Edward Seago: The Last Portrait

"The Bend in the Canal, Alkmaar" by Edward Seago

"As the years passed and Edward Seago was not made a Royal Academician or given official recognition, and his work was not bought for any National Collection, his insecurity reasserted itself. Close friends sensed the bitterness behind his reluctance to be described as 'a Norfolk artist' because, he complained, few people in Norfolk liked his paintings. This false assumption was based on his inability to recognize that any local resentment to him as a man bore no relationship to the admiration and pride his paintings engendered in his native county. The indifference had built up over the years largely because, with an ever-widening circle of friends and increasing commitment, he felt compelled to discard old, out-worn friendships and, to some extent, divorce himself from local affairs. 

He protected his pictures by meticulous conditions in an otherwise extremely simple will which he made in August 1972. Firstly, he instructed that one third of all his paintings in the studio at the time of his death should be destroyed by the artistic executors. This was because he accepted the fact that even a good painter could at times produce bad pictures. Edward Tsui, a friend, was left a Boudin and three of Seago's own paintings to be chosen within one month of his death; a week later, according to the will, another friend, Jeremy Spenser, was to select three Seago paintings. After that the artistic executors were to select three more pictures for the first friend and three for the other, then the solicitor and John Erle-Drax of the Marlborough Galleries were to choose one painting, and finally the artistic executors should choose one for each of the painter's eight godchildren. The rest went to his assistant Peter Seymour, providing he survived Seago by five years, otherwise they would go to museums or public art galleries. 

About that time Seago painted his last portrait. It was of Donald Sinden in the part of Sir William Harcourt Courtley that he was playing in 'London Assurance' at the Aldwych Theatre.  Seago had seen the play and invited Sinden and his wife to Dutch House for a week. Every morning Sinden would spend an hour putting on his stage make-up and costume. He kept it on all day and posed for an hour or so at a time.

He described how after a painting session Seago would light up his pipe, glare at him and the portrait from different parts of the studio and then study them both through a two-foot mirror to get a reverse and more objective view. In the then end there were two portraits: one a full-length study of the vain, extrovert character in the play with his arms outstretched, the other a head and shoulders of the actor sitting as he would have been after the show, not the part he was playing."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.) 

 

 

Edward Seago: As a Host

"Venice" by Edward Seago

"Edward Seago invariably contrived that the stream of visitors to Dutch House, his home and studio, had every opportunity to see him paint. His desire for an audience arose, perhaps, not from vanity but from a positive need for constant reassurance and admiration, to combat the persistent feeling of insecurity that no financial reward appeared to allay. He disliked being alone and, moreover, enjoyed sharing with friends his own passionate love of painting so that, just as a great musician in the role of host might offer to entertain his guests by playing to them, Seago was also happy to display to them his own greatest gift.

Friends accepted as a matter of course that after dinner everyone adjourned to the studio to talk or watch television. After a time their host would move over to his easel and begin painting. Occasionally someone would stroll across and watch and offer not too critical comments. Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, two of Seago's many stage friends, recalled the first time they stayed at the Dutch House. After dinner the painter said, 'You've only seen my finished work, would you like to see me painting?' Denison watched a familiar scene on the Grand Canal in Venice re-created, with lightning brush strokes, in less than half an hour. As the picture took shape he asked if some of the smaller insignificant buildings, at the left of the church of St. Mara del Giglio, were products of the painter's imagination. 'No, no, no,' Seago protested. 'They're exactly correct. I have a total mental photograph of the place.'

Invariably he used oils when painting in front of his friends. 'With oil I can be totally relaxed,' he told Denison, 'but with watercolours, I'm as taut as a bowstring.'

With the help of his assistant Peter Seymour he was a good host and revelled in the role, although he always assumed his guests would be happy to fit in with all his activities and accept him on his own terms. He provided an idyllic setting where it was easy to relax surrounded by fine paintings, including several Boudins, and a collection of early English watercolours. Meals were produced by the gardener's sister, the inimitable Miss Thompson, who lived in the village but as a young girl had learned to cook in the kitchens of great London houses."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)  

Edward Seago: 'Seagoland'

"A Rainy Day in Istanbul" by Edward Seago

"The time had come when Seago rarely used 'Capricorn.' He parted with her and in 1958 acquired a studio in Sardinia with a magnificent view of the Mediterranean from his balcony. He had, since 1960, discarded his technique of painting directly from nature, and out of doors he made only color notes and pencil sketches from which to create the finished picture in his studio. Indoors he could portray his personal experience of places or subjects that had once sparked off his imagination and be undisturbed by superficial visual distractions which intruded when he set up his easel outside. Applying this technique, when he was in Sardinia he often painted Norfolk scenes and home in Ludham he worked on the views from his Mediterranean holiday home.

