Farewell to an Old Master
Brilliantly waspish art critic and close friend of Anthony Blunt dead at 84
BRIAN SEWELL, one of Britain’s best-known art critics – famous as much for his acerbic wit as his knowledge of the Old Masters – has died, aged 84, after a battle with cancer.
Art historian and former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, Sir Roy Strong was among the first to pay tribute.
‘He was a very old friend of mine,’ Sir Roy said.
‘He could write something slam- ming you to the ground but we still remained friends. He was a fearless person, and I had the highest regard for him. There’s certainly not anyone like him around now. I shall miss him very much.’
And Naim Attallah, who published Sewell’s first autobiography, said he was ‘devastated’ by his death.
He added: ‘I shall miss him very much. He was the most generous man. Not many people knew that side of him.’
Sewell’s life was an essay in eccentricity and contradiction: He declared he didn’t care what people thought of him and insisted his greatest love came from his dogs.
And he boasted in his autobiography of his numerous male lovers, and once confessed that ‘sex has always been as frequent as my need for coffee – an addiction’.
By any standards, Sewell led an extraordinary life.
He was friends with Francis Bacon, whom he used to meet in the mornings at the juice bar in Harrods, Lucian Freud and Salvador Dali.
He was brought up by his mother in Kensington, London. When his mother learned that he was homosexual, he said: ‘A look of total, absolute scorn came over her face and she said: “Just like your father” and walked out of the room.’
At the time – in his 30s – he said, he was ‘utterly mystified’ but later wondered if his father, who died before he was born, had struggled with his sexuality.
He was offered a place to read history at Oxford but Sewell chose instead to go the Courtauld Institute of Art, at the University of London.
It was here he met Anthony Blunt, one of his tutors, who
I shall miss him very much. He was the most generous man
became a close friend. After Blunt’s exposure as the fourth man in the Cambridge spy ring, Sewell sheltered him in Chiswick from media attention.
He then worked at Christie’s auction house, specialising in Old Master paintings and drawings, and later left to become an art dealer.
He went on to be art critic for Tatler magazine and in 1984 took up the mantle as critic for the Evening Standard, eventually becoming a regular broadcaster on such shows as Radio 4’s Any Questions.
Sewell had stated that he intended to leave all his possessions to one close friend. A self-confessed pyromaniac, he burnt his diaries, together with most letters. His house, he concluded, was a cabinet of curiosities. He had already, in the past few months, bundled up his clothes for Oxfam.
He had bequeathed no paintings to art galleries and left most of his money to animal charities.
‘If the elephant, the tiger, the leopard and a thousand other animals are to survive our depredation of their habitats then they must have our charity,’ he wrote.
‘Any fool can leave his pictures to a gallery.’