Roger Hallett

Ruth Borchard received three letters from Roger Hallett, the first dated 1961, sent from Granar Cottage, Aldermaston, Berkshire; the next two, dated 1963, from Dove Cottage, Wells, Somerset. In the first, he writes: 'I have no such paintings (self-portraits) in my possession now, but there are six very early self-portraits in the collection of Brixton Prison where I was in 1953 [as a conscientious objector after a period in 1952 when, called up for Army National Service, he had served in the Intelligence Corps in Trieste]... I have a couple of pencil drawings, done last year, if you are at all interested in those, if not I would be quite willing to paint a new self-portrait for 20 guineas.'

In the second letter, he writes: 'The only self-portraits I have are one recent one, & six... in the collection at Brixton Prison, which are probably inaccessible.' In the third letter, he offers to bring the recent self-portrait to London to show Ruth. Signed simply 'HALLETT' in pale brown capitals, this undated picture seems to have been painted in 1962 or early 1963, when the artist was around thirty-three and living in Somerset. 

As the Obituary of the artist in the Telegraph (28th September 2018) notes, it was ‘after being posted to guard a warehouse, he was so horrified by his instructions to shoot anyone trying to break in that he applied to register as a conscientious objector – having to spend six weeks in Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs jails waiting for his case to be heard.’

Born in Bristol in 1919, Roger Hallett attended Bristol Cathedral School, and then was articled to an architect, making tracings and working drawings. He studied at the Slade from 1954-57, where his teachers included William Coldstream, Lucian Freud and Tom Monnington. As he wrote in his autobiographical memoir, Two Left Boots (Austin Macauley, London, 2013), he and his wife bought a Queen Anne house in Elder Street in Spitalfields in London's East End for £600 in 1955 – when he was a student at the Slade – which he painted a distinctive blue. The couple then emigrated to Australia under the so-called £10 Scheme (The Assisted Passage Migration Scheme initiated by the Australian Government in 1945, under which British migrants – who, under a racist law, known as The White Australia Policy, had to be white – were required only to pay £10 to migrate to Australia; the government paid the rest), working for television as a scenic artist in Sydney and then as a set designer in Melbourne; he also had one-man shows in both cities. He returned to England in 1960.

'Figurative abstraction – or abstracted figuration?' was the title of an Arts Review 'London Commentary' article in 1965 – a question highly pertinent to Hallett's radically reticent, coolly English self-portrait. Viewing himself no doubt through mirrors (rather than just through the mind's eye or memory), he portrays himself almost as a secret self-voyeur, seen from behind and in left-profile. This is probably the 'shyest' self-portrait in Ruth's Collection – we do not even see the artist's eyes, only his downturned, introverted countenance (evoking 'the pale cast of thought', as it were) in semi-profile. And yet the subject's silvery elusiveness, his wistful poise, is rather self-consciously elaborated.

Coldstream's lingering influence is perhaps evident in the measured realism of the still-boyish profile against a background of pale colours (predominantly greys, pale pinks and some browns). But this is Coldstream mediated by the fading, shifting geometric scaffolding of Mondrian's early Cubist experiments or perhaps by the vibratory spaces conjured up by the American artist Mark Tobey's often pale calligraphies on abstract fields of paint (Trembling Space is the title of a painting by Tobey from 1961, now in the Guggenheim Collection). Hallett's geometric background framework of orbs and asymmetric squares and rectangles – conjured up through a smudgy, almost watercolour-like use of oil paint, which also extends over the back of Hallett's brown jacket – appears impalpably opalescent.

Ruth Borchard would have seen two paintings by Hallett, illustrated in black-and-white, in Jack Beddington's 1957 book, Young Artists of Promise. In The Exercise Yard, a surging mass of anxious-seeming human figures, seen mostly from the back, but one or two in profile, appear like naively carved, ambulatory sculptures, set against a bleak backdrop. This picture undoubtedly was inspired by Hallett's six week-long imprisonment in 1953 as a conscientious objector.