Once on his way to Sardinia, he made a detour to visit Istanbul, where from his bedroom balcony at the Park Hotel, he had an incredible view of the Bosphorous. He made watercolors and pencil sketches there to translate into oil paintings and then went into the streets and filled his sketchbooks [pocket-sized, 4.5" x 7"] with meticulous drawings; street scenes where the houses were correct to the smallest window, a stretch of wall exact to every stone, crowded squares where every person was represented by a tiny pencil stroke. At a time when he had never painted more freely and with such apparent immense facility, his sketchbooks represented a discipline he practiced consistently until the end of his days.

The later sketch books, however, represented exercises in technique rather than memory training because, by that time, the image of ever place or subject he had ever seen and wanted to paint was stored in his mind in complete detail. The wealth of images, he told his friend, the actor Peter Cushing, was stored in 'Seagoland' from where he drew on it at will. His challenge was to express the image on canvas. Sometimes he painted a real landscape from memory; at other times he created a composite imaginary picture which he described as a 'Seagoscape.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)  

Edward Seago: Painting with the Prince

"Portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh" by Edward Seago

"For Prince Philip the journey on the Britannia involved a full programme of official commitments but he obviously regarded painting as an integral part of relaxation. He and Seago often worked together, either at separate easels or combining their efforts to produce a lino-cut for a 'Red Nose' certificate to be given to each member of the ship's company to commemorate their visit inside the Antarctic Circle. 'Prince Philip has really done the design for it although the wardroom asked me,' read the entry in Seago's diary, 'but I must admit his idea is better than what I had in mind! I am amazed at his keenness and energy.' This was written on the day when both men had experimented on an improvised roller to print three hundred sheets from the lino-block. 'The first pulls were not awfully encouraging,' Seago wrote, 'but Prince Philip was full of determination.' When the technical problems were resolved, the Prince headed a team of shift workers who volunteered to work the roller.

At one point during the voyage world tour during the voyage, the prince painted a portrait of Seago at his easel on board the Royal Yacht, Seago, in turn, made a portrait of the prince at work with his oil paints. The pair of paintings were shown together in the 2016 exhibition “Portrait of the Artist” at Buckingham Palace. 

One afternoon just before Christmas Seago wrote in his diary that he and the Prince had a joint effort of sea and sky. Some years afterwards recalling the 'joint effort' Prince Philip said he suspected that his own part was to ask Seago where he had gone wrong in his picture and Seago would have come over and put him right. 

Prince Philip spent quite a lot of time on the trip trying to do skies and seas, but not with any great success. He found it always very discouraging to try and learn from Seago because one felt as if one were riding a bicycle on the ground while the painter was riding another on the high wire above. Just watching Seago at work gave him great pleasure, he said, 'because while the results were fantastic, just watching the way he achieved them was even more fantastic.' 

Seago wrote down a list of colours he recommended should be put on the palette and Prince Philip always kept the old envelope with the list on the back in his paintbox although he noted that Seago was far more economical in his colours than he was.  

Seago's capacity for work was tremendous, the Prince recalled: 'He was always sketching. He always seemed to have a pencil in his hand and with just a few lines could reproduce all the atmosphere and feel of a place with just the smallest pencil sketch. He also had this photographic memory and if he'd ever painted anything he could always remember exactly how he'd painted it; not just what he'd painted but the way he'd done it.' 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)  

Edward Seago: To the Antarctic

"In 1956 Prince Philip invited Edward Seago to join him on part of his world tour on board the royal yacht Britannia for a trip to Antarctica. Such a journey, Prince Philip thought, would give a painter of Seago's talent a tremendous opportunity to work where no other artist had really tried to paint - with the exception of Wilson who did a few pictures on the expeditions with Shackleton and Scott.

"The Whaling Station, Leith Harbor, South Georgia" 
by Edward Seago

Seago met up with the tour in Australia before sailing to Antarctica. On Boxing Day, Britannia encountered her first iceberg, a castellated beauty about two and a half miles long and a hundred feet high. From then on, Seago concentrated on painting the exciting, unfamiliar scenery around him. 'It was tremendously thrilling,' he said afterwards. 'I had always expected something that was very, very flat, and instead of that it was mountainous with tremendous peaks and black rock. I thought there was going to be wide expanses of nothingness and now and again queer upright icebergs and, of course, I thought it would be colourless; a mixture of greys and blacks and whites. Instead of that the colour was tremendous. It was full of rich blues and greens and the cavities glowed with the most rich luminous blues and greens, which were tremendously exciting to paint."

While he painted there, Seago was aware from an artistic point of view that he was in completely unknown territory. 'You see,' he told a radio interviewer, 'we can't help being influenced by pictures we have seen by other painters of the past of various parts of the world and it was rather fascinating to go to a part of the world where you had seen no pictures at all because nobody had ever painted it. It was was particularly fascinating because I live in a part of the world which has been painted over and over again and really is the teething ground of landscape painting.'

