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Picture: Painting of Gaurisankar from the North West © Royal Geographical Society
| Howard Somervell was a compulsive sketcher and painter capable of completing a simple sketch or watercolour in twenty minutes. A studio photograph exists of Howard aged six with a paint tray in his hand and as a boy he began painting local scenes in Kendal, with encouragement from his father, W H Somervell, who was himself a competent watercolourist and a collector of modern art. Over 200 of his titles are of the Himalaya or Tibet and of the rest, there are 54 paintings of India, 86 of the Alps and other ranges, 86 of the Lake District and 23 of Scotland and Wales. It has been suggested that Somervell created his own artistic oeuvre and he wrote in his autobiography that the aspiring mountain artist must first draw his mountain, simplifying detail, ‘cubifying’ it as he put it. He was influenced by William Rothenstein (1872-1945) and Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). The Cubist influence in these artists is clear, but other influences included his father, the Heaton-Coopers and Edward Norton. Somervell wrote of the colour and atmosphere in Tibet in The Assault on Everest 1922 and his pictures capture the distances, space and remoteness of Tibet and the Himalaya. He wrote in his autobiography After Everest, ‘people at home will say my sketches are hard, lacking poetry or mystery but that is just where they are true records of this extraordinary clarity.’ He wrote a note to his 1936 exhibition that picture must ‘communicate something the artist wishes to say’ as well as being ‘in some measure descriptive of its subject’. Somervell gave many of his paintings away, and he should not be regarded as a commercial artist. Many of Somervell’s watercolours are painted on what may be no more than brown or off-white wrapping paper. The paper has a ribbed appearance and some of that used in 1922 was watermarked ‘Michallet, France’. He usually painted with the ribbing set horizontally, though in some paintings it appears vertically. His preference was body colour, that is, watercolour mixed with gouache, in preference to watercolour alone and he often used pastel either alone or with watercolour. Watercolour was his favoured medium in Tibet, the Himalaya and India. Many regard his paintings of the great Himalayan peaks and Tibet as unique, and are an important part of the history of modern art. |
Theodore Howard Somervell was born in Kendal in 1890, educated at Rugby and at Caius College Cambridge, and University College Hospital London. A family man of profound Christian belief, he devoted his life to the health of the people of Southern India. He established a field hospital in the Battle of the Somme and operated continuously for seventy hours in March 1918. Accepting a Medical Missionary post in 1923, he helped to establish a hospital in Neyyoor. He was a member of the 1924 Everest expedition and with E F Norton reached 28,000 feet without supplementary oxygen. This was just a few days before the loss of Mallory and Irvine. His climbing record in the Alps is well documented and worth telling. He was President of the FRCC (1954-1956) and President of the Alpine Club (1962-1965). Musician, author and a most accomplished artist who created his own oeuvre. He was encouraged to sketch by his father William Henry Somervell (1860-1934), a competent water colourist and a member of the founding family of K Shoes.  His first drawings and paintings were of Kendal. He was a compulsive sketcher; over 540 titles are known to exist in 2006 of which 201 are of the Himalaya. He joined the Lake Artists Society in retirement and exhibited 136 paintings from 1920 onwards. The Alpine Club owns 30 paintings and the Abbot Hall Gallery owns 14 paintings. Almost every Lake District fell and hillside is represented among the traceable paintings. The last exhibition of his work in Kendal was at Abbot Hall in 1976. An exhibition of his Himalaya paintings took place at the NME in Penrith in 2002. Kendal Mountain Film Brewery Arts Centre |
