Bernard Dunstan
'I acquired likings which have remained with me ever since… Rembrandt and Turner, Renoir and Sickert, Steer, Bonnard and Vuillard. Common to all these is a richness and beauty in the matière, or the quality of the paint surface.’
Bernard Dunstan wrote three letters to Ruth Borchard, all dated 1965. The first was sent from an address in Wales; the others from his home address in Kew. In the first he writes: 'When I get back to London... I will go through some pictures. I think I may be able to find you something, and if you like it will be quite willing to let you have it for 21 gns. It is likely to be quite small, a little oil study.'
In 'Extracts from an interview' (printed in the catalogue for Dunstan's 1988 'Selective Retrospective' at Oriel 31, Davies Memorial Gallery, Newtown, Powys), the artist describes his essential working routine and method over many years, in London Wales and abroad:
Although I am based in London, most of my work comes from abroad.
When Diana (his wife) and I are travelling, I draw every day and at the
end of the trip I come back with a sketch book full of studies. I paint
very few complete pictures while I'm away, but bring back beginnings
to be worked on later in the studio. We also spend some time in Wales
where I can work all day with no distraction.
Bernard Dunstan was born in Teddington, Middlesex in 1920. His self-portrait was painted when he was in his early forties. It is an uncompromising portrayal of a sensitive and gentle-seeming man, perhaps somewhat reticent and guarded in nature (or certainly at least at this moment of dispassionate introspection – an impression accentuated by the greater visibility of his probing right eye under a somewhat quizzically raised eyebrow). The bespectacled gaze and lean, somewhat strained features (notably the pursed lips and tensed brow), communicate an attitude of determination and persistence, with shadow under the eyes indicating a certain nervous tension.
In The Paintings of Bernard Dunstan (David & Charles, Newton Abbott, Devon and London, 1993), the artist wrote that at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London, in 1939, his tutor Alan Gwynne-Jones 'did not teach drawing, but he was the first teacher of painting whose comments on tone, warm and cool colours, and how a neutral grey could be made to look warm or cold according to what was put around it, were an eye-opener to me.' In his self-portrait, which is primarily made up of a range of greys and muted flesh tones, the deliberately attenuated range of colour – extending to his blue-grey jacket and muddy/olive, open-necked shirt – does not serve to bleach the picture of personality – far from it – but rather to make each 'neutral grey' element 'warm or cold according to what was put around it.' Thus his forehead and the left side of his face, catching the light, appear extremely lucid, even though the skin is rendered low in tone. By contrast, the grey tone shadowing his right side appears cool to the extreme. The abstracted background – perhaps showing the back of a large canvas – firmly distinguishes and separates out those light and dark tones permeating the entire picture.
Another passage in the 1993 book indicates longstanding influences. 'Quite early on at the Slade (where he studied from 1939-41) I acquired likings which have remained with me ever since... Rembrandt and Turner, Renoir and Sickert, Steer, Bonnard and Vuillard. Common to all these is a richness and beauty in the matière, or the quality of the paint surface.' In his interview in the 1988 Oriel 31 catalogue, he also notes Corot and Degas as among his influences, and says that 'Sickert means a great deal to me not only as a painter, but as a writer too.'
He also subsequently describes his art schooling, and his development and some of his interests as a painter. Certain passages, which cast light not only on Dunstan but on contemporary tendencies in English art and art education. are worth quoting at some length. It was in 1939 that he studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, where, he says:
Drawing from the antique, as it was called, was a valuable discipline...
we all had to serve our stint with the antiques (Greek and Roman casts)
before being promoted, so to speak, to 'the Life'... we were allowed up in
the life room late in the afternoon to attempt 'short poses', when the
model would stay in one position for five or ten minutes only.
In between these two studies, the antique and the life rooms, was the
head room, with its portrait models and more advanced students...
This teaching, though I was only there for a short time, had a lasting
effect on me, no doubt reinforced by my continuing friendship with Peter
Greenham, who was certainly the finest artist among [Professor]
Jackson's students at that time.
It was an attitude firmly instilled at the Byam Shaw that drawing was one
of the most important activities one could engage in; that there were no
easy solutions or useful tricks to be learnt; and that the human body was
the most rewarding and beautiful object of study. These beliefs have
remained with me ever since.
It was then 'Rather to my surprise, I got a Slade scholarship... However, before I could take it up, war broke out.' Volunteering for the RAF, 'to my relief [I] was rejected because of poor eyesight... So I went to Oxford [in 1940], where the Slade had been evacuated and had joined forces with the Ruskin School.' Peter Greenham (1909-1992) and Kyffin Williams (q.v.), who were fellow students at the Slade, became his lifelong friends. 'Peter Greenham and I started up a small informal life class, with no overt tuition, which was held in my flat... We were constantly on the look out for girls who would pose for us... we preferred amateurs, and a surprising number... were prepared to sit for us in the nude for the small fee – I fancy it was half a crown an hour – that was the going rate.' At the Slade he was also taught by Barnett Freedman (1901-1958). He attended evening classes run by William Roberts (1895-1980) and Bernard Meninsky (1891-1950), at another Oxford art school.
