While Frampton was Clapham’s artist, at Rickmansworth
two quite different painters were responsible for the
decoration of those areas used by the whole school – the
Chapel, Assembly Hall and Dining Room. They were Louis
John Ginnett (1875-1946) and Charles Knight (1901-1990).
Ginnett, the senior figure, was the dominant partner in the
project. He grew up in his father’s Sussex circus. After a brief
attempt, like Frampton, to study law he became an artist and
taught students. Before his work at the RMS, Ginnett had
decorated the hall at Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar
School (now Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College). He
taught at the Brighton School of Art until his death.
In the RMS Assembly Hall he designed and painted the 16
blue-on-red plaques or medallions, four depicting the
elements and the others the 12 months of the year, symbolised
as people. Ginnett’s work dominates the Chapel and
demonstrates his talent for painting and for stained glass.
Ginnett painted the four striking frescoes illustrating The
Sermon on the Mount, The Gathering of the Children, The
Adoration of the Magi and The Ascension. He also painted
the four, long stained glass windows displaying appropriately
female saints and the 36 artlessly charming small stained glass
windows depicting child angels playing a variety of musical
instruments.
Knight was a distinguished artist. In 1940 he was recruited
for Kenneth Clark’s Recording Britain project, an ambitious
scheme set up at the outbreak of World War II. The aim was
to record buildings and views before the war and
development obliterated them, and to boost national morale
by celebrating the country’s natural beauty and architectural
richness. In later years he exhibited regularly at the Royal
Academy and there is a large collection of his paintings in the
V&A and British Museums, as well as in Brighton.
Given the sheer artistic work undertaken by Ginnett at
Rickmansworth, it is no surprise that the last lock of paint
had not dried when the school opened for the first time in
the spring of 1934 – the first stage of the building had begun
in December 1929.
Charles Knight, like Ginnett and John Denman, the school
architect, was a Sussex man. As a youngster he was employed
by Denman’s firm and it was presumably this connection with
Denman – and no doubt a Masonic tie as well – that helped
him get the Masonic job at Rickmansworth.
Among his work at Rickmansworth, Knight painted the 16
square plaques in the dining hall, each representing an animal
or plant from which food is derived. Between them these two
artists gave the three public spaces of the school their unique
decorative character.
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Above
The West window
Below
A window depicting Horatius
This article is part of a feature which first appeared in Masonica,
the magazine of the Old Masonic Girls’ Association, in 2003
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