Robin Guthrie

Three letters from Robin Guthrie to Ruth Borchard are dated from 1965 to 1966. On each, three separate letter-headed addresses are printed, most prominent being the artist's 'Studio'in Knightsbridge; in smaller letters are the artist's 'Residence', a Kensington mansion flat, and a house in Chichester, Sussex. The third letter reads: 'I am now sending you the self-portrait for the collection you are making. The date would be somewhere about 1947 or so and the drawing is therefore not topical - but there have been no others since.' Ruth paid 21 guineas.

Robin Guthrie was born in Harting, Sussex in 1902. His father was the Scottish artist, poet and printer James Guthrie (1874-1952) – a mostly self-taught painter of considerable gifts (he painted a masterpiece in A Hind's Daughter (1883; Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh), a  poetic portrayal of a sturdy young girl, sharp knife in one hand, in a cabbage patch, very much in the style of the Glasgow Boys) and a distinguished portraitist whose subjects in oil included Winston Churchill, Arthur Balfour and Earl Haig.

Robin himself studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1918-22, with the financial assistance of his patron, the collector Jakob de Graaf;  his tutors there were Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942) and Henry Tonks (1862-1937). As Robin's grandson Jonathan Guthrie wrote in an article in the Financial Times (20^th November 2000) - marking a show of twelve drawings by Robin Guthrie at the National Portrait Gallery, London, works then recently acquired by the NPG - 'he had been a brilliant pupil of whom much was expected [...] throughout his life. Robin clung to the comfort of the impressionistic style fostered in him at the Slade.'

Writing to Ruth, Robin had dated his self-portrait, in pencil and watercolour, c.1947, when he was about forty-five. He actually looks younger here, perhaps in his twenties or early thirties. So either this was a somewhat age-flattering self-portrayal or he was very well-preserved in middle age (or indeed this was a rather earlier picture than he reckoned).

He comes across as a slender, boyish man only too well aware of his attractiveness. The long, bare neck, exposed throat and upper chest, sculpted lips, thin, raffish moustache, alluring eyes, hair flopping with studied casualness down his right temple from below the elegantly slanted straw boater – all these details are conjured up with panache, with a fluent use of line and chiaroscuro meriting comparison with the drawings of Guthrie's friend, Augustus John, whose own prodigious talent as a draughtsman had been been much admired by Henry Tonks in the 1890s.

Guthrie's cool, summery, soigné regard – accentuated by the spare wash of green acting on and around his head – is a curiously self-distancing one. The light falling on his forehead and left cheek (conjured up by keeping an interval of paper untouched and pristine) endows the subject with a lucid, rarefied air.

Though Robin told Ruth that there had been no other self-portraits since, we know of an earlier self-portrait, c.1936, purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in 1999. This is a pencil and pen-and-ink drawing of masterly facility, a penetrating self-appraisal showing the artist posing with a rifle over his shoulder. His face is shadowed here by self-doubt, hollow-eyed alarm even, perhaps an anguished unconscious premonition of worldwide struggle and war. Jonathan Guthrie wrote in his Financial Times article:

Robin Guthrie, my grandfather, was a skilful artist and an equally skilful philanderer. Proof of the first proposition is in a case of 12 drawings (at the NPG). The second proposition is illustrated by two failed marriages (his first wife was the painter and children's book writer, Kathleen Guthrie) and a string of mistresses.

What these society hostesses, art world hangers-on and shop-girls saw in Robin is apparent in a self-portrait included in the display [the c.1936 one]. He had soulful eyes, a floppy fringe and a sensuous mouth topped by one of those cursory moustaches regarded as dashing before the wars.

But there is something ambivalent about Robin's gaze. Even viewers whose family demonology does not feature him as a beguiling Lucifer might spot it.

Robin looks directly at the frame, as self-portraitists must when working with a mirror. But despite this, his expression is oddly uncertain.

Jonathan ends his article by comparing the c.1936 self-portrait to his grandfather's portrait drawings of famous public men. 'Robin died in 1971 at the age of 68, with a Bentley in the garage and a girlfriend many years younger than himself. There are worse ways to go, but my impression is that he was never really happy. The germ of this private malady is apparent in the self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. It is this, rather than the self-assurance of the public men surrounding him, that is most compelling.'

