Pietro Annigoni: Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, 1969, Pt. 1

"Self-Portrait, 1971" by Pietro Annigoni

"I had been surprised to get a letter from Dr. Roy Strong asking me if I would accept a commission to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II for the National Portrait Gallery, of which he was then the Director. Work on the portrait did not begin until two years afterwards. I arrived in London on 19th February 1969, having travelled by train across by train across a snowbound Europe. I had to be in the Yellow Drawing-room at Buckingham Palace, with a clear head, at eleven-thirty in the morning for the Queen's first sitting. I arrived early and arranged my things, feeling completely calm and at home in the familiar surroundings. 

It had been arranged that my portrait would show the Queen wearing the mantle of the Order of the British Empire, but it was not until the seventh and eighth sittings that she made her appearance in it for me. Each time she had come straight from another sitting which was for a sculptor who was making a bust for the new 'Queen Elizabeth' liner. 'The poor man is rather desperate,' she said. 'He says that my face is extremely changeable.' I told her that he had my sympathy and I could understand his difficulty, and she smiled, amused, and went on: 'This morning's sitting was an extra to the six agreed upon but he has destroyed the clay head again. He does it every time; takes it up in his hands and' - she imitated his action vigorously with her own hands - 'reforms it.'

At the end of the eighth sitting, the Queen reminded me that it was the last she was able to give me until the following October. I explained that during that period I would be working in Florence on the final painting, and I tried to convey to her how I visualised the finished portrait. 'I see Your Majesty as being condemned to solitude because of your position,' I said, 'and I intend to let that be my inspiration. It goes without saying that, as a wife and mother you are entirely different, but I see you really alone as a Monarch and I want to represent you that way. If I succeed, the woman, the Queen and, for that matter, the solitude will emerge.'

She nodded earnestly in agreement and then came to look at the study I had made during the eight sittings. Although I watched her closely, she gave me no idea of her reaction to it until she spoke. 'One doesn't know one's self,' she said. 'After all, we have a biased view when we see ourselves in a mirror and, what's more, the image is always in reverse.'

'I hope Your Majesty has nothing against being depicted without jewellery, including earrings?' I said. She listened and nodded in agreement and before she left she held out her hand to me and said: 'I feel that the inspiration is there. Go ahead. I look forward to seeing you and the picture in October.'"

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.) 

 

Pietro Annigoni: Florence Flooded

"Drawing of a Man"
by Pietro Annigoni 

"On 5th November, 1966, just after I had begun a portrait, I learned from the New York papers that Florence was flooded. A photograph in the 'New York Times' showed the Piazza San Marco three feet under water, but down in the Santa Croce area, where I had my studio until 1953, the water was five times as deep and still rising. The following day I had a telegram assuring me that my family and friends were safe, and only as the days passed and more and more news came through did I realise the true extent of the calamity. I noted in my diary: 'The disaster is really of gigantic proportions. Poor people and poor Florence. In the last twenty-five years it has endured the war, with the bombing, shelling and mines; then the rebuilding and expansion, with the hideous impositions of of a vulgar, anti-Florentine building industry; and now - a flood which must be the most disastrous in its long history. The toll of the death bell?'

I accepted the face that a great many of my own works must have been destroyed, but I had reckoned without the foresight of a stalwart friend, Palmiro Meacci, who is now my indispensable secretary and manager of my business affairs. For many years before the flood, he, together with Riccardo Noferi, used to do a little art dealing and he kept a small stock of my drawings and paintings in the backroom of a bar, of which he is part-owner, near my studio. The floodwater reached the ceiling of the bar but not before Palmiro had saved the paintings in the back room. 

He also remembered, before it was quite too late to save one of my biggest works from a warehouse where it was stored. This work, called 'Life, measures 3.5 by 5.5 metres and is painted in oil tempera on Japanese paper laid down on canvas, but although it was submerged in the water the paint remained fast, and it was possible to lift the paper and re-lay it on a new background canvas. The restored picture is now in the Pinacoteca Accademia d'Arte at Montecatini, Pistoia.

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.) 

Pietro Annigoni: Margot Fonteyn

Drawing of Margot Fonteyn
by Pietro Annigoni

Painting of Margot Fonteyn
by Pietro Annigoni

"A few months after my work at Buckingham Palace ended I began the portrait of the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, which was commissioned by her husband and shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition the following year, 1956. She gave me sixteen sittings and, as was to be expected, she held the pose extremely well, but I often wished she would relax a little from her role of prima ballerina. After all, I was not painting her as a prima ballerina, but as the Señora Doña de Arias, wife of the Panamanian ambassador in London, and she wore, not a tutu, but a tight-waited, wide-skirted, white dress embroidered with scarlet flowers, that was said to be the national costume of Panama. She snowed no interest in the progress of the portrait and conversation between us was such hard going that, until 1969, when I saw her dance for the first time - with Nureyev in 'Swan Lake' at Covent Garden - I had only rather unpleasant memories of the whole episode.

