A Young English Artist Meets Italian Immortals

When Mildred Elsie Eldridge (known as Elsie) graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 1933, she received a £180 travelling scholarship.

A year later, 1934, several months before her 24th birthday, she used the scholarship money (the equivalent today of a budget of £100 per day) to spend 13 weeks in Italy, studying the works of immortal painters and sculptors, enhancing her own watercolour skills, meeting distinguished women and men, whilst visiting Rome, Capri, Assisi, Florence, Ravenna, Venice, and Bolzano.

Everywhere she went, she looked and looked, sometimes seeing something that amused her.

“A sky so blue that it was alarmingly breathtaking”

The train she boarded in Paris was crowded – “everybody was going out of Paris for skiing and winter sports.” There were “a great many stops” on the way to the French Alps.

Steaming from France into Italy, the train passed through mountain range after mountain range until, suddenly, Elsie saw “the grass unbelievably green in the brilliant sunshine, under a sky so blue that it was alarmingly breathtaking after all the darkness of innumerable tunnels.”

On Friday, the 23rd of March, she sent a postcard to her parents from Genoa, saying that tomorrow she was going on to Rome.

Postcard, The Lighthouse, Genoa.

“Discovering paintings one knew only as reproductions in a book”

On Saturday, 24th of March, Elsie made her way to Genoa’s Piazza Giuseppe Verdi, located the Stazione Brignole, and boarded the Rome train. She caught “glimpses of the very blue Mediterranean” as the train rolled along the coast.

“Every day in Rome was spent discovering all the paintings and sculptures which one knew only as reproductions in a book.”

Elsie, writing to her father on her train ride from Rome to Naples, said: “I have visited dozens and dozens of churches and galleries and shall really be glad to get south and out of the rain.”

“Bathing was shared with the myriads of small coloured fishes”

Fifty years later, when she wrote her autobiography, Elsie could still see Capri:

“Many sandy bays between craggy grey stone cliffs, the water in the bays so clear and so greenly blue on the white sand that bathing was shared with the myriads of small coloured fishes swimming all around.”

“I got up as usual at 6 a.m., the loveliest and coolest time of the day, and went up to the top of Monte Solaro and sat on a lovely carpet of wild pink orchis. Vesuvius on the left, Capri down below, the Sorrento peninsula away beyond, and miles and miles of brilliant sea.”

“We all slept in the most alarming beds”

Elsie left Capri on Tuesday, the 24th of April, and travelled to Assisi, where she “stayed in a Franciscan convent recommended by the British School in Rome.” The nuns “drank the white wine of the district with their meals and we all slept in the most alarming beds with straw pillows and straw mattresses. The pillows made one’s ears so sore that I had to fill the pillowcase with the various woolen jerseys that I had with me.”

“I made many drawings of the narrow streets – houses crowding in on either side – always nuns walking in the shade made by the closeness of the houses. . . There were many shrines on the walls of the houses in Assisi.”

Elsie walked from the convent up the steep, narrow streets to the Basilica of Saint Francis where she “spent many hours studying the Giotto frescoes – these were even more beautiful than one had supposed.”

“The cell was even more lovely than the other churches”

One day, Elsie hiked up into the hills to I Carceri – “the prison”, where Saint Francis and his closest associates imprisoned themselves in prayer.

“The cell was even more lovely in its simple cave-like stone quality than the other churches.”

She remembered I Carceri “high on the hillside above the small villages and built on a great rock with forest behind…

…and a lovely stone-built well in the centre of a small courtyard.”

Elsie’s fascination with Saint Francis receiving the stigmata

Back in Assisi, Elsie pondered an incident in the life of St Francis, painted by Giotto – the moment when he received the stigmata.

As Francis was praying, he had a vision of Christ in the form of a crucified seraph, and wounds appeared in his hands and feet like the wounds of the crucifixion in the hands and feet of Jesus – the stigmata.

While she was still in Italy, Elsie talked with a physician about her fascination with the phenomenon of the stigmata – she was emphatic that he was not a Roman Catholic. He explained, “from experience it has been found possible for a person who is in an excessively nervous state of health on the verge of death, as St Francis was, and living an almost entirely spiritual life, to reproduce in themselves the physical state of others – the stigmata in his case.”

