Being at home abroad

In ‘Thé-Dansant; Saturday Evening, La Ciudadela’ the English painter James Reeve shows elderly men and women dancing the danzon, a national passion in Mexico not unlike the two-step, where partners perform a series of intricate, angular passes and twirls requiring complete control of wrists, elbows, and little fingers. In Mexico City, where Reeve lives, well-off aficionados repair to elegant palais de dance such as the California Dancing Club. Those who can’t afford such grandeur settle for the Ciudadela, a small park where from 12 noon until dusk they can dance in the open air to live mariachi bands. I know all this because in James Reeve: An English Painter in Mexico the artist’s diary entries are published alongside splendid colour reproductions of his pictures, enabling us to compare word and image.

Classically trained in the Academies in Florence and Madrid, Reeve is a miraculous draughtsman — and as proficient at portraiture as he is in landscape and genre. In some ways his own proficiency hampered his development as an artist, for the early landscapes painted in such exotic places as the Australian outback, Uganda, Haiti and Madagascar have the dead, emotionless surface of coloured photographs. It was not until Reeve moved to Mexico in 1985 that he found a subject that perfectly chimed with his own sensibility, for he is one of a long line of British eccentrics who, like Edward James, have been drawn to the beauty and exuberant surreality of daily life in that amazing country.

The closest literary equivalent to his paintings I can think of is Sybille Bedford’s A Visit to Don Otavio, the classic travel book in which Reeve himself might easily have been a character. He used to live in Xilita in the remote highlands of central Mexico and there he painted the transvestites, prostitutes, witches and nuns who were his neighbours.