Moving into another intensity | Anthony Eyton at Browse and Darby
Anthony Eyton, Irises against Yellow, 2023, oil on canvas, 22 x 15ins, courtesy of Browse and Darby2023 has been an eventful year for the painter Anthony Eyton. In May he celebrated his 100th birthday. In June he was awarded an OBE in King Charles’ first Birthday Honours, and was featured in an exhibition of portraits at Michael Richardson’s Art Space Gallery, alongside Arturo di Stefano. And in September he enjoyed the opening of a retrospective of his work at Browse and Darby. The show continues until November 10.
The painter has a long-standing relationship with the Bury Street gallery, having first exhibited with William Darby (in the gallery’s pre-merger Cork Street incarnation) as early as 1975. In the catalogue for his last exhibition there in 2019 – his 12th – he quoted TS Eliot’s poem East Coker: ‘Old men ought to be explorers… we must be still, moving into another intensity’. Well, he’s still exploring.
And this despite being hospitalised with pneumonia last year, aged 99. Once recovered, he dragged himself back into his studio, on the first floor of the Brixton house he has lived in since 1960: he still had plenty of work to do to finish off paintings for his centenary year shows, and in particular this retrospective.
Throughout his eight-decade career – eight decades! – undistracted by the fashions of the artworld, Eyton has based his work on careful observation, whether that be of landscapes or nudes, interiors or street scenes, of subjects witnessed in the UK, Italy, India, the Sudan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Australia or Israel. If you had to pigeon-hole his style, you might describe it as ‘post-impressionism’, but it is a post-impressionism that is well versed in the ways of the Old Masters. ‘Piero [della Francesca] is my guru’ he has stated, ‘and Titian shows the way to be free’.
Age has influenced a recent change in style, in a brighter palette. He has, in latter years, adopted looser brushstrokes, applied with a three-foot brush, incorporating more abstraction into his paintings, largely of the view of his garden from his studio, or intricately composed still lifes. He works on up to ten of these at a time, according to his good friend, the critic Andrew Lambirth (who wrote a fine piece on the artist in the August/September edition of The London Magazine); he starts the paintings at a cracking pace, then takes ages – sometimes up to ten years – to finish them (a practice that has earned him the nickname ‘The Fastest Brush in the West’).
This latest Browse and Darby retrospective charts the evolution of Eyton’s work, from a sombre self-portrait composed in 1941, to a sun-filled still life, Irises against Yellow, completed in 2023: a career-full of his attempts, as Anne Lyles puts it in the exhibition catalogue, to ‘[transcribe] a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface’. Lyles also quotes from an earlier Lambirth-Eyton interview, in which the artist cited the famous proverb ‘it is better to travel hopefully, than to arrive.’ Long may the journey continue.