Esther Grainger, artist and activist

1 Introduction

Around the turn of the century, when I was working in the National Library of Wales, I came across a smallish painting, in oil on board, called ‘Pontypridd at night’.  It struck me at the time as a bold and unusual work, and whenever I saw it I’d stand and admire it. From time to time it ventured out of the stacks and was available for public view. 

The painter’s name was Esther Grainger. I knew nothing about her at the time.  But her name, and the single painting, stuck in my mind.  Some eight years ago I tried to find out more, and wrote a piece summarising what I’d found out.  Which was not very much – she proved to be an elusive figure.  I said I hoped the piece would stimulate someone to do more research on her career and her art.  But no one emerged.  So in the end I decided I’d have to do some detective work myself.

There are two public sides to Esther Grainger – artist, and teacher and organiser.  In the years before, during and after the Second World War, she was a quiet but powerful figure in the art world of south Wales. As an artist in the post-war period she combined delicacy with a quiet assertiveness. In what follows I’m going to treat Esther as activist (teacher and organiser) and Esther as artist separately.  It’s important to say, though, that she wouldn’t have recognised that the two were distinct. She described herself simply as an artist.

To begin at the beginning, Esther Margaret Grainger was born in Cardiff in 1912, the daughter of Agnes Grainger and Joseph Grainger, an inspector of steam boilers who came originally from Manchester.  She won a scholarship to attend Howell’s School, and from there she went in 1928 to Cardiff School of Art, directed at that time by William Pickles, now a forgotten figure in art education.  Her training there was no doubt very traditional.  She learned the crafts of drawing and painting, embroidery (which she valued highly) and calligraphy.

2 Activist

On leaving the School Esther found work in the south Wales coalfield, teaching art and crafts to unemployed miners and their families.  This was a period when concerned and idealistic groups of people from outside the mining communities founded what were called ‘settlements’, to do what they could to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment and poverty.   Perhaps the best-known settlement today was the ‘Brynmawr experiment’ associated with the Quaker Peter Scott and famous for its furniture-making.  Some of the settlements specialised in art and craft.  Another Quaker, John Dennithorne, founded a club in Dowlais in 1928 to help unemployed men and boys.  It evolved into an educational centre and occupied Trewern House, and then Gwernllwyn House, bought by a philanthropist, Mary Horsfall.  Gwernllwyn House hosted art classes and included an art gallery.  Another settlement was started in Merthyr Tydfil, again with a strong interest in art. 

Esther taught in both centres, as art and craft tutor, with support from the National Council of Social Service, a charity that coordinated the work of the coalfield settlements.  According to her friend Nan Youngman, this work ‘seems to have consisted chiefly in making slippers, altering shirts, and going camping by the sea.  Esther’s accounts of this were hilarious and full of affection.’  This comment, though, may conceal the fact that Esther always felt a strong belief that artistic creativity was within the capacity of everyone, not just a privileged elite, and she was committed to putting that belief into action.

In 1936 a new centre was started, on the initiative of the National Provincial Bank Staff Fund for Distressed Areas.  This was called the Pontypridd and District Educational Settlement. Its aim was to provide ‘a permanent centre for the advancement of education, furthering health, relieving distress and encouraging a leisure-time occupation’.  It organised clubs for unemployed people and classes, including courses on art and craft, and it also supported local choral and operatic societies, and an orchestra.  Esther became the tutor-organiser for arts and craft education.

With the start of the Second World War Esther saw that she could extend her influence.  By 1940, with the support of the British Institute of Adult Education, she was organising art lectures, painting classes, courses and discussions on art, and exhibitions throughout the central Valleys.  In 1942 a collection of contemporary British art was shown at Gwernllwyn House, and toured to educational settlements at Rhymney and Pontypridd, where it was seen by a total of 4,400 visitors over three weeks.

In the same year, in Pontypridd, Esther met an artist who was to change the course of her life and art, Cedric Morris. Morris came from Sketty in Swansea. After a peripatetic early life he built a national and international reputation as a painter, though he later turned his back on the commercial art world.  He always retained a strong sense of social justice and attachment to his native country.  From 1935 he made regular visits to the settlements at Dowlais and Merthyr to teach art and to arrange influential touring art exhibitions.  In 1935 he was one of founders of the Contemporary Art Society for Wales.

