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The letters C&RE on the New Naturalist book jackets stand for Clifford and Rosemary Ellis; their names are usually spelt out in full on the rear fly leaf. Today these jackets are their best-known work, though book lovers may know some of their other jackets before and after the war, for the Collins Countryside series in the 1970s, or their design for John Betjeman’s Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Within the art world they are remembered more as innovative teachers, Clifford Ellis having run the Academy of Art at Corsham Court for a quarter of a century with his wife Rosemary as a leading member of the staff. But information about them is quite hard to come by. There is no biography, and very little about them on the internet. I attempted a short biography of ‘C&RE’ (as I shall call them) and their work for my book, The New Naturalists (1995), with the help and cooperation of Rosemary and her two daughters, Penelope and Charlotte. This more detailed account builds on that foundation, and, once again, I have relied heavily on information and comments from the family.

Clifford and Rosemary Ellis were at once husband and wife and an artistic partnership. Their collaboration began in 1931, the year of their marriage, and subsequently almost all their published freelance work is signed jointly. By the time the New Naturalist jackets were designed they had taken to using the cipher c&re to express their joint authorship. Such consistent use of a joint cipher is unusual, and needs a little explanation. The initials were put in alphabetical order, not out of any sense of seniority. In the 1930s and ‘40s, ‘r’ sometimes preceded ‘c’ to indicate where she was the initiator and had carried out most of the work. Penelope Ellis explained that its point was that they considered their freelance design work to be the product of two minds ‘collaborating in flexible harmony’. They seemingly never discussed with a third party who did what, and their work on book jackets was usually done behind closed doors. Both were distinctive artists and respected each other’s styles and preferences. The handwriting on the surviving New Naturalist artwork jackets is invariably Clifford’s (as is most but not all of the correspondence), but it would be wrong to assume that the hand that held the brush was normally his. The final artwork was only the last stage in a lengthy process of sketching and thinking, selecting and eliminating, and the creative impulse behind the design was, as they saw it, an equal joint effort. ‘c&re’ indicates a rare and complete fusion of creative thought.

Carting: two straining horses, carter and part of a hay wagon by Clifford Ellis, 1925. Sketch on rough paper in pencil and sepia wash (27.7 x 41.6 cm).

Clifford Wilson Ellis was born in Bognor, Sussex on 1 March 1907, the eldest of four children born to John and Annie Ellis. Artistic talent ran in the Ellis family. His father was a commercial artist, while his paternal grandfather, William Blackman Ellis, was not only a painter and naturalist but, for a time, a skilled commercial taxidermist. ‘Grandfather Ellis’ was also a countryman in the old-fashioned sense with a deep understanding of the land and its wildlife (in Clifford’s boyhood he kept a tame otter which was allowed to roam over part of his house in Arundel).

Another well-known artist in the family was Clifford’s ‘Uncle Ralph’, Ralph Gordon Ellis (1885–1963), a landscape painter and designer of inn signs. During his long career he designed hundreds of signs, especially for the Chichester-based Henty & Constable brewery. One of them, for ‘The Mayflower’ in Portsmouth, was the subject of a postage stamp in 2003. A blue plaque now marks his former home on Maltravers Street, Arundel. Around 1950, Clifford took his younger daughter, Charlotte, to Uncle Ralph’s studio, and she remembers him explaining to them both how inn signs are designed to make an impact from a distance, well above eye level, and how that was a very different matter from being seen close to, on the easel. Clifford, in turn, was to become fascinated by the way subjects are transformed when seen at different angles or against different backgrounds.

In 1916, his father having joined the Royal Engineers and been sent to France on active service, the nine-year-old Clifford spent several formative months with his grandparents at Arundel while his mother, expecting another baby, coped with her two small children at her parents’ home in Highbury. On vividly recalled walks with Grandfather Ellis, Clifford discovered nature and wildlife in the unspoiled West Sussex countryside, including the magnificent great park of Arundel Castle with its herds of deer – an experience, enhanced on subsequent holidays, that made a profound and lasting impression on him. From Grandfather Ellis he learned how to preserve and stuff animals, as well as to arrange their pose and painted backdrop to make them look as lifelike as possible. There are family memories of the young Clifford boiling small mammals to reveal their skeletons, and, once, his causing consternation by fainting halfway through the dissection of a rabbit. Clifford also acquired an assortment of slightly unorthodox pets: lizards, frogs and stick insects.

