Sir Bennett Lewis Godfrey Salmon RA

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Sir Ben (Bennett Lewis Godfrey) Salmon KBE MVO MiD, late Major RE, RA,  1919   – 2014, was a celebrated painter and Royal Academician, and a wartime camoufleur, who resided in the last decades of his life at Charltons, a Grade II* Queen Anne house in Woolfont Crucis, Wilts, to which he removed in 1993. His paintings of the landscape ’round, and his portraits of many of its inhabitants, exploded forever the artistic coterie’s dismissal of the Woolfonts and their adjoining country as ‘chocolate box’.

He was the uncle of Lewis David d’Avigdor Salmon OBE.

Early life
Sir Bennett Salmon was born, on what he always called ‘the more commercial and professional fringes of the cousinhood’, to Godfrey Salmon, the distinguished solicitor, and his wife, the former Ottoline Mocatta-Camondo. The ‘cousinhood’ to which Sir Bennett referred was that of the most distinguished Jewish families in the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the families of Goldsmid, Montefiore, Goldsmith, d’Avigdor, Sassoon, Henriques, Samuel, and a handful of others. Amsterdam and London having been refuges, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, for Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike, and with too few of each group safely to restrict themselves to marriage within their own kindred and minhagim, Sir Bennett’s recent ancestry included Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and indeed some Mizrahim (one great-grandmother was in fact a Kadoorie by birth, even as another was a Thoroughly Ashkenazi Rothschild of a minor and comparatively modest branch).

The ‘more commercial and professional fringes’ referred to the Salmon’s connexions, the Bischoffsheims, Barent-Cohens, and Glucksteins, and the Lyons family. Sir Bennett’s own paternal grandfather’s family was one of the earlier Jewish inside members of the Stock Exchange; his great-uncle was Sir Bennett Montague Salmon KC.

A literal cousin, ‘Cousin Danny’, was Daniel Simon (Abravanel-Lindo-)Lawrenson, Lord Hedgerley, who was killed as a subaltern in the Western Desert before he could succeed his father as Marquess of Chiltern. Another very distant cousin, through the Messels, was Antony Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowden.

Unlike his cousin Lord Hedgerley, Bennett Salmon attended the City of London School, whence he went on to the Slade. His time there was not altogether pleasant, as he was even then a resolutely old-fashioned painter, a born Realist whose natural idiom should have been considered ‘sound’ by Munnings and Sir Luke Fildes.

Events overseas made the issue moot. The Second World War broke out in his twentieth year, and Ben Salmon went off to war.

Career
Swiftly commissioned, Bennett Salmon served as a camoufleur officer RE – the number of painters who spent the Hitler War as Sapper officers is really rather extraordinary –, briefly under Sir Roland Penrose, then seconded to General Sir Frederick Pile’s staff at Anti-Aircraft Command, before being transferred to bear a hand in Fortitude South and Op Quicksilver. His part in deceiving the Third Reich over the Normandy landings, he ever after considered to have been the high point of his life.

After demobilisation, Major Salmon RE, who had been Mentioned in Despatches for his coolness and gallantry during a tricky few minutes at Dover, declined to return to the Slade, and was mildly amused by the suggestion of Camberwell, where Realism was being yoked in service to Socialism. He did a few courses at Heatherley’s, and then struck out on his own. Major Salmon, as such, subsisted for some time upon portrait and landscape commissions from County gentry, City men of a Conservative bent (and their wives), landowners, and military officers. Sir Alfred Munnings PRA, and, after his death, Violet, Lady Munnings, made a point of recommending the young artist: that this gained him a reputation amongst fellow artists as a mere ‘Society painter’ and ‘painter-in-ordinary to anyone wearing a blue rosette’ troubled Major Salmon not at all, so long as he was painting what and who he liked, how he liked.

Precious modernist and metropolitan critical disdain notwithstanding, his increasingly substantial fees, in guineas, continued to come in, as indeed they did and never ceased to do, freeing him to continue his project of reclaiming and restoring traditional style in his art. His career of painting the portraits and landscapes of the landed and Conservative classes certainly contributed to his appearing in the New Year Honours of 1984 (CBE) and 1988 (KBE): Mrs Thatcher approved his Realism and his conventionality, and he had by then painted Lord Hailsham, Lord Whitelaw, and the then Sir Geoffrey Howe.

Although he was never called upon to paint HM the Queen, he did paint HRH the Duke of Edinburgh twice; Clementine Churchill, Sir Winston’ widow, on the occasion of her elevation to a life peerage in 1965 as The Baroness Spencer-Churchill GBE; HRH the Princess Alice the Duchess of Gloucester; three views of the Royal Stud at Sandringham; and an equine portrait of HMQ’s horse, Burmese. He was created MVO in 1989.

In the 1980s, critical resistance to him and his work, which had never much impinged upon the opinions of the public, suffered further diminution, owing to the popularity of his large and panoramic painting, Lord’s: The First Innings: The Ashes of 1981: which happened, of course, to be the Second Test of what became celebrated as ‘Botham’s Ashes’. Despite, one might say, its public popularity, the critics were forced to concede its technical brilliance, and, by extension, to drop their long-standing sneering when it came to its painter (or at least the too open expression of it. All the same, it was Sir Roger de Grey who in 1984 became President of the Royal Academy, as the other non-Modernist candidate, in a political compromise).

In 1984, driving up to London from Newlyn, having there given a lecture upon the Newlyn School, Ben Salmon became so frustrated by traffic on the motorway that he turned off to ‘dawdle by choice rather than [by] compulsion’ along the A350, and thence onto country lanes. It was then and there that he first saw the Woolfonts and the country ’round.

