The Art of the Portrait 3: Late 19th Century to Modern. 9

Two Literary Portrait Painters: Patrick Heron & Tom Philips

We end with two artists, Patrick Heron and Tom Philips. This also brings us back to the link between portrait painting and literature as they both painted two well-known modern novelists, A.S. Byatt and Iris Murdoch (above). As a member of the St Ives Group Heron was at the forefront of abstraction even claiming that he’s invented abstract expressionism before the American crowd. Though Heron was mainly known for his open air “garden paintings” he had painted portraits earlier in his career; in 1949 he painted a “semi-cubist” portrait of T.S. Eliot which inspired Byatt to chose Heron as her portraitist; she also wanted an abstract artist as she said she did not like to look at images of herself; and rather than a likeness she wanted “the presence of the idea of me.”¹ The result- after three visits to St Ives- is a cross between Heron’s spatial experiments in colour and the human form which certainly has the semblance of the novelist rather than an exact likeness. Sadly, Heron died just after the portrait was completed. The second artist Tom Philips painted Dame Iris Murdoch in his studio in Peckham; the portrait took many sittings and was not finished for three years. The portrait shows the writer against Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas which seemed to have gained greater prominence as the commission progressed. The writer and artist had talked about Titian’s Marsyas at the Venice Exhibition held at the R.A. in 1984 According to Philips he was “more at home” with Murdoch’s books on philosophy rather than her novels because, as a Plato don, Murdoch could teach the artist about such concepts as Plato’s “Realm of Forms” which had implications for his own activity as an artist; though at the same time in her novels Murdoch uses painting to explore certain themes like love and ambition, even using the Marsyas theme.² The portrait generally was well-received by the critics, though one dissenting individual was unreserved in his horror at the R.A. accepting the portrait.³

1On the NPG’s website: “'I think there were two reasons why I wanted an abstract painting. One is that I do not like looking at images of myself, the second reason is because I don't like, to be truthful, most representational portraits I see nowadays. What I wanted was the presence of the idea of me, not of a record of the whole of my face that I don't much like

2For example, The Black Prince (1973) The Good Apprentice (1985) both exploit the .Apollo and Marsyas myth.

3Brian Sewell of course! “...by far the most deplorable new acquisition is Tom Phillips' portrait of Iris Murdoch. It is accompanied by bewildering preparatory material. There is a frankly appalling copy of Titian that would have been better done in chalk by a pavement artist outside the Gallery. There are huge hideous and wilfully distorted drawings of the novelist herself, out of focus, with the complexion of flaking distemper ... an inoffensive study of a Ginkgo leaf ... more plastic than real. And all these are brought together in dreadful disunity in the final portrait where poor jaundice-eyed Miss Murdoch is as flat and grainy as an overblown holiday snap. Could none of the trustees see how bad it is? Did none of them want to reject it?”