In Robin's first year at the Slade, he contributed five enchanting drawings to Eleanor Farjeon's romantic, bucolic book of poems, All the Way to Alfriston (Greenleaf Press and Morland Press, London, 1918). One illustrates, with an aptly atmospheric use of line and cross hatching, Farejeon's lines:

A Gypsy lives on Kithurst,

Gypsy with a dog;

She smokes her pipe inside a barn

And fills the barn with fog.

He also made a delicate frontispiece drawing – showing two little girls tending plants – for The Wild Garden. Verses for Children by his father James Guthrie (Selwyn & Blount Ltd., London, 1922). It was perhaps in the late 1920s or early 30s that Robin painted an affectionate and sensitive oil portrait of James J. Guthrie (Collection: Worthing Museum & Art Gallery), observed seated at a mahogany dining table, reading a leather-bound book and smoking a pipe, lost in abstraction, a fine green Arts and Craft vase scintillating with pink lilies before him.

On completing his studies at the Slade in the summer of 1922, Guthrie took a studio in Hampstead, London, with his fellow student and friend Rodney J. Burn (1899-1984). His painting Sermon on the Mount (Collection: Tate) was painted at around this time, the kind of religious and mythological subject encouraged by his Slade professors. It portrays a tall, svelte figure of Christ in khaki overalls – almost certainly a self-portrait of the twenty-year-old Guthrie – delivering his sermon to the faithful, an animated crowd of men, women and children in modern-day attire, a sartorial trope signifying surely the relevance of the Christian message to the post-Great War world. Biblical references abound, such as the olive tree at the centre of the picture, symbolising a message of peaceful reconciliation; figures of a man unwrapping his bandages and a young girl on crutches represent the sick Christ had healed before ascending the Mount. It seems likely that the casually-attired figure under the olive tree in blue jersey and straw hat is the artist Thomas Monnington (1902-76), a Slade contemporary. This ambitious, fanciful yet well-modulated painting can be related to other post-First World War artworks of surging religious faith, such as Stanley Spencer's Resurrection of the Soldiers (painted between 1927 and 1932) in the Sandham Memorial Chapel, and Jacob Epstein's sculpture The Risen Christ (1917-19).

Around 1930, W.H. Auden wrote: 'Private faces in public places / are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places.' Sometimes, Robin Guthrie's drawings do not go beyond capturing 'public faces in private places': his portrait of a po-faced Sir Edwin Lutyens reveals little. But often he does succinctly conjure up the 'wiser and nicer' or at least truer face: as in his transparently shimmering crayon drawing of a gaunt, otherworldly Adam Fox, the theologian; a pencil drawing of a morose-seeming William Morris, Viscount Nuffield, the industrialist; and a black-and-white chalk drawing evoking perhaps the undemonstrative, kindly humanity of Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister.

One of Guthrie's finest portraits is a c.1946 oil painting of an introspective Moira Shearer (star of the classic Powell and Pressburger film, The Red Shoes, a strikingly beautiful leading ballerina with the Sadler's Wells – later the Royal – Ballet, about whom the poet James Kirkup wrote, 'No other leading dancer, not even Fonteyn or Markova, demonstrated such intelligence in her dancing and such profound musicality as did Moira Shearer, at least among British dancers.' There was 'something intensely warm and human in her dancing'). In Guthrie's portrait, her blue-green, piercing, down-turned eyes, abundant copper-coloured hair, and pale skin with a subtle pink glow, are melodiously rendered.

On October 20th 1938, the Daily Sketch nicely described the artist preparing for his current London exhibition: 'Mr. Guthrie spent all summer in a remote Cornish cottage, working in complete isolation, cooking his own food and carrying water from a pump 200 yards away. Even rain did not stop him. Sometimes it poured down his brush and up his sleeve as he worked. In the show are portraits of Lord Hailsham [barrister and leading Conservative politician], Sir John Simon (eminent Liberal politician and barrister), Lord Nuffield [William Morris, the English motor manufacturer and philanthropist], [Alexander] Kerensky [the moderate Russian revolutionary statesman], and Mr. Hore-Belisha [British Secretary of State for War, 1937-40], catalogued as “Mars”.'