (wounded & POW) curator, artist, drawing master, journalist, lecturer & picture dealer.
Ref: Alumni Felstedienses NZSOG ENG.ESS.SAR

Rowland went straight into the War as a young man where, in the Somme he was wounded and taken prisoner. After the War he went to art school, specialising in watercolours. For 30 years until his early death he was Curator of the Watts Gallery at Compton.

Watts Galleries The Hostel , Guildford R.D., Surrey, England
Rowland W Alston 10 Jan 1897 single Artist Curator Of Watts Galleries Painter.

Alston, Roland Wright (1895-1958) Artist and Art Lecturer
GB/NNAF/P147748 (Former ISAAR ref: GB/NNAF/P493)
1940-45: letters (45) to DS MacColl, Repository Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department
1935-41: letters to TS Moore, Repository University of London: Senate House Library
Record Reference MS 978
NRA catalogue referenceNRA 17929 Moore

DEATHS
ALSTON - On December 21st, 1958. at the Royal Surrey County Hospital, Guildford. Rowland Wright Alston, Curator of the Watts Gallery, Compton. Cremation Private. Memorial service to be announced later.

The Times
Obituary
22 Dec 1958 pg 11 col G
MR R.W. ALSTON
THE WATTS GALLERY
Mr Rowland Wright Alston, who for over 30 years was curator of the G. F. Watts Gallery at Compton, died yesterday in a Guildford hospital. He was born in 1896, a younger son of the rector of Scrivelsby in Lincolnshire. On his father's side he was, related to the Alstons of Odell on his mother's he numbered among forebears Sir John Franklin. the Arctic explorer, to whose terracotta bust, especially when surmounted with a deer-stalker hat, he himself bore a marked resemblance.
He was a countryman to the depths of his heart. He was always slow of movement and sometimes absent-minded, and at his public school he learnt little; from childhood he practised drawing and must as a boy have been one of the very few who have succeeded at any age in taming and flying that intractable bird the sparrow hawk.
Throughout his life he shot and fished wherever he had the opportunity.
Rowland Alston went straight from school into a battalion of his county regiment. On the Somme he was severely wounded and taken prisoner. It was in captivity in Germany that he began to educate himself by wide and serious reading a practice which he maintained throughout his life. From the first he exercised his own independent judgment of he read and, though he never mastered such intricacies of formal education as spelling and arithmetic, he developed a critical, sane, and balanced form of high intelligence.
On leaving the Army. Alston trained first at the Slade School and then at the Royal College of Art. He became also a pupil of A.W. Rich, a leader of the New English Art Club and a lineal descendant in the school of English Water Colour. From him Alston derived his admiration for that school and owed to Peter de Wint and David Cox, and to Rich himself, much of his own admirable feeling and method in the watercolour medium.
While still in his twenties he was invited Mrs. G. F. Watts to become the curator of the Watts memorial gallery at Compton. In spite of the great disparity in age Mrs. Watts became devoted to him and relied with confidence on his help not only in the conduct of the gallery but also in the affairs of her small country estate at Limnerslease.
As curator Alston was conscientious and whole-hearted in his care for the fabric of the gallery and of its contents, and, not least for the amenities of its delightful rural setting. From a somewhat ramshackle affair he developed it by degrees into a model little gallery, arranged with taste and admirably lighted on principles of which he made a special study in Holland.
Through his life Alston practised painting both in oils and water colours, and latterly became deeply interested in the problems of restoration. He was at his best in water colour, in which he worked with freedom, breadth, and a fluid texture derived rather from pre-Victorian masters than from the later artists of the nineteenth century. In oil-painting he was perhaps on the whole less successful. He was deeply interested in the technique of all painting which he regarded as classical, and amongst English masters he had made a close study of the methods and art of Richard Wilson. In that sense he was a confirmed academic, though he had as little liking for insular Victorian and later academism as for naive or sophisticated experiments in the name of progress and some supposed zeitgeist.
As a result, however, of his consuming interest in method and of his isolation in the country from other practising artists, who might have helped him, his painting sometimes tended to be clumsy and laboured. He tended also to paint largely in his studio without the help of closely observed out of door sketches of skies and weather. He was at his best in his small paintings of birds, where he had models before him and used a fine and somewhat Flemish handling of his paint. His two published books, Figure Drawing and Painters' Idiom, are excellent guides for students and artists who are modest enough to wish to learn to walk.
As a man and an entirely individual character Rowland Alston endeared himself to a wide and various circle. He was very sociable provided the society was not conventionally inhibited, and he gave great warmth of affection to his many friends, who could rely upon him as always just and loyal. He had much sense of fun, humour and wit, but at heart he was a serious person and took life seriously. Living alone and reading widely, he was always interested in men and affairs, and debated with himself the incessant and unavoidable problems of social and private morals and conduct. Intellectually and at heart he was an aristocrat. He was gentle and kind and got on well with all sorts and conditions, but he was not an egalitarian, and, although not himself erudite or a trained scholar, he had no sympathy for popular silliness and the cult of the lowest common denominator.
He had no private means, but constantly spent money on books and surrounded himself with pleasant, if not costly. objects of merit. With means of his own Rowland would have made an admirable squire, country-loving, cultivated, gentle, and humane. He was a rarity. He may leave no fame or name behind. His own art may be overlooked and forgotten. But so long as those who knew him survive he will be remembered as a good friend an a good man.
Note by A A Fenn - Obituary written by an old friend who had been a prisoner in Germany with him during the 1914 War.
Ref Alstoniana Pg. 402C

