Kenneth Romney Towndrow’s divine dust jackets

One of the greatest privileges of working at the museum is the facility to discover incredible artists from yesteryear who have perhaps fallen out of widespread knowledge or appreciation. Stumbling across wonderful things in boxes whilst I am looking for something else takes me down many welcome rabbit holes. This experience is of course not limited to museum staff! Anyone can enjoy this sense of discovery by calling up some of the more varied boxes in the Prints and Drawings Study Room.

A few years ago, I happened upon the work of one such artist called Kenneth Romney Towndrow (1900-1953) who signed his works with the monogram KRT.  Designer of eight book jackets and a magazine cover in the V&A collection, made between 1925 and 1928, their dynamic, modern designs immediately stood out amongst the hundreds of examples they are housed with.

The earliest is for the Czech writer Karel Čapek’s Krakatit (1922) for the translated edition by Lawrence Hyde, published by Geoffrey Bles in London, 1925. A dystopian novel about an explosive material inspired by the volcano Krakatoa, Čapek was a noted science-fiction author who like many before him, prophesised world events with its terrifying predictions of nuclear warfare. Towndrow’s effective minimalist design with bold shafts of red light and black smoke blasting up the centre has made this edition especially sought after by collectors.

 

It was transferred to the V&A on January 1st 1934 within a large archive from the British Institute of Industrial Art (BIIA) which closed down in that year, subsumed into the Board of Trade. The BIIA’s primary aim had been to raise the standard of design in British manufacturing industries. With a dedicated gallery in Knightsbridge, London, they also sought to influence public taste towards modernism and sleek Art Deco design.

Cannon Law by T. C. Paynter, published in 1928, uses a similar colour palette and symmetry to Krakatit, silhouetting fearsome artillery guns in black, red and orange. The novel tells the story of Szandria, a fictional kingdom led by a half-English queen who attempts to resist her nation’s engulfment by the expanding Soviet Union.

 

My personal favourite of Kenneth Romney Towndrow’s book covers is for Burnt Fingers (1927) by Rachel Swete Macnamara (1876-1947). A prolific Irish writer of romantic thrillers, The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction (2002) describes her work as having “a (comparatively) lurid frankness about sexual yearning.” An intriguing subtext is hinted at between these two women as their upper bodies appear to be naked, tipping the interpretation towards a lover’s tiff.  Again, the sparing but dramatic use of colour and line make this cover one of the most eye-catching of all 151 book covers in this particular box, if not the 1300+ examples spread across many boxes.

 

The latest print the museum has is a 1928 cover for The Graphic, Vol CXXI, No. 3056, depicting an ocean liner with skyscrapers in the background. A long-running publication, it was started by wood-engraver William Luson Thomas (1830-1900) in 1869 and did not fold until 1932. Billing itself as ‘a superior illustrated weekly’, it recruited a number of celebrated artists including Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956), Luke Fildes (1843-1927), and Sidney Sime (1865-1941).

 

It was not long after this enviable cover commission that the artist rather abruptly gave up his career after 26 known published designs, many for the best-known publishing companies of the day including J.M. Dent, Heinemann, and Hutchinson. Instead, he became an art historian, critic and curator, turning his attentions chiefly towards the painter, sculptor and designer Alfred Stevens (1817-1875) about whom he wrote four books.  The V&A holds a staggering 1300+ works made by Stevens including plaster casts, architectural models, decorative panels, drawings, designs and paintings. KRT probably spent a great deal of time in the V&A researching.

 

When searching the internet for more information about Kenneth Romney Towndrow, it is Stevens who dominates the results with scant reference otherwise to KRT’s own designs. Following my initial cataloguing of the book covers and their visibility on Explore the Collections, a group of his descendants got in touch and kindly provided further information on the artist’s life.

He was born in Malvern Link, Worcestershire but by 1921 he had moved to Southport where the census records his job as a ‘Self-employed black and white advertising artist’. By 1929, he was in London and the following year married Bertha Heathorn Sutcliffe in Paddington. They briefly lived at Joubert Mansions, home to many artist’s studios off the Kings Road in Chelsea, before returning north to Cumbria in the mid-1930s where he became a curator of the Ruskin Museum at Coniston. He and Bertha then settled in Pulborough, Sussex, living from 1938 for the rest of their lives at his Threales Lane studio.

Besides his work on Stevens, which included a 1950 catalogue of the artist for the Tate Gallery, he wrote for Apollo magazine with essays on the craft and appreciation of early lithographs, aquatints, and engravings, plus a series on French painters including Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Paul Signac and Auguste Renoir. He also wrote articles for The Burlington Magazine on topics including the workshop of Albrecht Dürer’s The Virgin and Child (also known as The Madonna with the Iris) when it was bought by the National Gallery in 1945.

In 1949, he embarked on a book about Sir William Rothenstein (1872-1945) which was unfinished at the time of his death in 1953. Rothenstein’s son John described KRT as ‘a man of evident and disinterested enthusiasms. Once a cause engaged his interest he was ready to make infinite but, so far as possible, anonymous efforts on its behalf’.[1]  A humble man, further described as ‘utterly devoid of pose or prejudice’[2], he quietly made his mark in art history and graphic design.

Many thanks to the Romney Towndrow family for sharing more information about the elusive KRT.  To browse his books in the National Art Library, please visit this link.

[1] The Times, letter by Sir John Rothenstein, August 4^th, 1953.

[2] The Times, letter by Mr V. Cameron Turnbull, August 3rd, 1953.