Category: Artists Page 1 of 2

It took me some time to cross the South Circular, a vicious road which hurtles from its junction with the North Circular and the M4 at Chiswick, across the Thames via Kew Bridge, and south through Kew and Putney, before veering on a wild course east through Clapham, Dulwich, and Lewisham, to end at the Woolwich ferry. In what was once the hamlet of Kew it severs Kew Green in two, leaving Saint Anne’s church, which originally sat in the centre of the green, stranded in the western half. Saint Anne’s was built in 1714 as a chapel of ease and has been extended several times, but my purpose in manoeuvring across the A205 was not to see the church but the raised churchyard which surrounds it on three sides, and in particular the graves of two eighteenth century painters: Gainsborough and Zoffany.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) and Johan Zoffany (1733-1810), both founder members of the Royal Academy, were phenomenally successful in their lifetimes. They had little else in common, apart from fortuitously ending up in the same burial ground: Gainsborough had requested burial there to be close to his friend and fellow artist Joshua Kirby, and Zoffany was resident in the parish, living on the opposite side of the river at Strand on the Green. In Britain Gainsborough’s star has never faded, but Zoffany’s reputation has been more inclined to fluctuation.

Born in Sudbury, in Suffolk, Gainsborough studied art in London. On his return to Ipswich, he enjoyed a very modest success with his landscapes and small head portraits of local merchants and squires. Only when he moved to Bath in 1759 did his fame and popularity grow, resulting in lucrative commissions from a stylish clientele in the fashionable spa town. His portraits became larger with life-size, full-length paintings of prominent social figures: actors, playwrights, musicians, and aristocrats.

But Gainsborough was inclined to be cantankerous, and he was soon complaining that he was “sick of portraits” and yearned to indulge his real passion for “landskips.” (sic)

After settling in London in 1774, he began to integrate his sitters into landscapes. And gradually the figures shifted to the margins until, in his later years, the sitters disappeared entirely, and he returned to the pure landscapes which gave him most satisfaction. Oddly, unlike his youthful works, these were rarely painted from nature but completed at night by candlelight with model landscapes set up in his studio, using stones, twigs, leaves, and mirrors.

And in the Victoria and Albert museum is his strange “showbox”: sometimes Gainsborough painted landscapes with oils on glass, and backlit them with candles in the dark box to be viewed through a magnifying lens.

Gainsborough is credited as a founder member of the British landscape school, and, with Reynolds, as the dominant British portraitist of the late eighteenth century. But I have never been able to summon much enthusiasm for his work. Faced with grey powdered wigs, elaborate fussy hats and dresses, the stiff poses of his sitters, combined with the sludgy colours of the landscapes, I generally find the dogs the most attractive components of the portraits. And when, as with the famous Blue Boy, Gainsborough’s work reveals the influence of Van Dyck in both costume and technique, I find the effect positively weird.

Zoffany’s work is so much more fun: a merry-go-round of swirling colours; wry, risqué, full of satirical allusion. And his life was as flamboyant as his paintings. Of Hungarian and Bohemian origins, he was born in Frankfurt and when he was seventeen, he walked to Rome to study art. Ten years later he was in England where David Garrick became his first major patron. His depictions of Garrick both in his theatrical performances and with his family secured Zoffany’s fame. Like Gainsborough he was in demand for portraits of actors, musicians, scientists, and society. In 1764 he was taken up as a court painter, joining the expatriate German community around George III and Queen Charlotte.

He combined the exuberance of his painting with a meticulous attention to detail. Commenting on the latter, the art critic Christopher Hussey described him as “the Jane Austen of English painting,” which is apposite only so long as it applies only to his representation of teacups and saucers.

Zoffany espoused the genre of conversation pieces, adapting it specifically to produce theatrical conversation pieces, filling his huge canvasses with large casts of instantly recognisable actors.

Similarly, in The Academicians of the Royal Academy, artists jostled with models and works of art. At the request of the Royal household, he worked for five years on the Tribuna of the Uffizi, but here he came to grief for the bigoted and prudish Charlotte was shocked to recognise two notorious “finger twirlers”, a derogatory term for homosexual men, in the crowded gallery. There were no more Commissions from Charlotte.

