Anthony Eyton
‘We were… taught the discipline of how to give some certainty to looking… a certainty through measuring.’
Four letters from Anthony Eyton to Ruth Borchard date from 1964-5, all sent from Brixton in south London. In the first, 'I am very pleased that you should consider asking me for a self-portrait. I am engaged on one now and will get in touch with you when it is finished.'
The second letter tells of his progress: 'I am sorry to have been so long over the self-portrait. It is nearly finished now, but I would like another month to be certain of it. I am looking forward to seeing your collection, and will get in touch with you and bring the picture at the same time.' In the third letter he writes: 'I would like to see the collection on 27th February. Would 4 o'clock be a suitable time? The portrait is not ready yet but I hope to bring it then.'
The day after his visit to Ruth, he writes: 'Thank you very much for the rose cuttings. I have duly put them in the leaf moulded trenches. So all we can do is wait and see! I enjoyed my visit very much and was very impressed by the collection.'
In her notebook, Ruth indicates that she met the artist at a private view of a London Group exhibition in 1964 (Eyton had been elected a member in 1961), and requested then and there that he paint a self-portrait for her. It appears she paid twenty guineas.
Anthony Eyton was born in Teddington, Middlesex in 1923. His self-portrait was painted between June 1964 and late February 1965; he would then have been forty-one. With his left hand raised towards a canvas placed beyond the right edge of this picture, the artist is absorbed in the act of painting himself. The urgent singularity of the creative act is demonstrated by the painting of his left hand in especially bold black tones (strikingly white-tinged at the top as it catches the light), by the way the far end of his forearm – and perhaps even the hand and fingers themselves – are depicted with a kinetic flourish so as to appear dynamically moving, and the way a tiny, jagged area of this canvas is left scintillatingly blank at the creative juncture where fingers, brush and the picture-being-painted all meet.
In contrast to his swiftly moving left arm, Eyton's stocky-seeming body appears monumentally still, rooted to the spot, yet even this is characteristically conjured up by what he has called 'a vivid impressionism'... giving solidity of form to the ephemeral'. His bearded face has a tenderly grave look of measured attentiveness, as his eyes (the left painted opaque, his right seen to be incisively searching out its reflection) carefully, even fiercely weigh up his own self-image. His introspectiveness does not preclude a sense of childlike freshness.
The setting is bare: a studio room and a four-paned window looking out on an abstracted view of what appears to be a garden with trees and, maybe, water suggested by some soft blue strokes in the bottom left corner. He seems to be casually dressed, wearing a back-grey sweater and black trousers but the austere, dark simplicity of his garb (which matches the black tones of his hair and generous beard) and his overall appearance and demeanour possess a quite timeless, even Old Masterish, quality.
The picture's measured yet intuitive tones and approach evoke the influence of William Coldstream, once a teacher of Eyton's. Interviewed for a catalogue for a remarkable exhibition, 'Survey '66: Figurative Painters' (Hampstead Arts Centre, London 1966) – which included works by Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Dennis Creffield (q.v.) and Anthony Whishaw (q.v.) – Eyton said, 'My pictures have to be seen in terms of light or they make nonsense, but they are about lots of other things besides light.'
In his self-portrait, the swiftly notated brushwork, conjuring up occasional fierce effects of light, is clearly visible: note a long, thin, glistening white highlight along the length of his nose, itself painted quite a ruddy tone. The cool (though at times incandescent) palette infuses the overall composition with the kind of earthy, natural, rather subdued range of colours as seen through the window.
At this point, it is worth quoting a few lines written by the painter Euan Uglow (q.v.) in 1981:
Tony Eyton... paints like a fencer and when
the blade gets very hot we have,
demonstrated, the arc light.
When this happens the paintings are very good.
(Quotation taken from the catalogue for Eyton's 1985 exhibition, 'Sudan and other new paintings' at Browse & Darby, London. Between 1978 and 2013, the artist had ten one-man shows at Browse & Darby. He also had a touring retrospective show in 1980 at the South London Art Gallery, the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne and Plymouth Art Gallery.)
Interviewed by Andrew Lambirth for The Artist's & Illustrator's Magazine in November 1989, Eyton recalled: 'I'd grown up with my mother's paintings in the house, but it wasn't until I was 15 that I started to look at them [his mother Phyllis Eyton had died in 1929] and open up her paintbox and found all these beautiful old tubes of paint, and the smell, and the brushes and the pastels. The penny must have dropped that it was all about painting the delights of the world.'
