This is the saddest picture I ever saw. It was commissioned, among more
cheerful portraits, by Sir Christopher Ondaatje, one of the great patrons of
British art, who planned to open a unique literary museum in an early
nineteenth-century farmhouse (to which a laundry extension had been added in
the 1850s). This building is set a little above his home in the remote
cliffs near Countisbury on the north Devon coast, and was once used to
service it. The refurbished fabric of the farmhouse has now become the
setting for his gallery-museum. He has filled it with books by writers past
and present, accompanied by their portraits in a variety of forms –
photographs, bronze and marble busts, charcoal drawings, watercolours, oils,
copies of original paintings and new portraits of living writers by members
of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. It is an extraordinary omnium
gatherum.
One of the Royal Society’s artists who was involved was Michael Reynolds, who
had won the Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture in 2003. He wrote to me from
Italy asking whether he might come and paint me when he was next in England
during the spring of 2007. I hesitated before agreeing. Portrait painters,
after all, must rely on the co-operation of sitters in much the same way as
biographers rely on the help of all those who occupy their acknowledgement
pages.
There are people who view having one’s portrait painted as an exercise in
vanity – and for some celebrity portraiture perhaps this is true. But for me
it is a disturbing experience. When I work, trying to build up pen portraits
in a biographical narrative, the flow of energy goes from me towards my
subjects. I lose myself while concentrating on them and, all being well, I
feel much better after this holiday from myself. But when sitting for a
portrait the current of energy travels in the opposite direction, what feels
to me the wrong direction. It is difficult to be natural. Is that rictus of
a smile, which has become fixed across my face, natural? Or am I behaving
like a tame animal trying to please? I would prefer to close my eyes, hiding
part of myself. That would seem more natural – but also rather rude. To talk
or not to talk? That is the question.
Michael Reynolds wanted to talk and wanted me to talk. He arrived for a
preliminary inspection the day before our sittings began and told me that,
several years before, he had reviewed my Life of Augustus John and it was
this which had decided him to choose me as a subject. As with John, drawing
lay at the heart of all his work, including what Brian Sewell described as
“the stout and studied portraits of his later years”. I noticed he looked at
none of the pictures on my walls. He was here to inspect the rooms and see
what was best for his work. The dining room with its blue wallpaper got the
morning light and he chose this for our sessions, which were to take place
in the afternoons. Settling himself tightly in a corner with his back to the
window, he put up his easel between us, placed the empty canvas on it, and
left it there for the night. Each sitting over the next four days was to
last some four hours, with an interval for tea.
Reynolds was a couple of years older than me and approaching his mid-seventies
with caution interrupted by spasms of irritation. Like me he had come
through a serious operation for cancer, and was soon pressing various
recipes on me, asserting the merits of some magic drops of an untranslatable
Dutch substance that had come highly recommended by a Lebanese doctor he had
met in Spain. I envied him his fierce and fantastical optimism.
I sat in a solitary upright chair facing his corner encampment and we began
talking. Brought up in Brighton and educated at Brighton College of Art, he
had taught intermittently at various art schools, and in the early 1960s had
gone for a year or two to Rome, having won an engraving scholarship at the
British School there. After his return, he opened a wine shop in Norfolk and
had become, he assured me, quite a scholar of vintages. He had been married
and had four daughters, but he did not strike me as a family man. He was
gregarious but solitary. When he spoke of his achievements it was less as an
artist than a cook: his slowly prepared Basmati rice, his “heavenly loaves”
of wholemeal bread (“brown and crusty like granny’s dream world”) and, best
of all, his triumphant chestnut soup with its lavish fresh-ground pepper and
the juice of a lemon. No salt.
On matters of art he brimmed over with formidable opinions. No woman should
seriously think of taking up painting – she would simply be wasting her
time. There were of course a few exceptions to this rule – Artemisia
Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, Gwen John – but no others came to mind. He
himself had mathematical rules for portraiture, measuring the size of a
canvas and placing the head with formal discipline on it. This was how the
old masters worked – very far from “the flabby canvases” that had become
fashionable in the late twentieth century.
In 1977 he had won the Sunday Times “Landscape into Art” prize and been
elected to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. But though he became
proficient in what he curiously called “skilled art”, his accomplished
landscapes, still lives, nudes and portraits were seen as belonging to a
chapter in the history of art that was long past. His contempt for all
experimental and abstract work had sometimes reminded people of that most
outspoken opponent of modern art, the late president of the Royal Academy,
Sir Alfred Munnings. But the Royal Academy had changed since Munnings’s day,
and though Michael Reynolds often exhibited there, he felt more at home as a
member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, earning his income mainly
from commissioned portraits (there are examples of his work at the National
Portrait Gallery and in the Royal Collection).
To win a place for more traditional contemporary pictures, he founded, with
the support of Brian Sewell, “The Discerning Eye” exhibitions in 1989. This
was a successful innovation of annual open-submission shows restricted to
small paintings and sculpture, the dimensions of which were strictly
limited. The exhibits were selected by a mixed panel of collectors, artists
and critics whose independent judgement would be clear for all to see. By
the mid-1990s, however, after a series of rows over some panellists’ choices
(he believed that to gain publicity the collectors were being replaced by
celebrities), Reynolds angrily resigned and, in despair over the British art
scene, exiled himself. By the time he wrote to me he had been mainly living
abroad for a decade, exhibiting his work in Europe and dividing his time
between Italy, which he loved, and Holland where he was looked after by a
married couple.
