The English Paper is a personal blog by Ian Thompson — architect, visual thinker, and someone who has spent a very long time looking at things. It is a record of work that catches my eye: paintings, drawings, photographs of buildings, and occasionally a garden or a room that seems to have been put together with particular intelligence.
My particular obsession is what might loosely be called English Impressionism and the Bloomsbury circle — the generation of painters who absorbed the lessons of Paris and brought them home to English light and English subjects. The Camden Town Group, the Slade School, the Post-Impressionists of the Omega Workshops: these artists were working in the early decades of the twentieth century in an atmosphere of extraordinary creative intensity, and many of them remain surprisingly underknown.
The Instagram
This site grew out of my Instagram feed, @the.english.paper , where I've been sharing work that catches my attention — sometimes a painting seen at a gallery, sometimes something from a sale catalogue, sometimes just an image that arrived in my morning browsing and wouldn't let go. Over several years it has grown into an archive of more than six hundred posts, all of which you can now find here.
Instagram's format suits this kind of looking rather well — a single image, a note about what it is and why it matters, a few hashtags to help the curious find their way in. What you lose is any sense of accumulation, of one thing leading to another. That is what this site is for.
The Artists
A handful of names appear again and again in these pages. They are the artists I return to most readily, whose work I never tire of, and whose lives have become almost as interesting to me as the paintings themselves.
Duncan Grant
Perhaps the most instinctively gifted colourist of his generation. Grant's work ranges from grand decorative schemes — he decorated the interior of the liner Queen Mary — to tiny, intimate still lifes painted in the kitchen at Charleston. It never loses its quality of delight, or its absolute ease with colour. He painted until his nineties and remained curious until the end.
Vanessa Bell
Bell's interiors and portraits have a stillness and intelligence that I find endlessly satisfying. She saw clearly and painted it that way: unfussy, assured, deeply felt. Her portraits of Virginia Woolf are among the most sympathetic likenesses in English painting.
Augustus John
All swagger and virtuosity. His portraits crackle with life — Lawrence of Arabia, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas — and his landscapes, less well known, are extraordinary. He was the great natural talent of his generation, which perhaps explains why he was also so spectacularly unreliable.
Roger Fry
The critic who introduced Post-Impressionism to Britain, founded the Omega Workshops, and wrote about painting with more intelligence than almost anyone before or since. He was also a fine painter in his own right. His still lifes and French landscapes have a quiet authority that his critical reputation has tended to overshadow.
Gwen John
The other John. Where Augustus is extrovert, Gwen is interior. Her small paintings of women alone in rooms — reading, sewing, simply sitting — are among the most quietly extraordinary things in British art. She lived most of her adult life in Paris and is still not as well known as she deserves.
Christopher Wood
Cornish harbours, Breton fishing villages, a career cut tragically short at twenty-nine. Wood had a freshness and directness that never ages. There is something in his work — a quality of absolute attention to whatever is in front of him — that I find consistently moving.
Architecture
Architecture has always run alongside painting as my other great obsession. I trained as an architect and still see the world that way — attentive to proportion, to the relationship between buildings and landscape, to the way a staircase rises or a window frames a view.
British architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries particularly interests me: the Arts and Crafts movement, the grand country houses of Lutyens, the quiet domestic intelligence of Voysey, and the modernist experiments of the 1930s — Connell Ward and Lucas, Maxwell Fry, the Tecton group. Buildings that were trying to think something through.
Follow Along
The best place to keep up with new finds is Instagram: @the.english.paper . Posts appear regularly — sometimes fresh discoveries, sometimes another look at something I've been thinking about for a while. All of it ends up here eventually.
Thank you for looking.