George Hooper

No correspondence survives between George Hooper and Ruth Borchard. The picture is inscribed verso: 'Painted in 1946 from a drawing made while having my hair cut.' Hooper lived in Redhill in Surrey, not far from Ruth in Reigate, and it is likely they met socially.

In the introduction to his book, George Hooper (published by Hooper Gallery, 1995), James Beechey has underlined the nature of the artist’s critical isolation, and the reason for his relative neglect (at least until the end of his life, when Hooper's wife, Joyce (née Gayford) helped see to it that he exhibited in several commercial London galleries): 'George Hooper [...] belonged to no school or group, and so, although he painted for more than sixty years, he received little recognition beyond a devoted band of friends, admirers and students. He never sought worldly access, and was surprised – even a little indifferent – when, in time, a little of it came to him. From childhood, he wanted nothing more than to paint, and he was never happier than in his studio, where he worked every day.'

Hooper was born in India in 1910. He came to England at the age of twelve, and spent the rest of his life in Redhill. He died in 1994. He was about thirty-six years old when he painted this self-portrait. Hooper's sober, genial, yet slightly uneasy look captures that unmistakeable, sometimes cosily familiar, sometimes strangely unsettling sensation when, momentarily, we come face to face with ourselves in the mirror.

Here, Hooper evokes exactly the slightly bowed, vulnerable yet trusting posture of the typical seated customer – shrouded in a barber's gown, passive to the barber's instruments. The barber – his eyes hidden behind horn-rimmed glasses – concentrates with severe detachment on the task at hand. In contrast both to the barber, fiercely absorbed with comb and scissors, and a casually downcast customer in the right background, Hooper looks out of the picture frame, facing up to his mirrored image. The stark, overhanging bulb casts white light on top of Hooper's thick, black hair, all over the protective sheet, and seems to frost up the barber's glasses. Except for a tiny patch at the top of his forehead at the base of his parting, Hooper's face is in shadow. There is an element of quiet melancholy in his sober self-regard. Under the bare light bulb's interrogative glare in this glumly all-male environment, the patient artist sits uneasily stranded in the barber's chair.

A few years earlier, other British artists, such as Russell Sidney Reeve and Raymond Coxon (q.v.) had also portrayed themselves in the barber-shop chair. Hooper's muddy, masculine palette and the preoccupation with everyday life looks back to Sickert. The triangular relationship between the three figures – each self-consciously isolated – is succinctly balanced, as is the overall  palette, with its film noirish play of dark and light. James Beechey's comment on Hooper as a man and an artist, is useful when considering this picture: 'By nature amiably reserved, charming and well-mannered, he nevertheless stood out [...] His art has a ruthlessness not immediately apparent, for he was undeterred by the struggle to reach the right solution.'

In his review of the first edition of Face to Face in The Spectator (10^th July 2004), Bevis Hillier wrote: 'George Hooper, of Redhill, portrays himself in a hairdresser's in 1946 – an ingenious way of acquitting oneself of mere narcissism and of bringing an element of narrative into the picture. (Possibly he was influenced by Russell Reeve's barber-shop self-portrait of 1921, illustrated in the non-Borchard section of the book.) I'm almost sure that Hooper's scene is Mr Voller's barber shop in Redhill. In 1946 I was in St Matthew's Infants' School opposite (both that and the hairdresser's have gone now) and Mr Voller cut my hair too, ending the process with the dreaded spray – a final miasma that made one smell like someone from Schérézade.'

Hooper's father had left England for India as a young man to work as a printer and auditor for the Bengal North Western Railway.  He met and married a young Eurasian woman. As a child, George was adored by his mother who created 'a protective shroud around hm that he would crave in his later relationships. He never shared his intimacy with her, and after his move to England [at the age of twelve] she became a shadowy figure in his life, rarely mentioned in conversation.' At the age of twelve, George was sent, along with his brother, to be educated in the care of his grandfather, an architect in Redhill.

Beechey also notes: 'George's memories of India were childish. They were especially memories of colour, of glorious deep amaryllis that seemed to flower all year, of lusciously coloured fruit and vegetables under gaudily painted awnings, arrays of ground spices, exotic birds and variegated butterflies.' There seems to have been a dichotomy between his Indian and English roots, between elements of staid conservatism and exotic vibrancy in his life – a psychological conflict which he perhaps sought to resolve through his art, which became increasingly colourful as he grew older.

From 1931-2, Hooper studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was taught by Randolph Schwabe (1885-1948), a firm exponent of lucid draughtsmanship. Then he moved on to the Royal Academy Schools, from which he graduated in 1935; contemporaries and close friends there included Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) and William Scott (1913-1989). His tutor Tom Monnington (1902-1976), a future President of the Academy, inculcated in his students the use of pen-and-ink drawing whose structure was based on sure geometric foundations. There, Hooper won two travelling scholarships, which took him first to Madrid in 1935 for several months, followed by a two-year sojourn in Rome.

