Artists

CLAUD LOVAT FRASER (1890-1921)

Medium

Pen and ink, watercolour and bodycolour over traces of pencil

Dimensions:

30.50cm wide   52.00cm high (12.01 inches wide  20.47 inches high)

Provenance

Grace Lovat Fraser, the artist's widow.

Exhibition History

London, Leicester Galleries, Claude Lovat Fraser Memorial Exhibition, 1921;
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 1968, no.108;
London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Claud Lovat Fraser, 1969, no.13.

Description / Expertise

Claud Lovat Fraser was born in London and educated at Charterhouse. Initially intending to join the family firm of solicitors he gave up his legal studies in order to attend the Westminster School of Art. His love of literature and theatre led him to concentrate his artistic output on theatrical design and highly original book illustrations and publications. His passion for the work of Jacobean and eighteenth century playwrights was encouraged by his friends Edward Gordon Craig and Herbert Beerbohm Tree who also introduced him to the world of theatrical costume and set design.

Despite a history of frail health he volunteered for the army in 1914 and served with distinction at the Battle of Loos and in the Ypres Salient. In February 1916 he was sent to hospital suffering from shell shock and gas and was never to return to the front. At this time he produced a number of amusing and sometimes moving watercolours recording the incidents and uniforms of the front. After the war he worked with extreme energy holding a number of exhibitions and most importantly producing his revolutionary designs for the costumes and sets for Nigel Playfair’s important productions of As You Like It and The Beggar’s Opera.

This is one of Fraser’s last works and was intended to be included in a planned one-man exhibition of thirty-six carefully finished costume designs to be held at the Leicester Galleries in the autumn of 1921. In her autobiography the artist’s widow described the finished designs as “some of the finest work Lovat every produced; they consisted of three sets called Men, Women and Monsters and represented characters Lovat had chosen from his favourite plays” (Grace Lovat Fraser, In the Days of My Youth, 1970, p.275). Sadly the series was never completed as Fraser died of exhaustion and his weakened heart whilst staying with his friend Paul Nash at Dymchurch, Kent in June 1921. The Leicester Galleries’ one-man show became a Memorial Exhibition in December 1921.