Jack Millar

Jack Millar wrote twice to Ruth Borchard from south London. In the first letter dated '31st May 1964', he said, 'I am very pleased that you have liked my works for some time, and that you would like to have a Self-Portrait – I have one which I did earlier this year, about 24 x 24, and I would like to see your collection so perhaps I could bring it down some time.' Ruth paid £17 for the picture.

Millar's self-portrait is, typically, a 'sensitively personal' (to use the artist Colin Hayes's phrase when discussing Millar's special qualities) picture of the forty-three-year-old artist in front of his easel. It is a frankly austere work, perhaps a classic 'mid-life reckoning' picture, in which Millar's ascetic appearance – balding head, lined, domed forehead, mouth upturned slightly to his right, his rather angular leanness – is set out in a straightforward yet still subtle manner. It is thinly painted in a well-modulated yet restricted palette. He appears at once gritty and wary, keenly absorbed in the aesthetic self-scrutiny at hand. In his final post-graduate year at the Royal College of Art (1947-50), Millar's tutors included Rodrigo Moynihan, John Minton, Ruskin Spear, Carel Weight (q.v.) and Robert Buhler: their collective influence reverberates in this picture.

In a catalogue essay for Millar's one-man show at Duncan Campbell Contemporary Art in London in 1997, Colin Hayes R.A. wrote: 'Jack Millar is a realist intensely absorbed in observation, but he is not realistic. Far from it, his interpretations of observed nature are more abstract than many of those who declare themselves to be abstractionists, but who do no more than intimate geometrical diagrams.'

His self-portrait is divided into several abstract planes, representing the back wall –  ranging in colour from lavender to  purple to black – an imposing backdrop (a kind of void against which is head and neck are vividly illumined) with a framed but impenetrably dark picture hanging there – and the back and side of the canvas he is painting on. This endows the overall composition with a plain, coherent, geometric framework – which is in turn mediated by the artist's gaunt, 'sensitively personal' or intimate human presence and that of the apparently Old Master picture of a girl or young woman shown stuck on the back of the canvas.

Jack Millar was born in London in 1921. As David Buckman wrote in his Obituary of the artist in the Independent (4^th  December 2006), 'His father was Ernest Woodroffe de Cauze Millar, a scenic artist who, prior to his early death, worked at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Jack and his two brothers were the product of Ernest's second marriage. Whereas the brothers stayed at home, Jack was reckoned by his father to be a burden and he was fostered. Those early years remained a bitter memory, although as a young man Jack chummed up with his father again and remained an admirer of what he had achieved.

'Before the Second World War Millar became a student at Clapham Art School. After the war began and the school's evacuation, Millar disliked its new Midlands location and decided to return to London. He enrolled at St Martin's School of Art until he joined the Royal Artillery.

'It was characteristic of Millar's easy-going approach to life that one Christmas he had to forfeit his sergeant's stripes when gunners in his charge were found drunk on duty. Millar was next posted to India, where he contracted tuberculosis, which necessitated a transfer to South Africa for recuperation. When his health deteriorated to the point where it was feared he would not last long, he was sent home to England, but curiously by the time of his return he was found to be cured.

‘At the Royal College of Art […] in 1950 he was awarded the Andrew Lloyd Scholarship for landscape painting […] and graduated with first class honours […]

'Carel Weight remained a great help and influence. After a failed first marriage, Millar in 1969 married the painter Pamela Izzard. Weight's present to the happy couple was his own drolly titled The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden […]

'Like many artists, the Millars had to teach as well as paint, one compensation being the interaction with fellow teachers and students. Many students benefited from Millar's guidance as a visiting lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools from 1964 to 1992, also as head of fine art at Walthamstow School of Art, 1966-73, and Kingston Polytechnic, 1973-86.'

Millar had many exhibitions in London and elsewhere, showing many landscapes (based on extensive travels), and pictures of interiors with plant pots and vases of flowers with glimpses through windows and open French doors of gardens beyond (some with a solitary figure seen walking or gardening) – the latter pictures often redolent of Bonnard with an added Japanesque wistful delicacy of touch. Colin Hayes has written: 'Jack Millar translates nature into a pictorial language of tonality, colour values, drawing and design which add up to a poetic equivalent of nature; he knows too well the futility of attempting to imitate it [...] His language is always sensitively personal.'

As a coda to the Independent Obituary, his fellow painter Fred Cuming (q.v.) wrote: 'Jack Millar was a dedicated artist with encyclopaedic knowledge, huge energy and insight into the creative process. With a wicked and anarchic sense of humour, he delighted in and was capable of deflating pompous attitudes in others and occasionally, if necessary, himself. He was a great raconteur, and his tales of army life and experiences in the arts were Kiplingesque with a dash of Damon Runyon or Thurber.

'As a teacher, he was approachable, widely read and articulate; he made easy contact with students, being able to understand their thoughts and aspirations. Teaching is a two-way process in the arts and he was as excited and involved in their ideas as he was in transmitting his thoughts and ideas to them. He was infinitely patient but firm in criticism: his insistence on learning the basics never faltered.

'To draw, he thought, brought understanding – he was fascinated by the making of art works, film, music, theatre and the parallels between these activities and disciplines. In his own work his approach was deceptively simple: his home life, interiors, the structure and play of light, the changing seasons of Dulwich and London were all depicted with love and perception, his frequent trips abroad always producing a bonus of works.'

Of his final show, held when he was in his early eighties, at Duncan Campbell Fine Art in London in 2003, the Royal Academician Ken Howard (q.v.) wrote: 'Revelation is the key to all painting. Showing us a way to see. In Jack's case this is not shocking or confrontational, it is quiet and convincing and it adds to our perception of the world.'

Millar's 1997 exhibition showed the range of his achievement. His palette had evidently broadened and brightened over the years, though it retained the refinement (and, on occasion – such as in his chalky, blue-tinged painting of a winter walker on Penhill, a prominent hill in the North Yorkshire Pennines – the kind of asceticism) of colour that distinguishes his self-portrait. Yet pictures of willow trees in Dulwich Park and plants in a conservatory evoke a kind of natural sunniness or gaiety – absent in his self-portrait (except perhaps in the elucidated tones of his serious features), literally and metaphorically. In a painting of a Landing, Salt lLake Cottage, Millar's preoccupation with abstract forms opening up within a figurative framework – here, an open doorway framing further geometrical forms or frameworks (a picture on a wall, curtains, a window) – is as notable as ever.

Dried Flowers and the Tree of Life, illustrated on the catalogue cover, is a complex, allusive picture. It depicts a mixture of dried flowers and grasses set against a curtained backdrop, itself a paradisiacal composition of indigo branches, leaves, flowers and tiny, brilliant birds. There is an intriguing and fruitful interplay here between darks and lights, nature morte (literally so here) and art, and also between decorative profusion and simple natural forms and motifs.

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