March 30, 1965

John Farleigh (June 16, 1900 to March 30, 1965) was an English artist, made a CBE in 1949. His varied artistic career included having his drawing of Buckingham Palace after bombing purchased by the War Artists Committee, in 1942.

Farleigh's books include:

Autobiography, Graven Image, (1940),
It never Dies, Lectures and Essays, (1946),
and
The Creative Craftsman, (1950), among others.

John Farleigh illustrated books also, such as S. Sitwell’s Old-Fashioned Flowers; Ten Histories, Shakespeare, and -- Haunted England: A survey of English Ghost-lore (1940). This last is a book on English folklore by Christina Hole and we find there this depiction of a feline spectre.





We  examine Farleigh's work on this book to gain a sense of his contributions. 

Farleigh's art is:

'Far from being the folksy, gothic images that one might have anticipated,[and] many of these elegant wraiths and spectres have a distinctly surrealist look to them.'




Here is the cover art for Hole's book.

'A peculiar English cocktail, John Farleigh’s cover for Christina Hole’s book sits between two eras. Hole’s England was still a place haunted by its past, a world of spooky country houses. But the nation was also spooked by the new threat of the Blitz and gas attack.

'It was in this period, after all, that the artist Henry Moore was in the dark of the London Underground, sketching people sheltering from bombs, like mummies in a tomb. Illustrator Farleigh’s modernist ghosts appear to be haunted by the spectre of Moore’s abstracted figures.

'Farleigh ... himself was slightly stuck between those two worlds. He is known for the controversial, lightly eroticised illustrations commissioned by George Bernard Shaw for his 1934 story “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God”. But the artist also did delightful graphic work for the London County Council, exhorting people to travel by Underground and tram. His gentle abstraction was perfect for the age, while depictions of a Big Ben lost in a bucolic landscape reflected the period’s uneasy relationship between city, countryside and the growing suburbs in between.

'This cover illustrates that unease. The manor house is distorted, blown by the storm like the tree beside it. The ghouls are at the gates. The internal illustrations are wonderful, Miró meets Le Corbusier: abstraction haunts representation. Some are truly unsettling; others entirely ridiculous. Drawing on pulp illustration’s sensationalism and the dreamscapes of Paul Delvaux and Max Ernst, the book is an appealing mix of serious intent and publishers’ schlock.

'.....Farleigh, with his conservative woodcuts and acute awareness of the expressionistic and surreal, perfectly captured the feel of a book that revels in a nation’s subconscious.'