He began painting landscapes when he was a fifteeen-year old pupil at Canford School near Wimbourne in Dorset, where he was inspiringly taught by Enid Canning and Ian Fleming-Williams, an expert of John Constable (see the essay in this book on Frank Willcock's self-portrait for more information on Fleming-Williams, a 'wonderful teacher' of art and discerningat collector of modern British painting). 'William Coldstream used to come down to lecture for two or three days once a fortnight. He once painted on my picture, about three square inches of very carefully adjusted colour.' (Quotation from A&I Magazine.)
He was a student at Canford from 1936-41; the catalogue for the show 'A. Eyton R.A.: the first 25 years' (at Austin/Desmond Fine Art, Sunninghill, Berkshire, 1990) speaks of an 'impressively self-assured self-portrait [he painted] at the age of 18.' Before serving in the Army from 1942-47 (when, he says, 'I painted quite a lot, stationed in Scotland mostly, and then Egypt when the fighting was over'), he spent a term at Reading University 'under Professor Anthony Betts, who was an excellent teacher. I've never forgotten him because he taught me how to paint from drawings. He said always carry a sketchbook.'
From 1947-50, he studied at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, 'an obvious choice... where Coldstream taught. Victor Pasmore, Claude Rogers (q.v.) and Lawrence Gowing (q.v.) were among the staff... At Camberwell there was a great zeal among the ex-servicemen. One met people like Anthony Fry, Andrew Forge (q.v.), Christopher Pinsent and Patrick George... The teaching was just what I needed, a kind of firmness of how to do it, in what seem fairly modest terms now. We did rather dark pictures, so-called correct. We were also taught the discipline of how to give some certainty through measuring, in the way that Piero della Francesca and the great Italians had done, by different means perhaps, but the same rational approach...'
In 1951, awarded an Abbey Major scolarship, he spent two years in Italy, where Piero della Francesca especially delighted and influenced him. On his return to England, he spent the summers painting people in factories in northern England and the Potteries: 'I suppose this was the beginning of the effect of the Italian quattrocento, for the whole of Italian painting is about people in environments. I went through several stages: first of all it was factories and railway stations. I went on to paint children in Greek playgrounds, scenes in dance halls like Hammersmith Palais, and then ended up with beaches.'
It took a number of years to 'throw over' the constraining elements of a Camberwell training: 'It wasn't until three or four years after leaving Camberwell that I needed to expand and react against the rigorous, to me rather small way of seeing, in favour of something more expansive.'
However, interviewed by Andrew Lambirth in 2013 for his exhibition Near and Far that year at Broswe & Darby, Eyton expressed his utmost admiration for Coldstream as 'a great painter. They do have an air in them. And what's in the air is very much on the picture plane because he was so averse to modelling, preferring carving. I didn't notice the measuring marks, though I know people don't like them. He just gets the essence of a body, a flower or the landscape in a very beautiful way: a lovely painter.'
In the interview in his 1990 exhibition catalogue, Eyton noted, 'I do two different kinds of painting: there are group scenes, figures in environments, and the paintings done in front of nature, from models or in my garden. It seems that one emancipates the other.' The former are often based on 'drawings and later photographs', the latter on an 'immediate response from nature'.
It was a visit to Greece in 1955 that helped endow his palette with a new dimension, one of dazzling light. He has said that 'the big change in broadening my work was going to Canada in 1969-71', where he started painting beach scenes, impressed and inspired by the 'figures that seemed to be ascending into the sky, the height of the sky', and also by the huge waves and 'misty sunny atmosphere' experienced on the beach at Fire Island in New York. Seeing Abstract Expressionist paintings at this time unconsciously seemed, he says, to 'open me up to a much wider, more fluid approach, connecting me with abstract painting'.
Over the years he has made many paintings set in gardens – such as Wild Gardens (1993), described by him as 'sunlit irises and descending tree branch' – in which, 'getting myself against the leaves and branches, the intermeshing of light and dark (thick pigment for the light and thin for the dark), the tonal design, this is the nearest I come to abstraction.'
His 1983 exhibition of paintings depicting 'Hong Kong and the New Territories', at the Imperial War Museum, London, included a picture of a candlelit Regimental Guest Night at the reraised 2 nd Batallion of the 7th Duke of Edinburgh's Own Gurkha Rifles; the men's white shirts are seen to glisten subtly in the curiously convivial gloom.