In 1980, he painted a sensitive Self-Portrait in tempera, which depicts him in an open-necked pink shirt, with a flourishing grey beard and generous waves of grey hair. Unlike his earlier self-portrayal, this is a more straightforward self-portrait against a plain light blue backdrop. Though it shows his full face, there is nevertheless something touchingly oblique in his quite abstracted and vulnerable-seeming mien here.

In Two Left Boots, he singles out two modern painters as being especially meaningful to him – Edward Hopper for his 'lonely melancholy' and Gwen John, 'a painter always close to my heart'. He writes that he much prefers her modest collection of 'same view' portraits of her friends' to her brother Augustus John's much more unpredictable and variegated art. He relates the following (extended) amusing story: 'We were invited to a wedding in London. My friend Nell Dunn ([author of the 1963 collection of stories], Up the Junction [that depict contemporary life in the raw in working-class Battersea and Clapham Junction, which was adapted for television by Dunn and Ken Loach for the BBC Wednesday Play series in 1965, and made into a film in 1968 of the same name]) was marrying Jeremy Sandford ([author of the landmark 1966 television drama, directed by Ken Loach, about the downward social spiral into poverty and deprivation of a young homeless couple] Cathy come Home) in Soho Square, with the reception at the Ritz. Augustus John was there, a big bear of a man in a shabby corduroy suit standing around immobile and expressionless.'  Hallett was introduced to John, who was 'surrounded by the paparazzi'. John only became animated and responsive when Hallett agreed to go and get 'a fag' for him to smoke from a friend, at which the press photographers 'swooped and shot him from all angles'. 'When I returned with a thin, crumpled home-rolled cigarette for Augustus, he was already talking to someone else and didn't notice my intrusion...

'The friend who made the cigarette was Nick Garland, a friend of mine at the Slade. We were once drawing together in the life room and when he had finished his drawing it made me laugh so much that I said to him, “Nick, you're just a bloody cartoonist,” and he gave me the drawing. He went on to be for all his life the political cartoonist for the Daily Telegraph, and still is.'

In 1983, on a painting holiday in Holland, he discovered, and was greatly impressed by, the enormous Panorama of Scheveningen (housed in a purpose-built museum in The Hague) by the Dutch marine artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915). Inspired by this sweeping achievement, Hallett thereon embarked on his own ambitious artistic adventure over nearly four years, creating single-handedly a painted panorama of Bath, based on a 360 degree view of the Georgian city as seen from the basket of a hot-air balloon some fifty feet above Alexandra Park. This extensive work (70m long x 7m high), which he made in a disused factory, was exhibited for ten years at the Thames Barrier Visitor Centre in Greenwich; since put into storage, it has deteriorated beyond repair.

The Telegraph Obituary of the artist records that the Bath ‘panorama was painted in sections then rolled up, not to be seen again until hung in the round... The finished work featured such figures as the Queen, Chris Patten (Bath’s then MP), Hallett’s daughter, Dido, on a horse, Hallett himself – twice – and his own battered Morris Minor “with two mechanics under it, as usual”.

‘It also depicted just about every building in the city: the Abbey, Pump Rooms, Old Vicarage (Hallett’s house), Victorian roofscapes and a modern shopping precinct. Some scenes he invented, such as a nude woman in the window of one house..., and a green bus involved in an accident, with a pool of red blood outside a church proclaiming “Jesus Saves”. The finished work also included a faux terrain consisting of around 80 clay figures created by Hallett’s students.’

Hallett since painted panoramas of the townscapes of Salies de Béarn, in southwest France (where he moved to in 1991), Lourdes and Bordeaux, as well as, from 2006, a striking panorama of the rugged contours of Gibraltar; it would be impossible to find a better panorama subject, he has said, ‘because it is so full of exciting perspectives on a relatively small piece of land in a vast area'. Roger Hallett died on 1st August 2018 at Salies de Béarn.