Samuel Dodwell
Ruth Borchard recorded that she first requested a self-portrait from Samuel Dodwell in August 1962, and paid twelve guineas for it. Ruth and Samuel were near-neighbours at the time in Reigate.
The picture is signed 'DODWELL' but undated. Born in Wandsworth, London in 1909, Samuel Dodwell died in 1990. In a conversation in 2001 with the artist's son, Andrew Dodwell, the author was told that Samuel was always enthusiastic about his current paintings, but sometimes quite ostentatiously dismissed past works as being no longer of any interest. Andrew believes that his father painted this picture very soon after Ruth's request; he was a quick painter, and so it is likely to date from mid-to-late 1962, when he was fifty-three years old.
This self-portrayal is slightly angled so the viewer feels he or she is looking up at the artist, whose stance is quite imposing, perhaps even intimidating. An unsmiling, portly figure, he peers into the distance. His casual clothes are of a kind he wore in the evening, and at weekends, for long studio hours at home in Reigate (after dressing formally on weekdays as a prominent City banker). The right side of his face is heavily shadowed; the left illumined. His son recalls him as being 'a demanding, spontaneous person, quite truculent at times, an uncompromising character, combative, with a very youthful, agile mind', who also had an innate sense of justice and fairness and some radical left-wing views. More than just literally descriptive, the light and shadowed aspects of his face seem to conjure up the overt darks and lights of his character, his generosity and agility of mind as well as more challenging traits.
He appears boyishly plump in his golden sweater, but also detached. The mainly warm, light palette is characteristic of his work over many years; Andrew recalls that, in his father's studio, burnt umber and raw siena were always prominent. In such a work, we can feel the influence of Sickert and William Coldstream's Euston Road School, but also Titian and Cézanne. The sureness of composition here is complemented by some fine flourishes: a single, broad muted indigo blue brushstroke evoking his shirt collar, and fresh squiggles of yellow and brown on the sweater, which, when abstracted from the overall picture, resemble passages in contemporary expressionist painting by artists such as David Bomberg.
Dodwell had always wanted to be a painter –discovering his pleasure in painting early on and, visiting Cornwall on holiday at the age of eighteen, determining that the country would be his future home. However, his father, who himself worked in a bank, insisted he follow a City career. He painted in all his spare moments, and, during the 1930s, studied painting part-time at London's Regent Street Polytechnic. During the war, he was a squadron leader in R.A.F. Bomber Command. After the Normandy landings, he travelled through Holland and France, witnessing much civilian suffering and devastation. He visited newly liberated concentration camps – something he spoke sparingly about later on. Throughout his war service, he drew whenever he could – pilots waiting, sitting around, smoking, for example. A great trauma was the death of his brother, killed on the last British air raid on Berlin.
After the war, he joined an American bank in London, and was involved in some major financial deals and helped Ford set up its car manufacturing plant at Dagenham. Though he enjoyed being able to paint only what he wanted (independent of art dealers' expectations), his job was extremely stressful; he also became overweight. Aged fifty-nine, he had three major heart attacks, and his life was saved by pioneering open-heart surgery by Dr. Magdi Yacoub. His recuperation was long, and he gave up banking in favour of art. From then on, he painted seven days a week. His was, his son says, 'a driven talent'.
Now and then, he painted portraits of real psychological acuity, including ones of his wife and his mother, and also one of a young man perhaps in the mid-50s – he never dated his pictures whose features are delicately sculpted by broad strokes of muted colours. There are later gouaches and watercolour portraits of lovely-looking young women, full of free, faultless strokes and surprising decorative effects.
Some of his best pictures were done in the 50s and early 60s. Depicting 'ordinary' people at work and play, they are kin to portrayals of common life by modern painters like the Mexican Diego Rivera and the American Paul Cadmus. In an early 1950s oil, he portrayed ten teenage girl singers – each in a green dress, holding an open brown songbook – being conducted by a grey-haired woman in blue, her back looming at us in the immediate foreground. This abstractly balanced painting compellingly celebrates the communal task at hand.
Curiously, many of these oil paintings feature open-mouthed figures, such as greengrocers loudly and joyously extolling the virtues of piles of apples and pears on their market stalls. In The Chip Eaters, a man in a café almost religiously lifts up a single chip to his expectant mouth; his figure has been abstracted into concisely expressive planes of restrained greys and pinks. In an upfront, close-up of a performing trombonist, the instrument seems to take on the role of a vast, metallic open mouth.
An oil painting of Three Runners on the London-Brighton Road shows three male figures striding forwards, their exertion most effectively conveyed through a muscular use of abstracted, simplified form against an iridescent, almost cubist background (he professed to be inspired by especial interests in Impressionism and Cubism.).
Around 1979, Dodwell settled in Lostwithiel in Cornwall, which he later described as 'a little town which has got the balance right'. Getting the balance right was what he worked at hard in his art. It was in Cornwall that he befriended the painters Rose and Roger Hilton (q.v.). In later years his numerous paintings of sunflowers and marguerite daisies, as well as seascapes, sometimes became so highly abstracted as to appear, at first sight, purely abstract, though distinctive forms quickly emerge to view. In his many, more overtly representational watercolours of scenes in Cornwall and Brittany, spontaneity and firm structure, attenuated colours and rich dramatic effects are all finely balanced.
He exhibited at the Mid-Cornwall Galleries at St Blazey Gate from their foundation in 1980; he is commemorated there by a Sam Dodwell Gallery. A major retrospective of his works took place there in February 2007.
