Date: 23-06-2002
Owning Institution: The National Portrait Gallery
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     20th Century    

To mark the first anniversary of the death of the painter Nancy Sharp (who died a year and three days ago at the age of 91) this week’s picture is her portrait of the Irish-born writer Louis MacNeice. One of only a handful of portraits created by Sharp during the course of a career so inconspicuous as to have been almost invisible, it was painted in 1938. The picture is in the process of being acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in lieu of death duties. As the only serious extant oil painting of one of the best poets of his generation, it will be a welcome addition to the national collections of art.

Nancy Sharp was in her late twenties when she embarked on a passionate and adulterous affair with Louis Macneice. They were introduced by W.H. Auden, a mutual friend, who saw that Sharp’s marriage to her first husband, the painter William Coldstream, was not going well. Sharp and Coldstream had met as students at the Slade School of Art. She was the daughter of an eminent doctor and his wife, had been educated at Cheltenham Ladies College and had felt stifled by her strait-laced upbringing. Attending art school and living the bohemian life in London was her rebellion against a staid and socially conservative background. Sharp and Coldstream had married very young. He was an affectionate father but inattentive husband, whose first priority was his painting. With two young daughters to look after, more or less singlehandedly, she became lonely and depressed. Auden briefly contemplated trying to start an affair with her before reminding himself that he preferred the company of men. He decided to play the part of matchmaker. “Louis could be very convenient,” he remarked, “keeping Nancy happy while Bill got on with his painting.”

Sharp and MacNeice instantly hit it off. As they talked, she later recalled, his “black velvet voice” brought to her mind a phrase from Isaiah: “I am warm, I have seen the fire.” She remembered one conversation in particular, at the Café Royal in Hampstead one afternoon in the spring of 1937. “I was gloomy because I was ambitious and wanted to get on with my painting and drawing and was bogged down in domestic chores. Louis got v enthusiastic and told me to go somewhere like Iceland or Greenland for 3 weeks and write a book and then illustrate it. His talk was incandescent. By the end of the evening I was convinced that I could do anything.”

MacNeice’s suggestion turned into a proposition. He had himself been commissioned to write a travel book about the Hebrides (subsequently published as I Crossed the Minch). He asked Sharp to accompany him as its illustrator, which she did, having first deposited her two children with their maternal grandmother in Bude. It rained constantly in Scotland and the beds were so damp in some of the guest houses in which the young lovers stayed that they had to sleep in their greatcoats. But their passion was undampened. After their return, they continued to see each other almost every night for months, although Sharp eventually put a stop to the affair. By the time she painted her portrait of MacNeice, the following year, it was by way of a valediction. The picture is full of memories of the time they had spent together, and of the romantic escapade they had shared under wet northern skies. “I painted Louis looking broody, with his black hair and his shiny fisherman’s black mac with the velvet collar,” she remembered. “Afterwards he was pleased with the result.”

He was right to be. The dry graphic exactness of the portrait reflects Sharp’s training at the Slade under the rigorous eye of Sir Henry Tonks. But the invention with which the background has been treated – depicted as a warm wall of paint, flickering with abstract incident as if to indicate the liveliness of the poet’s mind – suggests the rather different example of French avant-garde painting. So too do other elements of the picture (appropriately, since MacNeice’s own tastes in art inclined to Paris and the recent past). The poet’s angularly painted head combines an expression of good humour with the remoteness and fixity of an idol – traces of Cezanne and Picasso – while his large, supple, sensitive hands recall the freedoms taken by Matisse in his portraiture. Above all it is a humane and loving picture, reflecting not only Sharp’s affectionate idea of MacNeice, as a fire before which she might warm herself, but also epitomising his own idea of what a poet should be. “I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, appreciative of women,” he had written in his book Modern Poetry, published in the same year that the portrait was painted.

MacNeice responded with a valediction of his own. Some of the most beautiful lines of his poem “Autumn Journal” remember Nancy Sharp. They make an affectionate portrait in words to match the one that she had created in paint, but tinged, inevitably, with sadness:  “September has come, it is hers, / Whose vitality leaps in the autumn…/ Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls / Dancing over and over with her shadow. / Whose hair is entwined in all my waterfalls / And all of London littered with remembered kisses.”