Rooke Noel

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Biografie:
Noel Rooke (1881-1953)
Noel Rooke died on October 5, 1953. Such a life as his seems so unmistakably to partake of the permanent as to mitigate the shock of his passing. He might well have been expected to live longer. His father, Thomas Matthew Rooke, lived to be ninety-nine, and would almost certainly have lived longer had he not been compelled, in the first world war and in his hundredth year, to leave his home in Bedford Park and move to the Midlands. Both father and son were distinguished artists, but while painting was the father's life-work Noel's profession was teaching. He taught at the L. C. C. Central School of Arts and Crafts until his retirement in 1947. This, perhaps, we may be tempted to regret, as if his main work had been the practice and not the teaching of art he would doubtless have left behind him a much greater number of paintings, including paintings of his favourite subject, mountains. But of course his old pupils might tell a different story.
How good a painter of mountains he was, many members will know from having seen work of his at our own exhibitions. One in particular of his exhibits at Savile Row is fresh in my memory. It was a view of the Aiguille Verte and the Dru done near the Flegere. Its great virtue was, I think, scale. I have never seen a water-colour drawing of a mountain which more convincingly conveyed size and distance. Another striking feature of this picture was the skill with which the appearance of rock or snow half obscured by mist was given.
It was the occasional privilege of seeing such work as this that made some of us wish Noel Rooke had made painting his principal pursuit. Indeed painting was not even the form of art that he mainly taught. For the greater part of his time at the Central School he was head of the school of book-production. Typography and book-illustration were thus two of his main concerns. It is interesting to notice his opinion as to how these can best be made to harmonise with each other. In his monograph on ' Woodcuts and Wood Engravings,' which was published by the Print Collector's Club in 1926, he wrote' Woodcuts and Wood Engravings are the only means of pictorial expression in a printed book which are not antagonistic in character with the rest of the book.' It was therefore natural that he should take up these arts himself ; and of the many delightful cuts and engravings, dating from the 15th century onwards, reproduced in that monograph, none is, I think, more charming than the cut showing two girls picnicking under a tree on page 35· He omitted to say whose work it is, but we can guess. Fine examples of his woodcuts may also be seen in a little book published by the Golden Cockerel Press in 1925 entitled The Birth of Christ. It consists of Saint Luke's account, the text being that of Barker's quarto edition of the Authorised Version of 1612, and both the arrangement of the book and the illustrations are Noel Rooke's. He made and exhibited cuts and engravings of a wide variety of subjects including, of course, mountains. There is, for example, a remarkable woodcut of the summit of the Aiguille de Blaitiere, worked out from a drawing which he made, surprisingly enough, at Montenvers. This, considering that it is from a drawing made at that distance, and comprising only the minutest fragment of the view that was before him, is astonishingly forcible. He had a way of picking out a tiny bit of a view and making a fine picture of it.
All this must have been a later development than his work with the brush. That, at the latest, must have begun at the Slade School, to which he went after leaving school in the more ordinary sense (in his case the Lycee de Chartres and the Godolphin School) and before he went, as a pupil, to the L. C. C. Central School. From the first he must have been attracted to mountains as subjects. As early as 1909 he was painting in the Mont Blanc group, and painting at high altitudes. There is in the possession of Mr. F. Gurney Salter a beautiful watercolour of a view taken on, and looking up, the Glacier de Trelatete, with the Tete Carree at the head of it. Although he was intensely serious in everything he did, Noel Rooke was never solemn; an example of his playfulness is shown in this very early work where two figures are seen climbing up a steep and smooth-looking chimney below the Dome de Miage on the left side of the picture. They are in the middle distance and minute, but their obviously boundless energy and intense enjoyment are most engaging ; the latter is positively infectious. In spite of this, as is the case with all his work, the fidelity and care, and indeed the reverence, with which the picture has been painted, are unmistakable.
Not very many members of the Club have been elected on a qualification in which, in accordance with rule 39, contributions to mountain art played a part. Noel Rooke was one of them. But, going where he went, he was far too spirited and gifted a man to fail to become a mountaineer. In his early visits to the Alps he often reached considerable altitudes alone. It is not difficult to imagine what an excellent early training for a mountaineer that must have been. And by the time he came up for election to the Club in 1921 he had made, as a competent member of a guideless party, such expeditions as ascents of the Aig. de Pierre Joseph, the Aig. du Moine and two of the peaks of the Aigs. Rouges d 'Arolla, the crossing of the Cols des Vignettes, de 1 'Eveque and Collon, and traverses of the Petite Dent de Veisivi and Mont Blanc de Seilon, and after his election he continued to avail himself of every chance of climbing whether likely to provide an opportunity of sketching or not. He climbed and painted in Wales, Cumber land and Skye, as well as in the Alps. He was once lucky enough to stay at the post office at Glen Brittle at a time when the other guests there consisted of Norman Collie and Colin Phillip (O tempora !), and he brought back, I remember, a superb water-colour of Sgurr Alasdair. And there was another lovely one of Scafell from the top of Great Gable.
He was about as near to being a perfect companion anywhere, but
especially on a mountain, as anybody can be. I never felt this more, I think, than when his and my one and only unpremeditated bivouac took place one September night when we two and Woodward had failed before dark to find a direct way down from the Glacier du Mont de Lans to the Chalets de la Sell e. We were ill equipped for a night out, and it was neither warm enough nor comfortable enough for any sleep to be possible. But Noel Rooke, not at all a robust man, kept us almost happy with the good humour with which he took the whole affair and the good talk with which he entertained us through the hours until there came the intense cold which immediately precedes the dawn.
After his marriage in 1938 he did not go so frequently to .the Alps. In his later years he did a good deal of boating on the Thames in a small and very trim house-boat of his own design, and came to know the river well from Putney almost to its source. Last year he was planning to write a book on the Thames, and had collected a good deal of material for it, which perhaps included sketches of his own.
"We cannot hope to meet with many of his like.
L. W. Clarke
Quelle: Alpine Journal Vol. 59. Nr. 289, 1954, Seite 452-454


Geboren am:
1881
Gestorben am:
05.10.1953