Relatively eccentric

My uncle Robin Ironside bewailed the demise, after the scandal of the Wilde trial and the early death of Beardsley, of the imaginative tradition which, he wrote, ‘had been kept flickering in England since the end of the 18th century, sometimes with a wild, always uneasy light, by a succession of gifted eccentrics’.

The truth is that he himself was one of those very eccentrics. Born in 1912 of a staunchly upper middle-class background, and after stints at the Courtauld and the Sorbonne, he landed, in 1937, the job of assistant keeper to Sir John Rothenstein at the Tate Gallery. Eventually, becoming frustrated at the boredom of a desk job, he gave it all up, moved into a sleazy flat near Victoria Station, and devoted the rest of his short life (he died at 53) to writing about art for magazines like Horizon and Encounter, and painting far into the night.

His writing includes a book on the Pre-Raphaelites, the Brotherhood having become relegated to the scrapheap as sentimental nonsense for over 70 years until he resuscitated interest in it, he coined the term ‘neo-romantic’, and he penned essays on subjects ranging from Proust and Burne-Jones to Gustave Moreau and Balthus. He also painted — obsessively. Addicted to Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, a mixture of laudanum, chloroform and tincture of cannabis, and keeping himself awake on Benzedrine, he’d often work with a magnifying glass on obsessively detailed figures, constantly painting and repainting. He sometimes took mescaline and once, having drawn what appeared to him, under the influence, as a vegetable on the kitchen table, glittering with meaning and colour, woke up to find he’d drawn a faithful representation of — a cabbage.

Permanently short of money, he’d often come round to our house in the middle of the night, begging my father Christopher to cash his cheques, pay for his taxi, lend him a tube of Chinese White or help him break down his flat door when he’d forgotten his key.