Tom Bowling and Frank Bowling

Tom Bowling; Frank Bowling

Tom Bowling is a song written towards the end of the C18 by Charles Dibdin. Dibdin was a succesful (but not always financially) singer, composer and popular dramatist. Tom Bowlingis his most famous, and long lasting, song. In modern times it has been given an arrangement by Benjamin Britten. It is, of course, Britten and Peter Pears that have produced the benchmark recording of the arrangement.

The song is a eulogy for a sea captain, who has recently died. Although the song names him “Tom Bowling”, Charles Dibdin was actually mourning his brother, Tom Dibdin.

Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling,

The darling of our crew;

No more he’ll hear the tempest howling,

For Death has broached him to..

Tom Bowling is a lovely song. But, studying and singing it, one often wonders what sort of sea captain Tom was. Not a naval type; so a commercial sailor. Trading in what? One very profitable enterprise in the C18 (apart from privateering in the many wars) was the slave trade…

The song lyrics give no clue. Insofar as Tom’s sea career is mentioned it is: “Faithful, below he did his duty”. Otherwise the song concentrates on the manly merits of Tom and his friends, and the destination of his soul – “gone aloft”.

These speculations came back, somewhat incongruously, whilst visiting the Frank Bowling exhibition at Tate Britain. The only thing in common between song and exhibition is the fictitious surname of Tom and the real surname of Frank. But yet.. could there be some tenuous connection between captain Dibdin and Frank?

One of Frank Bowling’s paintings is titled Middle Passage. 

(“Middle Passage” refers to the ghastly voyage suffered by African captives on ghastly slave ships. The adjective “Middle” can mean two things: the middle stage of the slaves’ journey, after capture and trek in Africa, and before the journey to their plantations in the Americas; or to the second leg of the slave ships’ journey: from Europe to Africa with manufactured goods to trade for humans; to the Americas with human cargo; and then home with plantation produce.)

As the commentary card to Middle Passage relates, Frank Bowling’s ancestors were trafficked to his home country of Guyana, on the North East coast of South America. But I doubt if Dibdin/Bowlingwas involved in this trading. It seems from Charles’s biographical details that Captain Tom was in the East Indies, dealing in cargoes of we know not what (but perhaps sometimes human, even there?). For Charles was settled, at a late point in his career, on joining his brother in the East. This plan was forestalled by Tom’s death.

My Tom Bowling musings lead nowhere. Time for a few thoughts about Frank.

The Tate Exhibition is another revelation, following closely the successful showings of Sorolla and Vallotton (see last blog). Our major galleries seem, this year, determined to draw wrongly neglected artists back into deserved light.

(Perhaps Frank Bowling is not entirely of this category, as he has persisted as a successful artist over many recent decades, but not of the first rank in reputation, and not well known, I suspect, to many art lovers.)

I do not attempt a critical synopsis. For one, I was very soon completely lost by the curators’ explanations of the many, many different techniques involving paint (enhanced, diluted, applied this way and that) and the other materials that Frank Bowling uses.

What impresses and moves greatly is his bold and vast deployment of colour. Whatever the techniques used, most of his paintings (usually pretty huge) are hymns to colours. Sometimes they are purely abstract (he ran with the Abstract Expressionist pack for a while), sometimes they hint at some place (often Guyana), and sometimes, intriguingly, faint images, of South America, or his mother’s house, are imbedded.

Much chaos, or unpredictability of method, is involved in the creation of many of the works. But chaotic processes ultimately cohere in artistic triumph.

Frank Bowling is distrustful of the label “black artist”. But clearly his birth country and his mother both continue to have great influence. He is therefore inevitably drawn to the things that shaped existence of both country and family – but perhaps not including the other Bowling.

July 2019