Unperturbed Zoffany set out for India, the paintings he produced there providing a wonderful insight into what William Dalrymple has described as the intermixing and mingling of people, culture and ideas in eighteenth century India before racial prejudices, arrogant imperial policies, and an ugly desire for British control swept all this away in the nineteenth century. Dalrymple uses a detail from Zoffany’s General William Palmer and Family for the cover of his book White Mughals; in the painting Palmer and his wife, the Mughal Princess, Bibi Faiz Bakhsh appear with their children and her sisters. In Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, Zoffany portrays a fight between the prize cockerel of the royal family of Awadh and that owned by East India Company men, a painting in which he and his friends also featured.

He painted an altar piece of the Last Supper for Saint John’s church in Kolkata, using local merchants as models for the apostles, a Greek Orthodox priest as a model for Jesus and, more controversially, the Police Magistrate Blaquiere for Saint John. Blaquiere who had feminine good looks and enjoyed cross dressing, had frequently used female disguise in successfully apprehending bandits, but he was unpopular with some Europeans because of his indifference to Christianity and his sympathy for local religions and customs. It was however Zoffany’s modelling of Judas on William Tulloh, an auctioneer with whom he had fallen out, which landed him with a lawsuit.

As he sailed back to England, Zoffany was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Dalrymple comments drily,

Lots having been drawn among the starving survivors, a young sailor was duly eaten. Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal. *

Back in England Zoffany produced a second notorious altarpiece featuring the Last Supper, this a commission from Saint Anne’s at Kew. He used fishermen from Strand on the Green as models for the disciples, modelled Peter on himself and John on his wife. Again, it was Judas who landed him in trouble; he had modelled the latter on his lawyer, who was also a churchwarden at Saint Anne’s. The church authorities refused to pay for the finished work, and he donated it instead to Saint George’s church in Brentford.

In search of the altarpiece, I crossed Kew Bridge and made for Brentford High Street, but Saint George’s had closed, being converted first into a music museum in 1963, and then, after a period of dereliction, and a delay owing to the discovery of graves under the nave, into “an exciting new gated development” with “upscale serviced apartments” in 2017. The altarpiece had been moved to Saint Paul’s, also in Brentford, where it has been relegated to a position high on the wall of a side chapel. And although I am amused by the story of its provenance, I have to admit that it is a very disappointing work. Sadly, I too would have consigned it to a dark corner.

But I found consolation in an excellent coffee and cake in the very welcoming Spire Café in Saint Paul’s church. Highly recommended should you find yourself in Brentford.

*William Dalrymple, White Mughals, (2002) p. 268

I was in search of someone else when I stumbled across Lucian Freud in Highgate West. There had been a storm the night before and the flat-topped grave was still wet, with a mix of early autumn leaves ripped from their trees and plastered to its surface, some already a yellowed gold while others retained the vigorous green of mid-summer. But it was the surface of the grave itself which arrested my attention and held me entranced, for beneath the leaves it seemed suffused with a lambent radiance, a lustrous turquoise glow.

It was, no doubt, a trick of the spectrum, a refraction of the autumn sunlight caught in the damp surface of the stone, or a malfunction in my eye to brain co-ordination. When I returned later the surface of the grave was a uniform grey and so it appeared in my photographs, but for a fleeting time I had been bewitched, mesmerized by the glowing colour.

It was felicitous that such a phenomenon offered itself at Freud’s grave for his paintings have a magical luminosity. His early works are surreal depictions of people, animals and wilting house plants often in strange juxtaposition, and his description of cyclamen as divas,

They die in such a dramatic way. It’s as if they fill and run over. They crash down; their stems turn to jelly, and their veins harden.*

reveals a mastery of words as well as paint.

The later portraits must rank amongst the greatest of the twentieth century. The figures in his paintings emerge from sombre backgrounds of muted interiors, bare floorboards, stained mattresses, and the heaped sheets which he bought from rag and bone sellers to wipe his brushes after each stroke.

