Brian Rees

There are two letters from Brian Rees to Ruth Borchard, both dated 1963, from Neath, Glamorgan, Wales. In the first, he says he will send a self-portrait soon, the price fifteen guineas. In the second he writes:

         I was very pleased that you were satisfied with my self-portrait. I feel myself that it is an honest piece of work if nothing else. Your commission came as a welcome ray of light to brighten my despondency.

I've been working all this summer in a Steelworks Office and I have been out of contact with Art & people interested in it. Life is pretty dull down here with little to do except drink and the allure of London grows ever stronger day by day.

I have made tentative attempts to obtain a teaching post in the London area but these have evoked little response. The prospect of facing another Winter in the provinces doesn't seem particularly attractive but I expect I shall endure it.

I've done very little in the way of art for some time now, not since I was in London and working as a free-lance artist. The break-up of my marriage forced me to return home and I've been unable to maintain the few, tenuous contacts I had in advertising.

Many thanks for your kind interest and I hope your project of a book of self-portraits materialises and is a success.

The artist posted the framed picture to Reigate, and soon afterwards visited Ruth and her collection.

The dating of the work is somewhat problematic. It is signed and dated in pencil, 'Brian Rees 1955'. The author visited Rees in his modest bedsit in southeast London in 2001; he was by then seventy-one, and I found him a gentle, buoyant presence, humble about his achievements, and delighted that at long last the book on Ruth's collection was about to appear. He was adamant, however, that the picture was made specially for Ruth in 1963. As such, it portrays him aged thirty-three; he was born in 1930 in the small South Wales town of Neath. He told me that Ruth had originally seen his pictures on display one Sunday (probably in 1963) on the railings at Bayswater Road in London; having bought one, she requested that he paint her a self-portrait – this is the result. In 2001, Rees said he recognised that his self-portrait has some affinities with the work of neo-Romantic artists prominent in the 50s, notably John Minton (who committed suicide in 1957), and also John Craxton and Michael Ayrton (q.v.). Rees remembered encountering Minton at a dance in London in the mid-50s, a charismatically lively presence, Rees said, 'jiving, flinging himself around', and he also recalled Minton's brilliant book and magazine illustrations being fashionably ubiquitous at the time.

Though this picture's intense scrutiny of the male form set against a stark, two-toned background has affinities with Minton and Craxton's similar portrayals, it possesses a grittier, more socially realistic quality – akin to the works of the English Kitchen Sink School of painting, as practised by artists such as John Bratby (1928-1992), Jack Smith (1928-2011) and Derrick Greaves (b.1927). Rees's self-portrait is also seemingly close in spirit to the polished  realism of Lucian Freud (especially in his early 50s' paintings, with their own German Neue Sachlichkeit affinities). With none of the magical idealism of a neo-Romantic portrait, it is a frank portrayal of a young man in a sullen mood.

Two long, subtly beaded lines on his forehead, a day or two's growth of beard, shadows around bleary eyes, as well as the crumpled vest revealing curlicues of hair on the chest and glimpsed under his right arm – all contribute to a slightly hungover air of hazy despondency. It could indeed be a portrait of some working class, still-Angry Young Man, out of the novels of Alan Sillitoe or the plays of John Osborne. The quality of line throughout is remarkable – seen in the figure's powerful outline, the exact, sturdy drawing of his glasses (described by the art writer Andrew Graham-Dixon as 'of the type favoured by the young Michael Caine'), the myriad fine lines conjuring up his curly, dishevelled hair, the swathes of gouache evoking the sagging vest, and the delicate chiaroscuro describing his neck and shoulder blades.

As Rees himself said, 'I feel that it is an honest piece of work if nothing else.' The lower stretch of black background against the monochrome figure has a bleak power of its own. The upper expanse or 'sky' of chalky, thinly applied blue has a cooling, somewhat relieving effect. This, low-key French blue somehow helps humanise the picture, allowing a quiet, contemplative space in which the central figure can simply be.

Reviewing the first edition of Face to Face in The British Art Journal (Winter 2004), Adrian Clark noted that 'although a book of two halves [...] the section of the book which deals with artists not represented in the collection fills many of the gaps [...] Here we can see what the great British artists of the century did with the genre and some of the work is particularly strong (Craxton, Freud, Sutherland).

'Nevertheless, although a book of two halves, it coheres beautifully, showing some great artists, some young, some unknown, some below par, wrestling with the challenge of depicting themselves. It has opened my eyes to many artists which are new to me – I particularly loved the self-portrait by the Welshman, Brian Rees, not a familiar name to me, whose picture is as strong as an early Freud or Craxton. What a fine accolade for him and what a fitting example of a fine book.'

In his article on the Borchard Collection (The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 20^th February 2005), Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote, 'Many of the pictures collected by Ruth Borchard are by relatively little-known artists, and by no means all of them could be called masterpieces. But that is a strong part of their collective charm. Although they span about half a century, the majority of them were painted during the 1950s and 1960s, many by artists who were still students – or at the very beginning of their careers – and they have a powerful reek of the period about them.

'This is not just a question of clothes and hairstyles (although it is partly that), but also of how these pictures reflect the emotional temper of their times.'