In his obituary of the artist in the Independent (9^th August 1994), the London-based art gallery owner and dealer Michael Parkin wrote: 'He returned to England [from Rome] with war clouding the horizon and his future as a painter. In Redhill he was drafted into the ARP, where he met his wife Joyce, a gifted musician who he married in 1941. The American 'Pilgrim Trust' asked him to produce work for their 'Recording Britain' scheme, where he worked alongside John Piper, William Rothenstein, and Kenneth Rowntree. He was also chosen to work for Esso and Shell Petroleum, Lyons Tea Shops, the Southern Railway and the Post Office. At the end of the Second World War, after a short period teaching at Watford School, he joined Brighton Art School, then under the enlightened direction of Ernest Sallis Benney. He found teaching rewarding with ideas of his own and his students being 'bounced' off each other. My former wife Molly Parkin, who was one of his students, remembers him: “Although rather distant he was a special and brilliant teacher who taught by example. However, often he also communicated by banging one on the head with his pencil.”'

A self-portrait drawing (c.1938) is realistic, but its tight-lipped expression gives nothing away. During the Second World War, he made many sensitive pen-and-ink drawings of fellow young men serving with him, in the Air Raid Precautions Unit in Reigate. These included ARP Workers Playing Cards and Man Cleaning his Gas Mask(both 1941) – these show young men with downturned countenances, quietly absorbed in their task. He often portrayed single figures at work or leisure, many seen from behind. His wife, Joyce is depicted writing, hunched over her desk (in a c.1942 oil), playing the piano (in several works), or lying in the bath (in a c.1955 oil). In each work, she appears touchingly vulnerable, so self-contained that she seems unconscious of, or at least oblivious to, the probing artist.

An early oil portrait (1946) of an elderly relation, Miriam Hooper, seated rather edgily in a Windsor chair by the fireside, is notable for its expressively drab palette inclining to blacks and greys. An oil portrait of his father and step-mother seated at leisure in their sitting room, Alfred and Olive Hooper (1950) conjures up a scene of cosier English domesticity, painted in brushstrokes that have broadened, and with some brilliant colour accents.

As Michael Parkin has written, 'A visit to Italy in 1958 opened a window on and introduced him to a Fauvist vision which characterised his work from then on. Vibrant colours dominant since his childhood in India brought revelatory new depth to his work. Matisse, Dufy and contemporaries such as Jean Hugo and Ivon Hitchens were all added influences that brought him delight.

'Living the major part of his life in 'Loxwood', Redhill, he was in many ways a loner. He made an exception for Duncan Grant, a friend whose old-fashioned courtesy and charm he very much enjoyed. He despised artistic London's pub life, preferring the countryside in England and France, English ceramics which he collected and a home always full of music and the colours of India - perhaps another Bloomsbury, but in Surrey. Independent and perhaps slightly eccentric, he once pointed out over tea that one must always cut a cake still in the tin: in this way not so much air gets at the cake and crumbs from the cutting help to keep the remaining piece fresh and young. And so in his teaching he stood out amongst many who were brilliant academics by his constant searching for new ways to look at subjects and objects, so that for student and teacher alike the idea was always fresh and young.'

Hooper's post-war still-lifes based on flowers, birds, butterflies and his own burgeoning collection of English ceramics, celebrate nature's fecundity with an economic yet intricate use of design, and increasingly pulsating palette. Beechey has noted that the 'singing colours which now entered his work George regarded almost as a birthright. His Indian inheritance, about which he had so long been reticent, was now mentioned at every turn.'

Hooper, who had started collecting paintings by living British artists, visited Duncan Grant in 1963 at Charleston, the Bloomsbury Group farmhouse on the Sussex Downs. He greatly enjoyed a number of visits over the next two years or so (Grant was eighty-years old in 1965) where, as Beechey has written, 'they shared childhood memories of India and talk of the painters Grant had known [...] Grant was able to tell George of those [ceramics] he had seen by Derain and Picasso [...] in turn, he was fascinated by George's own assembly.' Hooper went on to paint at least two views of the garden at Charleston. Around 1969, Hooper made a collage picture, decoratively abstracted almost to the point of cubism, based on Stephen Tomlin's bust of Virginia Woolf in the garden at Monk House (which had been Leonard and Virginia Woolf's country retreat). In 1994, Hooper was given a posthumous exhibition at Charleston. Michael Parkin noted that 'Although George Hooper exhibited with success at the Leicester Galleries ('Artists of Fame and Promise') in the Forties and at Wildenstein's in the Fifties and Sixties, and more recently in the Eighties in Motcomb Street with Sally Hunter and in Cork Street with Odette Gilbert, it was an entirely happy salute to a life in painting that his recent retrospective was held at Charleston, where he had often painted and visited his friend Duncan Grant.'

Beechey has given us a portrait of Hooper as a vibrantly anarchic man of mischievous humour and flamboyant dress sense. 'Away from the studio, friends remember his undimmed sparkle [...] his tendency to “dissolve into unstoppable fits of laughter [...] particularly when exacerbated by formality”.' In a late oil self-portrait (c.1980) – full of fresh, brilliant colours, expressionistically intermixed – Hooper quite exuberantly – and with characteristic ruthless flair – probes his persona as an 'amiably reserved man'.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004