Gordon Bottomley - Influences

Influences

Bottomley began writing poetry in the 1890s and was influenced by the Romantic poets and even more so by Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His first book The Mickle Drede and Other Verses was printed privately at Kendal in 1896.

Bottomley included many famous writers, poets and artists as friends, whom he kept in contact with mainly through letters. He did make occasional visits to London, and also received visitors at his home. The most notable of these friendships was with the artist Paul Nash. The two men where brought together in 1910 by Nash’s love of poetry and Bottomley’s extensive knowledge of painting. Bottomley encouraged the young artist and in exchange Nash made several designs for Bottomley’s plays that he exhibited or used as illustrations. Despite increasingly divergent tastes in art, their friendship survived and a prolific lifelong correspondence between the two men was published in 1955.

Bottomley studied the work of artists and was a dedicated collector. He bought artworks when he could afford to and his friends also gave him their art in gratitude for his support and friendship. In 1949 Bottomley and his wife Emily gave their personal art collection of six hundred paintings, prints and drawings to the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle, Cumbria. The bequest included a nationally important collection of works by the Pre-Raphaelites including pictures by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes, Ford Madox Brown, Elizabeth Siddal and Simeon Solomon. The collection also included work from artists of other genre including those of Stanley Spencer, Samuel Palmer, Albert Moore, Frederic, Lord Leighton, Henri Fantin-Latour, Lucien Pissarro, William Nicholson, Walter Crane, Charles Conder, Jessie Marion King, William Morris's daughter May Morris, William Rothenstein, Charles Ricketts, and of course Paul Nash.

Bottomley edited the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg in 1922, whom as a correspondent he had encouraged from 1915. The composer Edgar Bainton (1880–1956) was a close associate, and set The Crier by Night to music.