That experience of her art changed, magically, all my earlier feelings about her, and I went home and wrote a 'rave notice' in my diary.

 'Margot Fonteyn is great. They say she is in her fifties. If it's true she is an amazing phenomenon; not only because of the virtuosity of a perfect ballerina but, above all, her mime, mime that is a language impossible to misunderstand, an explosion of love, an outburst of overwhelming, young, virginal love - wasted, however, on that dolt of a Siegfried. After the performance I saw her in her dressing-room. Banal cordiality on both sides. She told me that the portrait I painted of her thirteen years ago, had returned to London, having been for some time in Panama and then in New York. I had never seen her on the stage until this evening, and I didn't really like her because of her prima ballerina manner offstage. Now I've changed my mind. She is entitled to give herself all the airs she likes, she is a great artist.'"

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.) 

 

Pietro Annigoni: The Witch

"La Strega (The Witch)
by Pietro Annigoni

"In 1959 I painted the portrait that came to be known as 'La Strega (The Witch)'. The model was an English girl, Patricia Rowlings, and was painted in Florence. She came to me first of all to sit for a pen-and-ink portrait commissioned by her father, a wealthy textile manufacturer. When that was done I asked her to sit again so that I could paint her for myself. She came to Florence twice, for two or three weeks each time, and sat for me every day at the same hour.

One day, when she was combing her hair during a break from posing, I told her that she looked like a witch, and I painted a little witch in the background of the portrait. So the picture got its title, the title under which it was exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy. 

What happened to it then was reported by William Hickey in the 'Daily Express':

'Textile magnate Mr. Louis Rawlings and his wife were hoping to buy the Annigoni portrait of their beautiful daughter, Patricia, which has been creating such a stir at the Royal Academy. Now they find that the picture has been sold for 5,000 pounds right from under their noses. The buyer? Thirty-year-old Mayfair company director, Mr. Adrian Jacobs, who lives a few doors from the Rawlings' town house in Grosvenor Street.

The picture is called 'La Strega - The Witch.' Mr. Jacobs told me last night: 'I sort of fell in love with the painting at the Royal Academy and thought it very good. Patricia Rawlings rang me as soon as she heard. I told her she had had the first opportunity of buying it, but that now I had bought it. I don't know why the family should be so upset about this because I know Mrs. Rawlings extremely well and she is not very concerned about it.'

At her home Mrs. Rawlings told me: 'We all feel very sore about this. We realise that it was Mr. Annigoni's property to do what he liked with, but we understood that we might have had an opportunity of acquiring it. Neither my daughter nor myself has ever heard of Mr. Jacobs. We just don't know him.'

Complicated. But there were more complications to follow. The sale at the Academy fell through when the money was not forthcoming, and the picture came back to me. Then I agreed to sell it to Patricia's parents for three thousand five hundred pounds, but once again it was returned to m when they decided they would prefer a smaller painting. When I made it clear that I was not going to paint a smaller picture, the Rawlings wanted the big picture again but quibbled about the price. Exasperated, I sold it to a doctor in Vicenza for two thousand pounds...and the picture remains in his beautiful, early Palladian Villa Godi-Malinverni near Vicenza where it is on show to the public with the rest of the doctor's art collection and where Patricia usually goes to see it when she is in Italy."

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.) 

 

Pietro Annigoni: Julie Andrews

"Portrait of Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle"
by Pietro Annigoni

"Not long after the musical 'My Fair Lady' opened at Drury Lane in May 1958, an American visiting Florence told me that the actress' manager wanted me to paint her for him. Although I hardly knew who Julie Andrews was then, I agreed, but nearly a year went by before I was able to start the portrait. On the day I arrived in London, the manager, Charles Tucker, took me to see the show and to meet the young actress. I was pleasurably surprised by both and decided there and then to paint her in the costume and character of Eliza Doolittle, the show's Cockney flowergirl.

When she sat for me I found her to be a very sweet girl. But, oh, she was so unpunctual! She came to me every weekday afternoon, except on matinée days, for about six weeks. There were more than twenty sittings altogether and for the first half-dozen of them she came more than twenty minutes late. It made me so angry that when she came - late again - for the seventh sitting, I did not open the door to her. She knocked and knocked and then went away. Half an hour passed; then she telephoned full of apologies and promised to keep better time in future. At her next sitting she explained that she was soon to be married and was very busy with wedding preparations. That news was ultimately of advantage to me because her husband-to-be, stage designer Tony Walton, was the son of a doctor, and Dr. Walton discovered that a pain in the upper part of my right arm, which had long been troubling me, was due to a cracked humerus. And he treated it successfully.

