Anthony Eyton
As he approaches his hundredth year, the Royal Academician tells STEVE PILL about what it means to be an artist and why there is a newfound urgency to his work
At 98, Anthony Eyton would be forgiven for taking it easy. The senior Royal Academician began his fine art studies 80 years ago, yet, he says, there is still much to learn and create. He has others to help him today – his housekeeper and her son, plus his daughter Sarah, a talented photographer in her own right – so that he can focus on the things that have kept him occupied all this time: thinking about, talking about, and making art.
We’ve barely made it inside the hallway of his large three-storey semi, set back from a busy road in South London, before Anthony is eagerly asking if he can show us his studio. It is only as he climbs the elegant winding staircase, adorned with faded posters from previous solo shows, that he briefly shows his age, taking his time to reach the first-floor studio before that gentle exuberance resumes. Rosy of cheek and wiry of hair, if Tigger has a grandfather, it is quite possibly Anthony Eyton.
The artist moved here in 1960 and his painting room has a wonderfully lived-in quality: a waft of turpentine hits your nostrils as you enter; chairs and bare floorboards are encrusted with oil paint; every conceivable surface is piled high with brush pots and well-thumbed monographs. Even the most visionary architect couldn’t envision this space being anything other than a painter’s studio, yet it is still a surprise to learn that an early spring clean has recently taken place. “The tidy up has made a revolution, which also becomes synonymous or equal to revelation,” he says, sagely. To illustrate this, he reaches for a stack of photos arranged in a rack – beach scenes, Indian temples,
a nude figure – all possible subjects, newly rediscovered amid the clutter.
The east-facing aspect wouldn’t be to every artists’ tastes, yet on this bright winter morning, the room is flooded with a soft, warm light that makes every object glow with potential. “I’ve been on that a year,” he says, gesturing towards a large canvas resting on the floor that shows his studio interior. “I made very great changes just this morning,” he adds proudly. Anthony’s late friend, the artist Euan Uglow, once called him “the fastest brush alive”, but that was in reference to his quick, deliberate mark making rather than the speed at which a painting is completed. “I am the slowest in another sense,” he says. “I always want to get it right.”
Back downstairs, the walls of the openplan lounge and dining room are a testimony to the artistic circles in which Anthony once operated. An impressive charcoal drawing by Leon Kossoff hangs beside the patio doors, while the wall behind where Anthony settles himself with a coffee contains paintings by Basil Beattie and Patrick George, as well as a “minor” David Bomberg drawing.
Bomberg was one of the founder members of The London Group, a collection of radical young artists who came together in 1913. Anthony was elected to the group 50 years later. “In those days, The London Group was extremely important,” he explains.
“It had the galleries in Suffolk Street and [exhibition at] the Royal Institute of Water Colours in Piccadilly, it had several rooms and was done on a very large scale. It was the latest thing, because the Royal Academy [of Arts] then was rather frowned on by all the London Group.”
“They were a really independent group, always have been,” he adds. “Fiercely independent and rather marvellous to get them all together.”
Post-war London was filled with opportunity for young, white, male painters, and with the camaraderie came creative frictions that spurred each other on. “I mean, it was bound to be a bit competitive, wasn’t it? Artists don’t talk about being against one another, but really they’re up for the game.” says Anthony. “I wanted to branch out and be my own man, as it were.”
Born in Teddington, Middlesex on 17 May 1923, Anthony John Plowden Eyton briefly enrolled in fine art at the University of Reading before conscription came in 1942 at the height of the Second World War. He resumed his studies five years later at Camberwell School of Art under the rather rigorous tutelage of William Coldstream who was a big believer in working from life and adhering to a strict form of “sight-size” measuring that involved plotting points on a canvas around which a composition could be constructed.
I’ve got to seize the moment and let my excitement about the subject galvanise me
In Modernists & Mavericks, Martin Gayford’s recent biography of the mid-century London art world, Anthony is quoted as saying he and his fellow Coldstream pupils, which included his good friends Euan Uglow and Patrick George, were a “rather bigoted lot” too wedded to “the certainty of drawing” to fully embrace modernity.
