Alfred Daniels

Ruth indicates in her notebook that she bought Daniels's self-portrait n 1958 but does not say for how much.

His self-portrait inscribed in white script in the bottom right corner of the canvas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1950. He was twenty-six years old at the time, and in his final year as an undergraduate student at the Royal College of Art in London. Here, the human form, and rather noble head, are modelled with vigorous simplicity against an enchantingly askew red-brick wall, with a slight glimpse above of a moody wintry sky, its icy blue tones scumbled with brown, and the bare bough and branches of a tree. The atmosphere, and the artist's attitude here, seem to be one of wistful melancholy - with a feeling that this young man feels psychologically somewhat hemmed, or bricked, in.

There is a characteristically shapely line, on one side, all the way down from his thick had of hair to his elegant white neck (itself, like his pallid complexion, lightly speckled with brown) and slender shoulder. The concomitant line running from forehead to high cheekbone to nicely sculpted chin and delicate throat, in no less concise. This is the stance of a young man who is coming into his own, with evident native wit and a certain gentle diffidence. The slightly upraised right eyebrow – and the way that eye is represented somewhat larger and bolder than the other – gives an impression of someone quite critically weighing up the world.

Using oil paint, the artist has achieved a chalky, fresco-like effect on much of the canvas. The palette balances a bold restraint – in the dark tones of sweater, shirt, eyes, bare bough and branches, and in the lucid if blanched complexion (which has a quite lunar intensity to it) – with the muted exuberance of the wall's variegated pinks, yellow, browns and reds.

A 1957 self-portrait drawing by Daniels, in charcoal and white chalk on paper, was reproduced in Art News and Review (March 2nd 1957) as that issue's 'Portrait of the Artist'. It is now in the Tate Gallery Archive. The quizzically self-appraising, eyebrow-raised expression echoes that of the earlier self-portrait. The use of line here is both economical (notably in the way the facial features and the shirt collar are drawn) and sensual (in the way it describes the dense matting of dark hair and the rough sweater texture).

Born in 1924, as his friend Simon Rodway wrote in his Guardian Obituary of the artist (30th June 2015), 'Danny was brought up in Bow, east London, where his father, Sam, was a tailor. Danny’s paternal grandfather had emigrated from Russia in the 1880s and his maternal grandfather from Poland. The family was not religious and he only realised he was Jewish when he was sent for his bar mitzvah.

'His uncle was a commercial artist and took Danny to learn lettering at a studio in Chancery Lane. When war broke out in 1939 he was evacuated to Kent and later joined the RAF. Afterwards, he sent some works of war subjects to the Royal College of Art and in 1947 was accepted to study there. He decided to tell stories in his paintings – about people, places, events, work and games. One of his mentors was Ruskin Spear. He was also particularly impressed by the work of Stanley Spencer and Eric Ravilious.' Daniels lived in London all his life, studying and then teaching art there.

Rodway wrote that 'In 1949, Danny met Margot Hamilton Hill, a set and costume designer, at a dance at the RCA and later married her. Danny became well known in Chiswick, where they lived, and always produced paintings for local exhibitions to raise money for charities. One of his last assignments was to paint two pictures of the Chiswick Dog Show in 2014.

'Danny was outspoken but had integrity and lots of humour, which he delivered in a mischievous style. At exhibitions he had no hesitation in being critical of the pictures of other artists, but he was equally critical of his own.'

In his essay on 'Alfred Daniels, Artist' (January 27th, 2012, on his website Spitalfields Life) 'the gentle author' quotes the artist:' “I’m not really an East Ender, I’m more of a Bow boy,” asserted Alfred Daniels with characteristic precision of thought, when I enquired of his origin. “My parents left the East End, because they were scared of the doodlebugs and bought this house in 1945,” he explained, as he welcomed me to the generous suburban mansion in Chiswick where he lives today.....

' "Although my parents were poor, my Uncle Charlie was rich. He was a commercial artist and my father said to him, ‘The boy wants to learn a craft.’ So Charlie got me a place at Woolwich Polytechnic to learn signwriting but I spent all day trying to sharpen my pencil. Then he took me out of the school and got me a job as a lettering artist at the Lawrence Danes Studio in Chancery Lane. It was wonderful to come up to the city to work, and his nephew befriended me and we went to art shops together to look at art books...

'When Uncle Charlie started his own studio in Fetter Lane above the Vogue photo studio, he offered me a job at £1 a week. Nobody showed me how to do anything, I worked it out for myself. He got me to do illustrations and comic drawings and retouching of photographs. At night, we went down in the tube stations entertaining people sheltering from the blitz. I played my violin like Django Reinhardt and he played like Stefan Grappelli, and one day we were recorded and ended up on Workers’ Playtime.

