Andrew Freeth

There are five letters from Andrew Freeth (signed in his full name H. [Hubert] Andrew Freeth) to Ruth Borchard, sent from his home/studio at Northwood in Middlesex. The first is undated (but contains Ruth's comment in pencil at the top, 'Yes pl. 14/9/65'), and reads: 'I have succumbed to the charm of your cheme and I will be glad to let you have a self portrait for 21 guineas. You do not say what medium you expect. Are these others in oil? I intend to do a more recent one, particularly for your scheme. So any medium you say could be used. I would much like to see your collection one day.' In the second letter, dated '2 April 66', he apologises for 'the delay in doing the self portrait', owing to illness. In the third letter, in June, he writes: 'I've done about four self-portraits in oil so far and I'm not really pleased with any of them. I must call a halt some time – so I propose to work this next weekend and then to bring them to you to see some time this month... I would bring my wife and twelve year old son too, and we'll have a picnic lunch somewhere in your beautiful countryside.' A letter fated '17 June 66' announces that the Freeth family ('Roseen, Richard and I') will visit Ruth on June 26^th; this letter is written on new headed paper, with the artist's name now at top: 'FROM H. ANDREW FREET, R.A.'/. He had been elected a Royal Academician the previous year.

In the final letter dated '28 June 1966', he writes: 'We much enjoyed seeing your collection of self portraits and also the delicious tea.

              'I've been thinking about other artists and the following names occur to me – they may not all play –

              Jean Bratby

              John Bratby

              Peter Greenham

              John Ward

              Frank Auerbach (Kossoff I mentioned it to today and he would not like to do one)

              Patrick George – William Coldstream – Euan Uglow (perhaps you had the last named?) Edward Le Bas, Moynihan, Lowrie [sic], Pasmore, Kokoschka. Peter Coker told me he is still trying!' Ruth did approach most of these artists. In the end, she acquired self-portraits from Jean Bratby, Euan Uglow and Peter Coker.

Freeth's self-portrait was painted when he was fifty-four years old. The strongly modelled head in bold self-profile is set against the domestic geometry of window panes, through which the presumably late spring or summer day filters. The garden view is abstracted into a delicate, vibrating impression of leave, sunlight earth. The head's overall pinkish-brownish flesh tones also contain green hues evoking veins and stubble, echoing palpitating natural forms beyond the window frame (the subtle abstracted rhythm of plein air shapes also contains elements of pale indigo). Sunlight illuminates Freeth's high forehead, outlines his nose and highlights his cheekbones, and percolates onto his thick, receding hair.

The strong cast of the head suggests resolute character. Freeth also appears as a man of exceptional sensitivity, yet there seems to be something emotionally frozen in the rather glassy, abstracted look, itself heightened by the pronounced shadow under the eye and the pursed, unyielding lips. His stern mien indicates a note of withheld or suppressed sadness and dissatisfaction, which the reflected light of nature does little to alleviate. There is poignancy in the contrast between the rigidity of the artist's stance and the fluidity of natural colour and light permeating the picture. The blood-red tie Freeth is wearing against a black shirt (irradiated with light green striations), adds a vivid, resonant note.

In a catalogue essay for 'Two Birmingham Painter-Etchers' (R.T. Cowern and H.A. Freeth) at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1988, Stephen Wildman noted that 'Freeth suffered a period of intense depression in the late 1960s, but had the strength of character to endure and indeed work through it: the series of religious aquatints including Christ Preaching and The Raising of Lazarus are all the more moving as a result.' His 1966 self-portrait may thus be seen in some way to portend this period of depression. Freeth was characterised by friends as a gentle, diffident, unselfish man, these very qualities (as one friend said) being 'close kin to his art'.

Born in Birmingham in 1912, he attended the School of Art there, half a day a week during adolescence, becoming a full-time student in 1929. A 1935 charcoal study for Pit-Head Bath is a fine exercise in raw yet empathetic social realism. Wildman has noted that around 1936 (the year Freeth won a Rome Scholarship) his 'portrait etching style was... rapidly maturing. Here, Freeth preferred to draw directly on the plate, so as to lose none of the immediacy of the sitting. One of his earliest subjects was Enoch Powell, whom he met at the beginning of his stay at The British School in Rome; of similar temperament, the two were to remain good friends, Freeth's portraits of the politician forming interesting milestones in his later career.'

After teaching for a year at St. Martin's School of Art in London (a post to which he returned in 1946), Freeth joined the Intelligence Corps. Attached to an Interrogation Centre near Cairo, he drew portraits of high-ranking German and Italian officers. His 1942 brown-and-white chalk drawing of General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma is a dispassionate study of a war-hardened, bitterly aloof individual. In 1943, Freeth served as an offical war artist with the RAF, making many pictures of daily camp life. He made his name as a portraitist with a series of drawings of mineworkers published, from 1947 to 1951, in 56 monthly 'Pit Profiles' in Coal magazine for the new National Coal Board.

Freeth's 1959 pencil portrait of the writer Alan Sillitoe (National Portrait Gallery Collection) unites superb, unshowy technical abilities with perceptiveness to subtlety of character. Sillitoe comes across as a vulnerable young man, shining with sensitivity and intelligence. Sillitoe was a literary phenomenon; the subjects of his rawly subversive novels, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), were rebellious working-class young men bruised by but defiantly resisting the stifling British class system.

John Ward, a fellow R.A., has described Freeth's qualities, which attracted many sitters: 'his personality, quiet and shrewd with a bubble of humour, relaxed his sitters so they “gave”.' In a 1952 exhibition of 'Sixty Oxford Portraits' by Freeth, a pen-and-ink drawing of a stern, balding, waist-coated Gilbert Ryle (then an Oxford Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy), sympathetically conveys the sitter's paradoxically airy gravitas. In the 1950s, Freeth made many moving, technically astute etchings of pensive, bereft-looking older figures – as in a beautifully drawn 1957 study, contrasting a bewhiskered old man with children practising handstands in the distance. H. Andrew Freeth died in 1986.