Michael Noakes

There are two letters from Michael Noakes to Ruth Borchard, dated '29 Jan 59' and '5 May 1960', from Reigate, Surrey, when both were living there and were good friends. In his first letter, Noakes was responding to Ruth's request for artists she could approach. Only one of these – Gerald Rose –  actually went on to contribute a self-portrait. Noakes concludes: 'All this thinking about portraits set me doing a couple myself – of me with beard! I doubt if you would like either, but I must show you sometime. (I'm now without beard, you'll be glad to hear).' Later that year, the artist showed Ruth the self-portraits, and she did buy one (dated 1958); for how much, she does not mention.

In his second letter, Noakes writes: 'About the middle of this month I have to collect together twenty or so paintings and as many drawings to put on show at the R.A. Schools for my Final Examination [...] And that's quite a lot of work, as you will realise.

'I would be very grateful if I could borrow that self-portrait that you bought from me, to submit as part of this 'evidence of study'. Would that be all right?'

Born in Brighton in 1933, Michael Noakes was twenty-five years old when he painted this self-portrait. In 2001, Noakes recalled in a letter to the author that as an R.A. Schools student, 'I was experimenting as a young artist, playing around with different self-portraits at the time.' He also remarked that painting oneself – the most 'convenient model of all' – was 'no problem, it takes the pressure off. Yet all the questions about how to find the form, to achieve likeness, colour and tone, remain.' He says that his self-portrait was 'painted fairly low, drained of colour, greenish', noting that, by contrast, 'you can't paint a sitter with a greenish face’.

The picture shows the artist with a long, gaunt face and large, penetrating eyes. His emphatically pallid, green-tinged skin, thick red beard, fiercely illumined auburn hair and those disquieting, shadowed eyes combine to give him a quite wary, haunted look, not unlike that seen in photographic portraits of D.H. Lawrence. There also seems to be some sort of kinship here, in terms of heightened colour and a hallucinatory intensity of feeling and detail (especially in the modelling of the head), with German Neue Sachlichkeit portraiture.

When one compares Noakes's appearance with his much more urbane, sometimes slightly mischievous, clean-shaven look in later self-portraits, as well as in photographs – such as one reproduced on the back cover of his 1968  book, A Professional Approach to Oil Painting – the differences are striking. As a young artist, Noakes was imaginatively experimenting with tonality, form and self-image; heightening tones, exaggerating forms somewhat and 'playing around', as he puts it, with identity.

'At art school,' he says, 'we were taught anatomy, and so I caught the last of the traditional training there.' Such training – based on the study of classical sculpture, Old Master drawings and paintings, and human anatomy – is surely evident in the formulation here, albeit a slightly exaggerated one, of his features. The white shirt and green tie are painted more impressionistically than the boldly realised head, yet their rumpled textures are sensuously evoked.

In her Obituary of the artist in the Guardian (Wednesday 13^th  June 2018), Beatrice Bowles-Bray wrote: 'Michael did not hail from artistic stock.  […] he was the son of Basil Noakes, an estate manager, and his wife, Mary (née Gerard). A devout Catholic from childhood, Michael aspired to join the priesthood, or failing that, to be a comedian. He went to Downside School, in Somerset, but left at 15 to train as an artist, studying design [at Reigate School of Art] before graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in London [in 1960; from 1954-56, he had spent two years doing National Service, mainly as an army officer in Germany].

'Just two years into his studies, Michael approached the television presenter Gilbert Harding with a bold request to paint his portrait. Harding was so impressed with the end result that he became a patron of the teenage prodigy, connecting the artist with other high-profile sitters including Malcolm Muggeridge and Ralph Richardson. By his mid-20s, Michael’s career was in full swing.'

The Obituary of the artist in the Times (5^th July  2018) noted that 'In 1957 [Michael] met Vivien Langley when her parents moved into a flat owned by his parents. On catching sight of the new neighbour through a window he announced that she would be his wife, a boast he made good three years later. Their first home together was a converted stable block in Reigate.' In her Memory of Ruth Borchard (2003), Vivien recalled attending in the late 1950s intellectually and culturally stimulating gatherings at Ruth's 'large and bustling family home where many of her guests were painters'. Vivien Noakes (1937-2011) went on later to become a perceptive writer and leading authority on both the artist and nonsense poet Edward Lear and the painter and First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg.

Michael Noakes himself became renowned as a portraitist of public figures, ranging from members of the Royal Family to leading politicians and ecclesiastical figures, industrialists, writers, academics, lawyers, actors, singers and family groupings. He was also a landscape painter. His book A Professional Approach to Oil Painting. Practical advice for students and amateurs (Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, London, 1968) illustrated many of his portraits, and various landscape and townscape studies, but it also reproduced some quite early paintings which reveal – like his 1958 self-portrait – a more expressionistic tendency. There are paintings of Christ on the Cross, and one of The Dead Christ, about which he commented, 'My idea was not to make an anatomically correct painting of a figure, but to distort the form to suggest more strongly the stresses and tensions it had undergone in life.'

