This blog is written by Stewart Fergusson, historian and volunteer.
A life in the day of Coventry artist Sydney J Bunney 1877-1928
Coventry has a legacy of native topographical artists. It is not unique, nor can it boast artists of the first rank such as J.M.W. Turner, but the work of these Coventry artists has a distinct character and is an important source for local history depicting the physical character of the City and its surrounding countryside before relentless redevelopment and the ravages of the Second World War changed it completely. This artistic tradition owes much to the influence of the Coventry School of Art founded in 1843 which served as a training centre for designers associated with the weaving industry but also flourished as a centre for local artists and painters.
The city is also blessed that much of this output of topographical painting, drawing and etching has been collected in the Herbert Art Gallery. Of some 4,700 works listed in the Herbert’s handlist of its permanent collection, over 1200 are views of Coventry and its environs. Many works have been donated since 1945 by people aware of the sudden change in the physical characteristics of the city. Others have been purchased to add to this record of the old City. In the local archives there are also the 10 volumes of drawings by Nathaniel Troughton, recently digitised.
The early topographical artists included Henry Jeayes, the son of a Coventry ribbon maker, working at the end of the 18th century. He illustrated a new edition of Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire. There are also the watercolours of Edward Rudge, a Birmingham artist, who depicted Coventry and Warwickshire in the first two decades of the 19th century.
In the next two decades, David Gee and Samuel Lines produced images of Coventry, with David Gee also noted for his depiction of the annual Lammas Day ride and the Godiva procession.
In the second half of the 19th century we have the evocative and large collection of Nathaniel Troughton’s sketches, the close studies of architectural features of old Coventry buildings by David Waters and the photolithographs of G R Webster.
In the early 20th century, the Coventry School of Art produced some noted native artists, prominent amongst them Herbert Cox and Florence Weston, an amateur local historian who gave talks on various old buildings often illustrated with her glass plate photographs that are held in the local archives. But the most original artist of this period was Sydney J Bunney. So, who was Bunney and what distinguishes his work?
In late spring 1916 Britain was preparing for the great offensive of the Somme. Coventry was at the heart of this effort. There was not just the recruitment of soldiers to fight, but Coventry’s engineering firms were switching from the manufacture of civilian transport to filling military contracts for vehicles, planes, guns and munitions.
One such firm was William Hillman’s The Auto Machinery Company of Hillfields that made steel balls and ball bearings. 1916 was a busy time for the company as they sought to fill government armament contracts and recruit people, particularly women, to replace the men who had just been conscripted into the forces. Amongst their employees was Sydney J Bunney, a clerk in accounts.
Bunney was born in 1877 at Raglan Street where his father worked in the ribbon top-shops. In 1916 this devoted family man and churchman was living at 154 Albany Road in the Coventry suburb of Earlsdon. He was entering his fortieth year and does not seem to have been caught by the military conscription introduced in January 1916.
The Auto Machinery Company gave him a living but his real passion was painting and drawing. As a teenager in 1892 he had been a student at Coventry School of Art studying first under John Anderson, a noted landscape oil painter in the manner of the popular Pre-Raphaelites, and then William Henry Milnes. John Anderson secured him a studentship at South Kensington Art School, now the Royal College of Art, where Milnes had also studied.
In 1907 Milnes set up the Coventry School of Art Sketch Club and Bunney became its first secretary. He held this post until 1909, but remained a member of the Club until 1916.
Up until 1913 Bunney’s artistic output was limited, just a handful of pictures a year mainly careful drawings and paintings of streets near his boyhood home in Hillfields, Christchurch Steeple and an interior of St Mary’s Guildhall.
But from 1913 his more distinctive and original impressionist approach emerged. Milnes had encouraged his students in ‘…Turner’s manner of making notes, as it were, quick sketches of certain things under varying conditions, and thereby gaining a better knowledge of nature in all her various moods…’ and he went on that Coventry’s buildings were ideal for representing the effects of light. Inspired by Milnes, Bunney would walk the streets of Coventry sketching in paint several views of the same scene, from different angles and under different light.
He seems to have spent every spare moment from 1916 sketching and painting his City. When interviewed by the Coventry Evening Telegraph in March 2000 his 94 year old son Wilfred, noted that ‘Father carried a pad of water-colour paper with him wherever he went’ and ‘whenever he saw something worth recording he would sketch the scene and finish colouring it at home’ He averaged 42 compositions a year during the war years and in the 1920s 45 a year with 1922 being his most prolific period in which he painted 124 scenes from Coventry
He dated every one of his sketches and despite the demands of war work, in the second half of May 1916 Bunney was out regularly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays sketching different views of Gosford Street. On Thursday 18th May, a warm spring day, he did a study of a row of shops that serves as an interesting social as well as topographical record of this old Coventry thoroughfare. Using Spennell’s Annual Directory of Coventry and District for 1912/3 we can determine the owners of this row of buildings. There was Sydney Fancott the butcher next to Mrs Booth, provisions dealer. Henry Ames was a wardrobe dealer ‘…for Good Left Off Clothing…’ then Henry Suter a confectioner and William Guest a motor fitter. In June he was at Butcher Row, soon to be demolished to make way for Trinity Street; and in November of that year Cook Street and Swanswell Gates were his preoccupation. Bunney was an active churchman in his local community and was deeply concerned about the social issues of the day. He kept a hard backed exercise book with his thoughts on, amongst other things, poor housing in the city and the politics of the General Strike.
He was painting Coventry right up to his death in 1928. His corpus of work of over 500 paintings and drawings held by the Herbert Art Gallery covers Coventry’s landmark historical buildings, detailed architectural features of doorways, gates etc, street scenes, inns and taverns, early industrial buildings and open spaces in and around Coventry. They have become an important source for architects and historians as accurate records of Coventry in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
