Roger de Grey

There is no surviving correspondence between Roger de Grey and Ruth Borchard. However, having seen a Self-Portrait by de Grey at an Arts Council exhibition in 1962, she had then written to him, offering twenty guineas for this or maybe another self-portrait, finally receiving the picture the following spring.

Signed elegantly, unobtrusively, 'de G' in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, Roger de Grey's self-portrait was probably painted during 1960-63, when he was in his early forties. At first sight, his countenance appears to be subtly reduced to a background feature, a pale reflection in the large, plain gilded mirror. As such, this may seem to be a painting literally of self-effacement (a term defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as 'The keeping of oneself out of sight or in the background'). Yet de Grey's wan, poised presence and agile-witted demeanour radiate insistently throughout the picture, his gentle, beatific regard creating a just off-centre yet ineluctable focus for the viewer. Friends and colleagues all stressed his modest, self-deprecating nature, his sincerity and horror of the meretricious and slapdash. Norman Rosenthal, the art historian and exhibition curator (Exhibitions Secretary at London's Royal Academy from 1977-2008), characterised him as 'a man of energy and exceptionally intelligent vision'. De Grey once described himself as 'a very limited painter', asserting that 'You come to terms with what you can do. There are all sorts of imaginative areas I cannot enter.' In this painting he appears to have come to terms perfectly with what he can do, the result being a subtly moving and cultivated work of art.

To the right of the artist's head we glimpse at a slant a tiny portion of the canvas he is working on. A long horizontal white bar (the edge of what may be a marble mantelpiece), a rectangular panel of rusty golden brown wall reflected to the left of the window, and golden struts (those demarcating the mirror frame, and more delicate bands around the window panes) all combine to endow the painting with its own informal grid pattern. This is complemented by other geometrical shapes – the circle of the clock face (it appears to be three o'clock  in the afternoon), the white and gold segments of the fan (mediated by delicate orbic designs), the globe of the porcelain egg. De Grey once said: 'I would like to have been an abstract painter. Abstract painting fascinates me from the sheer imaginative invention of it [...] And I would like to have been that sort of person' – adding with characteristic self-deprecation, 'You just have to accept that you are who you are.' But the abstract inventiveness of this self-portrait shows that he was innately 'that sort of person'; to a fair degree an 'abstract painter' in figurative apparel.

A keen collector of objets d'art, he said, 'I'm just as happy looking at small things as great masterpieces, and I love mixtures of things and styles.' The mix of precious objects in sharp, bold focus on the mantelpiece seems to carry subtle symbolic overtones. The heavy, black antique clock may remind us of time passing, our mortal nature even. The gilded miniature vessel with its possibly red-lacquered inside – and the fan behind making a lovely kind of sail – may suggest the notion of life as a precious kind of voyage. The near centrepiece porcelain egg in its golden carapace – a sort of 'pearl beyond price' – may speak of spiritual re-birth, 'the world', as de Grey described it, 'as a glittering marvel'.

The garden shimmering beyond the window, introduces de Grey's own self-avowedly key subject, that of nature observed and 'its colour sensations extracted' on the spot, with 'the addition of textual complexity [taking] place in the studio. Though here, of course, nature has been observed, painted and distilled on the spot in the studio’ (or drawing room). 'An obsession for working out-of-doors has been the motivation and the limitation of my painting,' he once said, and many of his paintings show the intimate landscape around his studio in Kent and heat-hazed wider estuary views around his house in France (he shared his studios with his wife, the artist Flavia Irwin (1916-2009), herself a painter of sensitively wrought abstracted works, themselves oscillating with ethereal light and tremulous lines). He was keen on portraying the juncture between studio and garden, habitation and landscape, as in a number of pictures representing Interior/Exterior (a recurrent title). A 1990 painting of that title (Collection: Royal West of England Academy, Bristol) shows the somewhat amazed-looking artist, casually but smartly dressed in bluish purple sweater, white shirt and pale indigo cravat, sitting on a stool on patio decking, brush in right hand, his face and body three quarters-framed by rectangular French windows.