In later years, after almost a decade’s time of comparing his own recollection of the Woolfonts to the dismissals of them, by such fellow artists as knew of them, as ‘chocolate box’ villages (a term they had long applied to him, as a ‘chocolate box artist’), he determined to retire there and wrestle with the landscape for such time as might be left to him. He approached the then Lord Templecombe – now Charles, Duke of Taunton – at the club of which both were members, to enquire about the possibility; as the two knew each other through Mrs T, Army circles, Tory circles, and, most importantly, through Charles Templecombe’s godfather the late Sir John Betjeman, the matter was arranged not only easily, but in fact enthusiastically.

<p align="LEFT" class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;border-width:initial;border-style:none;padding:0in;font-weight:normal;line-height:100%;">Sir Bennett expected perhaps five or ten years’ time in which to paint the Downs and the Woolfonts; in the event, he was granted one-and-twenty. Acting on the future Duke’s advice, he made himself a pillar of the community at once, by painting a new pub sign for the Blue Boar in Woolfont Magna. He was very active in community affairs, serving as, amongst other public duties, a supernumerary and volunteer Master in Art and Design at the Beechbourne Free School. He later painted a new pub sign for The Woolpack in Woolfont Crucis, and restored the historic sign of the King’s Head in the Vale.

<p align="LEFT" class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;border-width:initial;border-style:none;padding:0in;font-weight:normal;line-height:100%;">He also designed, though he did not quite live to execute, the traditional – although, of course, transformed by genius – roses-and-castles artwork for the narrowboat Chard, which became the eighteenth birthday present to James Fitzhugh-Holles-Clare-Malet from his uncle the Duke of Taunton. That work was in the event carried out from Sir Bennett’s designs by his chief pupil and successor, Martin Lawton-Martyn RA.

<p align="LEFT" class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;border-width:initial;border-style:none;padding:0in;font-weight:normal;line-height:100%;">Sir Bennett Salmon died in harness, as he should have wished, on May Day of 2014, painting on the Downs, having just completed his last landscape en plein air; he was found dead, paintbrush in hand, at the foot of his easel, by a rambler later that afternoon. Charltons passed to his nephew Lew Salmon OBE and Melanie (Mrs Lew) Salmon. By the date of his death, Sir Bennett had transformed the image of the Woolfonts and the Downlands, making them a popular destination for serious artists.

Notable paintings

 * General Sir Frederick Pile GCB DSO MC
 * Ashburnham Place: Upon the Eve of Destruction
 * FM the Rt Hon. the Earl Alexander of Tunis KG GCB OM GCMG CSI DSO MC CD PC PCc
 * Chartwell from the Garden Front
 * FM the Baron Harding of Petherton GCB CBE DSO & Two Bars MC
 * Lord’s: the Schools Match (Eton v Harrow) 1965
 * HRH the Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh
 * The Hirsel, East Front
 * The Rt Hon. The Baroness Spencer-Churchill
 * The Royal Stud, Sandringham
 * Chiswick Steps: The Boat Race  (1974)
 * Red Rum: Aintree, the Grand National, 1977
 * Brigadier the Duke of Taunton KT CB DSO & Bar MiD JP DL  (1978): the Tenth Duke, father to the current Duke
 * Trooping the Colour, 1979
 * HRH the Princess Alice the Duchess of Gloucester at Barnwell
 * Lord’s: The First Innings: The Ashes
 * Wolfdown House from Wolf Down  (1994)
 * Coytmoor Wood  (1997)
 * The Invincibles: The Woolfonts Combined 1st XI defeating Hants CCC in a Rose Bowl Friendly
 * Winter, The Woolfonts, January 2010: Community preparations against thaw and flood
 * HG the Duke of Taunton  (2013)
 * The Sons of Abraham  (a triple portrait and ‘conversation piece’ of Sir Bennett, the Revd Noel Paddick, and Deputy Headmaster Sher Mirza at table, after dining)
 * Wolf Down on May Morning  (his last painting)

Personal life
<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;line-height:100%">Prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, he had had an understanding with Hannah Levy Silver, the daughter of David Levy Silver, afterward Sir David, of the merchant banking house Silver Lawrenson & Co. It was no more than an understanding, owing to David Levy Silver’s disapproval of painters as a class (the future Sir David openly stated that he had no objection to Hannah’s marrying Bennett’s elder brother Samuel, a rising young City merchant, or, in time, his younger brother Lewis, who aspired to become a barrister, but he was not having a ‘wild, Bohemian artist’ marrying his daughter). This was a source of amusement to Hannah and Bennett both, as Bennett was then and ever remained as respectable and conventional as ever had been his solicitor father: as discreet in his life and as impeccable in his tailoring, and the antithesis of the popular image of the artist.

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;line-height:100%">David Levy Silver also distrusted Bennett’s Disraelian disinclination to interest himself even outwardly in religion and religious observance.

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;line-height:100%">The pair married, when war came, civilly and almost secretly, at the Registry Office, in defiance of the wishes of the bride's father and of the Levy Silver family. They intended upon a religious ceremony when matters should have settled; but the question was not reopened after the war, as Hannah was killed in the Blitz.

<p class="western" lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal;line-height:100%">Sir Bennett never remarried, devoting his attention to his nieces and nephews, and particularly to Lewis Salmon QC’s son and namesake, whom he made his heir. Upon Sir Bennett’s death, he was found to be wearing, and had evidently worn for some seventy years, a locket containing the portrait miniature – painted by him – of, and a lock of hair from, Hannah Levy Silver as was.