The Daily Telegraph - Features
The elite artists’ studio beside the grimy A4 dual carriageway
Talgarth Mansions is home to an acclaimed circle of painters and sculptors. Natasha Leake meets them
You could hear screams all the way from Florence to London when David Hockney declared that the bohemian art world had died. “What he doesn’t know,” says Ann Witheridge, founder and director of London Fine Art studios, “is that it does exist – and it’s right here.”
Today, next to a grim road in west London, is a bustling circle of artists commissioned by the British elite: from the late Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales to David Attenborough and Judi Dench. You’ll find them in Talgarth Mansions in Hammersmith, a row of red-brick houses on the A4, next to Barons Court Tube station.
In The Silkworm, JK Rowling’s detective Cormoran Strike describes these mansions as “architectural anomalies”. Eight rounded, oversized windows (“like fragments of the vanished Crystal Palace”) tower over terracotta bricks with cream-coloured carvings. Rowling says she’s “been fascinated by them for years”. “People are always wanting to know what’s inside,” agrees James Hayes, an artist and the owner of Mansion number 143.
I’m sitting in Hayes’s Talgarth studio on a bright winter morning. In front of me, a group of eight artists are laughing and chatting. They occupy three of the houses at Talgarth, where they share the gardens for lunch in summer and hold wine and cheese evenings in winter. “You go out for a coffee on a sunny day and everyone is gossiping,” says Hayes.
They can be guarded about their commissions. “If you have a conversation with a Royal, you can’t talk about it,” says Poppy Field, with an apologetic smile. Her sculptures were the last to have ever been approved by Elizabeth II and were unveiled at the Royal Albert Hall by Charles and Camilla last November. It’s said that the King had tears in his eyes at the sight of his late mother in bronze. Field explains that Elizabeth’s senior dresser, Angela Kelly, contacted her to suggest changes to how she had sculpted a tiara. “If you are knowledgeable about the Royal family and protocol, these things really matter,” says Field.
Jamie Coreth, who painted the first official portrait of the now Prince and Princess of Wales in 2022, agrees. The couple posed together twice for him, and once individually. “I remember thinking, ‘Should I be playing music or something?’” Coreth recalls. “I tried during the first session, and then I felt selfconscious about my terrible music choices, so I turned it off. But they were very easygoing.” He also helped choose Kate’s green dress for the painting. “We discussed how reflective fabrics translate well into paint. And green suited her really well.” He describes the couple as “disarmingly lovely”.
Like many others in his circle, Coreth rented rooms at Talgarth Mansions at the beginning of his career. “It’s like you’re in a sports car of a studio. The proportions of the room, the height of the window, mean you can control the fall of light in a way that you really cannot do elsewhere.”
Impressed by this quality of light, artists have lived at Talgarth Mansions since they were first built in 1891, and their presence has shaped the buildings over the decades. The studios were also built as a collective, showing that “artists were meant to be in communities”, says James Hayes.
“There’s a myth that artists are isolated characters,” Witheridge says. “They’re actually very sociable. They love discussing things.” Ballerina Margot Fonteyn clearly agreed: she lived at number nine. “We found a bunch of her ballet shoes in the roof and her plans for that building,” says Hayes.
At the end of the row is 75-yearold Clare Shenstone, wearing neon yellow trainers, a shocking vivid fringe and dark eyeliner. She is the only person that Francis Bacon ever commissioned to paint his portrait. Her studio is much lighter, with yellow walls, but paintings are everywhere. They include 15 charcoal sketches of David Bowie arranged in a rectangle.
“David and I were friends from 67-68, when I was 16, to when he died.” Bowie was “very put out” because he wanted her to paint him. “I said: ‘No, but I’d love to paint Iman,’” she says with a grin.
Further down the road are Isabella Watling and George Clark, who own another mansion. Watling and Clark’s door is unlocked. Inside, the house is dimly lit but whirring with activity. A small grey whippet named Dusty leaves paw prints on my white skirt. James Vaulkhard, commissioned by Country Life to paint a portrait of the late Queen in 2022, pokes his head out of a door under the stairs. I glimpse Watling with a baby in her arms. Two young artists, Lydia and Emily, are painting each other’s portraits with yellow sashes tied around their waists.
I peek into another studio and see Judi Dench hanging in front of me. “We just got it back from the National Gallery last week,” says Christabel Blackburn, the painter. Blackburn won Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year in 2020 and is one of the “trendiest” artists in the house, according to Hayes. She tells me about turntables which people bring to the studios for parties, and about evenings where they “stay up late and sketch each other”.
Back at studio 143, light pours in from high rafters. Classical paintings costing thousands of pounds are layered casually on top of each other. Original William Morris wallpaper lines the walls, a cat sits in front of an easel.
Hayes is finishing a portrait of his brother. He threw away a previous version he was working on – hauling it out of the bin and showing it to me, he explains, “I wasn’t painting at my best.” As he paints, he reflects on the community of artists living at Talgarth. “Isolation is the death of the painter,” he says. “Sometimes you just need someone to walk in who understands the language you’re trying to speak.”
Outside, the vague roar of the A4 is perceptible. Unknowing drivers are whizzing past on their way into town without a clue that this rich world of art and culture is bustling behind the doors.
Poppy Field’s sculptures were the last to have been approved by the late Queen