the times | Tuesday October 20 2020 1GM 53
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Howard Morgan painted portraits of
three queens, but rather than crowning
his career, two of these commissions
might well have ended it in ignominy.
When he set up at Clarence House for
the first time to paint the Queen
Mother, he found himself in a swirl of
corgis. Incautiously turning from the
easel to view his sitter, he managed to
kick one of them like “a furry rugby ball
cartwheeling between us”, he recalled.
“I was struck dumb. Fortunately the
Queen Mother spoke for me. ‘Gosh,’ she
said. ‘Don’t worry, it will be perfectly all
right.’ Happily it was, and I don’t think
the corgis troubled me after that.”
That portrait, now at Butchers’ Hall
in the City of London, was a success,
which may have led to the double
commission from the Anglo-Dutch
company Unilever for portraits of the
queens of the Netherlands and United
Kingdom in commemoration of the
300th anniversary of the Dutch Willi-
am III taking the British throne. Mor-
gan won the British Queen’s admira-
tion by reconnecting the spotlights in
the blacked-out room when his feet had
betrayed him again by tripping over the
cables. Then, he survived what he
described as “my going-to-the-Tower
moment” — she made no protest when,
unthinkingly, he manhandled her hips
into position for the pose.
He found ways to ignore “helpful”
suggestions from sitters, even queens.
When he mentioned to Elizabeth that
he was posing Beatrix by a huge gilt tor-
chère, she responded: “I’ve got some of
those — I will have them sent over!” He
dissuaded her by saying that if there
were more than one, she would “look
like a demented antiques dealer from
the Kings Road”.
Charm was an invaluable asset, but
tripping over his feet continued to be a
hazard. In 1988 he painted a double
portrait of the American journalist
Stephen G Smith, founding editor of
the magazine Civilization, and his wife,
the biographer Sally Bedell Smith,
whose notes of their six-day sitting
describe a theatrical process as enter-
taining and intriguing as it was ex-
hausting. His brushes were up to a yard
long, and he would not paint from
sketches or photographs. “He charges
the canvas with brush outstretched,
walks quickly backward, squints some
more, occasionally stopping to hold out
his brush as a measure. Several times he
nearly trips and falls, usually when
backing up, but sometimes when he is
standing and talking.” Periods of in-
tense concentration alternated with a
fund of anecdotes told “in a rapid-fire
mumble”. He was a “master of the
hilarious non-sequitur and misplaced
memory”. There was always music
from a paint-spattered cassette player.
He would hum or sing along softly
to 1930s jazz and blues taken from old
78s, the Beatles or occasional classical
choral works. He might also recite
poetry.
Stephen Smith commissioned Mor-
gan to produce watercolours of
Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello
for Civilization. “The white-gloved do-
cents [guides] are doubtless still recov-
ering from Howard blithely turning
back the two-century-old coverlet on
Jefferson’s chaise, and tourists must
still be shaking from Howard telling
them to ‘bugger off’ as he raced to cap-
ture the dying light. His watercolour
of Houdon’s bust of Jefferson graced
the cover.”
Howard James Morgan was born in
1949 in Denbigh, north Wales, the son
of Thomas, a teacher, and Olive Mor-
gan. They were Plymouth Brethren,
and Thomas was a gentle man but a fer-
vent lay preacher, taking his son with
him when addressing seaside holiday-
makers at Rhyll. The “tin tabernacles”
of his childhood gave Howard a lifelong
love of music and singing, including
hymns, spirituals and sea shanties, and
he remained a regular, albeit Anglican,
churchgoer. His father took a post at
Sutton Coldfield, where Howard was
educated.
He was a natural draughtsman, so
much so that an early art master tried to
discourage him, advising him to study
geography, on the grounds that his skill
would discourage his less talented
fellows. Luckily his work was shown to
someone more perceptive, who steered
him back to the right course, and he
attended the art college at Newcastle.
As important for his future were the
techniques he learnt from a local paint-
er and builder whom he had befriended.
He steeped himself in the art and
methods of past masters, and learnt to
make his own paints. His white con-
tained much lead, and since he re-
shaped his brushes by sucking themafter cleaning, he had to be tested every
six weeks for poisoning. He used cold-
pressed, rather than heated, linseed oil,
and no additives or preservatives. He
was also particular about his canvases,
which he stretched himself, and had his
frames specially made. He despised the
art school orthodoxy of “sight-sizing”
to measure subjects, preferring his long
brushes held at arm’s length.
