The Miss Mosleys

Miss Mosleys

The Miss Mosleys make an appearance in my Wakefield Women in History Month series of sketches, as representatives of the women naturalists, often on the botanical side, who have made such a contribution to our local natural history records. In the days before local and national government departments were set up to monitor the environment we relied – and still do rely to a large extent – on the observations made by amateur naturalists, the original citizen’s science.

As I understand it, the Mosley sisters were natural history royalty, the daughters (correct me if I’m wrong) of an outstanding naturalist of his day, Seth Lister Mosley (1847-1929), curator of the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield. He pioneered an ecological approach to understanding the natural environment. In October 1923 he was invited to the opening of Wakefield’s museum in Holmfield House, in the city’s park.

For many years, the Wakefield Naturalists Society held an unpublished manuscript of British butterflies and moths illustrated and written by Mosley, which has now been added to the archives at the Tolson Museum.

In 1999, Miss A Allen, former leader of Wakefield Naturalists’ Plant Section, recalled the Society’s meetings of half a century earlier:

After the opening formalities at each of our monthly winter meetings, and before we settled down to enjoy the illustrated talk, individual members would tell us of any interesting observations – one of my friends likened this to a Prayer Meeting! We took ourselves seriously, guided by the 60 and 70 year olds in charge.

The summer outings were less formal. The leader for the occasion would have walked the route a few days earlier to ensure that we missed nothing of interest on the Saturday afternoon. Apart from that we just among ourselves and made our own observations.

I was 40 when the 1951 survey was made the Naturalists’ was only one of many leisure pursuits. Looking back, I marvel that I was able to do so much.”

Miss A Allen
Wakefield Naturalists at St Aidan’s last autumn (we were actually more socially distanced than I’ve shown here!)

So Nats meetings were pretty much the same then as they are now! Sadly because of restrictions, we managed just two indoor and two outdoor meetings last year.

Naturalists meeting

In recent years a Wakefield Flower Group was started by the late Pauline Brook. Pauline really would deserve a post of her own. What particularly fascinated me was that, in her younger, hippy years, she had for a while lived in a cave below The Acropolis, Athens. A fascinating and funny lady.

Link

Wakefield Naturalists’ Society

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Ann Hurst

Ann Hurst

According to the blue plaque erected by Wakefield Civic Society this week:

Ann Hurst
(1772-1832)

Wakefield’s first female newspaper owner and proprietor. (1823-1830) Played a leading role in the promotion of the abolition of Slavery and was an active supporter of early medical provision for women and the poor. Her paper ‘The Wakefield & Halifax Journal’ was distributed from this property at 56 Westgate

Wakefield Civic Society, 2021, with Dream Time Creative.
Ann Hurst

I’m not sure if a portrait exists of her, so I imagined her reading galleys from her paper. I’m guessing that to do all she did, she must have been quite a commanding figure, so I thought of Anne Reid’s character, Lady Denham, in the recent television version of Jane Austen’s Sanditon. Hopefully Ann Hurst wasn’t quite so intimidating.

Angelica Kaufmann

Angelica Kaufmann

Angelica Kaufmann’s self-portrait hangs in the house at Nostell Priory and it is possible that she had a hand in the decorations, working alongside Robert Adam and Thomas Chippendale. The self-portrait sees her torn between her twins passions – for music and for painting, who she paints as muse-like figures.

Swiss-born Angelica (1741–1807) worked in England for fifteen years and in 1768 became a founder member of the Royal Academy. It would be another 150 years until the next female artist was elected as an academician.

Angelica Kaufmann

If we can believe the portraits of her, Angelica looked impossibly glamorous, in a Dangerous Liaisons kind of way when she painted but I can’t believe that she dressed like that when she painted murals at Nostell, so I’ve borrowed Kate Winslet’s landscape gardener’s outfit from A Little Chaos.

High-speed Still Life

sketches

Don’t get me wrong, I like slow drawing. I love to follow a contour at the speed that an ant would trundle along it. I find cross-hatching, bracelet shading and stippling mindlessly absorbing – or should that be mindfully?

But, as I’ve recently been taking a close look at the work of Quentin Blake, I can also see that it can be liberating to have a change of pace and to lighten up a bit, so each of these little details was completed in a minute or so. No shading, just outline.

As we reach a milestone on what we hope might be a steady return to some kind of normality, I should explain that I’m drawing these on location only because we’re in my brother-in-law John’s support bubble, on our regular socially-distanced visit. Monday morning walking around Illingworth Park with John is the social highlight of our week.

Jill Nalder

Jill Nalder

Jill Nalder, actress and activist, was this week’s sitter, painted by Gregory Mason on Portrait Artist of the Week.

Jill Nalder

Jill has been taking part in hedgehog surveys in Regents Park. In the area between Primrose Hill and Regents Park she says there should be about 300 hedgehogs but the surveys have revealed that they’re down to just 27 individuals. Rather than doing a hedgehog rescue, the group are looking at ways to ensure the population is sustainable.

Sultana Scones

scones

Luckily, I had Barbara to call on when I had a bit of a scone dough disaster this morning. All it took was her cool, calm manner, a spatula and the perfectly judged addition of extra self-raising flour.

loaf

I was on safer ground with our regular half wholemeal/ half plain flour loaf.

I drew the scones with a Waverley Pen nib and the loaf with the similar looking but slightly larger Telephone Pen nib. I think that for me the Telephone Pen, with its ‘Turned up Point’ is a bit smoother to draw with, which suits me. That’s just as well because I have just one Waverley Nib but luckily I’ve got an almost full box, containing a gross (144) of John Heath’s ‘Golden Coated Telephone Pen’ nibs.

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Four Shades of Grey

John Welding

My illustrator friend John Welding – who, thanks to lockdown, we’ve spotted in passing on his bike just once in the past year – posted some beautifully shot ‘drapery’ studies of himself which he’d taken as reference for an illustration project (loan of flat cap by Steve Hopewell).

I needed a tonal subject to test out my ink washes on, so this was ideal, so many thanks to John.

I started drawing from his photograph with a dip pen with a Waverley nib, using De Atramentis Document Ink.

Pen and Wash

I’ve revived an ink wash system that I used on location in the Peak District when I worked on my black and white published sketchbook High Peak Drifter. The washes from then had dried up long ago, so I cleaned out the jars (they’re plastic sample jars from a pharmacy) and remixed the four greys. Since testing them out in these swashes, I’ve made the ‘Pale’ and ‘Med. Pale’ a bit lighter and the ‘Dark’ a bit darker. As with the drawing, I used De Atramentis Ink.

Garage

garage

We’re rather unusual on our street in keeping a car in our garage but, like most of our neighbours, we use it as a store and work space. My 1976 Astro Daimler bicycle leans against the back wall but it hasn’t been used for years and when I last used it occasionally, it was to take parcels to the post office, rather than to get out touring the landscape, which was its original intended purpose.

boots

Our favourite way to get out in nature these days is to put on our hiking boots. They’re sitting on a unit saved from our old kitchen, which has proved to be a useful work bench.

Still hanging on the shelf unit, a string of large Stuggart Giant onions. We had a bumper crop of them last year, but because of cold, damp weather when we harvested them, they didn’t keep and soon turned bad.

Quite a Year

baby year 1

We’ve yet to meet the latest arrival in the family, but she hasn’t had such a bad year. And after all those new experiences, this card features a pop-up of the birthday girl taking a relaxing bath . . . in a kitchen sink during a holiday in the highlands.

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