I worked a great deal on the portrait between sittings, often late at night, and finished it in two months. Julie liked it and, I believe, would have liked to buy it from her manager, but he would not sell Instead, I was told, he promised to leave it to her in his will. But he must have been joking, for on 5th November 1975, it was put up for auction at Sotheby's by his widow and was sold for seven thousand pounds. My fee for it was two thousand, of which the astute Mr. Tucker quickly recouped a large part by selling exclusive newspaper reproduction rights." 

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.) 

 

Pietro Annigoni: Pope John XXIII

Pietro Annigoni's drawing of Pope John XXIII
for Time magazine 

"The Pope seemed even more weary than usual the morning of his third - and last - sitting and spoke again of his terrible insomnia. He was clearly in no mood for conversation and I expected him to keep dozing off. I had begun to despair of getting anything done, when Monsignor Capovilla adroitly rescued me. During his sleepless night the Holy Father had written a speech which he was to deliver shortly after the sitting ended. Monsignor now offered to read the speech aloud so that he and the Pope could check it together. The offer was welcomed and had the effect of reviving the Pope, who settled down, chin in hands, to listen intently. It was my salvation for, apart from occasional interruptions when he suggested a correction, he kept the pose so well that, at last, I had a passably complete drawing. 

During a brief break, when Monsignor had left us alone, the Holy Father looked at me thoughtfully and said: 'I wrote all that last night and now, re-reading it, I realize that when we ponder over what we are writing we often have the illusion that we are saying a great deal, that we are saying important things. Instead, we miss the essential point. The people who are out there waiting for my speech would be happier if I improvised instead of reading it. Human beings prefer to be looked in the eye when they are spoken to, and I would like to look them in the eye and tell them what comes from the heart. Yes, with simplicity, what really comes from the heart and only from the heart. In their eyes I would see their hearts, and that would help me to discover more profoundly what is in my own. But it is not always possible. Speeches must be written, printed, and preserved.' It seemed to me that as he said this he was suddenly isolated in a remote solitude, utterly alone.

Before leaving he came to look at the drawing and said to Monsignor Capovilla, 'This is someone who knows his business.' Then he pointed to the voluminous ear and commented, 'Even that is really lifelike. When I was in the seminary and was rather thin, my ears seemed even bigger than usual. So much so that my classmates, who saw in them a certain resemblance to the ears of pachyderms, used to call me 'The Elephant.'

As he left, I genuflected properly - no mean feat for a man of my size - and even succeeded in snatching his hand on the wing, that hand which he afterwards laid on my shoulder, saying for his only farewell: 'Courage!' A bad model, but a truly holy man. A sweet serenity emanated from him in spite of his evident suffering. With a few words he could bring a man back to the Eternal and remind him, like no one else I have ever known, of the 'vanitas vanitatum [vanity of vanities].'"

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.) 

 

Pietro Annigoni: Pope John XXIII and the Pietà

Michelangelo's "Pieta"

"'Time' magazine came to me with a request for a portrait of Pope John, upon which I started work in the Vatican on 5th June. A man from 'Time' took me there and presented me to Monsignor Cardinale, who in turn passed me on to the Pope's secretary, who in his turn, led me into the study of John XXIII. There, bending on one knee as I had been instructed, I kissed, and did not kiss, the hand that was extended to me and withdrawn from me at the same time. The Monsignor introduced me: 'Maestro Annigoni, who is here for the portrait.' 'Young for a maestro,' remarked the Pope with a little smile. 

During one of our conversations as I worked, our principle subject was the proposed shipment of Michelangelo's 'Pietà' to the New York World's Fair in 1964. I had been told that the Pope had promised Cardinal Spellman that the sublime sculpture would go and that there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. All the same, I felt very strongly that it should not and I said so.

He could scarcely wait for me to finish speaking and answered impatiently: 'I don't understand why this project should be so discussed and opposed in so many quarters. If it is sent to the New York World's Fair, this 'Pietà' will give satisfaction and joy to millions of people who would never have a chance to admire it, won't it? So why shouldn't it be sent? Even works of art - even the greatest of them - are things of this world, and we should not become fanatically attached to them.'

Although disheartened, I insisted on telling him that we had the duty of protecting works of art, of not exposing them voluntarily to the risk of being damaged or absolutely destroyed, if we wished to hand them down unharmed to those who come after us, whose number will be vastly greater than that of the beneficiaries of the Fair.

'That's true,' he replied. 'Even so, I was in Paris when Leonardo's 'La Gioconda [Mona Lisa]' was stolen from the Louvre, and what a rumpus there was about it. What a rumpus - for such a little thing.' With his fingers he indicated just how 'little', and continued: 'Of course the thief deserved to be punished, - he mimed the spanking of a child - but, all in all, what exaggeration!'

At that moment I remembered involuntarily how, a few days before I met him, he had been described to me as 'a good parish priest.' It was so true that I had to be careful not to address him by name or give him a comradely slap on the back."

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)