Gerard de Rose

There are three friendly, though businesslike, letters from Gerard de Rose to Ruth Borchard, dated between 1965-66, from Bedford Park, London W6, agreeing to send her a self-portrait (the letter-heading shows that he had a second home at Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk). Ruth paid twenty-one guineas for it.

This undated self-portrait is presumably from c.1964-66, since it seems stylistically close to de Rose's other mid-sixties portraits. The picture may very well have been painted especially for Ruth –the artist's appearance certainly seems to closely resemble contemporary photographs of him. His handsome, grey-green-tinged face looks cragged and worn beyond its 45 years; interestingly, a small black-and-white photograph of the artist in the catalogue for a 1966 exhibition in London, shows remarkably wrinkled features, topped by a still youthful head of thick, glossy, wavy hair.

De Rose was well known for perceptively isolating his subjects against stark or plain backgrounds: figures 'standing alone in a room' (to use Patrick Procktor's description, quoted more extensively below). In his self-portrait, cool, abstract panels formed from dark grey lines against light grey (resembling classical Nordic or Baltic décor) help accentuate the appearance of his well-marked, rather washed-out countenance, bringing it into fully human relief. Yet the juxtaposition of black suit, black tie, and white shirt – 'sharp' male gear at the time – and austere backdrop makes for an impeccably severe composition, made even more so by the artist's intense, desolate look. Aesthetic coolness and masculine sobriety (allowing for the generous head of strawberry-blonde hair) distinguish both the man and the picture. The overall effect is beautifully, unnervingly bleak.

Another self-portrait (Collection: Hawarth Art Gallery, Accrington), probably from around the same time, depicts the artist standing foursquare as a stocky presence in smart casual gear of brown cardigan, pale lemon tie, black shirt and beige trousers. The quite clinical isolation of the sturdy, spruce figure with his ambiguous air of perplexity and self-assurance, against a plain backdrop of silvery grey and dark brown, is poignant. De Rose has been described as a 'flamboyant character [...] a small man with red hair and a stutter [...] a convivial member of the Chelsea Arts Club, a skilled amateur musician and in his youth a formidable boxer’. He died in 1987.

De Rose was born in Accrington, Lancashire in 1921. His mother was British, and his father, a surgeon and professor of music, of Russian descent. He studied at Accrington School of Art, and then won a textile scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1939, but he was called up into the Royal Engineers at the outbreak of war, taking part in the Dunkirk evacuation. From his demobilisation in 1946 to 1950 he studied painting at the Royal College. He then taught until 1967 at various art colleges, by which time he had become renowned as a portraitist of the cream of Swinging London – including Julie Christie, David Hockney (based on a photograph of the unsmiling yet poised young artist with dyed blonde hair and austere, hip attire of black suit and tie and plain white shirt, sitting informally on a wooden chair against a cream, tongue-and-groove panelled wall) and the Rolling Stones. In a portrait of Mick Jagger, the singer is reduced to a state of aesthetic isolation in a small corner of the picture; thick tousles of hair falling down on to one of his closed eyes, the young rock musician is seen singing with ecstatic abandon. De Rose also painted Trevor Howard, Claire Bloom, the Duke of Bedford, Ken Dodd, Charlie Drake, Morecambe and Wise, Sammy Davis Junior and Vladimir Nabokov (the latter portrait appearing on the front of Time Magazine). 

In the summer of 2017, a retrospective exhibition of de Rose's paintings took place in Accrington. An article in the Lancashire Telegraph by Roger Airey (10th August 2017) noted that 'Gerard married his wife Noreen in 1948 and had one son, Theo, who has been instrumental in bringing the exhibition of his work together at Haworth Art Gallery in the town of his dad’s birth.

'The exhibition of Gerard’s work is spread over two rooms, one which depicts his life from attending Accrington Art School in 1930s to being elected to the Royal Academy in 1948 and the other displaying some of his fabulous celebrity portraits [...] along with a selection of photographs, news cuttings and memorabilia.' Amongst the portraits shown was that of David Hockney and  one too of David Oxtoby, the Pop Art movement-associated painter who since art college days has made pictures based on pop music and portraying pop and rock stars. Also on display was a succinctly composed portrait of the actor Trevor Howard as a self-possessed, imposing figure in black sweater and trousers, hands debonairly in pockets, standing on bare floorboards against a plain white wall.

The Accrington show re-united de Rose's deftly distilled, psychologically incisive portraits of Eric Morcambe and Ernie Wise; somewhat different sizes in a varied yet refined palette, each work portrays one of the comedians on a director's chair against a clinical yetlucid backdrop. The 1987 article noted that 'The Morecambe and Wise portraits were framed as a pair and shown at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1967 but then went their separate ways. Luckily, the two owners [...] have lent both pieces for the Accrington exhibition. Eric’s daughter, Gail said: “I am absolutely delighted that Dad and Ernie are to be reunited in this way. As one of the best known double acts it is only right that they should be side by side!”'

Three somewhat earlier paintings by de Rose show what an uncompromisingly direct and economically expressive painter he could be. His Portrait of the Artist's Wife (Collection: Haworth Art Gallery, Accrington) depicts an attractive, glamorous-looking young woman with long dark brown hair in a striking outfit of low-cut black top and full, crimson skirt. Her gaze and stance (seated, she extends her arms fully to rest just above the knees) engage the spectator with a compelling intimacy.

A 1955 portrait of Herbert Lom (b.1917), as the King in ‘The King and I’ by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II (Collection: Victoria and Albert Museum, London) is a brilliantly concise character study of the broodingly countenanced actor in impressively dark, exotic attire set against a warm silvery pink backdrop.

De Rose’s 1956 painting Wrestlers (Collection: Touchstones Rochdale), a view from just above the ring of two brawny, bronzed men in black trunks grappling in a hardy sensual embrace on a chalky white ground, is remarkable for its taut composition, exacting palette and visceral vigour.

Patrick Procktor (q.v.) wrote a catalogue essay for de Rose's exhibition at the Alwin Gallery, London in November 1966. He started by recalling an adolescent memory of a de Rose painting in the Royal Academy of a young art student 'standing alone in a room':

I can think of no other painting in that company which had for me a comparable sense of romantic identification. De Rose created the archetypal image of the present-day artist, not heroic exactly but living according to a firmly believed ideal, possibly the only heroic ideal (of Art) left in our society...

[…] not for him the gleaming business men, cheap highlights on the cheeks, noses full of nickels, dressed in Stella-type chalk stripe lounge suits [as in 'conventional modern portraits]. De Rose's attitude is rare also among artists of any persuasion – as well as the formal reasons for the relative unpopularity of portraiture in modern painting there is also the unwillingness of many painters to look trustfully at people around them, to see, to imagine and draw the way their outward appearance closely reflects and is conditioned by their lives. These outward signs, of expression, posture and dress, are the visual vocabulary of de Rose's portraits and form the substance of his art [With] de Rose's sitters, chosen as they are [...] for his recognition of something stylish about their appearance or their lives, the over-riding psychological flavour is of the artist himself. Separately these are portraits of other people, collectively they represent an image of the artist himself.