GEOFFREY HAMILTON RHOADES was born in 1898 in Balham, London, to a middle class family. His father, Walter, was a senior civil servant and author, mainly of boys’ adventure stories. Geoffrey attended Dulwich College where his education involved the Latin language and Roman and Greek culture which included drawing from classical casts. After Dulwich he spent two years at Clapham Art School under the direction of L C Nightingale before serving in the Mercantile Marine from 1917 to 1919.
On completing his war service he took a portfolio of drawings to show Professor Tonks at the then most prestigious Slade School, University of London, who accepted him onto the course immediately. Later, at the conclusion of his time at the School, Tonks remarked “You have something which I have not – imagination.” During the Slade years between 1919 and 1924 he socialized with both fellow students and a number of established artists at Barnett Freedman’s studio off the Tottenham Court Road, among whom were Albert Houthueson, Percy Horton, Charles Mahoney and
James Laver who was just beginning his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A fellow student of Geoffrey’s at the Slade was John Mansbridge through whom he met Christopher Turnor
and his wife Sarah who were in the process of opening their large country house, Stoke Rochford in Lincolshire, for summer schools. Geoffrey was invited to go there and make paintings for an indefinite length of time. He stayed for two years painting family portraits, some murals, landscapes and making many drawings. The Turnors were very kind to him and he became very much part of the household.
Geoffrey moved back to London in 1928 and was invited to undertake some teaching at the Working Man’s College in Crowndale Road. He was initially not confident about his suitability for teaching but became much admired and loved as a teacher of studio studies. In 1929 Geoffrey followed Percy Horton as the art master at Bishop’s Stortford College, remaining in this post for fifteen years. A distinguished colleague and friend on the College staff was Walter Strachan.
In 1934 Geoffrey married Joan Jenner whom he is reputed to have met at a Royal College Ball, and they remained together until his death in 1980. Their son, Peter, was
born in 1938 while they were still resident in London. Geoffrey’s reputation must have been high because in 1935 the Tate (Britain) bought his “Winter Afternoon, Chalk Farm” landscape, but, after Peter’s birth and the onset of the Second World War blitz, they moved house
to Stebbing in Essex. It was as well they did so because their London street, Greville Road, in Kilburn, was subsequently bombed. The move brought them close to Great Bardfield where the very prestigious artists’ group including Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Michael Rothenstein and a number of other distinguished artists had collected away from London. Geoffrey and Joan
were intimate members of this creative community and remained so during the course of the war.
After a short period residing near Chesham in, Buckinghamshire, and close to Stephen Gooden, the engraver, and his wife Mona, the Rhoades family made
a final move to Cuddington on the Buckinghamshire
and Oxfordshire border. This change of location was stimulated by the necessity of being closer to Oxford. Percy Horton had been appointed Ruskin Master of Drawing at the Ruskin School, University of Oxford, and had invited Joan to be his secretary there. He subsequently engaged Geoffrey as a tutor at the School and this began a very long relationship with the Ruskin and Oxford for both of them, Joan continued to be secretary with Percy Horton followed by Richard Naish, and, just before her retirement in 1974, Philip Morsberger. Both Joan and Geoffrey were much admired and loved at the Ruskin which was then housed in the Ashmolean Museum.
The final phase of Geoffrey’s life was lived happily at Seven Stars, Cuddington with Joan and his son Peter who is also an artist. This concluding period, however, was marred by the tragic death of his sister, Esmee, in a traffic accident near the family home in Balham, which affected him very deeply. He steadily produced landscape and mythological figure compositions in oils and in a variety of graphic media. Joan developed quite a large garden with both horticultural expertise and aesthetic judgement, a lovely foil to the art work of her husband and son. Geoffrey continued to teach at the Ruskin School until
his retirement in 1972 and also conducted therapeutic
art classes at St John’s Hospital, Stone, through the 1960s. He died, after suffering from cancer, in 1980.