The Times 8 January 1959 pg 14 col D full stop
MR R W ALSTON.
Mr Ralph Edwards writes:
As your sympathetic notice of him suggests, Rowland Alston was at times preoccupied with the human predicament and the unintelligible course of the world. He had in him a strain of resigned fatalism recalling some of Thomas Hardy's countrymen, but his friends will not remember him as a melancholy man; his strong sense of humour was a sovereign antidote. Though living alone for many years in the little house attached to his gallery, time never hung heavy upon his hands, for in his leisurely fashion he devoted himself wholeheartedly to what ever occupation he might have on hand. If his painting, as you observe, "was sometimes clumsy and laboured" those occasions for the most part were when he was trying out a new method based on his persistent researchers into technique, and the experiment had not worked out right. That this was so can be seen from the extreme disparity in quality between his pictures with similar themes. The best of Alston's bird studies are very good indeed, searchingly observant and admirably decorative. He was really to part with the one for a song, and, lacking a market, latterly he devoted himself largely to restoration; and here's Painters Idiom, which reveals his sure I grasp of method and diligent research, is a sufficient indication of his qualifications.
No one who entrusted him with a picture if I had cause to complain that it had not been competently dealt with or had diminished in value. The very import a series of panels with Italianate ornaments at Loseley, which date c1540 and credibly stated to have come from Nonsuch Palace, Ford an excellent example of Alston's patient and conservative methods of restoration. Painted on parchment laid down, many of them were in a sorely damaged state; they had been clumsily retouched, while the brilliant, fantastic, original decoration was obscured by coats of dirty vanish. Loseley Park is open to visitors and these exceedingly rare and fascinating panels will henceforth constitute a memorial to their restorers skill.

Compton's Curators
MR. WILFRID BLUNT, who retired from being drawing master at Eton to become curator of Watts collection of pictures at Compton, near Guildford, is today having a private view of a memorial exhibition he has arranged.
It is of the paintings, drawings and painted china of the late Rowland Alston, Mr. Blunt's predecessor at Compton for the past 30 years.
The Watts Gallery is not the only link between these two creative curators. Each in his day also taught drawing at Haileybury.
Ref Alstoniana Pg. 402C

Alston Rowland Wright of the Watts Gallery Compton Surrey died 21 December 1958 at the Royal Surrey County Hospital Guildford. Probate London 29 May 1959 to Victor Rupert de Ambrosis Woollcombe solicitor and Ruth Mary Alston spinster Effects £8095 12s 9d.
National Probate Calendar