John Branfield was born m Somerset and read English at Cambridge.He taught in Cornish grammar and comprehensive schools before writing full-time.He is the author of a dozen novels and two collections of short stories for adults and older children.They have been translated into several languages and published in tile United States;The Fox in Winter was commended for the Carnegie Gold Medal,A Breath of Fresh Air,published in 2001.is a novel about collecting Ncwlvn School paintings.Through their close friendships,Ella and Charles Naper helped define the Lamorna art colony in its heyday.
John Branfield was born m Somerset and read English at Cambridge.He taught in Cornish grammar and comprehensive schools before writing full-time.He is the author of a dozen novels and two collections of short stories for adults and older children.They have been translated into several languages and published in tile United States;The Fox in Winter was commended for the Carnegie Gold Medal,A Breath of Fresh Air,published in 2001.is a novel about collecting Ncwlvn School paintings.Through their close friendships,Ella and Charles Naper helped define the Lamorna art colony in its heyday.
Ella had learned handicrafts at the Camberwell School of Ar and Crafts under Frcdcrick Partridge,a disciple of the great arts and crafts practitioner C R Ashbee,and later joined his jewellerky workshop at Branscombe in south Devon.There.she developed and refined her feel for art nouveau.
Ella met and married a young architect and painter,Charles Naper.Thcv moved to Lamorna in 1912,where Charles built a house,Trewoofe.at the head of the vallev.They soon became part of the Samuel J (Lamorna)Birch circle,making lifelong friendships with,in particular.Laura and Harold Knight and Harold and Gertrude Harvey Other friends included the lesbian painter Gluck,who developed an unrequited passion for Ella.
The Napers appeared in several notable paintings.I.aura Knight's celebrated Spring shows Ella and Charles setting out for a day's fishing,and in Self and Nude Ella modelled as the nude.Ella was also one of the thrce women in Harold Harvcy's painting,The Critics.
In the early 1920s Ella set up the Lamorna Pottery with Kate Westrup,producing mainly commercial ware.but also some beautifully modelled ceramic figures,including ones of herself and I.aura Knight.Charles Naper,less gregarious and involved,was an accomplished landscapc painter who latterly concentrated on the geometry of cliffs and the pattcrns and shapes of rock formations.Easily discouraged,though,he rarely exhibited,sold little and in his cccentric last vears destroycd a studio full of paintmgs.
But the enduring artistic legacy is Ella's elegant jewellery today highly regarded by connoisseurs and collectors,and good enough to bc chosen to illustrate the jacket of a definitive book on art nouveau jewellers.
Acknowledgements
Ella: The Art Student
Charles: The Younger Son
Lamorna Blue
Emerald and Gold: Dozmary Pool
The Great War
The Art Colony after the War
Ella and Gluck
The Lamorna Pottery
Cornish Scarlet: Ella and Laura
Silver: The Middle Years
Apples and Honey: The Second World War
Aunt Wiggy
Charlie
Ella
Index