Twenty years later, Elsie included a figure with a pierced foot and a pierced hand in The Dance of Life.

Sightseeing - The American way

Elsie travelled from Assisi to Florence on Wednesday, the 2nd of May. Leaving the station, she crossed the Arno river to the Piazza del Carmine, where she was going to stay.

The Casa Santo Nome di Gesù, a convent of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary – “Mostly Irish nuns and all charmingly unworldly.”

Writing to her father, she sums up her impressions of Italy and her approach to sightseeing.

“I can’t say that I like the Italian people but then the country is glorious.” She proposes to sightsee “à l’américaine – read up everything first and learn all about it. Then visit the place and have a really good look at all the things that are of interest to me and give a fleeting glance to all the rest – it is quite impossible to do everything thoroughly – besides being rather silly if it does not interest you.”

Fifty meters from the Casa’s front door, across the Piazza del Carmine, is the 15th- Century Brancacci Chapel, its walls covered with frescos created by three artists, Masaccio, Masolino and Filippino Lippi.

They changed the course of Western art by presenting solid figures in real space. A figure of a mother, holding her child and receiving alms from St Peter, is marked by a deep, almost tragic sense of human dignity.

Elsie – “a painter of decorations”

A letter for Elsie arrived in the Convent’s post on Saturday, 12th May – an invitation from Mary Berenson, wife of the renowned Renaissance art scholar Bernard Berenson, to come to tea at Villa I Tatti on Monday, the 14th. “I shall certainly be here,” Mary wrote, “and my husband hopes to be.”

Elsie was not the typical guest welcomed by Mary to her home in the hills above Florence. Usually, the visitors were researchers of Renaissance art, wealthy collectors, and famous writers.

One long-time friend said that Mary greeted one with a “radiant smile,” making you feel that “all is well with the world.”

Mary’s diary entry for Monday, 14th May, is brief: “A Miss Eldridge sent by Rothenstein came to tea – a painter of decorations.”

“Rather alarming to find oneself … sealed in by books”

When Elsie wrote her autobiography in the 1980s, she remembered having “tea with Mrs. Berenson in
the library” at Villa I Tatti. “Bernard Berenson was not there.”

“The library appeared to have no door, as the door was camouflaged with rows of books on shelves.
Rather alarming to find oneself there, alone, apparently sealed in by books, with no means of escape.”

From the 1890s to the 1930s, Bernard Berenson was an outstanding American historian of Italian Renaissance art. Private collectors and museum curators turned to him for verification of works of art. Often, he was able to identify the artist just by looking at the nose or an ear in a painting!

His books dealt with the Renaissance painters of north and central Italy, with art criticism, ethics, and aesthetics. One title seems to sum up his life and to point us towards Elsie Eldridge: The Passionate Sightseer.

“Look and look and look till we live the painting”

“We must look,” wrote Bernard Berenson, “and look and look till we live the painting and for a fleeting moment become identified with it.”

Some weeks after Elsie had tea with Mary Berenson, she returned for a tour of I Tatti with Bernard Berenson: He “showed me his special treasures – madonnas and altar pieces – so many that one became confused.”

“unacceptable to Mussolini”

Elsie writes: “I had a letter of introduction to Aubrey Waterfield, and eventually went up to Poggio Gherardo, outside the city, with a sheaf of drawings and sketches, for Aubrey Waterfield was a painter.”

The letter of introduction was almost certainly written by Sir William Rothenstein, who also “sent” Elsie to visit the Berensons at I Tatti.

Rothenstein was a friend of Aubrey Waterfield and considered him “an artist of distinction, who also has a scholarly mind” – he was a graduate of the Slade School of Art, London, and of New College, Oxford.

Writing to Aubrey, Sir William said: “All sorts of extreme ‘abstract’ ideas are about, which settle like microbes in the students’ brains, so I sent in your name to the Executive Committee” of the British School.

Aubrey did not get the directorship, not because he was anti-Abstract, but because he and his wife, Lina, were anti-Fascist. The British Ambassador vetoed the idea, declaring the appointment “unacceptable to Mussolini.”