“It’s always been a battle to break away from that accuracy,” he says today. “I still want that certainty, and still to this day I measure sometimes, but painting is so much about the excitement of the subject and being carried away by that. It’s a battle between certainty and not knowing, losing that certainty and almost letting a Zen
[state] come when you get magical moments and accidents.”
Later in the conversation, he returns to this point as he stops himself in the middle of reminiscing. “Can I come onto the present?” he asks rhetorically, before continuing. “I suddenly feel more alive now than I was with the London Group.
I’m more alive to change. I’ve got to dig deeply into the extremes much more, rather than pussyfooting about. I’ve got to seize the moment and get to the point of letting my excitement about the subject galvanise me into going further, deeper into myself than I have before.”
Painting, he says, is primarily about three fundamentals – “Who am I? What have I got to say? And how am I going to say it?” – yet ask if there was a point in his career when he remembers having a breakthrough in terms of finding the answers to those questions and he just smiles: “I’ve always wanted a breakthrough.”
In truth, a breakthrough of sorts came in 1969 when he was invited to provide maternity cover for an old Camberwell friend who ran the art school at St Lawrence College in Ontario, Canada. He jumped at the chance as the campus was based in Kingston, home to the mother of his wife, Mary. “I loved her very much and we took the children out there and that’s how it all began really. This went on for two years. We went to New York, several visits, and I was obviously very influenced by the Abstract Expressionists – Rothko and De Kooning and all those people. That was obviously going to change me a little bit and then the vast skies of Canada and the intensity of blue. How was one going to express that?”
With 50 students keeping him busy during the week, his own painting was largely confined to a series of plein air watercolours made on regular Sunday trips to Lake Ontario, watching how friends and family
“behaved on the beach with this marvellous light”. Upon returning to England, a canvas based around his Canadian work found success at the John Moores Painting Prize in 1972 – though not quite to the extent that his gallery biography would have you assume. “I did get a prize, but I didn’t actually win it,” he explains. “Euan Uglow won it. But the very act of winning a prize counted for something.”
Establishment acceptance finally arrived in 1976 as he was elected as an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts, a decade prior to becoming a full member. Though Anthony’s London Group peers had once opposed the institution’s output, his election carried added emotional weight as his mother, Phyllis, a Heatherley’s graduate and accomplished landscape painter, had
“danced with joy” at simply having a piece accepted to the RA’s Summer Exhibition in 1929. She sadly died later that same year, an experience that still colours everything Anthony paints. “I am very much beholden to my mother’s paintings,” he says. “She was such a good painter, and she was on the cusp of the wave of finding herself, I think. I look at her paintings every day – I can’t help it because they are up there.”
Several of them take pride of place on the chimney breast in the sitting room, including one which was unearthed at a yard sale in Tucson, Arizona and returned to him recently after a bit of online detective work by the new owners.
The urban landscape remains a favourite subject for Anthony. Over the years he has spent intense periods documenting the
changing structures of Brixton market and the developing skyline around Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church in Spitalfields, as seen from the window of a studio he once kept there. “This fascinated me how ancient and modern were coming together and one of the best churches in the world should be threatened,” he recalls.
More recently, he has made regular sketching trips to Vauxhall, often accompanied by his grandson, to document the modern blocks of flats that have been thrown up along the River Thames at Nine Elms. He rails against the commerce of the area – “Napoleon was right, we’re a nation of shopkeepers” – and draws comparisons with the Tower of Babel and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Searching for a visual reference point, he asks his daughter to fetch him the catalogue from the National Gallery’s recent Bellotto exhibition. “It’s in the bathroom,” he tells her, revealing his all-consuming reading habits. After browsing the catalogue, he points to a painting of a church in Dresden. “Imagine the Vauxhall towers like that,” he says, his eyes lighting up.
His mind has already begun to wander back up the stairs to the freshly unearthed piles of potential subjects in his studio.
“It’s a mammoth task,” he says. “I’m 98 now, so I’ve got to get going on the next painting.”
Does he feel an increasing sense of urgency nowadays?
“Well yes, I’ve got to get a move on, really,” he says, smiling again. “There’s a lot to do.” Anthony’s work features in Step and Stair, which runs until 20 January 2022 at Art Space Gallery, London. www.artspacegallery.co.uk
Anthony’s mind has wandered to the piles of potential subjects in his studio: “I’m 98 now… I’ve got to get a move on”