Beggarstaffs review: simple but striking

“Beggarstaffs” begins with a hulking great poster, at once eye-catching and crowd-pleasing. It would certainly have enticed the crowds to Drury Lane in 1895. Today it mesmerises the incoming visitors at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It shows Cinderella, broom in hand, staring longingly at a coach passing her by. Apart from her blonde hair she is featureless, a figure of perfect blankness, as if the artist has forgotten to colour her in. The coach, in contrast, is a resplendent red. To the right of her stand thick black railings like the bars of a prison. Her life is here, at the sidelines. The bright alternative is a fleeting vision out in the open, forever beyond her reach.

Cinderella was designed by William Nicholson (1872-1949) and his brother-in-law James Pryde (1866-1941), known throughout the 1890s as “the Brothers Beggarstaff”. A year earlier, in 1894, both men were young painters at the outset of their careers but going nowhere fast. Then they received a commission to design a pictorial poster for a production of Hamlet. They joined forces, devised their pseudonym and created an original work which caused a sensation. Cinderella saw them continuing their collaboration and consolidating their inspired technique, one that involved collage and stencilling on large sheets of paper.

There is a distinct no-frills aspect to the Beggarstaffs’ art. That paper they used was ordinary brown wrapping paper. Each poster skimps on detail and uses the bare minimum of colours. Even their name, though exotic-sounding, has a prosaic source: “Pryde and I came across it one day in an old stable, on a sack of fodder,” Nicholson revealed. But those seemingly simplistic images composed primarily of outlines and silhouettes proved extremely effective. Seeing them illuminated in an otherwise darkened room makes for a singular viewing experience.

Hanging on the other side of Cinderella is a poster of the same scale, almost three metres by two metres. Once again size matters. The advertised performance this time is an adaptation of Don Quixote for the Lyceum Theatre. The knight-errant sits astride his horse, a shadow of his former self: he is solemn, shorn of Sancho Panza, and unaware of, or uninterested in, the giant windmill in the background. Scattered around these two captivating works are other posters, some smaller but none less impressive. The girl in the advertisement for Kassama cornflour carries a basket as sunlit-yellow as her golden backdrop. Dressed from top to toe in black, the only other colour in the picture is a pleasingly vital touch on her anaemic face: a dab of red for pursed lips. That career-launching Hamlet is also here. Similarly black-clad, the prince stands ramrod-straight, his gaze focused on the skull in his hands – only his eyes are as hollow as the skull’s.

As we take in more of these posters, it becomes harder to fathom why so many have been kept rolled up in storage for years. For it would be no exaggeration to claim that this superb exhibition showcases some of Britain’s finest graphic art. Unfortunately there isn’t enough of it to fill every room – not because the Fitzwilliam has been miserly in its approach but because Nicholson and Pryde only ever produced so much. After just a couple of years they found the work financially unrewarding and so amicably dissolved their partnership and went their separate ways. It is our loss: who knows what further cutting-edge wonders they might have dreamed up.

Not that the exhibition is over too soon. Its curator Stephen Calloway makes up the shortfall by presenting substantial work from each artist’s post-Beggarstaffs career. Nicholson turned out to be more ambitious and more prolific. We admire the broad selection on display. His iconic woodcut prints exude a crisp freshness, from his portraits of Rudyard Kipling and Queen Victoria to his pages from An Almanac of Sports and An Alphabet (lest we forget: D is for Dandy and L is for Lady). Nicholson’s oil portraits are true likenesses which consistently charm and move. Mrs Stafford of Paradise Row (1906) is a vivid depiction of a twenty-three-year-old washerwoman in profile, her elegant crimson blouse and flamboyant feathered hat belying her lowly status. The popular Girl With Tattered Glove (1909) shows Marie Laquelle, for a while Nicholson’s housekeeper and mistress, sitting with studied poise in worn-out clothes – and, according to Calloway’s caption, “just clinging to respectability”. Particularly arresting is the portrait of young artist Diana Low, whose outward stare and upright posture smack of confidence or defiance or both. Elsewhere we find Nicholson’s equally precise landscapes, his playful book illustrations, and also his remarkable still-life studies which constitute a master-class in verisimilitude. Gold jugs, silver caskets, brown crows and Miss Simpson’s lurid red boots: all are redolent of seventeenth-century Dutch art; all prompt us to squint for the slightest hint of a brushstroke beneath the photographic sheen.

Nicholson became an establishment figure and was awarded a knighthood for his artistic achievement. Pryde, on the other hand, drifted the other way, developing a fascination with those on the fringes of society or in its underbelly. His bohemian lifestyle impaired his creative output and when he began to struggle he declared he had “one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin”. Both his outlook and his misfortune engendered some suitably dark art. There is a whole room devoted to his “sinister corners” comprising gloomy slums, murky courtyards and dank alleys. Larger canvases overwhelm: we stand not in the cool shade but the chilled shadow of an imposing derelict building or burnt-out ruin watching billowing rags, skulking or sheltering figures, and other less distinct forms. Again and again, we come across Pryde’s recurring architectural motif, the arch. However, in a different room consisting of a suite of paintings entitled The Human Comedy the common link turns out to be a four-poster bed, often containing a poor soul wasting away. Sadness was conveyed in those Beggarstaffs advertisements for Cinderella and Don Quixote but in these scenes it is unadulterated desolation.

This is the first time that Nicholson and Pryde’s groundbreaking graphic posters have been exhibited alongside the best of their individual works. Those solo achievements are wildly diverse and richly rewarding. But it pays to linger that little bit longer at the Beggarstaffs section and to be enthralled by each poster’s homespun magic. Here we see what happens when two great minds think alike.

Beggarstaffs is exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until August 4. For more information see

https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/