'Mostly Beaches, 1990-2000' was the title of his one-man show at Browse & Darby in late 2000. Here, we see people in pleasure-loving, sun-drenched environments, in which they are at ease in nature yet still regulated by a certain (albeit very laid-back) etiquette. 'I'm aware of the choreography of the scene, and that's what I'm really after.' So, in one oil painting, we see four unidealised Ladies in the Shower on the shore of the Dead Sea, choreographed in their bathing suits and caps, as opalescent jets of water pour all over them; the synaesthetic sensation of being immersed all at once in sun, running water and sand is well evoked.
In 1995, he was invited by the Tate to record the unpeopled interior of Bankside Power Station, in a series of pictures, before it was converted to Tate Modern. About his painting of Machinery and Pipes in that epic-scaled setting, he has written: 'Once the machinery had a use. Piranesi came to mind when looking from the rust-coloured floor to the huge window and ceiling in one sweep of vision.'
Eyton's portrayals of groups of people immersed in ritual, whether commuting to work in a grand railway concourse or bathing in the Ganges as part of a Hindu festival, acknowledge the exuberant communality of people in shared environments, as well as each individual's integrity and suffering aloneness.
Writing in the catalogue for Eyton's 1993 exhibition at Browse & Darby, Anthony Green (q.v.) pointed out that like 'Singer Sargent and Sugar Ray Leonard', Eyton too has “fast hands” and always gives the impression of being able to draw at the speed of thought – be it beach, plant, bricks or flesh,
'The English usually mistrust virtuosity. But with quiet virtue and quick eyes Tony compels us to re-order our prejudices. He de-mystifies our art, he conjures simplicity and reality from paint, oil and pastel.'
Contemplating his 2011 self-portrait (now in the Ruth Borchard Next Generation Collection), Eyton still recalls Coldstream's perceptive advice to his young student: 'Look at the space and air behind and in front of you and round about.'
In a conversation with the author, Eyton says he tends to paint self-portraits only very rarely. He finds his recent self-portrait more definitively and keenly structured, less impressionistic, than the 1964 self-portrait, characterising the former as 'quite specific in its rendering of detail but not photographic'. The setting is an alcove with a mirror (which he is facing) in a small greenhouse extension to his south London house.
As with all his paintings, he says, 'the light is what sets me off. The light makes me want to paint really, it brings a glow to things. Then it's a question of working with the light, and over a long period moving the paint and colour about. The self-portrait was not painted in one session, I was continually redrawing it over time to get it right. Overall continuous changes meant that the final picture took over twenty sessions to make.
'I have an ambiguous look here – my wandering eye was slowly scanning the whole space; my approach was not at all like that of a Rembrandt looking at you directly. The eyes in the face changed a good deal during the long painting process, the aim of which was very much to achieve depth and resonance of feeling.
'The light in the painting comes from the glass roof above, which illumines the top of my head and my beard, the painted white plank shelf in front of me (on which sits a bit of charcoal about five centimetres long) and the array of objects on the shelf behind me – what could be a vase with a handle on the left, the glistening globe itself (which is counterbalanced by the black-based object to the left) and, to the right, an indeterminate mass of black with yellow and red highlights that might be a plant or a suggestion of I don't know what. To the left one glimpses the edge of a terracotta plant pot, and above two leaves – to the right of which is the flat plane of a white door, next to which is the side of the shelving unit.'
Eyton discusses the picture in terms of rhythms running with subtle dynamism through the composition and shapes counterbalancing one another. For him, 'there is a line running from the black handle of the object on the shelf to the left to my right ear [on the viewer's left] and then on to the globe on the other side. Similarly this dark object on the left is echoed by the mass of dark tones on the left hand-side of my jacket. These vertical forms – the side of the shelves behind and the shelf in front of me – seem informally to frame the figure, to frame myself.' Eyton says he greatly admires Giacometti's portraits for their focussed scrutiny of subjects over a period of time, distilled (and internally framed, as it were, within the scope of the composition) into what appears like an eternal, enigmatic moment.
There is perennial youthfulness about Eyton's figure (with its weathered landscape of a face with searchingly melancholic eyes) in his blue denim jacket and checked shirt. Forms and objects in this self-portrait contain a largely unconscious but still vital symbolism: the simple piece of charcoal as a tool of the artist's trade; the leaves seemingly alluding to the centrality of nature and growth in Eyton's art; and the vibrant globe itself (revolving, as it were, with a kinetic flurry of brushtrokes) reminding the discerning viewer of Eyton's exhilarating and inspiring painting trips over many years to countries such as Italy, Greece, Israel, Canada, the United States and India.