[From the catalogue-in-progress for “Landscapes & Livestock”, a loan exhibition for Agincourt Homecoming in the Fall of 2015]
BUSH, Reginald Edgar James [1869-1956]
“Lynemouth, North Devon”
undated
color etching / 6.3 inches x 3.7 inches
R.E.J. Bush showed his work at galleries and exhibitions in London, Paris and Rome, but he also exhibited in the U.S. (St. Louis, Chicago, and Los Angeles). “Lynemouth, North Devon” [previously identified as “Village, Cornwall”] may have been shown at the Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904— “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis. Meet me at the Fair.” —but its frame also bears a sticker suggesting it had been sold by Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago.
This evocative small etching came to the collection in 1959 from the estate of Miss Rose Kavanagh, long-time principal of Charles Darwin Elementary school.
Hello,
This etching is not a village in Cornwall, but the village of Lynmouth in North Devon. The scene depicted is Mars Hill with the Rising Sun public house.
Hello, Mr Williams: Thanks for that correction. I can’t say at the moment how the attribution came to our attention; perhaps it’s written on the reverse of the work itself. I’ll look and report back to you.
BTW, I wonder if you gathered that the “Community Collection” is an actual collection of art (and obviously the piece in question is real), but the Tennant Memorial Gallery in the Public Library in Agincourt, Iowa is entirely fictional. The Agincourt Project is an academic exercise in the relationship between design and narrative, between place-making and story-telling. We’ve already done three museum exhibitions locally and are working on a fourth. These have included designs by students and faculty at North Dakota State University, graduates, architects, artists, composers, and other friends of the project.