Lina Waterfield – “Determined not to be cowed by Mussolini”

For 12 years before Elsie met her, Lina Duff Gordon Waterfield, OBE, had been the Italian correspondent for a London newspaper, The Observer. She interviewed Mussolini on several occasions and wrote articles about his dictatorial ways. At one of his mass rallies, she listened to him scream: “Whoever touches [my supporters] meets lead [bullets].” Lina thought: “The man is mad. Poor Italy.”

“disliked nuns”

Mid-May, Elsie went up from the Casa Santo Nome di Gesù Convent where she was staying in Florence to Poggio Gherardo, carrying “a sheaf of drawings and sketches” for Aubrey Waterfield to look at.

“He was delighted with the work,” she recalled, “for it seemed that I used the same blue and gray tones he did.”

When Aubrey learned that Elsie had a room in a convent, “he insisted that I should stay at the Poggio Gherardo.” He “disliked nuns. He could not endure anyone who was willing to shut themselves away from the beauty of Italy for whatever reason.”

He disliked art dealers too – their commercialism offended his sense of the artist’s dignity, so he refused to exhibit.

A perfectionist, he laboured over his paintings, never quite satisfied; often so dissatisfied that he abandoned what he was working on.

There was a rhythm to Elsie’s life at Poggio Gherardo: one day, she painted and sketched, the next, went sightseeing in Florence. Every evening, she watched fireflies in the garden: “They don’t often come near you but one walked up my arm the other night and it is fun to see a little star walking up your arm!”

“I made drawings of him so that he would not show any sign of dying”

Elsie painted “women [who worked on the Poggio Gherardo farms] wearing white head scarves and sienna red or black or gray dresses with white aprons.” She “painted in the olive groves with storm clouds gathering over the distant mountains, but which never came to break the golden light on the trees and the ripening oats beneath them.”

The Waterfields “know everything about everything in Florence”

When Elsie stayed with the Waterfields, she would paint and sketch one day, the next, she went sightseeing with them, “who of course know everything about everything in Florence.”

Aubrey was “an artist of distinction who also has a scholarly mind” whilst Lina was tutored in Italian Renaissance art by two authorities in the field, John Addington Symonds and Bernard Berenson.

Lina was also a friend of Bernard Berenson for many years. Like Symonds, Berenson insisted on the importance of taking time to look and look at art. He insisted that his wife, Mary, “study a picture in the Uffizi for hours seated on a ladder.”

with the Waterfields

With Lina and Aubrey as Elsie’s tutors and tour guides, sightseeing in Florence was a master class in Italian art and preparation for her to teach art history and appreciation in years to come.

Aubrey, a practicing artist, focused on technique – drawing, composition, balance, shapes, and colors.

Lina, a guidebook author, focused on subject matter – the story told by the work of art, the words of the artists, and the writings of art historians.

“The first nude statue made in Italy for a thousand years”

Perhaps Elsie was not interested in “the first nude statue made in Italy for a thousand years.” Perhaps she was prepared to give it a “fleeting glance” and move on. Lina however, as her guide kept her focused on Donatello’s place in art history.

We can imagine Elsie walking with Lina through the Donatello gallery of the Bargello Museum, looking at one work after another, listening to Lina quoting from her guidebook: “Donatello, the great Florentine sculptor, influenced most of the artists of the day, even Michelangelo. He taught men to draw inspiration from the classical world without servile imitation.”

““A strange feeling to be face to face with Botticelli”

Elsie wrote in her journal many years later: “There was so much to explore in Florence – a strange feeling to be face to face with the Botticelli paintings.”

One of his masterworks seems to have left a deep impression on her – Primavera – The Allegory of Spring. There are echoes of it in a number of her paintings, in particular, The Dance of Life.

Playing with Berenson’s words, we may say that both artists looked and looked and looked till they lived nature and became identified with it.

“a sense of the sublime that demands silence.”

Elsie remembered: “I saw all the Michelangelo sculptures and paintings.”

Lina Waterfield: In his David, Michelangelo “for the first time conveyed a sense of terribilità” – a quality of provoking awe and wonder in the viewer; a sense of the sublime that demands silence.

“The mosaics were imposing and full of colours”

On Sunday, the 27th of May, just before 6 a.m., Elsie was waiting on the platform of Santa Maria Novella station in Florence, with Lina, Aubrey, and the young ladies from their finishing school, to board the train to Ravenna.