In 1943 Morris invited Esther to visit the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, which he managed with his partner Arthur Lett-Haines in an old house and garden called Benton End, near Hadleigh in Suffolk. Her trip there was the first of many; indeed, later visits were an almost annual event.  The experience of Morris’s guidance – he didn’t offer direct teaching – and of the liberated and unorthodox society of artists at Benton End taught Esther new skills, like oil painting, and a new confidence in her art practice.  All of her surviving artworks date from after her exposure to Morris and others at Benton End.

Esther got to know many other artists who were coming to prominence in wartime south Wales, both native artists and refugees from the Continent. Many of them became her lasting friends.  She met Heinz Koppel, whom Morris persuaded to come to work and teach in Dowlais in 1944, after fleeing from the Nazis and after his London studio had been bombed.  Another Dowlais artist was Arthur Giardelli, who had been evacuated from Folkstone in 1940.  She was also in touch with George Mayer-Marton, another refugee from the Nazis, who had Welsh connections.  Together, Morris and these other artists formed a critical mass of creativity in the valleys that was a basis for that post-war flourishing, the so-called ‘Rhondda Group’ of painters, which included Charles Burton, Ernest Zobole and Glyn Morgan.

Esther was an expert by now at organisation and facilitation.  In 1944 in Llanelli, with Morris and Giardelli, she set up the Federation of Welsh Music and Arts Clubs, and acted as its Secretary.  Soon it had forty affiliated clubs.  After the War the Federation arranged touring exhibitions and lectures and classes.  In 1945 it organised an ‘unusual and perhaps important exhibition’ (Esther’s words) of contemporary Welsh artists.  It included work by children and their teachers, and visited many venues throughout the Valleys.

But the nature of support for the arts was now beginning to change.  In 1939 the Committee (later Council) for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) had been set up by London philanthropists to sustain the creation and consumption of art in wartime.  Crucially, it received a grant from the Treasury as well as from the Pilgrim Trust. With the Contemporary Art Society for Wales it mounted a long series of exhibitions, held in non-traditional locations, like factories and the educational settlements.  These shows originated in a pre-war educational programme called ‘Art for the People’.

After the War CEMA was replaced by the Arts Council of Great Britain.  This was a state-funded and top-down organisation.  It operated in Wales via a Welsh Committee and a paid officer, David Bell, later Curator of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. Its arrival threatened the continuing existence of the pre-war grass-roots tradition of arts support.  The Arts Council now began to take responsibility for organising exhibitions, commissioning artists, purchasing art, documenting art activity and working with galleries and other bodies.

Esther was clear about the danger.  In a letter to Cedric Morris in 1946 she wrote:

One thing that rather changed the situation is this appointment of David Bell – I expect that you’ve heard that the Arts Council has appointed more staff for Wales and David Bell as arts officer.  That’s probably a good thing (I haven’t met him yet).  But if they are going to expand in Wales then there isn’t much room for the expansion we foresaw in Federation work.  They are the official people with the money and staff to do the job, and it looks as if eventually they will do it.

She could also see that the settlements in general had little future.  The Education Act 1944 led to their grant funding being cut. The Pontypridd Settlement had to admit that ‘the present spirit of the time reveals a tendency towards a public or national welfare and a public or national system of education …  Education has moved from the voluntary and pioneer stage to that of state recognition and control.’  In another letter to Morris in 1946, Esther wrote:

Things in Pontypridd are about as grim as they can be; the Settlement is just hanging on, but the outlook is gloomy indeed.  They are hoping to get some money out of the Glamorgan Education Committee … but goodness knows how long that will be – it may take years.

This eclipse of grassroots arts activity by state intervention is particularly interesting today, when the process seems to be going into reverse, as state funding and activity in the arts is in headlong retreat.  If state activity declines further, will we see a revival, perhaps, of voluntarist organisation and activism?

Through this period, though, Esther remained active.  In 1950 she became the Welsh Secretary of ‘Pictures for Schools’, a programme devised in 1947 by her close friend Nan Youngman.  Supported by the Society for Education through Art, and with the backing of David Bell, ‘Pictures for Welsh Schools’ put on touring art exhibitions. The idea behind this imaginative scheme was that schoolchildren had a chance to view the works on display in the exhibitions, and vote on them; the chosen works were then bought by local education authorities for display in the schools.