It is both poignant and, in many kinds of ways, illuminating and instructive to read Bernard Dunstan's own Obituary (Independent, 12th July 1992) of his good friend and artist colleague Peter Greenham, which begins:
Peter Greenham was a figurative painter of great distinction. His work
was always based with conviction on traditional practices; it was both
scholarly and sensitive and, like himself, totally without showiness or
pretension.
In a period when portrait-painting seemed to be at its lowest ebb, his
portraits stood out for their beauty of touch, their grasp of form, their
sympathetic characterisation. His sitters came to know that the first
sitting could mean the start of a long process, sometimes, indeed, to be
measured in years; but also that the result would have its own
individual beauty, quite unlike any other painter's.
Portraits, however, were only part of his output, though he remained
fascinated by the challenge of the human head and the relationship
between artist and sitter all his life. His small landscapes and
seascapes show the same sensitive touch in a more relaxed format, and
with a more liberated enjoyment of luminous colour.
The word 'sensitive' can be over-used in the context of English painting,
and can imply merely a certain weak charm. Nothing could be further
from the truth in Greenham's case. There was always a foundation of
searching and vigorous drawing under that subtle touch. He was,
indeed, to many people one of the finest draughtsmen of recent times.
He had studied under Ernest Jackson at the Byam Shaw school, and
held to the principles of Jackson's teaching of drawing all his life. To
watch him draw or paint was an eye-opening experience for students.
From the most summary of beginnings the form was built up with
apparently tentative touches, the contours established, lost and then
found again, gradually developing towards a greater precision of
statement; in a painting, the tonal relationships and colour emerged
similarly from slight indications. Even after many sittings it was
always remarkable to see how the surface of his painting remained
fresh and lively.
Greenham was elected to the Royal Academy in 1960. He was always
devoted to the institution serving as Keeper from 1964 until his
retirement in 1985. The Keeper has the responsibility of running the RA
Schools, and Greenham showed himself to have great sympathy and
understanding for the students. He ran the schools in a manner which
appeared relaxed but which actually depended on strongly held
convictions, for example of the importance of life drawing – this at a
time when other art schools were busily abandoning traditional
methods. But these principles never prevented him from showing
sympathy with students of all persuasions, with the revolutionary as
well as the academic, and gaining the affection and respect of them all;
and this could be said equally of his professional colleagues.
To see him, a slighty dishevelled but always sympathetic figure, in the
Schools corridor or in the foyer of Burlington House, in deep
conversation with a student or a fellow painter was to see someone in
his element. Perhaps one should say in his second element, for the
studio is always the painter's first; but painting is a solitary activity and
Peter Greenham had, in spite of a dislike for 'occasions', a warm and
humorous sociability, the humour often of a self-deprecatory kind; no
one enjoyed more than he did the gossip, the anecdotes, and the play of
individuality and character to be found in an institution such as the RA.
In 1949 Bernard Dunstan married the painter Diana Armfield (b.1920). For a time they lived and worked in a large studio in London's Belsize Park. 'We slept and ate in an alcove at one end of the studio. We were very happy there, and it was not long before I was painting and drawing Diana for as long as she could sit – a process that has gone on with hardly a break to this day.' The couple went on to have three sons, Andrew and David (who survived him) and Robert (who died in 2007).
In a touching and inspirational short film, made by the Royal Academy in late 2015 (and published on YouTube), we see Diana Armfield and Bernard Dunstan (who had by then been painting alongside each other for sixty-five years) at home, each secluded in their own studio. As the website preamble explains, 'Diana Armfield tells us about a life of shared creativity, compromise, and mutual support.' Diana is seen saying, 'We met at the Slade, because I'd been to the Central School to start a textile and wallpaper course, and it closed down in the War, and so I applied for the Slade as a design student, and Bernard was there as a painting student. I didn't do much there – but I met Bernard there, which was the great thing... He went on there, and I went to do war work and went back to the Central. So there was no question of my being a painter then but Bernard naturally became [one]... his training was based almost entirely on the figure. He influenced me when I turned over to painting but I think it's possible I made him more aware of colour. For a lot of painters of course it's instinctive what they create... and I often think Bernard has even when his signature goes awry – it's still got artistry...
