A well-kept secret

One of the great things about having an area of specialism is the discovery of a new aspect to it. Since my teens, I have developed a particular interest in 20th-century British art, encouraged initially by a brilliant art teacher and by the writings of Sir John Rothenstein, quondam director of the Tate Gallery. Well, it’s a big area to cover, so for me new things are emerging all the time as my knowledge extends and my tastes change and develop. Charles Mahoney (1903–68) is one of those artists who had somehow slipped through the net of connections and cross-references I have gradually built up over 30 years of reading and research. Looking back, I realised I had come across his name from time to time but without the artist coming into focus. And this was principally because I hadn’t seen his work anywhere.

It’s impossible to see all the exhibitions that are on in London (never mind the provinces) at any one time, and write articles and books as well. So I had managed to miss the Charles Mahoney exhibition staged by the enterprising dealer Paul Liss at the Fine Art Society in 2000. (In these infuriating days of postal strikes I am still awaiting the delivery of the catalogue from that show, which is the principal source of information about Mahoney.) What really alerted me to his presence was a not very good book about the artist Evelyn Dunbar (1906–60), best known now as an official war artist, who’d been a close friend and colleague of Mahoney, and with whom she’d written and illustrated the delightful volume Gardeners’ Choice, published by Routledge in 1937.

From being an unknown quantity, Mahoney suddenly began to register as an artist and assert his continuing existence through his drawings and paintings. First I began to see reproductions of his work in catalogues, then the real thing at an art fair.