Michael Reynolds, as I soon discovered, was very well read. But he had little
good to say about most twentieth-century writers with the exception of Iain
M. Banks and Patricia Highsmith. He challenged me to come up with some good
new authors and so we began an animated conversation. I had the feeling that
he wanted me to persuade him to take a more buoyant view of contemporary
writing and with it perhaps of contemporary life. That, at any rate, is what
I found myself doing. For though he was oddly optimistic about his esoteric
medicines and had plenty of energy, his judgements were imbued with a
belligerent pessimism. He appeared to enjoy being in the wilderness – Brian
Sewell referred to him as a “gadfly and maverick . . . in every aspect of
his life and work an outsider”. But I had the feeling he would have liked to
find himself with a more secure and celebrated reputation (providing he did
not have to compromise or be polite to anyone).
I did not examine the portrait between our sittings, since he did not want me
to look at it. He grew, I realized, very anxious over his paintings while he
was at work on them. The design of my portrait, he declared at the end of
our last sitting, was eminently apt, but he needed more time to “give it
intensity”. Since he never painted from photographs, he would welcome a
couple more sittings when he returned to England the following year. I
hesitantly agreed to this and when he left, heaving the canvas and easel
into his car, I gave him a copy of my wife, Margaret Drabble’s, Oxford
Companion to English Literature. I felt rather nervous over his response to
this present (particularly as it had a portrait of Vanessa Bell by Duncan
Grant on the jacket), but he was delighted, describing it in a letter from
Italy as “a marvellous piece of scholarship in succinct, elegant English”.
He was putting it to good use, he added, by picking out names of
contemporary writers and firing them off to Ondaatje for inclusion in his
“Elysium hall”.
Over the next few months we exchanged six or eight letters. “I am sad that the
portrait of you is not more developed”, he wrote. “I don’t care that it’s
distorted since, as I told you, all my work is distorted, but this is
concealed given a little more time.” His letters, written in a fine italic
hand, were warm-hearted and generous. He thanked me for allowing him to
“reach into your banks of charity” and give him two more sittings, the dates
of which we fixed.
In March 2008, shortly before these sittings were to take place and not having
heard from him for two or three months, I wrote again and received a reply
from his agent informing me that his cancer had returned and spread
dramatically. He was in a hospital in Holland where he had been told there
was no hope of recovery. “Michael asked me to send you the following
message, especially for you. He is not able to write by hand. We have to do
this by email.” His message was set out in short paragraphs.
The great roulette wheel is about to stop spinning for me and we can all see
it ends in zero.
So, my dear Michael, I bitterly regret I shant be able to go on playing with
your portrait.
He sent his love and disappointment at not being able to continue our
conversations together. I had not been greatly looking forward to these
extra sittings, but now felt mean about this reluctance and suddenly found
myself missing them. A few days later I read an obituary in the Guardian by
William Packer describing him as
one of the most naturally gifted painters of his generation . . . building up
over the years a deserved reputation as a master of the contemporary
portrait . . . . His misfortunes were to a degree much of his own making,
for he was a difficult man, irascible, combative . . . capable of being
formidably offensive.
But, Packer continued, his talent had won him the admiration of his peers, and
his support for work he admired, their affection. Reading this, I felt he
had guided me through the angry entanglements of his personality so that I
too had come to feel an affection for him.
Six months later I received an invitation from Christopher Ondaatje to attend
a private opening of his literary museum on the cliffs of north Devon. It
was a bewildering get-together of images and books. The old laundry contains
early printing presses, the earliest being a large cast-iron Albion (similar
to Caxton’s wooden press). They are overlooked by Shakespeare, Milton,
Chaucer and others. The ground floor of the house is largely given over to
the Bloomsbury group and its associates or bêtes noires: Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot
and members of the Memoir Club. The copy of a well-known portrait of Vita
Sackville-West shares one corner with an original portrait of the young
Violet Trefusis by the Scottish Royal Academician, William Rankin. Here and
on the first floor the dead keep amiable if unlikely company with the
living: Doris Lessing, Pepys, Michael Frayn, Tennyson, the Brontës . . . .
Throughout the museum there are busts of Bernard Shaw, Ian Fleming, Dickens,
Arthur C. Clarke, Rossetti and others.
As I climbed the stairs to the first floor, I saw hanging on the wall over the
half-landing above me Michael Reynolds’s picture. It was a shock: I don’t
think I have ever seen so melancholy a portrait. I looked away and back
again several times: and each time I looked, it appeared more profoundly
sorrowful than my immediate memory of it.
The Times obituary had noted that among the most intense paintings Michael
Reynolds painted while fighting cancer during these last four years were a
series of self-portraits. Externally this portrait I am looking at has a
resemblance to me, but essentially I believe it to be a concealed
self-portrait of the artist. I wondered whether, after another couple of
sittings, he might have lightened my expression, and I his spirits. In its
present state, as if held in limbo, I sense I am a mask through which the
painter is looking at the world beyond that corner window where he sat
during those cold spring afternoons: one Michael confronting another.
Michael Holroyd’s books include Basil Street Blues: A family story,
2000, Mosaic, 2004, and, most recently, A Strange Eventful History: The
dramatic lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their remarkable families,
2008.
