AND ANOTHER THING
What art can do for you, if you have the sense to try it
PAUL JOHNSON The exhibition, Private Painters in Public Life, which is at the London School of Eco- nomics until 3 December, illustrates how busy and often highly-placed people seek respite in the pencil and brush. About the show itself I say nothing as I am one of the participants. But it surprises me that more of those who are in stressful jobs — Cabi- net ministers and business tycoons, for example — do not try to paint. It isn't diffi- cult. If you have the smallest skill in draw- ing you can begin, and with every hour you spend sketching your proficiency improves. The pleasure is intense and it is not merely Innocent but virtuous, for to use the apti- tude God has given you to record the beau- ty of His creation is an act of piety. It is therapeutic. The concentration required is total. In the act of looking systematically at the three-dimensional world of reality, and getting it down on a two-dimensional space, the eye, the brain and the hand form a mes- meric circuit along which sensations, per- ceptions, commands and critical feedback pass every microsecond to the exclusion of all else. When you stop it is like coming out of a deep sleep or a dive into the depths of the ocean. In one sense it is hard work, but work so remote from anything else you do, and using such different faculties of the mind, that it is refreshing and restorative.
I often think of the amateur artists of the past. The Benedictine monk of St Albans, Matthew Paris, greatest of our mediaeval chronicler-historians, used to relax his weary, ink-stained forgers by inserting an occasional drawing in his text. Very illumi- nating these sketches are, telling us much more than he can possibly have imagined. Most prominent men who turned to draw- ing in the old days did so for a practical purpose. Early navigators, lacking charts, usually had on board someone who could make accurate drawings of coastlines and harbour entrances in ink and watercolour. Sometimes captains drew themselves. Sir Francis Drake was a practised water- colourist. So were many martial men at one time. Prince Rupert, when he was a prison- er of war of the Austrians in Linz castle, learned to draw and paint with proficiency (as well as seducing the daughter of the governor). He found his hobby came in useful both as a general and as an admiral. The library of the old India Office contains vast numbers of watercolours, both primi- tive and exquisite, of forts, harbours, river-
crossings and unexplored mountain ranges, done by officers of the old John Company army in the service of the English Raj. In 1969 the Stationery Office published two delightful volumes of them, edited by Mil- dred Archer. Even the memsahibs got to work. Some of them, such as Lady Sarah, wife of Lord Amherst, governor-general from 1825 to 1828, achieved results of almost professional quality. Indeed, taking the 19th century as a whole, the ladies were better than the gentlemen.
The French produced a mass of amateurs who recorded their colonies in Africa and south-east Asia. When Bonaparte invaded Egypt he took along with him a crowd of artists, both, amateur and professional, who together produced a visual record of the country and its antiquities which has never been excelled for thoroughness and beauty. More than one of his marshals was a skilled draughtsman. Joachim Murat, the dashing cavalry commander whom Bonaparte made king of Naples, was a fine landscape artist. A flashy sort of fellow, with a gift for designing his own exotic uniforms, he loved to paint in elaborate detail the many princely properties he won by his sword. There used to be a roomful of Murats in the Elysee palace in Paris. Maybe they are still there — or perhaps President de Gaulle, a legitimist, had them removed.
But of course the outstanding French amateur artist was Victor Hugo. Indeed I am not quite sure whether one ought to call him an amateur. After a voyage up the Rhine in 1840, during which his romantic spirit was inflamed by the Gothic castles he saw, art jostled with poetry to take posses- sion of his creative powers. In the year 1850, when he thought his poetic genius had died, drawing occupied all his time. I vividly recall seeing his work properly dis- played for the first time when the Victoria & Albert Museum ran a big show of it in 1974 (I still have the catalogue). Sombre castles of the mind ranged themselves alongside 'cliffs of fall', caverns and gloomy lighthouses, dashed off in Indian ink and sepia washes by a master of chiarosctiro. Hugo was prolific in drawing as in every- thing else, and there must be more than 3,000 of his works in the Bibliothbque Nationale and the two Maisons de Victor Hugo in Paris and Villequier. He was a profound influence on the equally sombre and spiky Bernard Buffet, who died recent- ly — the last French artist anyone has heard of now that painting has died out in Paris.
We have no equivalent to Hugo in Eng- land, since William Blake was a profession- al artist who happened to be a poet, rather
than the other way round. But Thackeray drew well for Punch, illustrated his own Irish Sketch Book and, according to his lat- est biographer, D.J. Taylor (who shows a number of unpublished specimens), came close to setting up shop as a professional artist. But he found, as we all do, that there is more money in words than lines. That was the conclusion Evelyn Waugh reached after early efforts to earn a living as an illustrator. But what a tragedy he did not continue to draw after he became a world- famous novelist! He might have thrown off his gloom — painting is an unfailing anti- depressant — lived longer and given us more of his incomparable tales.
Before photography, most well-off par- ents engaged drawing masters for their chil- dren, especially girls. George III had all his children taught, including the dreadful Duke of Cumberland who murdered his valet; a drawing by him of Windsor Castle survives in the library there. It also houses several albums of watercolours by Queen Victoria, who was taught by Edward Lear and a funny little man called Leitch, a for- mer scene-painter under David Roberts and Clarkson Stanfield. At Victoria's urging her daughter-in-law, Alexandra of Denmark, went to Leitch to be taught. Prince Philip carried on the royal tradition, painting in oils and acrylic and, as we all know, Prince Charles is a watercolourist — he was lucky enough to be taught by such masters as John Ward and the late Edward Seago.
Winston Churchill was fortunate in his tutors too, especially John Lavery and his vivacious wife Hazel. In his use of art as therapy he was an example to the rest of us. How he set about it can be found in a beau- tiful book, Winston Churchill,. His Life as a Painter, which his devoted daughter Mary Soames published in 1990. There is also Churchill's own account, a little essay of 32 pages, Painting as a Pastime, which he pub- lished exactly half a century ago. Therein he tells you what art did for him, in times of joy and sadness alike. If you go to the LSE you will find what it continues to do to a wide range of public personalities — and can do for you too, if you have the sense to try it,
Previous page
