Anthony Harris

Four letters from Anthony Harris to Ruth Borchard are dated 1959. Three were sent from Chiswick, London W4, the second from Egham in Surrey. In the first, he writes: 'I am not able to offer a very early self portrait in oils but I am willing to sell (unframed) a painting I completed early last year. This is a half-length self portrait on canvas 24" x 20".' In the third letter, 'I shall be able to meet you in London on Thursday 21st May. I suggest that I wait at the main entrance of Victoria Station between 4.30 and 4.45. I am sure that I shall be easily recognisable with a painting under my arm.'

In 2001, Anthony Harris recalled (in a letter to the author) 'going to the Grosvenor Hotel near Victoria Station and being somewhat over-awed by the grand surroundings (they really were grand at that time!). Ruth asked me to hold up my self-portrait against myself and to pose for a few seconds (it seemed like several minutes to me, surrounded by all the other guests in the lounge). I believe the price was 15 guineas, which I thought was a minor fortune at that time.'

Anthony Harris was born in Reading in 1931. He says he 'was not four years out of art college' when he painted his self-portrait in early 1958, when he was twenty-seven years old. It was painted in a room – which he used as a studio – in the Chiswick house he then shared. Looking back more than forty years later, his first reaction was one of being 'amazed how thin I was!' He partly ascribes his tentative yet alert look in the picture to the fact that 'I was particularly concerned to get everything right. At the time, I certainly was very anxious to have success as a painter.' He also ascribes it to the fact 'in doing a self-portrait one is aware the image is reversed.' He says now that he has 'always had darkness under the eyes', a noticeable feature in this painting.

The eyes here are painted with especial clarity, with quite keen attention paid to each part: the white of the eye, the grey-greenish iris, the pupil. As the head is turned just slightly towards the canvas on the right, the eyes swivel somewhat to transfix us (and the artist's reflection) with a look that is at once strained and fully awake, self-assured and hesitant. The deep, almost hewed-out cavities under the eyes (accentuated still further by flushes of redness on the high cheekbones) suggest strain and tiredness, and yet the closed, sensual lips hint perhaps at an incipient smile.

The picture can be seen as a kind of statement about the young man as aspiring artist. Applying oil paint thinly, Harris portrays himself in a makeshift studio room with its brick wall (or possibly brickwork-like textured wall paper) on which a painting is hung, as well as the edge of a canvas, what seems to be three brushes and a palette surface. He has all his needs around him for the self-scrutinising task in hand; nothing is wanted in this bare environment. It is a harmonious and measured composition with singular, subtle tones spreading throughout – such as the cool bluish-green of his block-like textured sweater also seen echoed under the eyes, and shadowing some of the wall (with its melding tones of purple, rose and some yellow), and a darker blue permeating the oil painting on the wall (its subject now indiscernible), which the artist has identified as his 1952 Night Scene, Reading. The fierce, even glaring exterior or artificial light falling on the right side of his face, and illuminating his fair hair, contributes also to the intensity of his searching look.

From 1946-48, Harris was a part-time student at Reading University. He then studied full-time from 1948-53 in the University's Department of Fine Art, under the painter Professor Anthony Betts (1897-1980). He says now that Reading, under Betts, 'was very much a drawing school. In teaching drawing, Betts went back to Degas and Sickert, and in painting, to Cézanne. I was still under the influence of professor Betts (when painting the self-portrait), and a mixture of Cézanne and Degas can be perceived.' He also relates the picture 'to that of certain other British artists after the war – such as Lawrence Gowing (q.v.) whom I knew – who were part of this Cézanne tradition.'

Writing in November 2001, he says: 'I have not attempted a self-portrait since as I fear I would be producing a series of Dorian Gray. In the 1960s, I painted several portraits of the family and later I attempted some of the children. I have concentrated on landscapes although I have never stopped painting from the life model (and in the past three years giving master classes). Two fairly recent nudes have fine heads.'

As a fine art student in Reading, Harris spent four days a week studying painting, one day art history. He was fortunate enough to be taught there by several German and Austrian-born art historians, notably Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) – author of the renowned The Story of Art (1950), an at once erudite and accessible introduction to the history of art, and the hugely influential Art and Illusion (1960), a classic study of the psychology of perception and the stylistic imitation of nature – and Leopold Ettlinger (1913-1989) (expert on the early Renaissance) – refugees from Nazi Germany, many of whom had been interned by the British authorities for a period during the war, but who by the late 1940s were starting to gain public reputations lecturing in art history. Harris went on to study art history at London's Courtauld Institute of Art from 1954-55.

Ruth had first encountered Harris's work in Jack Beddington's 1957 book, Young Artists of Promise, in which three of his oil paintings were illustrated in black-and-white. These were Night Scene, Reading (1952) – a dark figure seen strolling under a huge street lamp; Chiswick Empire (1955) – a highly Sickertian Edwardian musical hall interior illuminated at night; and Brentford Dock (1956), set in daylight.

In 1960, Harris joined the staff of St Albans School of Art; from 1967-75 he was the Principal there, establishing the first course in Europe in Art Therapy. From 1975-86, he was Vice-Principal at Chelsea School of Art in London. In 1977 he was elected a Director of the John Ruskin Guild of St George in Sheffield, and elected its Master in 1982. From 1986-89, he was Head of the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts.

Many of the landscapes in watercolour that have preoccupied him since the early 1970s were painted during annual visits to Italy, where he says he is 'always interested in breaks in nature, like at Carrara, natural chasms, or man-made ones like a quarry'. A 1988 one-man show in a gallery in Bergamo, Italy showed examples of landscape chasms and fissures, rendered in watercolour in the 1970s but with such bold outlines and strong definition as to take on almost the quality of oil painting. His 1996 watercolour Strines Reservoir from Jacob's Plantation in the Peak District – exhibited in a one-man show that year at the Ruskin Gallery, Sheffield – shows a continued interest in headlong landscape vistas. However, trees, water, hillsides and buildings appear less rigorously striated than before; now washes of lucid colour coalesce to create resolute landscape structures. In such works, Cézanne inspires him still.