Charles McCall

There is one letter from Charles McCall to Ruth Borchard, dated '13th December 1965', from his home and studio in London SW1. 'Thanks very much for your letter and for your enquiry with reference to a self portrait. I did one quite recently and gave it to my wife, who, taking into consideration the particular purpose for which it is required, would be willing to let you have it for twenty-one guineas. Perhaps when you are next in town you would like to come to the studio and see the picture. We are very easy to get at as we are just behind Sloane Square and off Eaton Terrace.'

In his 1965 self-portrait, he has cast himself in the traditional mould of the respectable, traditional artist in his studio – seen standing by the easel, wearing a blue smock, brushes in hand, painting tools on the table in front. He looks suavely self-assured, nobly erect in bearing, with a fine white beard and neat silvery hair, his features gentle and impassive. McCall was fifty-eight years old at the time, but although he had achieved a successful career, he continued to suffer from a degree of uncertainty as an artist. This self-portrayal as a traditional artist, surrounded by the accoutrements of his calling, and his pictures on the easel and wall, may perhaps have been a means of helping compensate for certain insecurities he felt as a painter, difficulties that may have had their origin in his own struggles in late adolescence and in his early twenties.

Once, when asked to explain the relative simplicity of his subject matter, he replied: 'The troubles of this world are many. I do not paint troubles. I paint a workman because of the shape he makes; I observe, I do not paint a woman because she is rich or poor or votes for some political party. I paint her for the shape she makes in a room; the stillness and peace fascinate me. [His small, compellingly decorative oil painting, Pensive Woman(undated; Collection: York Museums Trust) full of surprisingly vivid colour accents and contrasts, in which a woman with a striking head of black hair sits disconsolately head in hands, is the epitome of this.] Critics have said, because I paint cosy scenes (perhaps I do), that I am secure. This is ridiculous, no artist feels secure, perhaps when painting one feels secure; but in life security is something an artist very rarely has.'

Far from being reassuringly 'cosy', his apparently debonair self-portrait plumbs hidden psychological depths. To the left of the artist on the is his easel painting seemingly of a cathedral or grand church interior, its literal depths conjured up in rich greens, golds and browns – with iridescent white for the stained glass windows – like those of an Italian Old Master. This painting within a painting suggests that in the artist's rigorously ordered studio world -- indeed within his own mind -- are disquieting, even transcendent qualities below the surface. Ironically, the way he has portrayed his other pictures on the studio wall, has made them appear like contemporary abstract paintings – far removed from the supposedly 'cosy' figurative interiors they surely represent.

Curiously, McCall has 'framed' his own figure – in a refreshingly blue smock, its invigorating oceanic colour that of a creative navigator in a studio world otherwise of classical order and a subdued tawny and amber-hued palette – within a door or mirror frame, as if he himself was just another composition, albeit a vital sentient one, within the wider painting. Perhaps the artist is unconsciously acknowledging that he himself, at least in part, is his own creation.

There are painterly passages – notably the fresh still life on the table, with its dazzling white highlights, and the concentrated white, cadmium yellow and red on the tips of his brushes – reminiscent of the Scottish Colourists, notably his own college tutor S.J. Peploe (1871-1935).

Two further self-portraits are illustrated in the book by the artist's wife, Mitzi McCall's Interior with Figure: the Life and Paintings of Charles McCall (The Book Guild, Lewes, 1987). A pencil or maybe crayon drawing, dated 1951, illustrated in all his Canadian exhibition catalogues, shows the artist's head and shoulders close-up. Forty-four years old here, the artist has thick dark hair and a goatee and moustache – all immaculately looked after, and no less immaculately drawn. His look is gentle but with a wary edge to it.

A 1970 self-portrait shows the artist – in his customary smock – seated in his studio, concentrating rather grimly on a picture, held outstretched on his knee. Pictures are seen on and stacked against the wall – this time their figurative content clear, not abstracted. His brushes are stacked profusely and neatly in a jar behind him. McCall himself is semi-framed by a curtain, a rather self-conscious pose suggesting almost that he is playing the part of an artist on a stage-set. Interestingly, in a short essay on 'The Man and the Painter' for the catalogue of a 1995 McCall Retrospective, David Coombs noted that 'Charles McCall was a shy man, quiet and reticent, characteristics not hidden even in later years by his tall and distinguished bearing.'