'I had been doing some still lifes but I wanted to paint the beautiful old shops in Campbell Rd, Bow, so I went to make some sketches and a policeman came up and asked to see my identity card. ‘You can’t do this because we’ve had complaints you’re a spy,’ he said. It was illegal to take photographs during the war, so I sat and absorbed into memory what I saw. And the result came out like a naive or primitive painting. When Herbert Buckley my tutor at Woolwich saw it, he said, ‘Would you like to be a painter? I’ll put you in for the Royal College of Art. To be honest, I should rather have done illustration or lettering. At the Royal College of Art, my tutors included Carel Weight – he said, ‘I’m not interested in art only in pictures.’ – Ruskin Spear – ‘always drunk because of the pain of polio’ – and John Minton – ‘ a lovely man, if only he hadn’t been so mixed up.’'

As 'the gentle author' remarks, 'After Alfred left the East End in 1945, he kept coming back to make sketchbooks and do paintings, often of the same subjects', as in The Gramophone Man in Wentworth St, the subject of a masterful 1950 painting and also later versions; and brilliantly trenchant sketches such as those of East End streets (from March and April 1954) – depicting a fruit seller in Hessel Street with rudimentary boxes filled with produce, a cyclist in Old Montague Street, homburg-hatted Jewish gentlemen and a red-bescarfed woman in Old Montague St & Davenant St, and fire escapes and wire-meshed back yards at the back of pell-mell buildings in Cable Street.'

'The gentle author' notes that 'there are certain images that Alfred has returned to continuously throughout his long career and a particular favourite is the gramophone man who always sat in Wentworth St in the nineteen fifties. “I was getting into it,” he admitted in delighted surprise, “and it was becoming different.” The character portrayed in this painting is an East End legend, a subject Alfred first painted from life as a student on a field trip from the Royal College of Art more than sixty years ago. I was intrigued to discover him painting this new version, working from a photograph yet reconfiguring it. “I went there during the blitz, Petticoat Lane and Spitalfields,” he explained to me, thinking out loud again as he resumed work, “it was the first place I experienced a sense of being part of a community, it was the Jewish community then.” '

Daniels's subjects included many other London scenes (notably his mid-50s mural paintings of boatmen on the Thames at Hammersmith, and a 1978 panoramic view of the Thames by the Houses of Parliament as well as shrewdly observed aspects in his sketchbooks such as a 1966 double page spread portraying businessmen at the Royal Exchange and a view of Throgmorton Street in the City), though he also drew and sketched elsewhere – for example, Italy (including, notably, Sicily) in the mid-1950s, Israel in the late 1980s, and Oxford and Scotland in the late 1990s, in each case making paintings of what he had seen on his return home.

He first studied commercial art at Woolwich Polytechnic in 1943-44, followed by service in the Royal Air Force. As the art historian and critic Charles Spencer noted (in his article on Daniels in The Studio,July 1957), 'When he was free to resume his studies, his attitude had changed and he entered the Royal College of Art (from 1947-50), and then undertook post-graduate studies there in mural design from 1950-52. He later taught for long periods at the Royal College and elsewhere. Along with a student colleague John Titchell, he was commissioned from 1952 to 1956, to execute murals, with river-based subjects, at Hammersmith Town Hall.'

His self-portrait shows affinities with contemporary American Social Realist artists, notably Ben Shahn and Bernard Perlin, both Jewish Americans. For example, in Portrait of Myself When Young (1943), Shahn depicted himself against a backdrop of a Victorian warehouse, delineating with a calculated naivety its vast, overwhelming symmetry of windows; in Orthodox Boys (1948), Perlin portrayed the sculpted faces of two young men in strong relief against a graffiti-strewn wall, itself rendered in tempera with fantastic intricacy. The latter painting had been shown in the 1950 exhibition 'Symbolic Realism in American Painting 1940-50' at the ICA (the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which had been founded founded in London in 1950 by Roland Penrose, Peter Watson, Herbert Read, Geoffrey Grigson, Peter Gregory and E.L.T. Messens to create an alternative 'laboratory' or 'playground' for the contemporary arts), and was admired there by Daniels, as later by Peter Blake, when the painting hung for a number of years in the Tate Gallery.

Daniels's early paintings – like Sunday on the Grass (1951), exhibited in 'Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties' at the Barbican Gallery, Barbican Centre, London in early 2002 – demonstrate how he was then influenced not only by contemporary American realist painters and Mexican muralists but also by the meticulousness and heightened clarity of Mughal Miniatures.

Sunday on the Grass shows five beautifully contoured figures – three young men and two young women, as glimpsed by Daniels one fine Sunday afternoon in London's Hyde Park – drowsily at ease with heat, drinks and fags (empty beer and pop bottles, discarded boxes of cigarettes and matches, as well as film-star magazines and orange Penguin paperbacks littered around them on the grass, like scattered ingredients of a Pop Art painting 'a decade later', as Martin Harrison, the art historian and writer has pointed out). The picture deliciously conjures up the growing leisure time and increasing consumerism of early 50s youth in its spare time, unselfconsciously counter-acting, and rebelling against,  the neat, stiff, more rule-bound manners of their elders.

