Peter Freeth

There is one letter from Peter Freeth to Ruth Borchard, dated '16 December' (probably 1959), sent from Handsworth in Birmingham. 'Thank you for your letter... which I received just as I was leaving the Slade on Thursday... I have two self-portraits I should like to show you (and, as you say, one I won't part with just yet!) and I hope to be working this vacation at head painting.'

This unsigned, undated self-portrait was painted during the period (1956-60) when Peter Freeth was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Born in Birmingham in 1938, nephew of the etcher and painter Andrew Freeth (q.v.), Peter was eighteen-years-old when he went to the Slade. His contemporaries there included Mario Dubsky, Dennis Creffield, Anthony Green, Ben Levene and Patrick Procktor; Keith Vaughan was a teacher: all are included in Ruth's collection.

In his self-portrait, Freeth comes across as the epitome of stiff-necked, youthful insouciance, though its is evident that this is a tin 'veneer' (the artist's word) for a sensitive, uncertain young man, which only serves to make this an especially poignant self-portrayal. The downturned, slightly agape mouth, pallid/lunar bluish-pinkish features, arched eyebrows and black, abysmal eyes create a kind of enfant terrible mask – self-consciously determined to give nothing away. In fact, vulnerability of easily transparent behind the mask.

The ochreish, burnished highlights to the hair, the glowing yellow collar do nothing to lighten the tone: there is a coldness to their refulgence. The abstracted background, with its black upper 'void' (as the artist describes it) and icy blue undertow, is reminiscent of much contemporary abstract painting. It is redolent of coolness, in all senses of that word, yet there is a somewhat abstract expressionist passage towards the left of the picture –small yet intense gusty white waves over dark blue – which indicates that, on the horizon perhaps, is a glimmer of hope and freshness.

On seeing a photograph of this picture more than forty years after it was painted, Peter wrote to the author:

        Excuse my delay in answering. I have only now recovered from the

        shock!... I really had no recollection of the painting, and certainly didn't

        keep records in those days, in the way I do now.

        Let me put down, in no order, some reactions.

        How this portrait brings back (almost) lost thoughts and sensations! I

        can't say I like it. I certainly don't admire it. What it does is make me

        remember all the uncertainty of being a young art student, the anguish

        and self doubt under the wafer thin veneer of arrogance and high

        seriousness... That black void! Is that a washing line I see behind me?

        Take out the head completely, come to think of it, and the resulting

        picture would have quite a lot in common with many of my later

        aquatints.

        I must have done 2 or three other self-portraits while at the Slade, one of

        which I still have (and quite like), but none since, apart from

        occasional scribbles. Going to the Slade at 18 straight from school, I

        suppose I grasped at the only thing the place offered, the tradition of

        life drawing and painting, still much under the sway of Coldstream and

        Euston Road spirit.

        My paintings were very much in that tradition (although my printmaking

        was already going its more independent and original way.

        I enjoyed painting the head, though my thoughts of 'portrait painting'

        received a mortal blow at the outset... the Crittall company in

        Braintree commissioned one (possibly more?) portrait a year from a

        student, and Coldstream gave me the job. It was a nightmare! The

        sales manager clearly didn't want his portrait painted – or was just

        embarrassed about the whole thing, and simply refused to sit still or look

        at me. In desperation I painted him looking down at his desk. Heaven

        knows what it looked like. I can still recall Coldstream's expression

        Could do Better when he saw it...

        My Euston Road mode pretty well evaporated under the Roman sun

        when I spent 3 years in Italy on leaving the Slade. And getting the

        Rome scholarship in Engraving (as it was called then) put me on the

        path to becoming primarily a printmaker.

Peter Freeth has described his childhood in Birmingham – 'a city under sporadic siege, with mournful sirens and dramatic searchlights, and later, flags and street parties' – as 'still the most important factor in my make-up'. A major influence was 'my uncle's etchings at home (Andrew Freeth) of the Black Country, miners etc. etc.'

After returning from his Rome Scholarship in 1963, Freeth began teaching part-time in various London art schools, and has since spent most summers in Italy. Eschewing colour, he has concentrated on producing subtly nuanced aquatints, thrillingly unpredictable in their variations of light and dark. These are the result of discovering, in the early 70s, 'a new etching technique, of a very unorthodox kind', he says. 'There is no stopping out, no progressive biting. The whole image is first painted, transferred to a 'negative' plate... etched, printed and reversed onto a second plate. The image is itself made of resin of varying thicknesses, and bitten in one go, whites, greys and blacks together.'

He has gone on to conjure up modern yet primordial-seeming cities with glowing tenements overhung by awe-inspiring skyscrapers; impalpably delicate empty sea shells resting like sentient creatures on tabletops; carved Roman letters abstracted from ancient monuments (his aquatint Solitary City, a carved memorial of these very words, is accompanied by a quotation from 'Lamentations': 'How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people!'); and archaic sculpted masks, dead to the world, yet movingly evoking the evanescence of all past glories.

He has described his apocalyptic urban vistas as 'dreams, not portraits', yet in an aquatint in the 2001 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (he is a Royal Academician), he portrays rough sleeps in London doorways. He depicts the homeless here with compassion as literally faceless derelicts devastatingly – and inconsolably – splayed on the pavement.

Freeth's Northern Line – an aquatint exhibited in a 2001 show at London's Bankside Gallery – depicts segmented 'glimpse[s] through an interstice caught' (to adapt Walt Whitman's poetic phrase) of London Tube passengers, subterranean glimpses of ghostly heads and hands and other inchoately realised, mask-like features. Such a work, rooted in daily reality, is perhaps best described as visionary portraiture.

Peter Freeth was a tutor in etching at the Royal Academy Schools from 1966 to 2007. He lives and works in London and Italy.

He was a tutor in etching at the Royal Academy Schools from 1966 to 2007.