Patrick Procktor

There are two letters from Patrick Procktor to Ruth Borchard in 1963, from London NW5. In the first, he writes: 'There is a painting which you might be interested to see. It is oil on cardboard. 30” x 24”, dated August 1967. It is a self-portrait, but painted from imagination and based on a portrait of a young man by Raphael, now in the National Gallery of Budapest, of which I once saw a reproduction. It is a somewhat strange picture, unique in my work but important to me. It is totally unlike other self-portraits I have done [...] I have not exhibited it except in the Slade/Royal College exhibition of 1962.' Ruth paid twenty guineas.

The Raphael painting that Procktor alludes to, Portrait of a Young Man (c.1504; Szépmuvészeti Museum, Budapest), displays classical calm and pervasive golden tonality – qualities characteristic of Raphael's great portraits. In his imaginative recreation, Procktor has dispensed with the original's landscape background (creating an abstracted backdrop, with a central panel suggesting maybe a door or window opening into a luminous vista), and perhaps even slightly 'peroxided-up' (à la Hockney, who declared as a Slade student that 'blondes have more fun') the young man's long hair. The figure's theatricality owes something to the timeless if indeterminate nature of the costume, and perhaps also to facial make-up. As the filmmaker, writer and artist Derek Jarman (1942-1994) noted, when he himself played Patrick Procktor as a young man in Stephen Frears's 1987 film, Prick Up Your Ears, chronicling the life of the playwright Joe Orton: 'Patrick wore quite simple shirts, green trousers, and sometimes a little eye-shadow. We all put on slap for an occasion: for the Slade dance out came the kohl, panstick and henna.'

Procktor's self-portrait exudes youthful wit, a generous measure of sunniness, though the somewhat grimacing face (harder in line than Procktor's own features) suggests a fiercer, more quizzical note. The sensitive, audacious colours here, and the crisp red sartorial line, anticipate Procktor's future career as a colourist of originality and grace.

Interestingly, in the Roy Strong Diaries 1967-1987 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), the museum director conjures up Procktor’s appearance at a number of high-arty parties between 1968 and 1970. At a party for Duncan Grant’s 80^th birthday on 20^th January 1969, ‘a dinner for about thirty […] with Hockney’s Splash and a bloody Bacon on the walls’, Procktor’s sartorial distinction is singled out: he ‘was, as always, languorously elegant in grey with a blood-orange-red open necked shirt and gaudy waistband’.  

Procktor was born in Dublin in 1936. His art master at school in London was the Welsh painter, Kyiffin Williams (q.v.), who has said, 'If I summed up his art in a single word it would be charm. Charming in the way Gainsborough is charming and most of the best English art.' From 1954-56, Procktor was a conscript in the Royal Navy as a student of Russian language, subsequently visiting Russia three times as an interpreter with various delegations. He studied at the Slade School of Art, London from 1958-62; among his teachers were William Coldstream (who, for Procktor, personified 'the beauty of draughtsmanship'), Keith Vaughan (q.v.), Dorothy Mead (q.v.), Claude Rogers and Robert Medley.

In his autobiography, Kicking the Pricks (Vintage, London, 1996; first published as The Last of England, Constable, London, 1987), Derek Jarman described ' a new world [of] David Hockney, Patrick Procktor, and Ossie Clark [the fashion designer], all of them at the beginning of glittering '60s careers [...] David danced with us at the Slade dance: it is difficult now to imagine the effect this had, it was like diving for the first time from a very great height [...] we would enjoy ourselves, something the repressed hated. Our openness hurt them [...] There was immense generosity, Patrick Procktor was very generous [...] There were lots of private parties; if you were young and bright the doors opened [...] Decadence, I soon learnt, was the first sign of intelligence.'

Procktor's earlier thickly impastoed student pictures show a Bombergian influence, intensely mediated by his teacher at the Slade, Dorothy Mead, herself a pupil and associate of Bomberg, and by fellow Slade students and Bomberg devotees, Creffield and Dubsky. By 1961, his palette had lightened; a fellow student has remarked that 'lightness and humour came into his work round the time he met Hockney'. Procktor exhibited alongside Hockney, Peter Phillips, John Hoyland, Allen Jones and Bridget Riley in 'The New Generation' exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1964, curated by Bryan Robertson. In Private View (1965), a sensationally fashionable book with photographs of both established modernist artists (such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson) and hip and promising young artists by Snowden, Robertson describes Procktor as 'extrovert, gregarious, sharp-witted, and intellectually both serious and well versed [...] He has learned from other figurative painters in England: Vaughan [...] Bacon, Hockney, and above all from Kitaj. All these artists are trying to find answers to similar problems, the main one being an attempt to project a new image of man in a relevant and meaningful context without relapsing into a devitalised and academic formula or accepting total abstraction.'