A self-portrait (also from 1990, in the National Portrait Gallery Collection) depicts him in his studio, his reflected head and upper torso framed diminutively in the corner of a mirror placed on a table covered with a variety of painting 'gear', the tools of his trade. With the striking band of his indigo cravat standing out against his pristine white collar and beige- with-purple-notes sweater, he looks dapperly informal – and quite poignantly forlorn against the packed orderliness of painting accoutrements in an otherwise bare-looking studio.

Two paintings, Interior: Evening (1960; Collection: Royal Academy of Arts, London) and Interior (1966; Collection: Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry) each depict a young woman with long dark hair as a rather diminutive presence in, firstly, a tall-ceilinged, blue-shaded living room, as she sits reading by a table on which stands a vase with a monumentally imposing bouquet of flowers and leaves; and, secondly, in another living room with bare floor boards and pale rug, sitting on a contemporary-looking armchair in a pose of homely, unselfconscious ease – a television set with spindly leg in the corner of the room. Though both female figures appear quite remote and miniscule in scale within the wider compositions, each is, ultimately, the intense figurative focus. These paintings evoking subtle atmospheres of domestic intimacy, articulate what W.H. Auden called the 'wiser and nicer' aspects of 'private faces' (as opposed to the stiff self-consciousness of 'public faces').

Born in Penn, Buckinghamshire, Roger de Grey was nephew of the painter Spencer Gore. He studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1936-39, where his teachers included Raymond Coxon (q.v.), Robert Medley and Ceri Richards. Following wartime Army service – when his left hand was badly damaged by a German sniper as he was helping a wounded man to safety – he returned briefly to study at Chelsea in 1946-47. But it was the Euston Road School's example – the rigorously measured realism, precisely attenuated palette and subdued tonal gradations of William Coldstream and his associates – that helped inspire many early paintings of figures posed in studios. However, as he told the art writer Andrew Lambirth, 'I measured away like anything, yes. But [...] I couldn't quite put the little ticks [the measuring co-ordinates] in, because it seemed to me to be insincere.'

De Grey taught at King's College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 1947-54, where his teaching colleagues included Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton. Lawrence Gowing (q.v.) became a professor there in 1948. As de Gray told Lambirth: 'Suddenly this extraordinary character [Gowing] appeared [...] who was both the most well educated and most literate and articulate man I've ever met, and a total sort of barbarian […] [Both of us] were trying to discover some new attitude to figurative art.' Cézanne's example helped de Grey find a way forward in his paintings, which from the mid-50s onwards, concentrated on landscapes and paradoxical 'Interior and Exterior' views.

The art historian and critic Frank Whitford wrote that 'school encouraged a rebellious attitude. Never very healthy, slightly built, sensitive and shy, [de Grey] was bullied at preparatory school and at Eton.' Teaching from 1954-73 at the Royal College of Art, and then at the City and Guilds of London Art School, where he became Principal, and as President of the Royal Academy in London from 1984-93 – where, as Norman Rosenthal wrote in his Obituary of de Grey in the Independent (16th February 1995), 'he was prepared to take enormous financial risks, that a state-subsidised institution could never have allowed itself, and in consequence London was able to see marvellous exhibitions initiated under his influence. Monographic shows of the highest quality were devoted to great masters including Mantegna, Frans Hals, Poussin, Goya, Monet, Chagall, Sickert and Henry Moore, and equally spectacular were the ambitious, synoptic exhibitions such as "The Genius of Venice" (1983-84), "The Age of Chivalry" (1987-88) and "The Art of Photography" (1989), as well as many devoted to aspects of 20th-century art, of which he was the most passionate defender' – de Grey remained throughout a non-conformist and rebel (albeit ultimately at the heart of the artistic establishment), always welcoming new ideas which genuinely challenged current fads and fashions.  He died in 1995.

Rosenthal noted: 'De Grey was also a landscape and still-life painter of real distinction, much inspired by Cézanne maybe, but his art had a very particular, competent and professional grandeur. It was amazing to me to note over the last 10 years, given his own punishing schedule, not only that he found time to paint but more, that his paintings became ever stronger and more vital. Ultimately it was the making of art that gave him strength to do everything else.'