1950 was an important year for another reason.  For many years the National Eisteddfod of Wales had featured exhibitions of arts and crafts.  They were not organised by curators, and rural crafts and folk art tended to predominate.  But for the 1950 Eisteddfod in Caerphilly David Bell persuaded the authorities to appoint three artists, Cedric Morris, George Mayer-Marton and Ceri Richards as curators.  They criticised previous policy, saying ‘the exhibitions of the National Eisteddfod are not always truly representative … because artists of standing are not offered sufficient inducement to exhibit’.   This greatly annoyed the ‘nativists’, led by Iorwerth Peate, who was equally suspicious of fine art and industrial life, writing that ‘we continue to depend excessively on critics and patterns of thought which are foreign to our tradition.’ The selection committee actively sought out artists of talent.  They chose the works of many of the settlement artists, including Esther, along with younger artists like Charles Burton.  Esther was responsible for the organisation of the exhibition, which set a new pattern for art shows in succeeding Eisteddfodau.

By now the educational work of the settlements had been superseded by state provision, and for the rest of her career Esther was employed as a teacher in state institutions.  Between 1946 and 1950 she taught art in Caerphilly Girls Grammar School, and from 1950 to her retirement in 1975 in Cardiff – for the final fifteen years as lecturer and then principal lecturer in Cardiff School of Art.

3 Artist

All this time Esther was creating paintings, drawings, embroideries and works in other media.  However, I can trace no surviving pre-war works by her.  Her first group show took place in 1945, and her first solo show was not until 1954.  This might reinforce the view that it was Cedric Morris and other settlement and Benton End artists who sparked her to produce her most characteristic work, or possibly that she began to flourish as a painter after she had shed her organising roles in the Valleys.

The oil painting that first took my attention years ago, ‘Pontypridd at night’, dates from around 1950.  It turns out to be an outlier in Esther’s oeuvre, painted in a bold, colourful style, apparently as a tribute to Heinz Koppel, who’d brought a German expressionist style with him from the continent.  In 1945 he’d painted a picture of fireworks in Kew Gardens on VE night, and Esther’s picture takes up where it left off.  The buildings of the town, lit intermittently by streetlamps, gather higgledy-piggledy at the valley bottom, huddled together for warmth under a cold, windy sky.  In the right foreground, though, is a fiery bright orange bush. The original crude wooden frame, coloured pink and mauve, adds to the painting’s impression of radiance and improvisation.

It seems that Esther never repeated this experiment.  But her early post-war paintings are still colourful and bold.  ‘Sunflower tops’, another oil painting from the same period, but this time on canvas, shows the house and garden at Benton End.  Flowers were very important to Esther throughout her life, and the garden there must have been a powerful part of her attraction to the place.  Here the flowers blend into a perfectly balanced composition, a symphony of colours that recalls Gaugin’s Tahitian paintings.  There’s more than a hint of Gaugin’s exoticism, as if the south seas had invaded rural Suffolk.

Nan Youngman, in her obituary of Esther, wrote that ‘it was from Morris that she learned to use oils on large canvases of thick impasto, strong landscapes and portraits, and develop her previous feeling for nature, especially flowers.’ 

While at Benton End Esther followed Cedric Morris’s example in painting flowers, and she also turned her hand to still lifes.  Her notebooks include dried and pressed flowers, and throughout her career flowers featured in her watercolours and other works.

Flowers were the stars of one of Esther’s last exhibitions, in Cardiff in 1990.  Inspired by Robert John Thornton’s famous flower engravings in the book Temple of flora (1807), she painted a series of giant flowers that seem to tower over the Victorian terrace houses and railings of Pontcanna. She wrote, ‘my debt to Thornton lies in a tradition which shows large-scale plants dominating small-scale backgrounds, enhancing the mystery of both.’  In a note in the exhibition catalogue, Nan Youngman wrote, ‘Hosta and drinking fountain … with its opened railing and mysterious low horizon has a poetic, dreamlike quality which is almost surreal. There is an uncanny relationship between the plant and that marvellous cast-iron Cardiff fountain.’  ‘Tulips, Plasturton Avenue, Pontcanna’ has a very similar feel.

Esther was very attached to Cardiff, especially its parks and Victorian residential streets, like Ryder Street in Pontcanna, where she lived all her life.  Her house was far from Victorian inside.  It was full of art, books and modern furniture, and she always welcomed visitors inside, particularly children.

Landscapes always formed an important part of Esther’s work.  Often they were pastoral scenes, like ‘The pool’ and ‘The river’, both in Newport Art Gallery, or ‘Tree and island’ in Maesteg, but Esther could take on other landscapes, as in ‘Kenfig water’, where she uses ink, chalk and watercolour to convey the trackless wilderness of the Kenfig dunes.  She also liked to paint in wilder, upland areas of Wales.  The structure of the rock formations in these hills, and on the coastal cliffs of Wales appealed to her instinctive love of pictorial structure.