Two fine 1956 paintings by Daniels, both titled Jack's Snack Bar, were illustrated in black-and-white at the time – one on the cover of The Studio (July 1957), the other in Jack Beddington's 1957 book Young Artists of Promise. These depict East End men unwinding with cups of tea, their weary workaday postures summoned up tersely against austerely patterned awnings, plate glass, brick and pavement. Charles Spencer recognised Daniels's stylistic affinity with Shan, notably in the former's 'organisation of the scene and the flat application of the paint to create broad silhouettes of human beings', but he noted 'What a difference lies in personality. Shan is a precise man with a clearly defined attitude to life; in his politics, for instance, and his comment on public affairs.

'Daniels is not a political moralizer... To Daniels the eye is the most important feature in the artist. Yet Spencer acknowledged Daniels's 'sadness of sympathy for the old, the weary and the impoverished... Daniels has been fashioned by his working-class background and his paintings explore and recreate a world he understands.'

In his 1950 painting The Card Players, we see seven figures, middle-aged and elderly (only one is a woman) – doubtlessly working class Italians – seated round a long, café-like table. Not only are the characters skilfully and credibly observed in their diverse postures and attitudes but the picture's palette – in which brilliant, pristine whites contrast with sober blacks in the figures' garbs, and dark, spindly wooden chairs stand out starkly against the mottled, nacreous floor (with its slight olive overtones) – is most subtly attenuated.

Daniels's 1952 painting Children's Playground similarly explores the diverse postures of eight children of varying ages as they sit on, or lean against, the bars of a kind of swing set within what is effectively a climbing frame. In this taut composition, the pliant as well as restful attitudes of the children (and their relations with each other), all so perspicaciously descried, are ingeniously descried against the austere geometry of the playground apparatus. 

In The Goalkeeper, Craven Cottage (1953), the goalkeeper is seen as a rather gauche-looking, tensely anticipatory figure, partly framed by his goal; behind him in the stand are a diverse array of male spectators – ranging from those dressed in cloth caps and working class attire, others more smartly in tie, shirt, jacket and hats, as well a young boys, two casually dressed, another pair in school uniform. The scope of their expressions, on the verge of caricature – ranging from looks of anxious perplexity (amongst the boys) to more equable but fixated regards (amongst the men), as they all contemplate the (unseen to us) seemingly nail-biting sporting action further down the pitch - is both amusing and poignant to behold. The study of human character here both transcends, and yet is instantaneously immersed in, the particular subject matter: a current glimpse of a section of the pitch and stadium of Craven Cottage (the home ground of Fulham F.C. since 1896).

Daniels's 1957 painting, Painted Stall, Palermo, illustrated in colour in both Artists of Promise and The Studio, shows him burgeoning as an at once abstract and figurative pattern-maker. It depicts a young, barefoot girl buying bread from a man with an ornate stall – broad silhouetted figures portrayed with fresco-like chalkiness, without recessive perspective, and with compassionate humanity.

Spencer noted that the 'same qualities found on the canvas will be found in the man. He is an unaffected and natural individual, high-spirited, sociable, easy to know... There is somewhere a calculating centre in his make-up, not in the disparaging sense of someone who weighs things up in his own interests, but as a balance between heart and mind.' His 1957 self-portrait drawing, exhibited at the Zwemmer Gallery, London in February of that year and in a Tate Gallery exhibition in 1989, clearly shows the artist again in the mental act of astutely weighing himself up, reckoning that 'balance between heart and mind'.

Daniels's mid-50s murals of the river at Hammersmith (which can be seen by appointment at Hammersmith Town Hall) contain some marvellous passages which relate his work to the mural achievements of Stanley Spencer, de Rivera and Shahn. One panel portrays young oarsmen standing on the quayside, in white vests and shorts and black pumps, grasping their oars upright. The figures appear serenely monumental yet true to the quick of life.

Ruth Borcahrd kept a newspaper cutting (Daily Telegraph, March 4th 1959), in which Terence Mullaly, reviewing Daniels's show at the Zwemmer Gallery, praised 'the shrewdness of his powers of observation', 'dexterous and pleasing use of palette knife' and 'the mixture of wit and satire' but pointed out 'the obvious danger from which his work suffers... that having developed a distinctive manner, involving a particular kind of simplification and distortion, he is in danger of becoming merely mannered.' It is true that a fair number of his later paintings did not avoid this 'danger', and for all their decorative finesse, they lack the edgy psychological acuity and subtle originality of composition characterising his work of the 50s and 60s.

For two late-1990s exhibitions at London's Rona Gallery, he made detailed pictorial surveys of the Scottish whisky industry, based on extensive travels around distilleries in the Highlands and Islands. Subjects include whisky experts sampling in The Nosing Room, and tartan-capped peat-cutters seen hard at work near a distillery. In the later part of his life as a painter, Daniels continued to relish human beings – now much less individualistically drawn, usually less acutely seen, more stylised than in earlier years - and the intricate, infinitely varied patterns they make in both nature and society.