The Blood Collages

JOHN BINGLEY GARLAND

1791-1875

THE BLOOD COLLAGES

John Bingley Garland, a successful merchant, pioneering Canadian politician, public servant and mysterious ‘outsider’ artist was responsible for one of the most ambitious and remarkable sets of collages produced during the nineteenth century. Garland developed a technique of combining cut-outs from architectural and old master prints with natural history engravings, passages of scripture, decoupaged papers and ink crosses of various forms then elaborately and copiously decorated with drips of blood in red ink. These bold and extraordinary, almost hallucinatory collages could be seen as proto-surrealist .

John Bingley Garland was the son of George Garland Snr, the head of a well- established family firm, Garland and Son of Poole, Dorset, engaged in the fish trade with Newfoundland. John Bingley Garland was sent out to Trinity, Newfoundland, to manage the family's business interests, where he became a Justice of the Peace and erected a church, St Pauls, in the town. He returned to England in 1821 and served as Mayor of Poole in 1824 and 1830 With his brother, George, he inherited the family trade in imported salted cod after the death of their father. He went out again, with his wife and children, to Newfoundland in 1832, entering politics, becoming the first Speaker of the Newfoundland Parliament. He returned to England in 1834 and ran the family firm until his death, in 1875, at Stone Cottage, Wimborne, Dorset, at the age of 83. A mention in J.B.Garland's will of 'all the mythological paintings in the Library purchased by me in Italy', is the sole indication that he had any artistic interests.

Nothing in Garland’s biography prepares us for the strange collages he created in the decades after his return to England. Garland’s most ambitious surviving artistic project was the large album acquired by Evelyn Waugh in the 1950s. It contains forty-one collage pages in a landscape format, made up from engravings carefully cut out from early nineteenth- century illustrated books, heightened with gouache and gold paper. Drops of blood in red India ink and extensive religious commentary have been added to the images, many of which are drawn from the natural world (flowers, birds, animals and reptiles, especially snakes), while others appear to be taken from luxurious books about religion and travel. Waugh's Blood Book bears an inscription from John Bingley Garland to his daughter Amy, dated 1 September 1854: 'A legacy left in his lifetime for her future examination by her affectionate father'. The album was probably intended as a wedding present. The first page of the book includes a table of contents under the heading of 'Durenstein! ', the Austrian castle in which Richard the Lionheart was held captive, and the theme of many of the plates are the spiritual battles Christians encounter on the road to Salvation.

The Victorian parlour hobby of collage was later to inspire artists in the twentieth century, from the searing mock propaganda of the German John Heartfield, to the Surrealist confections of Max Ernst and Sir Roland Penrose. Collage has played a central role in Post-War art, notably with Richard Rauschenberg in America, and the Pop artists Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake in Britain. The 'Blood Collages' of John Bingley Garland are, in their delicacy, and sophistication, in their use of images cut from expensive illustrated books and with their mysterious watercolour and manuscript embellishments, far removed from the nursery screens and parlour scrapbooks of Victorian Britain. They are remarkable and thought-provoking works of art.

The ‘Victorian Blood Book’ a manuscript formerly in the collection of Evelyn Waugh is now in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.