In November 1916, following the birth of his sister, Clifford rejoined his mother and family in Highbury to sit the Junior County Scholarship which enabled him to attend the Dame Alice Owens Boys’ School in Finsbury. He was by now what his later colleague and fellow teacher Colin Thompson described as ‘a voracious reader’, a habit he kept up all his life. He became a frequent visitor to London Zoo which he used as a kind of living reference library to study the way the animals moved and behaved. Throughout his life he enjoyed visiting zoos, exhibitions, galleries and museums, both at home and abroad, filing away perceptions and images in his mind. ‘Clifford was deeply interested in visual communication,’ recalled Charlotte. ‘His visual memory was extensive and nearly always deadly accurate.’ The jacket of British Seals, for example, was based on his memories of the postures of seals at London Zoo.

Clifford and Rosemary Ellis (1937), in their studio with the cartoon for the mosaic floor for the British Pavilion, Paris Exhibition of 1937. Photo: Kate Collinson/Norman Parkinson Studio (Kate Collinson was Rosemary Ellis’s sister).

After leaving school, Clifford attended two full-time courses in London art schools, first St Martin’s College of Art, then the Regent Street Polytechnic, before taking University of London postgraduate diploma courses in art history and art education – where he was particularly inspired by the innovative ideas of Marion Richardson. All this time his perceptions of art were expanding. From his family he had thoroughly absorbed the William Morris-derived notion of ‘art for all’ – the infusion of artistic principles in the arts and crafts, as expressed in commercial art such as posters and advertisements. As far as he was concerned, natural history, art, educational theory and graphic design were interlinked aspects of a whole. Visits to exhibitions by progressive artists like Paul Cézanne, or the opportunity of seeing Paul Klee paintings brought to lectures by Roger Fry, opened his eyes to their freshness of colour and the visual impact of forms reduced to their essentials.

Leaves from Rosemary Ellis’s scrapbook of c. 1944–5, made up of fragments of designs, collage and printed, in watercolour, pen and printing ink, double spread (23 x 37 cm).

Having been a student teacher at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in 1928 Clifford became a full-time member of staff there. He was placed in charge of the first-year students and taught perspective – a technique and skill he mastered with ease and whose historical development always fascinated him. One of his young students there was his future wife, Rosemary Collinson. Born in Totteridge, North London in 1910, Rosemary, like Clifford, came from a family of craftsmen and artists. Her grandfather was F.W. Collinson, a leading designer of art furniture and co-founder of the fashionably aesthetic firm of Collinson & Lock. Her father, Frank Graham Collinson, trained as an artist and cabinet maker before going into the family firm and subsequently founding his own furniture business, Frank Collinson & Co, Designs for Decorations & Furniture.

Rosemary was also related to a famous writer, her maternal uncle, Edward Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) – ‘Uncle Jack’ as Rosemary knew him – the leader writer and author of innovative modern detective novels, notably Trent’s Last Case, who, while still at school, had invented the ‘clerihew’, the humorous rhyming form of verse named after him. His subsequent published volumes of clerihews had great popular success and many eminent emulators.

Rosemary’s father had joined the Volunteers where he rose to become colonel, a rank he retained on their later absorption into the Territorial Army. He served in the Great War at that rank, initially in training but soon enough on service, first in France and then in Italy. There, having survived the war, he succumbed to the terrible worldwide flu epidemic in 1919. Rosemary, with her sisters and brothers, had been taken by their mother to live with her parents in their large house at Netley Marsh in the New Forest. Rosemary therefore had a similar, if lengthier, formative experience to Clifford’s, of a wartime country childhood. She, too, developed a deep fascination for nature and animals in and around the Forest, and always retained particularly fond and vivid memories of her grandfather’s pigs and rare-breed herd of Gloucester park cattle. After the war Rosemary and her younger sister moved with their widowed mother to London; their elder siblings had, by then, flown the nest.