Charles McCall was born in Edinburgh in 1907; his father was a talented stone-setter in the jewellery trade. In her book, Mitzi McCall recalls the early conversations she had with her husband around 1944, in which he expounded his youthful struggles to become a painter:

Charles I wanted to be an artist very early in life [...] my father would have none of it, and placed me as a clerk with a well known Edinburgh lawyer [...] Every evening I would dash off to night school at Edinburgh College of Art. My teacher there was D.M. Sutherland [David Macbeth Sutherland (1883-1973)], a remarkable man, with a great gift of story telling, as well as being a very fine draughtsman and painter. He encouraged me to enter for the Scholarship to Edinburgh College of Art, and to my great joy I won it (he was then twenty-three years old).

Mitzi So you left the lawyer, and his eight shillings a week?

Charles Yes, with great relief...

Mitzi But why did your father not accept it?

Charles Well he was afraid for me, and the very uncertain future as an artist. At art school I was very lucky to have S.J. Peploe for my last year.

Mitzi If I may ask, who was he?

Charles He was a very fine Scottish painter, well known in Scotland and becoming known in England, a shy introverted man, he taught by inference rather than words. He had chalked up in his studio 'Relations in planes'. I did not know what he meant at first, but it slowly filtered through, and one day he came to my easel in the studio and studied my painting. 'That's it, you've got it!' It was a wonderful moment.

Under Peploe's tutorship, McCall gained his diploma in two years rather than the usual four, and was awarded two travelling scholarships, visiting France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany. He spent most of 1937 in Paris studying under Othon Friesz (1879-1949; a lifelong friend of Raoul Dufy, early on Friesz was a talented Fauvist painter; in his last three decades, he painted in a more classically-inspired, Cézannesque style, using a more restrained palette). On his return home, McCall was awarded a two-year fellowship at Edinburgh College of Art; this was interrupted by wartime service in the Royal Engineers as a camouflage officer. In 1944 he painted his first portrait of Mitzi, who was then serving as a WAAF officer (they were married in December 1945 in Germany). A lifelong support and inspiration to her husband, she is the subject of many of his pictures.

William McCall, the artist's father, was the subject of a 1935 painting (Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art). This is a lovingly illumined picture of domestic ease showing a middle-aged man in a grey cardigan over a black waistcoat, gold watch chain and white collarless shirt, seated in an armchair, with what appears to be a pipe in one hand, an open book in another, his bespectacled gaze absorbed in his reading. To his right, there is a scrupulously observed still life grouping, on a side-table, of a plate of slices of bread and a knife, and a glass and a bottle of beer.

One of McCall's most notable portraits depicted Mac (1938), a handsome young man seen leaning forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together, in a natural quiescent pose. Its understated palette is very much of the period – predominantly olive and beige relieved by the golden brown of his full head of hair – though the striking scarlet of the curtain behind him adds a note of exhilarating fervour.

Though he painted many landscapes, seascapes and townscapes, the subject McCall made truly his own was people absorbed in thought or work or daily tasks. His subjects included that of a woman at her sewing machine, a dark figure merging, Vuillard-like, into the gloomy, patterned backdrop of the room, except for the mesmerising lamplit yellow of the garment she's working on. Another picture portrays a woman rapt in stillness as she sits Mending the Sheet, while extensively around her is set the intriguingly undulating patterning of the large white sheet itself.

There are also paintings of male figures, often observed from a distance. A 1954 painting shows The Diamond Dealer, Jermyn Street at his desk, his bowed grey head illumined a silvery white as he examines a diamond stone through a magnifying glass (perhaps a pictorial echo of McCall's own father's work as a gem-setter). Similar evocatively aloof perspectives are used to portray an art dealer In the Gallery (1975) handling a small painting at his desk, and The Jade Collector (1972) intently examining some precious object at a desk in the far corner of a commodious drawing room.

McCall's first exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1950. Many successful London shows followed, and in the 50s and 60s he exhibited several times in Canada and the United States. A 1952 studio exchange with a painter in Monte Carlo greatly inspired him, especially after his experience of the drab austerity of post-war London. Charles McCall died in 1989. There was a retrospective of his work at Christie's in London in 1995.

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