A seminal picture for Noakes was his portrait of Gilbert Harding (1959; Collection Hereford Museum and Art Gallery). Here, Noakes resolved many of the painterly quandaries he had been faced with, and managed to portray a brilliant, prickly and vulnerable man with wonderful perceptiveness. Noakes's earlier expressionistic tendencies have been eschewed in favour of a more muted palette and a subtle, ungarnished realism. 'Though it wasn't how he was usually seen on television, Gilbert Harding wanted to be painted wearing an open-necked shirt. In a way, I think this helped the picture for my concern was to say something of the private personality of a strangely gifted and unconventional man.' In 1960, as the focus of an interview in the BBC television Face to Face series, the gruff, intensely private and understandably secretive Harding (he was a homosexual man at a time when gay men in Britain were subject to widespread public prejudice and legal persecution for consensual sexual activity) was reduced to tears by the sly and prying questioning of John Freeman, the Labour politician and broadcaster. Just fifty-three years old, Harding died a few weeks after this programme was broadcast in an asthmatic attack after collapsing outside Broadcasting House as he was about to climb into a taxi. In a 1979 BBC Radio London programme, Gilbert Harding, the presenter Owen Spencer-Thomas characterised the late broadcaster as 'enigmatic [...] bad-tempered and rude, yet his friends counted him as one of kindest and most generous'.

Noakes's portraits are in numerous public and private collections. In 1973-74 he painted the portrait of Sir John (later Lord) Wolfenden (1906-1985) – the British educator and social reformer best known for chairing the Wolfenden Committee, whose report, recommending the partial decriminalisation of homosexual acts in private between consenting males over the age of twenty-one, was published in 1957 (and which led eventually to the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967). This elegant portrait (Collection British Museum) depicts Sir John as a slim, humorously alert, decorous-looking man in a smart navy blue suit and tie seated in a capacious, blue-winged armchair.

In 1954, following several notorious trials of figures such as Alan Turing, Peter Wildeblood and Lord Montague of Beaulieu, the Conservative government had set up a Committee under Wolfenden to consider the legal status of male homosexuality as well as prostitution in England and Wales – by the end of that year, there were 1,069 men in English and Welsh prisons for homosexual acts, with an average age of 37. The committee of fifteen (twelve men and three women) led by Wolfenden, first met on 15th September 1954, gathering on sixty-two days, of which just under half were spent interviewing witnesses, who included not only gay men whose lives had been adversely affected by the law but also religious leaders, psychiatrists and police and probation officers. Early on in the proceedings Wolfenden decorously suggested, that for the sake of the ladies in the room, the committee use the terms Huntleys and Palmers (after the biscuit manufacturers) – Huntleys to denote homosexuals, Palmers for prostitutes.

As Sir David Bell, Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, wrote in Pink News in 2013, 'It would be a caricature to see John Wolfenden as some ahead-of-his-time visionary or free thinker. Indeed in many ways, he was a rather old-fashioned and traditional man (he had, after all, been the headmaster of two public schools). But crucially, he was in that great English liberal tradition and was a man who believed in tolerance, freedom and – yes – fair play.

'Wolfenden was far-sighted enough to trust that public opinion would, in time, move with the committee’s recommendations [...] John Wolfenden should again be feted as one of homosexual equality’s most unlikely heroes.' In Noakes's portrait, the modest, conservatively dapper Sir John appears as the epitome of English liberal-minded perspicacity.

Noakes's psychologically discerning, formally quite austere portraits of Sir Ralph Richardson (1961), Robert Morley (1964), J.B. Priestley (1970) – the latter an oil sketch study for a more ambitious portrait now in the Collection of Bradford Museums and Galleries – and a richly intricate, humane pencil drawing of the weathered features of Dame Margaret Rutherford (1970), all belong to the National Portrait Gallery. His work is also in the personal collection of the Queen as well as in the Royal Collection at Windsor. He was a member of The Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Noakes also painted group portraits, for one of which the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and other members of the Royal family sat individually. A family portrait (1981-83) of the theatre critic and writer Sheridan Morley, his wife Margaret and their three children, was commissioned by Sheridan's father, the comic actor Robert Morley. The focal point of this informally posed family grouping is a television screen; Robert is the broadcast subject, seen in undoubtedly witty, loquacious flow.

In 1995, Noakes painted a portrait of President Bill Clinton for Rhodes House in Oxford (where, as a young man, Clinton had been a Rhodes Scholar). The Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual catalogue for 1996 illustrated this picture, which shows the president, with an open, genial look, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, with numerous objects arrayed in front of him. As the catalogue text explained, Michael and his wife Vivien (who accompanied him) were warned beforehand that the President would just carry on being President (i.e. receiving numerous visitors) whilst they were with him. Although this added to the fascination of their time in the Oval office, it also added to the problems involved in painting the portrait.

