In the previous entry under NEWS in December 2023, I wrote how I was preparing to paint examples of the Lewes twittens. The result is ten smallish (9 x 5) paintings on board of 4 twittens. You’ll find these under ‘Recent Work’. Local people know these sites well, but a background note on the twittens might be useful and interesting. They date from the Saxon-Norman period and run in Lewes, North to South off the present School Hill and High Street. There were, it appears, some 17 such twittens, of which six are deemed lost or have been reconfigured and renamed, for example, Station Street. A further set running North – variously named ‘Street’, ‘Passage’, ‘Lane’, ‘Rise’ or ‘Banks’ – numbered 11. The word ‘twitten’ itself is said to derive from the C13th ‘twyten’ – close to the German ‘twiete’ (a narrow lane or alleyway) and the later German ‘zwischen’ (‘between’). (See Kim Clark, The Twittens. The Saxon and Norman Lanes of Lewes). Another related and literally firmer suggestion is that the term denotes a prescribed distance between two plots of land and served as a marker of ownership.
Personally, I was drawn to the twitten’s paradoxical function and effect, or affect, as an open passage from A to B experienced as curves and bends, closed doors, high walls, and bricked in window-sites – of openness and confinement combined. Lewesians and visitors to the town will have their own reaction; mine has led me to view other larger and more open, but still local historical sights, as possible subjects for painting: The Needlemakers and Harvey’s Yard, for example, or the cluster of old and new buildings alongside the Ouse going south from the bridge on Cliffe High Street. Suggestions of other sites are welcome.
As a prospect for painting on a literally broader scale, this takes me back to the art of two favourite painters – who I named when Liz and I first started the website – the two prominent American painters of the ‘Precisionist’ movement in New York in the 1920s and 1930s: Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. Here are a couple of examples of their work:
It may seem odd to look to the commanding sights and a painting style of the 1920s and 1930s in America to treat present-day subjects in Lewes, but it’s worth noting that these present-day sites have their own long histories. The Needlemakers, for example, was built around 1820 and produced candles before the factory production of surgical needles, only subsequently to fall into semi-dereliction before re-emerging as a collection of craft shops and studios in the 1970s and therefore something like we know today. Harveys, meanwhile, dates from the 1790s and was established in 1859 to become the oldest independent brewery in Sussex. Both will, no doubt, present their own challenge as subjects to paint.
Meanwhile, some notes on a few of the present twitten paintings:
‘Bull Lane’ extending to ‘Paine’s twitten’, is well-known for its association with Tom Paine, pamphleteer, author, firebrand and inspiration to revolutionary movements in America and France, who fell foul of some of the leaders he at first inspired, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Paine was resident here in Bull House, from 1768, when it was a grocer’s shop, owned by Samuel Olive, whose daughter, Elizabeth, Paine, at this time an exciseman, married, before his departure for America in 1774. My painting shows only the wall plaque to Paine. Beside it and the subject of the next painting, is the satyr said to be medieval and to belong to the building’s earlier life as an Inn.
‘Pipe Passage’ was originally a mill and was most famously purchased, on an impulse it seems, by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1919. Woolf marvelled at the ‘completely round or semi-circular’ rooms but chose, in the event, not to live there, but, as we know, at Monk’s House in Rodmell.
‘St Martin’s Lane’: I was struck by the (almost) present-day graffiti making an appearance on an original Saxon site. In June 2022, with Putin’s approval, the HSPC (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) sold its Russia unit to Expobank. Would this satisfy the graffiti artist?