My brainy pin-ups
For 30 years, Bel Mooney has collected portraits of her favourite writers
As a student (Eng Lang and Lit at University College London), I loved frontispieces – those steel engravings of Defoe, Fielding and Swift in curly wigs.
I wondered if they really looked like that: Donne in his ruff and Pope in his velvet hat. How do we know? And what did the faces reveal?
That fascination led to a three-decade passion for collecting author portraits: etchings, photographs, cartoons, oils and sketches.
As well as the 71 (or so) hanging, there are around 15 objets, too: an 18thcentury Royal Worcester Milton (rouge and carmine lipstick!) and matching Shakespeare, a ghostly, Parian Byron and an early souvenir jug showing Burns.
Early-’80s purchases were a set of etchings by the great Muirhead Bone (Robert Louis Stevenson, Hardy, Shaw, Binyon, Conrad and ‘Compleat Angler’ Isaac Walton) as well as my favourite, Augustus John’s Yeats.
All collectors relish the hunt. In 1990, I loved the Peter Edwards exhibition Contemporary Poets at the National Portrait Gallery, especially his majestic portrait of Seamus Heaney.
I signed the visitors’ book with a cheeky ‘Do you have any studies of Seamus?’ and my phone number – like a call girl touting for business. It worked. I gained a lovely pencil drawing of a hero – joined now by P Edwards oils of Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy.
Cheek often pays off. In 1996, the photographer Mark Gerson asked if I’d write an introduction to the catalogue for his exhibition Literati at the NPG. I’d interviewed him at the Fox Talbot Museum for a TV arts programme and loved his work. So I naturally agreed.
‘I’m afraid they can’t pay you much,’ he apologised.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’d just love some prints.’
Bingo. He gave me Edith Sitwell, John Betjeman, Muriel Spark (shopping in Peckham Rye), Evelyn Waugh ( pictured opposite) and his famous image of the Faber poets – young Ted Hughes flanked by Spender, Auden, Eliot and Macneice.
Since Eliot is one of my favourite poets, I was delighted to pick up a moody black-and-white portrait (photographer unknown) framed with a letter from his Russell Square Faber office.
Dated 23rd September 1947, it rejects the work of a hapless playwright with a kindly equivocation: ‘I … believe it must have been successful for the purpose for which it is designed.’
Twenty years ago, my first husband,
Jonathan Dimbleby, gave me a wonderful gift: an original Julia Margaret Cameron portrait of a very shaggy Tennyson ( pictured opposite). Schooled by me, he kept his eye out, too.
Collecting can make you singleminded. I scoured art fairs and talked to dealers. And I was lucky. A massive favour to somebody in trouble led to a precious gift: a delicate pencil sketch of a young George Eliot.
Then an exquisite watercolour of a VAD nurse, dated 1916, turned out to be a brilliant (and not-enough-known) woman writer of the First World War, the American Mary Borden.
I was tireless. On holiday in New Hampshire with my second husband, Robin Allison-smith, I heard of a huge collection of prints in a barn. After a day of sightseeing, though tired, I insisted on the diversion. Surrounded by daunting stacks of prints, I said to the elderly lady in charge, ‘I’ll cut to the chase – do you have a literary section?’
She shook her head, and I was heading, weary and disappointed, for the door when she called me back: ‘I forgot, I have something I’m selling for a lady … might you be interested in Frost?’
I nodded, thinking that, even if it was an ordinary frontispiece print, Robert Frost was one I didn’t have.
She came back with a beautiful pencil portrait of the poet, ‘sketched from life’, dated 1927 ( pictured right). The Frost summer home was in New Hampshire – so might this have belonged to him? He certainly sat for it – and that thrilled me.
Meanwhile, the saleslady warned, ‘I have to charge you $300; I’m sorry.’ I’d have paid four times that to leave that barn with such a beauty under my arm.
There was the thrill of attending my first ever auction at Bonhams in 2005 and snaffling William Blake, Edna St Vincent Millay, bewigged Richardson, and rare photographs of Edward Thomas and Isaac Rosenberg.
And there are little messages in the way I hang them. Carol Ann Duffy is next to Adrian Henri, her mentor and one-time lover. Sassoon is next to a collage of Wilfred Owen by Graham Arnold.
And Sylvia Plath’s actual high-school yearbook photograph (that beaming, youthful heartbreaking optimism, ( pictured right) hangs in an ‘installation’ devoted to Plath and Hughes, with five portraits of charismatic Ted.
What do such portraits reveal? Can you read the soul of Conrad in that casual posture? Did J P Donleavy have to make Samuel Beckett quite so cadaverous? And why did Michael Ayrton caricature William Golding with such a vast beer gut ( pictured opposite)?
There’ll be no more now – because I have no room. But my beloved authors keep the world at bay and give me comfort. They tell me they were just as fallible, and that everything we know and feel has been experienced before.
‘Why did Michael Ayrton caricature William Golding with such a vast beer gut?’