In 1999 Michael and Vivien Noakes embarked on a challenging project to accompany the Queen on her public appearances, formally, informally and 'behind-the-scenes' – in Britain and abroad, throughout the year. The resulting illustrations by Michael, and Vivien's evocative and descriptive text, were published as The Daily Life of the Queen: An Artist's Diary (Ebury Press, London, 2000). As the book's introduction made clear: 'Of immense importance was the proposal – which came not from us but from the Palace –that we should be free agents in interpreting what we saw.'

The reader of the book accompanies the Queen on State Visits to Korea, Ghana, South Africa and Mozambique; on day trips throughout the United Kingdom; to Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral. An impression of the Queen as a real, credible human being emerges from this respectful but unsycophantic book.

The splendour of ceremonial and large-scale gatherings gave Michael Noakes the opportunity to create some vibrant, decorative pictures – such as a vista of the Queen on a Korean red carpet in front of television cameramen and soldiers in traditional yellow robes. Some of the most original images here are the simplest, sometimes almost surreal in their odd social conjunctions: the Queen and Queen Mother seen inspecting a table-top of tea cosies; three police outriders seen waiting at night at Buckingham Palace, their fluorescent yellow jackets, helmets and motorbikes dynamically patterned against a dark backdrop; the Queen in a salmon-pink outfit observing stroke patients using walking machines in a gym so as to regain physical co-ordination and strength.

The Times Obituary of the artist noted that 'Noakes created self-portraits for pleasure, sometimes alone or with his wife; other family pictures depict the children [Anya, Jonathan and Ben] in deckchairs [...] He would also draw himself in cartoons, the artist depicted as a superhero, while letters to the taxman, telephone companies or utilities would be signed with an amusing pencil drawing, a near-foolproof way of eliciting a response from officialdom.

'He had much fun creating trompe l'oeil works, including a full-size portrait of Thatcher on the steps of Downing Street. Another, of himself as a young man with pipe in mouth and palette in hand, was hinged on a door to the family's basement and had the benefit of making potential burglars think that they were being watched […]

'He was bemused by some of the trends in modern art [...] Noting that Rembrandt once produced a wonderful picture of a flayed ox, Noakes added: “He didn't expect to exhibit the ox, just his picture of it; now would he have shown a pickled shark. Van Gogh painted his bedroom; now they display a bed itself.”'

The Guardian Obituary recorded that 'Michael continued to paint until the end of his life. Recently completed portraits of Dame Judi Dench and Bernard Longley, Catholic archbishop of Birmingham, were shown at the Mall Galleries in London in May [2018], and the artist had four more portraits in the pipeline.'

Here are some of Noakes's illuminating thoughts on the nature of portraiture from his  book A Professional Approach to Oil Painting:

The first essential that every sitter demands is that the portrait must be 'like' – physically and in character. This does not imply, however, that experiment is excluded with portrait commissions, for some sitters give welcome encouragement and help over this. And it certainly does not mean that a professional portrait painter must attempt to flatter his subject. Though I doubt it if an artist would stay in the market for long if he were consistently cruel, he can certainly be truthful […]

Objectivity in painting, however, must always be a selective operation. It may involve an over-statement of some facts at the expense of others, in order to arrive at a representation of the truth. So, if you respond at all to the excitement of the unusual and interesting in form, you will even find a discreet element of caricature creeps in.

Rembrandt painted many portraits that are both convincing in physical likeness, and also tell us much about the personality of his subjects. Yet they have, in addition to that, a universal quality: they say something about the human situation generally. This was a great achievement, and it is something we can only aim at [...] Nevertheless, on the question of how much one can hope to say about character, it is the individual artist's intuition and sensibility that count [...] I don't believe that artists can automatically expect to 'strip off the veneer and expose the inmost soul' of their subjects – that kind of magic belongs to the painter and the psychiatrist only in the bad novel.

But these problems would probably only hover at the back of the mind during the early stages of painting a portrait. The first sitting often turns out to be an exploratory one, and I do not normally start work then on what will be the final canvas. Though I have usually met my sitter previously, we will both need more time – so that I’m able to recognise a characteristic pose when he’s ready to relax into it. Therefore I often paint a rather unresolved study of just the head.

Though I cannot easily paint and talk simultaneously, I encourage my sitter to chat if he feels like it. This can lead me to all kinds of discoveries about him; and since he's bound to feel less like a cabbage he'll probably display a surprising range of vital expressions, too. Of course, the inevitable movement involved can be a great nuisance so I don't pretend this is a fully satisfactory procedure.

Sargent, the painter, once said that the features on a face had no more to do with making a portrait like its subject than the spots on an apple made up a likeness of an apple. This was an overstatement, but the truth behind it is that the overall shape and proportions of the head are of fundamental importance – whilst counting how many eyelashes somebody has will never make a portrait more like its subject. Why, otherwise, can a person be recognised from a considerable distance away, even when stationary? No, it is the big relationships of one part to the rest that establish a likeness.

Though this first canvas I work on is often used only for 'finding out', and may be no more than a quick study, it sometimes happens that I may even spend more time on this preliminary version than I will on the final one. If so, it normally becomes thoroughly lifeless – but I reckon the time has been usefully spent if it helps the end result to be more economically and freshly painted.

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