Joan lived until she was ninety seven years old at Seven Stars having helped to raise two generations of Peter’s children, her grandchildren, in the house; Lucy and Marion by Peter’s first marriage to Rosemary Bell; and Alice and Oliver by the second marriage to Jane Harrison. Marion and Oliver are both professional graphic designers. Peter, Jane and Oliver still live (in 2018) at Seven Stars.
HANS FEIBUUSCH wrote of Geoffrey’s paintings: Geoffrey Rhoades’ art grew steadily and organically from the more or less direct rendering of a particular landscape to the deeper moods which lie behind her forms and colours. His palette changed gradually from light and cool tones to darker, richer ones, and the outlines of his subject from the precise and clearly defined to the broad and more general. The curious atmosphere, sometimes brooding, even slightly frightening, sometimes cheerful, that envelops his landscapes and figures, forest deities or village girls in them, is created by a rich texture of paint applied in small touches. He loved to go over his pictures again and again, sometimes over long spells of time, enriching and deepening them and thus creating a sensuous quality of texture. Lights and shadows flicker over the surface, bringing out part of a figure here
or a branch there. Other forms gleam uncertainly out
of semi-darkness. Often it seems as if a mysterious rite
were being enacted. The pictures glow; they grow in significance the longer one looks at them.
The Studio in the Garden by PETER GREENHAM
A year before he died, Geoffrey Rhoades gave me the pleasure of taking me to the studio in his garden and showing me a collection of his drawings, a wonderful life’s work. He had put them into four bundles – flower and plant drawings, life studies, imaginative compositions and landscapes in watercolour.
Geoffrey was one of those artists, like F. E. Jackson, Percy Horton and Charles Mahoney, who made an exchange of fame for the pleasure of teaching. Horton and Mahoney were his friends and he too had an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, which, like Mahoney’s, was a revelation in its variety, vivacity and its integrity. Some painters, Jackson used to say, live on rich food and wine, others on brown bread
and honey. Brown bread and honey, with all the associations of health and sweetness, may well have been what sustained Rhoades’ art.
The paintings, full of the figures of myth and legend display the colour of hyacinth, roses and the flowers that bees visit. They have none or little of the melancholy which often afflicts the painter of pastoral and heroic scenes. They could be used to illuminate the phrase “When the world was young”: for they
are supported by a precision and energy which come from his drawing; not only from the preliminary designs for the paintings, in wash and line, but still more from the drawings done from life, irreproachable in form, yet sensitive and humane. The same response to life makes his studies of plants something to enrich our own lives and make our responses more keen.
A tribute to my Father by PETER RHOADES
He seldom seemed to hurry or put pressure on himself, but he achieved a large body of very consistent work and a unique serenity. My mother shielded him from many of the practicalities of life, surrounding him with the cocoons of her beautiful gardens which were, like his paintings, dense and mysterious.
Handling his paintings has always been a Proustian experience for me. I was one of the few people whom he welcomed into his studio and therefore into his imaginative world. Cleaning and polishing the encrusted, repainted and ambiguous surfaces, sometimes worked on through many years, is to re-enter his sense of personal and allegorical time and my own genesis and past. I periodically used to become frustrated with the nostalgia of his symbolic language, with his dependence on the aesthetics of impressionism. We seldom discussed my reservations which were my problem and not his. He worked on quietly and steadily in the space and time gently created by himself and my mother, true to the strengths and limitations of his talent and inheritance. He was very tolerant and appreciative of ideas and aesthetics far removed from his own, censoring only what he felt to be thin or dishonest. He was particularly loved as a teacher.
The work represents to me both a celebration and a mourning for the life of a gentle and very talented artist well and purposefully spent. The paintings seem quiet and undemonstrative, but below their atmospheric surfaces is firm architectural construction derived from his deep knowledge of classical and Renaissance design. The surrealist iconography of the figure compositions was his response to the present. The work and his life leave me with much to wonder at and to learn from.