Procktor is reputedly the tall-necked, naked figure painted on the front and side of the Typhoo tea packet in Hockney's vigorous, comically wayward Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style (1961), and also the subject of the latter's realistic The Room, Manchester Street (1967) – portraying Patrick in his London studio, smoking a cigarette, dressed neatly and casually – a highly polished and affectionate image of still-boyish, sixties aestheticism.

On graduating from the Slade in 1962, with scholarship funding Procktor visited Italy and Greece. Then on, he journeyed widely abroad; in 1965, he travelled in the United States with Hockney and Colin Self. Egypt, Morocco, China, France, Spain and California are the 'settings' of many paintings. Since 1963, he had had regular one-man shows at London's Redfern Gallery. His large canvasses depicting Chinese Red Guards and young men dressed head-to-toe in leather caused quite a stir when exhibited there in 1967.

Procktor's works, including many portraits, are vibrant and reticent at once, allying the decorative and the figurative with sensuous wit and gracefulness. Portrait subjects included Jill Bennett the actress, in a stylishly original 1972 oil in which she is attired in a flamboyant yet elegant red silk trouser suit and a seemingly endless string of pearls, lying on a green sofa, arms casually akimbo; and a 1967 Hockneyesque drawing of a naked Joe Orton*, the playwright, which shocked and delighted mid-60s theatre-goers, when it appeared in their programme.

There are also some finely understated portraits – in oil and watercolour – of Richard Selby, a painter himself and Redfern Gallery director, depicted as a slender, introspective-looking young man, seen barefoot or in indigo jeans and white tee-shirt, made on a painting holiday in France in 1991. In his book on the artist, Patrick Proctor (Scolar Press, 1997), the art critic John McEwen has quoted Selby recalling the oil Portrait of a Young Mantaking two four-hour stints on consecutive days to complete. ‘It was very hard work. He painted it flat, not on an easel. It looked dreadful from my angle when he was painting it, but when I saw it right way up, the hairs stood on the back of my neck – it was so true a likeness. It was like looking in a mirror! The watercolour portrait of me was a far more casual affair. He works with great speed in watercolour.'

Fluent watercolours, with some exquisite, startling colour combinations, predominate in Procktor's oeuvre. These include Kyoto, Golden Temple, Rain (1991) in which pale lilac streaks are shown falling almost diagrammatically in front of the gold-and-mauve Zen temple, and Gooseberry (1996), in which, using only three tonally variegated colours, a dish of gooseberries is conjured up, in flat perspective, on a grey platter against a black background, with sensuous clarity.

Procktor's autobiography, Self-Portrait was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1991. David Buckman has written: 'There was a retrospective of [his] aquatints at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1985 and a touring show of paintings, 1959-89 from Davies Memorial Gallery, Newtown, in 1989-90. In 1984, the year his wife Kirsten died, Procktor painted a reredos for Chichester Cathedral.’ He had married Kirsten Benson in 1973, and they had a son, Nicholas.’ He was elected a Royal Academician in 1996.

In 2010, the perspicacious and copiously-illustrated Patrick Procktor: Art and Life by Ian Massey – based on original interview material with those who knew Procktor at all stages of his life and career – was published by Unicorn Press. The book relates that the artist's 'later years were blighted by alcoholism and loneliness, but Procktor continued drawing and painting very nearly to the end’. He died in August 2003.

