A painting at the gallery has it's first showing!

Friday Focus review by Membership Secretary, Flag.

 

 No. 1 Kenilworth Road, Leamington Spa. Painted by Joseph Parsons (1932)

   

At the Friday Focus on 30th January 2025, we were able to see a painting from the collection that's not been seen in public before.

The talk given by the Leamington Literary Society was extremely interesting and featured lots of books and their writers who had lived in or passed through Leamington.

The image in one of the books turned out to be a painting that the gallery had in store, and we were all delighted to be able to see it. The building hidden in the distance behind the trees is the Town Hall. The connection was the poem by John Betjeman called Death in Leamington. The painting has been used to illustrate the poem. It was among his earliest published works in the early 1930s, long before his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1972.

 

Here's a link to the poem which we can't quote because it's still in copyright. 

 

The poem tells the story of a busy nurse who discovers that her employer, living in an impressive house in Leamington Spa, has passed away. A passionate advocate for historic buildings, Betjeman uses the setting to explore mortality alongside architectural decline. He draws attention to details such as “large round plate-glass windows,” “flaking stucco,” and “yellow Italianate arches,” linking these features to the “grey, decaying face” of the dead woman.

 

Through precise observation and rich imagery, from the placement of furniture to the sound of falling plaster, Betjeman creates a vivid and haunting atmosphere. I especially liked the line about the lonely crochet, lying patiently unstirred, and the fingers that would have work'd it being dead as the spoken word.
 
Many of his poems were rooted in real locations rather than abstract ideas, which helps explain his fascination with Leamington Spa. Its elegant Regency terraces and crescents would have appealed to someone so deeply committed to preservation. Betjeman was actively involved in organisations such as the SPAB, the Victorian Society, and the Georgian Group.

Today, his legacy is perhaps most visibly celebrated by the statue welcoming travellers at St Pancras Station in London — a grand neo-Gothic landmark that he famously helped to save from demolition in the 1960s.

Oh, and he went to enormous lengths to save the pier at Clevedon which is always worth a visit if you're heading south west!  

 

Sadly, not a lot is known about the artist or his works, and further research so far has been unsuccessful.