Jonathan Myles-lea
Painter of traditional bird’s-eye views of country houses and gardens which gained wide acclaim
JONATHAN MYLES-LEA, the artist, who has died aged 52 from cancer, worked for 30 years, he claimed, “in a radical subculture: painting in oils in a traditional figurative style”. His images of country houses and gardens, with their distinctive flattened aerial perspective and microscopic details, won him distinguished followers, including the Prince of Wales, for whom, in 2009, he produced a meticulous map of the gardens at Highgrove; Queen Paola of the Belgians; and the Earl of Snowdon.
“I’m not trying to create a photographic representation of a property or its garden,” he explained. Instead he aimed at an image which was “the memory of the experience of going to that property”.
It was a stylised but romantic view of the formal gardens created at The Laskett in Herefordshire by Sir Roy Strong and his wife, Julia Trevelyan Oman, that determined the course of Myles-lea’s career. He was 24 when he met Strong in 1995, having written to him: “I am destined to paint your garden” after reading an interview in Country Life with the former director of the V & A.
On a school trip to Florence, Myles-lea had encountered the series of lunettes of Medici villas painted by Giusto Utens for Ferdinando I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, at the beginning of the 17th century; the flatness and decorative qualities of these bird’s-eye views delighted him. Later he came across paintings from the 1670s of Longleat, in Wiltshire, by the Flemish artist Jan Siberechts.
From the outset, his distinctive style was shaped by these and other historical influences: it was the perfect visual idiom in which to capture the highly wrought complexities of The Laskett garden, and subsequently seduced a host of like-minded patrons, including Oprah Winfrey.
Myles-lea’s work also came to the attention of Gervase Jackson-stops, architectural adviser to the National Trust, who commissioned a plan of Stowe Landscape Gardens, the first of a number of pen-and-ink plans he made for the Trust in the 1990s.
Myles-lea said recently that he had known from his teenage years that he would have “a short but busy life”. Time proved him correct. Almost a hundred country house commissions took him to more than 20 countries. He lived in London, New York, Los Angeles, Brussels and, latterly, the Royal Crescent, Bath; for several years, he settled at the cottage in The Laskett gardens known as the Folly.
Fresh from university, he had talked his way into a job at Channel Four. As a general Man Friday, he chose new coffee cups for the chief executive Michael Grade and presented an episode of Right to Reply, Channel Four’s answer to BBC Television’s Points of View; Richard Attenborough showed him how to use a studio camera.
His determination to paint outweighed other interests, however, especially after a chance meeting with Francis Bacon in the Colony Room Club in Soho convinced him of his vocation: Bacon told him to abandon television as too ephemeral.
Jonathan Myles-lea was born on January 23 1969 at the Christiana Hartley Maternity Hospital in Southport – an event he would later claim to remember clearly.
His parents, John and Elaine, were Methodists; through his maternal grandmother, he was related to the 18thcentury caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson as well as to Thomas Baxter, the porcelain painter in Worcester from whom Lord Nelson commissioned views of his estate in Merton.
As an adult, Myles-lea recalled the beauty of his native Lancashire. As a child, addicted to Radio 4, and “hearing voices which sounded like they were from a different world”, he decided “the North … was a place which one aimed to escape when one was old enough to do so”, and from the age of 12 he hid under his bed a going-away case containing a teddy bear from Harrods and a selection of magazines commemorating the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer.
Myles-lea’s “introduction to a sense of tradition” happened at Malvern College, to which he won a scholarship in 1985. Of equal importance, his art teacher and housemaster Bill Denny introduced him to Kenneth Clark’s landmark television series Civilisation. This was the start of what became an obsession with Italy (he visited the country annually for the next 20 years) and shaped his decision to study the History of Art and Architecture at Westfield College, University of London.
Tall, handsome and charming, in his own words “a rugby player, a vegetarian and a very positive-spirited person”, Myles-lea achieved considerable renown in his twenties: he was 28 when, in 1997, Country Life hailed him as a Living National Treasure.
He maintained an impressive output, but he also read widely, travelled extensively and, through his thoughtful and often provocative Instagram account, opposed “woke” politics, which he dismissed as ill-informed, dishonest and philistine.
The diagnosis of an aggressive cancer of the kidney in 2016 seemed only to increase his joie de vivre, despite interludes of excruciating pain. “I only have the best kind of cancer, the most aggressive, the most naughty,” he told the journalist James Delingpole earlier this year, before adding that he had never been happier and that positive consequences of his illness included a blooming of his spiritual life, notably following a long-contemplated conversion to Catholicism.
Whenever possible, he continued to paint. He invented an alter ego, Dame Jenny Fulborough, who left humorous messages on friends’ answering machines. Only latterly did he admit that having terminal cancer was like “living inside a glass cloche, while the rest of the world is taking place outside the glass cloche”.
Jonathan Myles-lea, born January 23 1969, died August 25 2021