From 25^th August to 10^th November, an exhibition, also titled Patrick Procktor: Art and Life, was held at Huddersfield Art Gallery, curated by Ian Massey. The author was commissioned by the University of Huddersfield to write an extensive review of this show – which then appeared in a 2014 issue of ROTOR Review, published by University of Huddersfield Press. Here are some extracts from this article:

Procktor 'possessed a quality which the painter John Craxton described as 'the chic of facility' – an uncanny ability to evoke a person, a place, a creature, still-life or a milieu with a gliding freshness, a disciplined spontaneity revealed in, say, a fluctuating watercolour wash impeccably expressing the langorous figure of a young man reclining in sensual repose […]

'His early '60s paintings have many sparkling inventive intimations of an innately graceful sensibility in their depiction of balletic nudes. These qualities may seem submerged under a weight of sombre impasto and the heavy existential seriousness and convoluted compositional complexities of a young “very tall, gangling, firework display” of an artist (as the renowned writer and curator Bryan Robertson characterised him) finding his way […]

'A delightful wing of the Huddersfield exhibition [...] was a wall of paintings (from the Kirklees Collection) by modern British artists who had inspired Procktor: an enchanting still-life by Christopher Wood; a vibrant mountainscape by David Bomberg; a fiercely tender assembly of male nudes in a Keith Vaughan gouache; and a tersely magisterial overview of The Antique Room at the Slade (1953) by Robert Medley. Bomberg's example as a neglected visionary genius permeated Procktor's experience at the Slade. Keith Vaughan never taught Procktor there but they became close friends. Procktor wrote, 'I was very, very excited by his painting. I thought it was beautiful [...] He was the best painter of the male nude.’

'Procktor's meticulously pared-down though sometimes ecstatically diaphanous portraits from the mid-'60s onwards were rooted in the sense of joyous liberation embraced in the period. In one portrait of a psychedelic green-and-yellow scarved Jimi Hendrix, the musician's Afro hair is miraculously conjured up in a wild black watercolour wash. In a 1969 portrait in which Procktor's handsome, pop star-aspirant boyfriend Gervase Griffiths is seen absorbed in music on his headphones, the vibrant though miniscule detail of a single Moroccan Slipper (the picture's title) perhaps hints at the phantasmagoric inner world Gervase has access to. The tactile and empathetic fluency, 'the chic of facility' of such pictures is surely equal to that achieved in Hockney's more renowned portraits from the same period – as in Hockney's own large acrylic portrait of Procktor himself standing in profile, cigarette in upraised hand at home in The Room, Manchester Street (1967) […]

'Procktor's imagination was kindled by his long painting trips abroad. He wrote, 'The light in Egypt is violet, in China daffodil, in Venice opalescent.' The violet Egyptian light can be seen to permeate his exquisitely layered water/land/skyscape painting of The Nile Near Efdu (1985), in which metallic paint is used to conjure up the sizzling heat haze of the mountains reflected in the waters, whose colours run to deeper lilac-infused tones than those of the sky they mirror.

'The aquatints that Procktor made following a trip to China in 1980 are masterpieces of dispassionate intimacy: in his distilled view of Peking's Forbidden City (1980), architectural shapes and colours appear both theatrically monumental and elegantly sparse and pristine in composition. A similar kind of spatial and colourist economy, as well as an (understated) compassion for anyone immersed in such an apparently clinical environment, is also evident in Procktor's remarkable large-scale oil painting Inside Old Holloway (1974). It depicts the wire-enmeshed spiral staircase descending to the immaculately polished, glistening blood-pink floor below. Two indistinct yet somehow dignified-appearing female inmates stand on the two bisecting prison landings. Far above, a muted expanse of blue is glimpsed through a hexagonal skylight, where grey metal bars, curiously branch-like in form, seem to reach beyond the confines of the prison. Perhaps they offer a transcendent allusion to the nature of freedom existing beyond the prison confines. The artist discerns a poignant, immanent beauty even in such a stark setting.'

         * See Joe Orton's diary entry for Friday 5^th May, 1967: 'At 4.30 I had to go to Patrick Procktor's studio in Manchester Street [...] I rang the bell. Patrick Procktor was tall, thin, pallid. Rather queerish. Willowy [...] he put on a record of the Beatles on the record player. He drew several pictures of me in my woolly and cap. Then he told me to take the cap off [...] I sat on the bed and he drew me. Then we talked a little more. And he drew me lying on the bed. I kept my socks on, nothing else. I kept my socks on because I think they're sexy. “I've drawn you looking like a beautiful teenager,” P. Procktor said. “You'll get a lot of kinky letters after this, I'm sure.”’

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