'Wherever we went, we worked and turned it into a working holiday. We'd be in these, to begin with, very modest hotels; we always had the breakfast tray brought up so there was plenty of time, so then when I was getting dressed and having a bath, he'd do drawings for an hour or more, and then we'd go out to my site, whatever it was, drive about until we'd found it. He rather handed the landscape over to me. I think this is one of the reasons why it's worked – that we have made some separations; it wouldn't overlap very much except in Venice – neither can claim Venice for themselves. We have, as you see, our different studios. It's very useful to have a fellow painter who's deeply sympathetic to talk about one's painting to.'
As a newly married man, so as to make ends meet, Dunstan began teaching part-time at Camberwell School of Art (1950-64), where:
I was confronted with drawing taught along the lines established by
Coldstream and the Euston Road School... little interest was shown in
foreshortenings or in the fullness and roundness of forms...
Camberwell took the Sickertian method to a far more systematic extent.
It was a teacheable way of drawing, easily transmitted to beginners.
However, too often it resulted in a constipated and deadly slow way of
working. in which endless measurements and plumbings were taken.
The best feature as far as I could see of the 'Camberwell method' was
that it encouraged accurate observation. This could not be said of its
opposite number, based on David Bomberg's teaching... which later
began to infiltrate Camberwell itself. 'Bombergism' went back to the
isolated figure but treated it in terms of mass. The drawings were on a
large scale, compared with the 'sight-size' insisted on at Camberwell,
and they were fiercely attacked with charcoal.
From 1953-74, he also taught part-time at the Byam Shaw. 'By nature cautious, I did not dare give up teaching until I was sure of selling enough to survive.' He especially enjoyed conducting life classes, 'where a kind of democracy of the body reigns; every one is equally worth drawing; the sheer variety of shape that the human body can take on is an education in itself.' Among the quite 'large pool of professionals' who circulated around the London art schools were 'the last of the great Italian families of models', and 'Quentin Crisp... (who) could do appallingly difficult poses and knew exactly how long he could hold them.'
Dunstan's early paintings, such as a view of Cardigan Street, Oxford (1946), and a portrait (c.1953) of the painter Anthony Kerr at work, certainly demonstrate 'a richness and beauty in the matiére.' Around 1954, in Head Room at the Byam Shaw School, he made what he has called 'an ambitious attempt to do a portrait group of staff and students (including himself and Peter Greenham). Charles Mahoney stands in the foreground, looking at a student's work.' This unusually large (for him) oil painting forms a perceptive and evocative period account of an idiosyncratic artistic milieu.
In 1950, Dunstan made a number of black chalk sketches and drawings of the opera singer Kathleen Ferrier, now in the National Portrait Gallery Collection. None of these 'was a commissioned drawing. I asked her to come and give me a sitting, with some trepidation, because I was trying to do a large picture of her singing with an orchestra; also because I admired her enormously. I need not have been nervous. She was friendly and totally unpretentious.' Some impressionistic sketches (with up to ten heads quickly rendered on a single sheet), movingly capture her graceful, poised, rather mysterious-seeming presence. They are even more effective – have a more immediate magic – than the polished, full-page studies, and the finished painting itself.
In his small-scale paintings - exhibited in many one-man shows at Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London from 1952 onwards, and then at Agnew's, London from 1972 - Dunstan manages, paradoxically, to remain aloof from and yet intimately absorbed in his subject matter. His 1996 show at Agnew's included a view of a Concert at Sotheby's, in which the happily absorbed musicians and (seen-from-behind) audience are sketchily evoked in a low palette, against a red backdrop of muted vibrancy. His view of The American Café, Amsterdam, de-individualises both waiters and customers, yet nevertheless portrays them as a touchingly human component within the sumptuous café decor. Its glittering theatricality is itself evoked with typical low-keyed restraint.
Oil paintings of a female nude reflected in a mirrored wardrobe in a Venice bedroom – and a pastel of a woman in bed talking on the telephone – both his wife Diana) – ally sensuous intimism and detachment. He has written:
my own way of painting figures in interiors... (evokes) a momentary
position - not a 'pose'; a drawing made to note down the essentials, the
shapes of background objects being put in where they come against the
figure; later on, more studies, or work carried out directly on the spot...
As Christopher Masters noted in his Obituary of the artist in the Guardian (10th September 2017), 'Crucially, Dunstan was a member of the new English Art Club, the society that had been founded in the 1880s in opposition to the RA, as a bastion of new-fangled impressionism. As Dunstan himself said, by the time he joined the Art Club in 1947, it was already middle-aged, but it provided a link with Walter Sickert and other historic figures on whom he drew heavily. At his death some of the warmest tributes have come from NEAC members, who found him a source of instruction and inspiration as an exponent of the “poetry of paint”.' At the time of his death, Bernard Dunstan was the longest serving Royal Academician.