Esther enjoyed travelling abroad, and painting what she found, as in ‘Mediterranean valley scene’. She often visited her friend the sculptor Marion Lloyd in Villiers-le-Bois in the Champagne region of central France. In February 1977 she took Cedric Morris, who by then was 87 years old, on a trip to Spain and Portugal, where they marvelled at the flowers and architecture.  In Caldas de Monchique in southern Portugal Esther painted a characteristic Moorish building.

Esther was fond of architecture, especially of the Romanesque period, and buildings often feature in her landscapes, especially her drawings. Her depictions of buildings are keenly observed and highly detailed, though not at all like mechanical technical drawings. Cardiff scenes became frequent in her works. In 1977 she made a Cardiff terrace into a pen-and-ink Christmas card.

Charles Burton remembers Esther as an artist who worked with ‘discretion and care’, and was especially meticulous in her drawing – as she was in all her personal life.  He recalls that, even if she was dining alone, she’d lay the table perfectly, and serve herself a glass of aperitif, always Noily Prat, before starting her meal.

Esther was an accomplished portraitist.  An undated oil painting in the National Museum, ‘Portrait of a miner’s wife: Con Morgan’, might well portray a woman in one of Esther’s art classes. She sits erect, proud and serious, with strong features, and she’s wrapped in a blanket, against a chilly blue background.  Equally direct paintings are the portraits of the surrealist and fellow flower-painter Elvic Steele, whom Esther knew from her visits to Benton End, and of Gerry Stewart, nephew of Arthur Lett-Haines.  ‘Portrait of a Nigerian woman’ dates to around the same time; this woman, it seems, stayed with Esther in her home for a month.  What strikes me about all the portraits is how strongly modelled they are, as if Esther was determined to capture her subjects at their most assertive and confident.

In her lifetime Esther was valued for her embroideries and embroidery collages as much as for her drawings and paintings.  An inspiration here was the work of the leading textile artist and embroiderer Constance Howard. As far as I know, there are very few examples in public collections, and only a few survive in private hands.  One of the most ambitious, now apparently lost, was an image of the west front of Ely Cathedral, which she made for the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1986.  (A friend of Esther’s reckons that she smuggled a self-portrait into the surround of this work.)  A small work is ‘Radiolaria’, a quasi-psychedelic collage inspired by marine protozoa.  It formed part of the ‘Arts for Schools’ scheme and originally belonged to Manorbier Primary School.

4 In conclusion

In her obituary Nan Youngman summed up Esther Grainger’s character:

… a tall, quiet, rather shy woman, she nevertheless retained the Benton End characteristics and a reserve of strength and integrity.  A younger friend, on hearing recently that she was dying, said, ‘A good person, Esther.  Never made emotional demands on anybody.’  When Esther was told of this remark she considered it with a serious face for a moment, then said quietly, ‘That is a very nice thing to say.’

Youngman summarised Esther as ‘a considerable and unusual artist’.  Evan Charlton, writing in an exhibition catalogue in 1973, said that ‘it is indeed fortunate that Esther Grainger, who has done so much in the course of her life for the development of art in Wales, has at the same time been able to bring her own art to the impressive culmination we can enjoy here today.’  Charles Burton describes her as ‘a beautiful maker.’

Esther Grainger died on 22 December 1990, aged 78.  The thirty-five years since her death have not been kind to her reputation, and her work, as an activist and an artist, has been unjustly forgotten.  What are the reasons?   

First, it’s possible that, at least in the first part of her career, she subordinated her own creative practice to her other work, teaching, promotion and organisation.  Second, she had limited interest in publicising her own art, as opposed to those of others.  Third, her work is, on the whole, quiet and undemonstrative; it makes no loud statements, its brushstrokes are well-behaved.  And finally, as a woman in a man’s age, she may have attracted less attention at exhibitions and among buyers, both private and public.  It’s interesting that comparatively few of her works are represented in public collections. 

Esther Grainger deserves to be remembered, as someone who cared deeply about art – her own art, and the art of helping others to develop their creativity.

This article is based on a talk given to the Friends of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery on 17 May 2025.  I’m grateful to the following people who helped me in its preparation: Morfudd Bevan, Charles Burton, Jonathan Burton, Robjn Cantus, Ellie Dawkins, Chloe England, Rob Evans, Jeff and Mary Grainger, Liz Hesketh, Peter Lord, David Moore, Dai Smith, Ceri Thomas and Peter Wakelin. Comments and corrections are welcome.