Elsie: “We went over the Apennines by a very narrow pass and then saw that we had passed the watershed and all rivers were flowing towards the Adriatic.”

“Ravenna itself is rather a dull town with now and again a round tower shooting up from a church or building, which makes the discovery of the mosaics especially remarkable.”

“The mosaics were far more imposing and full of colours than I had thought.”

“As startling as the line of mosaic sheep”

Five decades later, Elsie recalled: “When we got back to Florence there was a great thunderstorm. How different from the quietness of the Ravenna woods, with wild pink cyclamen growing everywhere under the trees, and the pines against the very blue sky made a pattern as startling as the line of mosaic sheep marching around the walls of the church.”

The mosaic Elsie remembered is in the Basilica of Saint Apollinaris in Classe, where the sheep form a pattern above an arch below a blue sky.

Twenty years after her visit to Ravenna, Elsie painted sheep in a winter landscape. The trees against the sky make a pattern as startling as the line of mosaic sheep.

Did she also have Ezekiel 34:12-13 in mind? “I will rescue them … on a day of clouds and darkness…. And I will feed them on the mountains….by the watercourses…”

“A“How frightful it must be to be famous”

Sometime after Elsie returned from Ravenna to Florence, she went “with Aubrey Waterfield for a prolonged visit” to his other home, Castello della Brunella, located above the town of Aulla in northwestern Tuscany.

Aubrey and Lina made the medieval castle a place of refuge away from Poggio Gherardo, Florence. In Elsie’s words, away from the “dozens of Countesses, and things with strange names hovering about”. “It only makes one feel,” she wrote to her parents, “how frightful it must be to be famous.”

“Sometimes,” Elsie writes in her autobiography, “Aubrey fell to remembering the many people who had visited them. . . He was only interested in the painters and writers; telling of the day that D. H. Lawrence brought Frieda to lunch at Poggio, he remembered the alarming sight of Frieda ‘bursting out of her bodice’, as he described it, for she was wearing a white blouse and laced-up black bodice.”

She continues: Aubrey “was cheered by Lawrence’s knowledge of Italian wild flowers.” More than fifty years later, Elsie noted in her Garden Journal: “I cheer myself by reading D. H. Laurence’s Flowering Tuscany” – so buoyed up that she sent an extract to a friend, perhaps this one: “Spring returns, and on the terrace lips, and in the stony nooks between terraces, up rise the aconites, the crocuses, the narcissus and the asphodel, the inextinguishable wild tulips. There they are, for ever hanging on the precarious brink of existence, but for ever triumphant, never quite losing their footing.”

“Painting until the light faded into the luminous evenings”

Elsie describes a typical day at the Fortezza della Brunella:

“I was able to make studies of the women doing their washing in the river far below.”

“Aubrey had decorated several of the rooms of the Castello with watercolour landscape panels in the grays and blues that he used and which looked splendid on the walls between the tall windows looking down to the river.”

“I can’t think of anything more pathetic...”

Elsie and Aubrey left Aulla and returned to Florence, where they listened to Lina’s account of being in Venice on the 14th of June for Mussolini’s first meeting with Hitler.

Lina: “Hitler, who had been told not to come in uniform, arrived in civilian clothes – black suit and yellow mackintosh and wearing a gray felt hat – whereas Mussolini was resplendent in the uniform of the Fascist Militia . . . The two men shouted at each other as though enraged.”

A few days later, Elsie went with the Waterfields and the young ladies of their finishing school to Venice, no longer resounding with the shouts of dictators.

Elsie: “I stayed in the Casa Fiolla on the Rio della Pallada . . . In the morning, I saw down below on the water, boats which had come into Venice in the very early morning. They had patched sails of orange and dusky yellow and rudders painted bright green.

“He swore me to deadly secrecy…”

Elsie said goodbye to the Waterfields – perhaps wondering if she would ever see them again – and traveled north from Venice to the Dolomites.

“I was afraid if I went by Germany of having a bomb dropped on me”

Elsie: “Bolzano, at the foot of the Dolomites, was an amazing town with rushing streams from the mountains pouring down the main streets in deep, open ‘canals’ or channels.”

