Etchells, Frederick

Etchells, Frederick (1886–1973). British painter (of figure compositions, portraits, and still-lifes), architect, designer, and writer. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the son of an engineer, and studied at the Royal College of Art, 1908–11. In the second decade of the century he was active in some of the most avant-garde developments in British art: he showed six paintings at Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912, for example, he worked briefly for the Omega Workshops in 1913 before siding with Wyndham Lewis in his quarrel with Fry ( Etchells's textile designs are regarded as some of the best work produced by Omega), and he participated in the Vorticist exhibitions in London in 1915 and New York in 1917. From about 1920, however, he concentrated on architecture. He translated Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture (1927) and The City of Tomorrow (1929), and his most important building—the office block for W. S. Crawford Ltd. in High Holborn, London (1930)—has been described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘a pioneer work in the history of modern architecture in Britain'. Later Etchells specialized in church architecture and restoration, and with G. W. O. Addleshaw wrote The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (1948). In 1912 Vanessa Bell had described Etchells as a ‘somewhat uncouth north-country youth'; in 1931 she met him by chance in London and wrote to Roger Fry: ‘He is now a flourishing architect and has a house in Davies St. where he lives and has offices and employs several young men and a youngish woman who also lives there. He owned a car and also a house and a wife near Uckfield! Altogether I have never seen anyone so changed except that he is still a bore.’