Against these stark, inhospitable backgrounds his often-naked figures burst from the canvas. Their flesh is impastoed, textured, highly coloured, vibrant, and disturbing. These unsentimental portraits are of his friends: the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the benefits supervisor Sue Tilley; his fellow painters: Bacon and Auerbach; and his family: wives, children, and lovers. Nothing is romanticised and when relationships deteriorated this was mirrored in the paintings, which, as he repeatedly claimed, were all autobiographical,

Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait.*

My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings.*

The subject matter is autobiographical. It is all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really.*

But his biographers have supplemented Lucian Freud’s painterly autobiography, and if the manipulation of light playing on his grave seemed appropriate, the wording on the stone seemed odd. Beloved Father and Grandfather?

This does not sound like Freud whose failings as a father are well documented. He acknowledged fourteen children, others have estimated more, but did not live with any of them. His son David McAdam Freud described the absent and distant Lucian with wry understatement as “hardly father material.” Frank Paul states that the longest time he ever spent with his father was when he sat for his portrait. The portraits of his daughters while classed as affectionate by some critics are considered intrusive and inappropriate by others. When his daughter Annie would not let her own daughter sit for Large Interior, London 11 (After Watteau) Freud’s response was spiteful and ugly.

His personal relations do not make Freud any less talented an artist. The arguments about great art versus morally problematic artists are well rehearsed. Without defending the indefensible, it may be possible to separate the art from the artist. Moreover, Freud’s personal failings were petty and selfish, not evil, he was not a Gaugin or an Eric Gill. Yet when I reflected upon the strangely unconvincing epitaph, I liked his paintings a little less.

*Quotations from William Feaver, Lucian Freud: Life into Art, Tate Publishing 2002.

See also Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist, Vintage Publishing, 2013

The first time I saw it Patrick Caulfield’s After Lunch caught and held my attention and it continues to do so whenever I visit the Tate Gallery. The cartoonish, black outlines of the deserted restaurant, tables, chairs, the half obscured fondu set, the bored waiter staring across empty space, are suffused with an eerie blue light. Then, in contrast, from the wall at the back of the restaurant strident colours blaze out, a picture within a picture, a photomural of the Chateau de Chillon. In front of this but barely obscuring it Matisse-evoking goldfish swim around a plastic castle in an aquarium.

Clearly it is not a Swiss restaurant, more likely one of those themed restaurants which enjoyed popularity in the England of the sixties and early seventies. I have no idea what first drew me to the painting save that I wanted to know where and why, and what happened next.

After graduating from Chelsea Art School in 1960, Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005), visited Crete where he was inspired by the hard bright colours and fascinated by the Minoan frescoes. Later, looking at the postcards he had bought, he realised that the printer had added black lines around objects in the frescoes. Intrigued, he began using similar black outlines in his own work.

He developed a graphic style, depicting everyday objects – lamps, glasses, clocks – with deceptive simplicity in flat, bold colours: the banal rendered intriguing. At first he used household gloss paint on board, later oil paint, and finally acrylic on canvas.

But it is always the larger stylised interiors of empty public buildings, offices, and restaurants, which attract me most. I am fascinated by the saturated planes of colour bound by heavy back lines  contrasting with the photorealistic landscapes on the walls. They hold me spellbound, transfixed by the unease with which I might regard a snake charmer. For although I find them alluring there is also a sense of foreboding  about them. The anonymity and melancholy  with which I feel quite comfortable in the works of Edward Hopper, here seems sinister and menacing.

When Caulfield died, William Feaver’s obituary recalled  a discussion about famous artists’ epitaphs. Someone had asked  Caulfield what he would put on his own gravestone. The response: “DEAD, of course.” And that is exactly what it says on his grave. Designed by Caulfield himself, the curt monosyllable is laser-cut through a block of granite like a  child’s letter puzzle. Eye-catching amidst the crosses and angels, open books and obelisks, it brings me to a halt as my first sighting of his painting did. And I am not alone, for the arresting design exerts a magnetic lure over amused visitors. The distinctive grave has become one of the most popular in Highgate East.

Perhaps people empathise with the blunt statement, welcome its frankness. I recall a friend who, wearied by delicate, well meant, euphemisms said crossly, “You don’t lose people. You lose your keys. People die.”

It is a view with which I sympathise and by all accounts Caulfield’s funeral was a joyful celebration of the life which preceded the death. And yet, fascinated  as I am by the memorial, its stark, bleak message chills me, fostering the same disquiet which I experience when I stand in front of those rather threatening interiors.