Although the sub-zero temperatures made it impossible to use watercolour, Seago found the dry cold no worse than a winter's day in England. He painted about sixty pictures on the expedition and gave them all to Prince Philip who sent most of them to Balmoral and had a particularly fine painting of an iceberg hung in Britannia. The Prince said it was a marvellous gift but if ever the painter wanted any pictures back for reproduction purposes or anything like that, to be sure and ask for them. 'Oh, that's quite unnecessary,' Seago replied. 'If I want them at any time I can easily remember them.'

In support of this he told the story of a painting Seago had given the Wardroom of the ice-breaker John Biscoe, the research ship in which the party travelled to one of the remotest Antarctic bases. The Captain though it was intended as a personal gift for him and when he left the ship he took it away with him, to the annoyance and disappointment of the officers. Seago did not hear about the incident until some ten years afterwards. He then painted the same picture all over again and sent it to the officers of the ship. Telling the story, Prince Philip said if the two pictures were hung side by side, it would have been impossible to tell the difference."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)  

 

Edward Seago: Thoughts on Modern Art

"Mooring Posts, Grand Canal, Venice" by Edward Seago

"Edward Seago was always willing to be a guest speaker and revelled in the opportunity to express his views on modern art. 'I believe that more than fifty per cent of abstract art is pure balderdash, absolutely phony,' he told Norwich Rotary Club in 1952 when he deplored its exaggerated worship by a gullible public, even while admitting there were many sincere abstract painters to be found.

'This is an age of experiment,' he wrote, 'when talent must be willfully moulded and eyes can no longer see without the brain distorting their vision. It is no long enough, apparently, to approach nature with humility, hoping only that one's personality may stamp the interpretation. Nature must be put in her place, bent to the will of man's inflated sense of intellect. I have read much concerning this superior attitude and I have seen the bewildering products of its cult. 

I admit wholeheartedly that, by their standards, I am old-fashioned; I do not think that I shall receive the sympathy of the intellectual forces in the great art world for I admit that I am offering nothing new by following in a great tradition - except that I am me, and anything that I do cannot have been before. But I work in all sincerity, as I feel and as I see.'

 To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.) 

Edward Seago: The Capricorn

"August Afternoon, Champs Elysées" by Edward Seago

"Apart from occasional trips to London and the visits to Sandringham, the only time Edward Seago spent any time away from home was to live on his boat. At sea he became more ambitious and exchanged 'Endeavour' for a younger, more seaworthy craft, 'Capricorn,' a thirty-ton auxiliary ketch, which he equipped as his ideal floating studio.

Even her name fired his romantic imagination. It had been chosen because she was registered in the month of December and Seago learnt with satisfaction that those born under the symbol of the goat were headstrong and brave of heart. Further investigation revealed that the symbol should, in fact, be a sea-goat - half goat, half fish. He interpreted it in a pair of frolicsome creatures with long scaly tails which he had cast in brass, covered in gold leaf and fixed to either side of the bow of his boat's blue-green hull. A red pennant held by another golden capricorn streamed from the top of the main mast.  Gold flashed from her symbols, the name on her hull, her lifebelts and from an extravagant thin gold line just above the rubbing rail. 

In his refitted floating studio he crossed the Channel to Dieppe for the first of a series of memorable cruises to Paris. He had never seen the port, but he felt he knew it well from the pictures of Bonington, Fancia and Whistler. Its character had been changed by modern features like lamp posts, telegraph poles and traffic, and he queried whether the older artists would have recognized it. But, for his own part, he often found good painting material in the evidence of modern times. In Dieppe, Seago set up his easel near the port to sketch the ragged skyline of leaning roofs and chimney stacks and old grey-washed houses.

Capricorn cruised up the Seine in the August sunshine and the painter made notes in his sketchbook of the passing scenes. Had he stopped long enough to set up his easel and make more permanent records he knew he would have been faced with the difficulty he invariably encountered in strange places where he saw so much to paint that he did not know where to begin.

'At first, all the more obvious compositions catch the eye,' he wrote in his last book 'With Capricorn to Paris,' after they had passed a chateau he longed to paint. 'If I had painted the chateau it would have been the whole chateau as I had first seen it - pink and grey against the dark trees and the cool, green pattern of the shadow-streaked pasture. Then I expect the light would change and I should want to paint it again. Only after I had worked there several days would my eye become more selective. I should find bits of the chateau - a corner of a terrace and some stone steps; perhaps only one doorway - and then I should leave the chateau and find endless subjects under the trees and along the smooth grass of the river bank where anglers sat by the hour.'" 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)