“A bus went up into the mountains – meadows full of wild flowers where the snow had managed to melt but otherwise snow and snow – in the evening turning pink and red gold in the light of the setting sun.”

Leatherhead: Elsie returns home

The outline of Elsie’s homeward journey is drawn from 1930s train timetables. Most likely, she traveled by train from Bolzano back to Venice, where she boarded the Simplon Orient-Express to Paris via Milan, the Simplon Tunnel, and Lausanne. Arriving in Paris, she dashed by taxi to the Gare du Nord, caught the boat train to Calais, sailed by ferry to Dover, took the boat train to London, Victoria, and finally one more train to Leatherhead.

Elsie had written to her mother from Italy, saying that people at the Royal College of Art seemed “to be in a flutter” about when she would begin work on a mural project at the Brockley School – “it is so silly because I could work much quicker if I leave it till end of July when the boys at the school will be away for summer holidays.” It is reasonable to assume that by the end of July 1934, Elsie was painting her contribution to the set of murals at the Brockley School.

The principal artists – Charles (Cyril) Mahoney, one of Elsie’s tutors at the Royal College of Art, and Evelyn Dunbar a former RCA student – had each completed a panel the year before; they would continue to work on the project for several more years.

A reunion

In the autumn of 1943, Elsie and her husband R. S. Thomas went by train from North Wales to London, carrying a gift of apples from their garden for Lina and Aubrey Waterfield. This reunion was rich in memories, as Elsie and the Waterfields recalled their time together in Italy in 1934 and shared the events in their lives when Hitler and Mussolini were darkening the skies over Europe.

With war clouds in the air, the Waterfields left Italy in late August 1939 and returned to England. Then, when the clouds did not break, they went back to Italy.

Lina and Aubrey observed one of those raids: Their “gallant ship”, endeavoring to stay offshore from the Liverpool docks, lost its anchor, “bumped on the sand banks” and drifted “among the mine fields,” while they sat “on deck all night, watching a tremendous air raid on Liverpool.”

In the meantime, the Waterfields had settled into a studio apartment in London, which was shocked nightly by German air raids. Lina prepared a weekly newspaper for Italian-speaking prisoners of war. Aubrey, his health failing, stayed home and by painting “brought something of Italy to London in the war years.”

Some weeks after their reunion, Aubrey shared with Elsie his thoughts about the work of an artist.

“However small one’s contribution, it is ……. part of the great Way.”

Seven months before he died, Aubrey wrote a letter to Elsie. After apologizing for his failure to thank her for “the lovely apples” that she and Ronald brought to Lina and himself in the autumn of 1943, he reflects on what motivates a painter.

“If one is sufficiently humble and sincere, however small one’s contribution, it is as a little path through the wood, but part of the great Way.”

Perhaps, Elsie sensed the distinctiveness of her own path as she continued to read Aubrey’s letter: “The actual urge to paint is the desire of creation, ‘our little bit of Revelation’, and to make plain some infinite small facet of Eternal Beauty and Truth – to others that they too may see it.”

Elsie may have realized that her little bit of revelation differed from Aubrey’s, for she was revealing the beauty and truth that exists both beneath and above the surface world that Aubrey painted.

Elsie also began to realize that a painting may be clear in its revelation of beauty, while being ambiguous in its revelation of truth.

Typical self-portraits say: “Here I am”; however, Elsie’s self-portrait asks, “Who do you think I am?”

She provides a blue clue: There are two jay feathers, one piercing the flesh of her right foot, the other visible through holes in her left foot. According to tradition, the jay symbolizes walking less-trodden paths.

Aubrey may not have appreciated Elsie’s surreal and abstract works, yet he admired her determination to tread her own “little path through the wood, but part of the great Way.”

Elsie brought Italy home with her

Central to these experiences were the Waterfields, whose determination to do their work well and with integrity inspired her.

A third of a century later, Elsie was still holding Italy in her memory and, quite literally, in her hands, for she was re-reading D. H. Lawrence’s Flowery Tuscany, perhaps ticking these sentences: “Man can live on the earth and by the earth without disfiguring the earth. It has been done here [in Tuscany], on all these sculptured hills and softly, sensitively terraced slopes.”