Robert Lutyens

There are five letters from Robert Lutyens to Ruth Borchard, dated between late 1965 and early 1966, sent from his home in London W1. In the first, he writes: 'I am afraid the only self-portrait is one which I want to leave to my small daughter. I enclose a photograph of it. I wouldn't mind doing one for you in brush-drawing in oil on canvas for the price you mention – that is to say in monochrome. It is my favourite medium, and is always good practice.'

In the second letter, he writes: 'I have reached an age when it seems best to do whatever one wants to do as soon as possible! I am not too well, I'm fitful [illegible words], and I have a growing inclination to postpone everything that is not absolutely necessary. In the circumstances I think the thing to do would be to let you have the painting of which I sent a photograph (since you said you like it) without any more fuss. The canvas is 22 x 16 [...] I am sorry if this proposal deprives you of a vicarious creativeness. It shouldn't really, because I will do another self portrait when I feel like it. But I have no idea when that will be – Not, perhaps until I have grown a Sickert-like white beard, which is so much more paintable than an ageing chin!'

As a footnote, he adds: 'The critic, John Russell, was very flattering about this self-portrait when he was last in my studio. I don't know what it is really worth in money. My fee for a commission is £500.' Ruth paid £21.

Born in 1901, Robert Lutyens was almost sixty-two years old when he painted this picture. He appears to have portrayed himself in the artistic, bohemian garb and guise of the early-to-mid-eighteenth century poet, scholar, architect, gentleman connoisseur or collector – flowing white cravat, Oriental-style hat, informal jacket, pince-nez. With his large forehead (accentuated by the placing above of the dark fez-like hat), somewhat beady eyes peering from above sketchily drawn eyeglasses, and rather wizened folds and pouches of flesh with delicately drawn wrinkles, he comes across as an ascetic-featured sage, worn down perhaps by his years of learning and his wry sensitivity (an impression emphasised by the use of a pale, autumnal-wintry, near monochrome palette). The area of blurry white 'cloud' on the left of the canvas (actually where the bare canvas shows through) is an especially evocative area – possibly feelings of sublime emptiness, even intimations of death.

Another self-portrait (1967) is also made using a spare, Oriental-influenced style of oil brush painting and wash on canvas. It shows suffering, intelligent eyes peering over pince-nez; the fine, gaunt, nearly bald head appears to be that of a man without illusions or pretensions. This picture was exhibited in the Sir Edward Lutyens exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery in 1981-82. Robert Lutyens made other portraits in charcoal and oil., acutely perceptive to subtle nuances of character, as in several portrayals of his friend, the publisher and politician Brendan Bracken (Viscount Bracken, 1901-1958). His hauntingly lovely mid-60s oil portrait of Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, shows a characteristically attenuated palette based on sparsely composed areas of grey, white, black and pale turquoise. In this picture, the influence of his  father's close friend, the painter William Nicholson (1872-1949), is plain to see – as it is in his 1964 portrait of the historian and academic Agnes Headlam Morley (1902-1986), the first woman to be appointed to a chair at Oxford University (in 1948). In the latter painting (Collection: St. Hugh's College, University of Oxford), a perceptive study of the subject's character, the historian reclines with graceful ease on a pale chintz-covered armchair, her gaze downward-looking towards a sleek black cat perched, also gracefully, on her knee – the long, eloquent fingers of her left hand touching the cat's fur with gentle expressiveness. The sheer blackness of the cat makes a subtly forceful statement. William Nicholson's portraits and still-lifes also often contain powerful swathes of black – often in the backdrops and sartorial details – against delicately modulated and understated ranges of pale tones. Robert was himself reportedly the subject of portraits by Braque and Augustus John.

In 1962, his set of eleven lithographic portraits of 'The Old Burgundians' – members of a private drinking club – was published in an edition of fifty. With its witty miniaturist frontispiece showing Robert in profile and its linear economy and terse observations throughout, this set of black-and-white prints – portraying, amongst others, a benign, bewhiskered Arthur Ransome (1884-1967), the author of a series of famous children’s book as well as studies of bohemian London (1907) and Oscar Wilde (1912)  – is splendidly evocative of a convivial cigar-smoking, gourmandising evening among English establishment figure intimates.

It was while living in New York in the early 1950s that Lutyens, having abandoned careers in journalism, interior design and architecture, picked up a paintbrush for the first time since boyhood. By 1954 he was living again in London as a full-time painter. He had two one-man exhibitions at Matthiesen in New Bond Street – in 1954 and 1957. The catalogue for the first show, which included portraits of the novelist Rosamund Lehmann and the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, contained a foreword by the art critic John Russell, who wrote in part:

He painted as a boy – Tonks wanted him, in fact, to go to the Slade – but his painting was long laid aside. He served in the 1914-18 war, when he was only seventeen; he wrote editorials for the Daily Mail; he became an architect. His painting is designed to appease himself, not the public. It includes, for instance, a series of canvases inspired by a childhood favourite: Heine's Florentine Nights. These pictures (one at least of which is clearly marked scuola di Pryde [School of the painter James Pryde (1966-1951)] have an instinctive sweetness and a sense of theatre which will surprise those of his friends who knew him mainly as a painter of plain-spoken still-life.

