Leonard Rosoman by Tanya Harrod
TOM FLEMING Leonard Rosoman By Tanya Harrod Royal Academy of Arts £29.95 Oldie price £19.73 inc p&p Leonard Rosoman was born in 1913 into a lower-middle-class family in West Hampstead. His father was descended from the theatrical manager Thomas Rosoman, who ran Sadler’s Wells from 1746 to 1771. Leonard relished this connection. His rakish father was largely absent, but would occasionally take his son to see musicals, a formative experience for Leonard.
A theatrical element came to underpin much of his work. He liked to depict scenes, crowds, people in commotion: subject matter that lent itself to his many large works for public display. His mural of life at the Royal Academy, permanently on view in the dining room there, teems with colour and activity and, like much of his work, portrays the world at a slight angle to reality. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2002, he chose for his luxury item a ‘sloping lawn’, since he enjoyed showing his figures from an unusual perspective. A lawn might also have appealed, you suspect, as a potential stage for the kind of ambiguous, domestic tableau Rosoman liked so much to paint.
He was 72 when he painted the RA mural. A few years later, he redecorated the vaulted ceiling in the chapel at Lambeth Palace. He continued drawing well into his nineties. One of the last images in Tanya Harrod’s biographical study of him is an intricate drawing in Biro from 2007. He only stopped working when he went into a nursing home in 2008, dying four years later.
Rosoman worked assiduously his entire life. He went to art school on a scholarship, despite the initial opposition of his family (his grandmother suggested he go into the biscuit trade). His deftness as a draughtsman soon led to regular work as an illustrator, particularly of books. Such commissions became a staple of his career. He showed an illustrator’s instinct in everything he created, combining compositional ingenuity with an ability to evoke fleeting scenes from the world around him. One of his best-known early works, A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, Shoe Lane (1940), arose from a harrowing experience during his work in the Auxiliary Fire Service when he had been fighting a fire near Fleet Street and narrowly missed being crushed by a burning building. Towards the end of the war, he became an official war artist, taking an eye-opening voyage by boat to the Far East during which he produced surreal, intensely coloured paintings of menacing radar equipment and planes amassed on deck like insects.
His artistic vision remained steadfastly figurative in the face of the mid-20th-century turn towards abstraction. He dedicated much of his time to teaching – David Hockney was a student – and was constantly in demand as a portraitist, catering to a seam of the
creative bourgeoisie: architects, writers, art-world grandees. He liked to draw his friends. There is a wonderful pencil-andchalk portrait from the early 1980s of Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine, in his office with his dog.
Harrod’s book is beautifully written and reassuringly knowledgeable. She is alive to all the nuances of her subject’s work, sympathetic without being strident. You struggle, at the same time, to get a sense of what made Rosoman tick. It’s probably not Harrod’s fault. Rosoman was congenial but enigmatic; at his funeral, Peyton Skipwith called him ‘a biographer’s nightmare’. He kept a diary, from which Harrod quotes often, but it doesn’t seem to have contained much self-revelation. A little more on how others saw Rosoman might have provided another perspective. We long to know more about his friendships with Ross, Keith Vaughan and John Minton, for instance, or how Hockney remembers him.
Like the man himself, Rosoman’s art carries a certain opacity. ‘Splendidly Unexplained’ is the title of one of Harrod’s chapters. His figures contain little interiority; in his portraits, as he said, he was as interested in the scenery as the sitters, taking his cue from the conversation pieces of Johan Zoffany, whom he so admired.
His paintings, all beautifully reproduced here, are rich in detail and colour – sometimes, even, saturated. But they always demand a long look. They have humour and originality. There is a dream-like pageantry to many of them, with an accompanying sense of disquietude and the threat of the everyday. For Harrod, his art, stretching as it does over most of the 20th century, provides a visual record of what W H Auden identified as the ‘age of anxiety’.