He has often been likened to Sar-
gent, but Velasquez, Hals, Vermeer and
Tiepolo were as important to him and,
as the critic William Packer observed,
in paint-handling Carracci is perhaps a
better comparison. Other than theirswagger, however, he and Sargent were
rare among portrait painters in also
being superb landscape watercolour-
ists.
When he arrived in London to
begin his career in the early 1970s, he
found a studio in a former convent in
Stockwell, and he remained a south
Londoner, later moving to Battersea
and Wandsworth. He quickly estab-
lished himself as a society portrait
painter, producing incisive crayon
drawings as well as oil paintings, and hisHe was a ‘master of the
hilarious non-sequitur
and misplaced memory’
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Page 54
Howard Morgan
Society portrait artist who charmed his sitters, sucked his brushes, liked painting nudes and once inadvertently manhandled a monarch
MURRAY SANDERS/SOLO SYNDICATION; HOWARD MORGANHoward Morgan in 2014. After tripping while doing a portrait of the Queen, right,
he moved her hips into position for the sitting, his “going-to-the-Tower moment”first work to hang in the
National Portrait Gallery, of the com-
poser Herbert Howells, dates from- Other notable sitters included
Tom Stoppard, Francis Crick, the phys-
icist Paul Dirac — who told him that
there was no life possible elsewhere in
the universe — Philip Larkin and Dame
Antoinette Sibley. He was elected to the
Royal Society of Portrait Painters in
In 1977 he married a designer, Susie
Sandilands, whom he had met on a
train. They had three children, Alexan-
der, a musician now working in Los
Angeles, Romilly, a book publisher, and
Bo, a musician and visual artist. That
marriage ended in divorce, and in 2004
he married Sarah Milligan, an abstract
painter. They too had three children,
twins Perseus, also a musician, a drum-
mer, and Velvet, a writer, and Samuel,
who is in education.
For all his success, Morgan was not
always businesslike. On one occasion
the contents of his studio were seized
for non-payment of VAT and sent to a
Midlands auction. Three friends nego-
tiated to buy everything just before the
sale, which satisfied everyone except
the other dealers who turned up hoping
for pickings. He sometimes exasperat-
ed gallery owners by pressing new
works on them halfway through
exhibitions, and despite his charm, he
was capable of alienating patrons and
supporters.
He could not be neatly pigeonholed,
as William Packer has indicated: “This
is what Morgan is good at, spiking his
compositions with subversive effects
that unnerve us and put us on edge. The
sensuality is there alright, the pleasure
in bodies, the rich textures of paint and
colour, but it is crossed by darker strains
of danger and anxiety.”
As well as portraits and watercolours
he painted conversation pieces, such as
the sizeable group of members of the
Chelsea Art Club, regarded by some as
his masterpiece, naked or near-naked
women, a “Ladies’ Shoes” series — as
much leg as shoe — Mozart operas, cars
and large religious subjects including a
triptych of the evangelists. There were
also significant historical reconstruc-
tions, notably The March of Marlbor-
ough to the Danube, 1704 and
The Climax of the Battle of
Waterloo, in which he did not
include the Iron Duke, even
though it was painted for his
descendant, the Marquess of
Douro. For these he would
get local people or actors to
pose in full costume with
period weaponry, a some-
times onerous job.
His final conversation por-
trait was a commission last
year from the Inner Temple to
paint the five Supreme Court
judges who were among its
members.
By no means all of the por-
traits were of society figures. A
vagrant, Arthur Gathercole,
“was a familiar figure in the
streets near my studio in Bat-
tersea, which is how I got to
know him. Usually he was
pushing a supermarket trolley
full of old dressing-up clothes. I
button-holed him and asked if l
could paint his picture. We got
to know each other as I painted several
pictures of him.” As often as not, Mor-
gan’s own dressing-up clothes included
eye-bruising red jackets or trousers.
Away from the easel, other than
music his enthusiasms included cars of
all kinds and riding. His horse was
called Doric, as the conceit of being a
capital on a column amused him.
He died unexpectedly of a heart
attack at a cottage in Herefordshire.
Like William Orpen before him, he was
buried with his paints, palette and
brushes.Howard Morgan, painter, was born April
21, 1949. He died of a heart attack on
September 22, 2020, aged 71f k to hang in the
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