Edward Seago: Prelude to a Portrait

"The Piazzetta, Venice" by Edward Seago

"It was a bleak winter's day, with the east wind whipping in over the marshes from the North Sea, when I sat for my portrait in a small Tudor house in the heart of Norfolk. I left my car in the narrow lane near a small iron gate and went in. As it clanged behind me there was a sense of entering a private world of enchantment. Edward Seago's secretary, a young man with a puckish face and laughing eyes, let me in to the small square hall where a conglomeration of personal treasures jostled for attention. There stood a sculpture of a bronze horse and winged rider, the model for the wartime insignia of the Airborne Forces, an Orpen self-portrait, some Augustus John drawings and, through the open doorway into the drawing room, a glimpse of an ancient clavichord, elegant silk curtains and velvet and damask-covered chairs. 

Inside Seago's studio a giant Parliament clock on the wall ticked solemnly and the crackling of a log fire mingled with the soft wail of the wind. There were well-worn armchairs, rug-covered settees, shelves of books and souvenirs of working holidays spent abroad. It was a homely place. I found myself enthroned on the sheeted armchair on a raised dais in the centre of his studio. He ignored me and busied himself mixing the paints. It seemed as if he would never stop. I studied him, a tall lean man in his early forties. He had long, beautiful hands but on the middle finger of the left hand an ornate gold ring which seemed as out of place as his bow tie. Coolly his eyes met mine, appraising and enquiring, but without emotion. I sensed that already he knew all he needed to know about me, and with an occasional look, was transferring it to canvas. In less than three hours it was caught forever, as large as life.

'It's like,' he said, even before I had been invited to see the portrait, and I detected the relief and satisfaction in his voice. So he too had been apprehensive about the result! It was 'like.' As I studied the mirror-image of a slightly windswept girl in a faded red shirt, my hand automatically went up to straighten my hair. 'I shall paint a picture,' he had said, 'not just a likeness.' But how had he sensed that, given different opportunities, I could have been the outdoor type?

Over the years I acquired other Seago paintings: ships and scenes of faraway places, oils and watercolours and little pen-and-ink sketches. But always, the portrait held pride of place in the sitting room; or it did until recently. Last year it was supplanted and moved over to make way for one of his last canvases. It is a picture of a place where we once walked together, a near-secret place at the bottom of his garden where a little wood gives way to a dyke leading to a secluded stretch of water where he kept the blue-hulled boat that bore him on painting trips, across the seas. To study it was, for me, to know I should write about him again. But this time it would be a portrait in depth of the painter I had once studied from the other side of a canvas." 

To be continued

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