All, all are going, the old familiar faces
The sudden death of Glynn Boyd Harte, aged only 55 and at the height of his considerable powers, is a tragedy for British art, already in a desperately anaemic condition under the ScrotaSaatchi-Rosenthal oligopolistic dictatorship. For Glynn was a true artist in the grand British watercolour tradition: a superb draughtsman and a hard-working one, becoming more skilled with every day that passed, loving nature and the urban world of shapes, colours and reflections which he rendered on paper with such exultant glory; a gay (in the true sense) and dandified figure, full of fun and jokes, a great party-goer and giver, but also a devoted family man whose greatest delight was to create beautiful homes to live, work and scintillate in.
I once had the impertinence to give him professional advice: 'I wish you would stop doing all those shop-fronts and try your hand at a heavyweight, grand building. Imagine you are Piranesi or Muirhead Bone.' To my astonishment he agreed and did some magnificent impressions of London churches. I bought one of the finest, a dramatic coloured pencil study of St George's Bloomsbury, which now hangs in my hall alongside drawings by Sir Edward Poynter and Lord Leighton and a seascape by an artist Glynn much admired, S.J. `Lamorna' Birch. However, he was soon back at façades because he could get more ravishing highlights and shades into them. The last work of his I bought, in watercolour, is called 'J. Evans, 35 Conway Street'. This amazing doorway and its deepblue tiled surrounds is a major work of art in itself, but Glynn rendered it with a virtuoso display of watercolour technique and draughtsmanship, which turned it into a masterpiece of daring. Turner, who rightly valued courage as the major virtue in art. would have taken off his funny, paintstained top hat to a man who could gamble for such high aesthetic stakes and pull it off. I cannot think a better watercolour has been painted in the past half-century. I bought it as soon as the show opened, to the fury of a dozen other collectors who took several seconds too many to make up their minds. It hangs in my library, in good company: alongside a brilliant little oil by Julian Barrow of the front door of The Spectator (what a striking Christmas card it would make) and not far from a masterly drawing of an Academy model by Etty, the greatest painter of nudes England has ever produced. Nearby, too, is a ravishing watercolour of an old Highland woman by Landseer, another master Glynn admired. I should add that his last show, in December at the Curwen, called Apples and Artichokes, featured small-scale watercolours of French fruit and vegetables, done with wonderful vivacity in his Normandy house. He sent me a postcard saying he had had a massive heart attack and so was painting small objects indoors to save energy. But, with typical gallantry, he devoted himself to fine art right to the end of his strength. He recalls to me the most moving remark in the entire history of art, spoken by Gainsborough on his deathbed to Reynolds: 'We shall all meet again, and Van Dyck will be of the company.'
Glynn's life and work are a reminder that fashion art, boosted by the official cultural establishment, is not the only one, though the BBC and the well-drilled art critics like to pretend it is. Alongside the crooks and frauds, who get all the vulgar media publicity and make vast sums — though the fashion-art galleries which promote them grab up to 60 per cent of the sale prices — there exist, happily, hundreds of painters and sculptors who continue to practise fine art. They constitute, as it were, an honourable government-inexile, ready to restore civilised rule once the fashion-art dictatorship is overthrown or collapses under its own arrogance, fatuity and bile. Some of these gifted men and women, who often write to me asking 'When will the Dark Ages of Art end?', are considerable artists and will in time be recognised as such when the chamberpot brigade are forgotten and the Turner Prize is remembered, if at all, as merely a bad joke. Meanwhile there are still, thank God, a surprising number of discerning collectors who buy the works of these gallant practitioners of fine art and give them places of honour in their houses. Their children, and certainly their grandchildren, will have cause to bless them. So I salute Glynn Boyd Harte as a major artist who devoted his life and strength to the greatest of all causes: the skill in depicting the visual world which, since 30,000 BC, lies at the heart of civilisation.
I have actually been weeping while I wrote that. something I hardly ever do, being a dry-eyed, cynical and battle-hardened student of the world and its wicked ways. But it is hard to lose a friend one likes and admires at such an early age and when still capable of great work. It is a dreadful thing to part even with those who are much older than you are, but at least they have had a long, run-rich spell at the crease and return to the pavilion with their bats held high. It is worse, by far, when your contemporaries die, people you have known at school or Oxford or in your regiment or as fellow hedonists half a century ago in the Paris of irresponsible young men. These horrible blows come with deadly regularity in your seventies, leaving gaps which can never be filled. There are, as Lamb once remarked, special friends of old with whom alone you can share a particular kind of joke, and relish or deplore in an intimate way passing events. No one else will quite do. When such a contemporary dies, an important part of yourself, which you value and need, goes with them, leaving you diminished, smaller, your range of pleasures and interests suddenly contracted. Men die so young, comparatively. Of the dozen or so ushers at my wedding, for instance, only two are left.
Worst of all is when you lose friends who are younger, sometimes much younger, than you, chaps you had counted on to be still around when your time comes, who would safely see you out and be productive and flourishing when you slowly fade into oblivion. This has happened to me so many times recently that I was almost prepared for the blow of losing Glynn Boyd Harte. Oh, well — we still have the girls, women, old ladies, to comfort us.
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