Watermeads, Mitcham: one of EG Handel Lucas’s famous local landscapes. He was a prominent Victorian-era artist who lived in the shadow of Croydon Parish Church. This painting is now owned by the Wandle Industrial Museum
SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Born to a family based on Church Street and named after a great musical composer, he became one of Victorian England’s leading painters, as DAVID MORGAN explains
Self-portrait: Handel Lucas, from 1887
I wonder how many child prodigies there are in Croydon today?
Are there musicians, artists, or gymnasts? Are there linguists, athletes or chess players?
In every generation there are children who achieve things that usually can only be done by adults.
Back in the 1860s, right by the old Parish Church, on Church Street, Croydon had its own child prodigy, whose art skills from a young age marked the lad as being special.
Number 87 Church Street was the home of the Lucas family, as well as being their shop premises. Edwin Newton Lucas was a tailor and outfitter, who did a particular trade for the military and clerical personnel. He also had a passion for classical music.
Lucas was so enthusiastic about his favourite composer that he even christened one of his sons George Edward Handel Lucas. Born on May 4 1861, Handel Lucas became a prince of the palette.
Edwin Lucas’s love of music was reflected in his business life, too. From mid-1871, he ran a tailor’s business at what is today 186 London Road. To boost his income, on two evenings a week, he offered singing lessons, too, to boost his income.
Business register: Edwin Lucas’s tailor’s shop listed alongside the butcher and bakers, and Almshouses along Church Streetaround the 1870s
According to a newspaper advertisement from 1872, Lucas was running an elementary group on a Tuesday and an advanced one on a Wednesday, with the cost to the singer of either between five and 10 shillings a term. The business expansion possibly never hit the high notes, and in 1875 he gave up the London Road shop and focused on Church Street.
From the age of seven, Young George attended Whitgift Middle School, a school set up back then to educate the poor of the parish.
He drew and painted from an early age and, although he had no great art education, he exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists when just 14, one of the youngest to do so.
Portrait master: Lucas captured Jesse Ward, the founder of his local newspaper, one of several commissioned portraits
After leaving school, George continued to paint, using a shed on Church Street for his studio. His speciality, even back then, was still life, painting flowers with great detail. From the sale of these paintings, the family funded some artistic training. George studied life drawing in the evenings at Heatherley School of Fine Art and for a short time studied at the St John’s Wood Art School.
A breakthrough came when he was 17. He had a painting accepted for the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. “Roses from the Vicarage” sold on the very first day for £30 – worth close to £4,500 today.
An article appeared in the Croydon Advertiser in 1887 about Lucas’ artistic talents. In the 10 years since, he had been displaying at the RA each year since, but none of these pictures took less than six months of intense work to complete.
One of the paintings he was working on at the time, “Dust Crowns All”, had already taken fifteen months of work and still wasn’t finished. Lucas was keen to move on from his still-life subjects to more figurative matter.
However, he had to continue to paint his flowers because they sold well, unlike some of the newer material. It wasn’t good economics to spend months on a project and then not find a buyer.
In 1895, Lucas married Clare Mary Stunell. They had two daughters, Elsie born in 1899 and Marie a year later. Life wasn’t easy for the family, as Lucas’s artistic output slowed to two or three major paintings a year, and their income fell as well. The growing public interest for Impressionism meant that Lucas’ great attention to detail in his painting fell out of fashion.
Fake or fortune: check out the back of your artworks to see if you have a ‘genuine Lucas’
One new market opened up for him, though, as the Pears soap company bought some of his work to put into their popular annuals. They appeared as coloured 15×12 inch prints.
“The Cause of Many Troubles” was bought by Pears in 1903 for £106 – close to £15,000 in today’s money – and was published in 1906.
“Of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven” was bought for £150 in 1905, but it was never published.
The third purchase by Pears was “Some of Life’s Pleasures” which was published in 1909.
Lucas sold this for £81, because he was desperate for money to pay off his debts.
But the worries and concerns of paying his bills and providing for his family saw Lucas suffer a breakdown in 1908. That was the year that he and his family moved to Brighton.
‘The Cause of Many Troubles’: playing cards, dice, a tombola, a picture of a racehorse and a beer flagon. THere, menacingly, on the wall is a pistol. Was this some kind of biographical messaging from Lucas?
There, Lucas teamed up with two photographers to begin a venture in a new medium. They started a company called The Handeltype Syndicate Company. Lucas filed a patent for a new photographic process but after a year the company collapsed and he, together with friends and family, lost their money.
He eventually found employment in Streatham, designing Christmas cards for a friend. He still maintained an interest in photography, inventing a printing process called Handelchrome.
Sadly for Lucas, like all his inventions, it did not make him any money. For the rest of his life, money, or the lack of it, was an issue.
He did have some success when Brooke Bond, the tea company, bought several of his paintings to be included in their calendars. “The Stolen Nest” appeared in the 1929 production. Looking at this painting, one could think that the scene was painted beside the River Wandle.
We know that Lucas painted some local views and a few years ago the Wandle Industrial Museum in Mitcham was bequeathed one of his works, a painting of “The Watermeads, Mitcham”.
One of his striking portraits of prominent Croydon folk was the one he completed of Jesse Ward, the founder of The Croydon Advertiser.
‘The Stolen Nest’: this scene may have been based by Lucas on the nearby River Wandle
In 1936, Lucas the child prodigy now aged 75, heard that his wife had been knocked down in a road traffic accident. He suffered a fatal heart attack.
Did GE Handel Lucas fulfil his potential? Probably not.
Despite some great reviews in the 1880s and 1890s, Lucas never earned enough, nor did he come from a wealthy enough family, ever to ease the worries he felt about paying his bills. His attempts to move into photography floundered.
The detail on his still-life painting was quite remarkable. Where are those paintings that he sold from the shop in Church Street? If they are lurking in a loft or hidden in an attic, you might be onto a winner.
Prints of Lucas’s works – often taken from a dog-eared old Pears annual – quite often appear at auction today, usually with a sale estimate of around £50. But Lucas’s original paintings also sell at auction, too: one, of a bird’s nest and flowers on a mossy bank, oil on wooden board, sold in April this year for £650.
The last word on Handel Lucas came from a critic back on the 1890s: “When the present and succeeding generations have passed away, this little gem of the painter’s art will survive to prove that one man in Croydon, at least, knew how to paint, and could unite patent toil with Heaven Born genius.”
- David Morgan is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster, who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Other recent articles by David Morgan:
- Empire pioneer who put Croydon on the map in Australia
- Minster memorial celebrates life of Victorian woman reformer
- How Melbourne’s White Flats is linked forever to Croydon
- Purley schoolboy who reached for the sky in Battle of Britain
- Goodwyn’s list that takes us back through to Tudor times
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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A very good Sunday Supplement as usual and David writes: “I wonder how many child prodigies there are in Croydon today? Are there musicians, artists, or gymnasts? Are there linguists, athletes or chess players?”
Perhaps the “This is Croydon Culture” people should have asked that question, then we might have found out some interesting things to discuss and perhaps see, rather than the few mediocre things we have experienced from them so far this year.