As son of the great architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), Robert was perhaps inevitably shadowed all his life by his father's influence and reputation. In a 1942 publication, Sir Edwin Lutyens: An Appreciation in Perspective. By HIS SON [sic], published by Country Life, Robert wrote: 'It is difficult for a son to assume the rôle of critic at all', and noted that 'the personal relationship between subject and author makes unavoidable the intrusion of some pages at least of something singularly akin to self-portraiture’. He affirmed that his father 'is still the most distinguished man I have ever met [...] the touchstone of his distinction is his fundamental integrity as an artist.'

Robert Lutyens's 1959 oil portrait of his father in the National Portrait Gallery Collection portrays Sir Edwin, his features flushed pink-and-mauve, in evening dress at a banquet, smiling jovially against a brilliant reddish purple velvet backdrop; on the table in front of him, sumptuous glassware, fruits, flowers and bottles (apparently wine and beer) – all evoked with a fleeting impressionistic touch; it seems certain that the painting was made from a snapshot of the occasion, using the frozen photographic image as source material in the manner of Sickert.

This painting differs from other well-known portraits of the great man and architect, also in the NPG Collection, by Sir William Rothenstein and Sir Bernard Partridge, who both made Sir Edwin out to be a sombre, even pompous-looking personage. The NPG Archive contains the following note: 'The posthumous portrait by his son, depicting Lutyens in the mid 1930s, was painted because the artist felt every other portrait made his father look “over-serious”. “He was in fact,” the artist told the National Portrait Gallery, “the least solemn man that ever lived, and banished boredom more effectively than anyone I ever knew.”'

In his Appreciation in Perspective, Robert elaborated on his relationship with his parents:

I was perplexed, off and on, when I was a boy, to know what I was expected to do with my life. Being on the whole unlike my father, I never understood him, therefore, when (looking up from his game of patience) he merely said: 'Make boots!' I know better what he meant now. I can understand his abhorrence of superficial education as well as his respect for the ingenuity of sensitive hands and the excellence of skilled illiteracy. At the time I felt affronted by his lack of interest, and there grew up between us a wall of mutual suspicion.

Father had, for that matter, very little personal life. My mother's temperament was generous and impulsive, and her absorption in mystical experience puzzled him, while I inherited, I suppose, the rather baroque instability of the Lyttons. When I was a boy he appeared to me remote and unsympathetic to any serious approach, having no real participation in family life. Yet he was lovable and unforbidding and gentle and full of fun. He was also very funny, and, as children, we naturally delighted in his enormous success with guests.

In the introduction to The Letters of Edwin Lutyens (To His Wife, Lady Emily), edited by Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley, published by William Collins, 1985, Robert's relationship with his parents is further evoked. He was influenced by the questing idealism of his mother, Lady Emily, who devoted her life to spreading the message of the mystic Krishnamurti whom she had met when the Theosophist Mrs Besant brought the young sage to England: 'She and the children became strict vegetarians, subsisting on a diet of nut cutlets, and the food at Bloomsbury Square, which was never good, became worse.' A further biographical passage outlines key elements in Robert's personal and professional life: 'Robert [...] eloped at the age of nineteen with Eva, a niece of Chaim Weizmann [1874-1952; the Russian-born Zionist leader, who had settled in England in 1904, and in 1948 renounced his British citizenship to become the first President of Israel] and seven years his senior – a marriage to which his father was never reconciled. [Robert married three times; his daughter Candia and her husband, the architect Paul Peterson (1956-2015), founded a company  reproducing examples of furniture and other furnishings designed both by Edwin and Robert.] Robert wrote, painted and designed with equal facility; perhaps his greatest flair was for interior decoration, which he practised in the 1930s. Though without any personal training, he joined his father as a partner in a few of his later buildings: notably Middleton Park, Oxfordshire (1938).'

A widely reviewed 1992 exhibition, 'A Personal Tribute to Robert Lutyens' at the Concord Gallery in London, which showed examples of his paintings, explored in some detail his achievements as an interior decorator and architect. As Alan Powers wrote in the Architects' Journal (May 1992), 'Robert was inevitably overshadowed by his father's presence, although he introduced a characteristic “vogue regency” feeling into work like the interiors of Gloucester Lodge for his brother-in-law, Lord Ridley. He designed Lord Sieff's flat at Brook House, now destroyed [photographs of the interior reveal that some of his fine modernist designs for furniture and light fittings were actually far ahead of their time], and the headquarters of Marks and Spencer in Baker Street, London.' Robert Lutyens's book Six Great Architects (Hamish Hamilton, 1959) – with chapters on his father as well as Inigo Jones, the Adam brothers, Sir Christopher Wren, John Nash and Sir John Vanbrugh – deserves re-issue.

The year that he eloped with Eva, Robert's book of Poems & Verses was published by the Baltic Review offices in London. Though much of it is conventional 'poesy', there is a robust underlying strain of philosophical thought, questions about the nature of eternity and the futility of human endeavours; it is no coincidence perhaps that in his 1963 self-portrait he portrayed himself above all in the persona of a world-weary philosopher.

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