Graham-Dixon then goes on to single out self-portraits by Kenneth Brazier, Peter Coker, Anthony Eyton, Peter Freeth, Anthony Green as by 'artists [who] are very much Angry Young Men, bohemians on a mission. One of the best pictures is a pugnacious self-portrait, beautifully drawn, by the somewhat underappreciated Welsh painter Brian Rees. Its combination of gritty realism and linear delicacy recalls the work of Lucian Freud, a notable absentee from the Borchard Collection, from the same period.'

Rees's father was a coal miner. At school, Brian's artistic abilities were recognised early on. He was an art student for about ten years in all, studying at Swansea School of Art from 1947-49 and 1951-54, with an intervening year spent at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts in London. From 1955-57, he worked as a Welsh steelworks' clerk, but was awarded a company scholarship (with no strings attached), and so left to study at University College, Swansea (1957-58) and then at the Central School in London (1958-63), where his subjects were book illustration and relief-painting. At Camberwell, his tutors included Edward Ardizonne (1900-1979) and Gilbert Spencer (1892-1979). He recalls Spencer asking Ardizonne if Rees was any good, and the reply, 'Yes, he paints the Celtic twilight.' At the Central School, he was fortunate to be taught print-making by Michael Rothenstein (1908-1993) and Gertrude Hermes (1901-1983); the latter, he says, 'let me take an extensive range of lino tools home for a fifteen pound deposit at the weekend'. Ardizonne impressed upon him how important it was 'to follow your own style'.

In 1959, Rees illustrated the dustjacket for the twelfth edition of Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood (published by J.M. Dent of London). He described to me how he was then employed by this publisher, making some illustrations but also doing much menial administrative work. One day he was coming down the stairs and happened to overhear someone in the firm saying that they were going to publish a new edition of the play; Rees at once interrupted, and declared enthusiastically, 'I come from exactly the kind of Welsh village and community portrayed in that book; I know all the characters!' – and as a result he was given the book jacket commission.

Dylan Thomas had died in November 1953. Rees had a memory of seeing him and the poet Vernon Watkins animatedly conversing in a Swansea pub, and Thomas emerging with two flagons in his jacket pocket. Rees found Under Milk Wood a naturally sympathetic subject to illustrate, since Thomas's comical, mythical Welsh village of Llareggob, with its ultra-gossipy air – conjured up in what Thomas himself called 'prose under blood pressure' – reminded him intimately of his native Neath. The jacket is segmented into linocut vignettes portraying the villagers – Mr. Edwards, 'a draper mad for love'; the shrewish, manically houseproud Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard; the Reverend Eli Jenkins, 'poet, preacher dreaming of Eisteddfodau’; Butcher Beynon, purveyor (in his wife's dream) of 'owl meat, dogs' eyes, man-chop', etc. Rees's amusing, caricaturist portraits are incisively true to the text. Interestingly, the backdrop of sea and sky (and some other details) are a vivid blue in colour, against which the black-and-white figures stand out strongly; some affinities here then to the approach he undertook in his (non-illustrational) self-portrait.

Hilly Neath has been the subject of pictures by Rees over the years. Two 1977 oil paintings, Aspect of the Rhonddha and Rhonddha Valley Scene (both Collection: Bangor University) dynamically represent the chapels, pubs, terraced houses, ornate Victorian street lamps, and the collieries on the hills beyond – but none of the inhabitants – in a cheerfully colourful, Pop Artish palette (the former picture has a bright pink sun against a turquoise sky). There is a linocut view of the town from a high vantage point – where he recalls seeing one day in the late 1950s, three painters sitting on a bench – Josef Herman (who then lived nearby), Martin Bloch (who had taught Rees at the Central School) and William Roberts; the view in the picture is precisely what this illustrious artistic trio would have gazed upon.

Though there is tantalisingly little artwork by Rees out there, the quality and originality of his art was confirmed when a quantity of works of paper (around twenty-five or so) by him appeared at Sworders auction house, Stansted, Essex in November 2015. These included a fine small gouache and pen-and-ink self-portrait of him seated at home, wearing an open-necked white shirt, a brown sweater or cardigan, a cigarette held aloft in one hand, his gaze thoughtfully downcast, his black hair and thick, black spectacles standing out against the pallor of his shirt and unembellished facial features. The mood here is not one of hungover despondency but rather of domestic ease (with an element of nervous strain too) – it could be a portrait of any studious, somewhat impecunious British fellow at home, in the late fifties or early sixties. The plain honesty, the lack of any self-aggrandisement here, is striking.

There are also two beautifully observed late 50s or early 60s' gouache and pen-and-ink studies of students in art school studios. In one, two young men – one in an indigo cardigan, the other in a vivid pink jumper – sit on either side of a twin easel, each oblivious of the other, both absorbed in the painting task at hand. In the other, the subject is two young women – one in a blue sweater, the other in an orangey red one – also seen intensively working either side of a double easel. Each and every nuance of these art student pairs at work is subtly choreographed. These two pictures succeed in evoking the workaday, creative atmosphere of a British art school at that time surely as faithfully, and humanely, as any works surviving from that period.

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