Brian Horton
1.
Valley and Hills near Cader Idris
oil on canvas 56 x 86 cms 22 x 34 ins
2. Hill
Full of Trees, Midsummer Eve
gouache 37 x 40 cms 141⁄2 x 153⁄4 ins
Brian Horton 2017
www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG  Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545
3.
Horseshoe Pass, Llangollen
gouache 28 x 33 cms 11 x 13 ins
Brian Horton: Quiet Enchantment ‘The search for novelty and originality is an artif icial need which barely conceals banality and absence of temperament.’
Cezanne *
Brian Horton is a master of temperament in the sense that Cezanne uses it here: an intensely human response to the landscape, of a distinct nature and character, which is full of emotion (much of it recollected in the tranquillity of the studio) channelled through the imposed restraints of pictorial construction. Horton has not been seduced by the headline lure of novelty and sensation. He doesn’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel every time he makes a painting. It is enough for him to penetrate further into the subtleties of his subject, to persist in his enquiry into why a particular place looks so beautiful and means so much. His latest series of paintings carry his research to new depths of visual intelligence, and to a new peak of refinement. His pictures are clearly not intended as a mirror held up to nature - they are painted constructs, equivalents of a state of being: the artist becoming aligned in some profound way with his subject. They are (literally) paint on paper, but they are also telluric, very much of the earth. Artists are the necessary angels of earth, to adopt Wallace Stevens’ image, because through them we see the earth again and freshly. Although Horton’s fields are filled with Thomas Traherne’s orient and immortal wheat, and thus register with us on a metaphysical level, they are also real, so that a poppy amongst the corn is as perfectly placed as the lipsticked kiss on a love letter. Horton’s trees are half-solid half-transparent, moving but standing, beneath a cloud-daunted sky. There’s poetry in his pastorals, sunlight on the garden and on those blue remembered hills. There’s even something Shakespearian in the pungency he conjures when he paints the spirit of a place. Consider Hill Full of Trees, Midsummer Eve. This is not some vision of rustic nostalgia, Olde England in kitsch Saloon Bar decor, but a distillation of British character through our landscape. Jonathan Meades, that masterly dissector of what it means to be English, has this to say of the typical English landscape (the chequerboard of fields and hedges, mapped out by trees) that has * I am indebted to another Messum’s ar tist, Jake Attree, for bringing this Cezanne quote to my attention during the course of a recent correspondence.
filled the dreams and memories of generations. Although it may look wonderfully random and haphazard, everywhere man’s guiding hand may be seen. ‘There’s nothing natural about nature’, he says. ‘The qualities that we revere in those acres belong entirely to mankind’s intercession. Nature is always improvable. It needs man to shape it, to fashion its raw material. Patchworks don’t just happen. What we’re looking at here are human creations.’ (From his 1997 documentary film Remember the Future.) If the landscape we know and love is a product of our interaction with wild nature, then good landscape art is yet a further human intervention, a clarification of the meaning of what we live with and so often take for granted. How soon do we become inured to even the most breath-taking unfamiliar view, if we live with it and wake up to it every morning? Horton shows us that we must keep looking and responding, searching out the heartbeat of beauty in the world. Brian Horton is a virtuoso of soft, diffused colour: expert on blues and greens and yellows, underscored by brown and black and grey. As I’ve remarked before, green can be a tough colour to handle with conviction (for years our landscapists painted green leaves and fields brown, because green was thought to be lacking in harmony and grace), but Horton has an easy authority over it – though only apparently easy, like all hard-won skills. He is also adept at autumnal hues, so superbly demonstrated here by Lake with November Trees and Wooded Stream, November. He reconnoitres Britain from Wales to the Scilly Isles, from Shropshire to Devon and the Cotswolds. He also paints his own garden, taking inspiration from the local and familiar, as well as the less well-known. But he has been travelling to his favourite places for many years now (he went to school, for instance, in Shropshire, and used to live in the Cotswolds), and the accumulation of all those individual acts of looking at a landscape have endowed him with the ability to summon up its spirit in skilfully orchestrated washes of gouache. Some pictures are titled by subject, but then there are the unspecified scenes, which are less topographical and descriptive, and much more about the shapes to be found and celebrated in nature, together with the fall of light, or the disposition of ancient stones in a bridge spanning a purling brook. Horton is drawn to that abstracting tendency to be found in the radical simplifications of John Sell Cotman’s style of watercolour. Thus he favours the spatial articulation of landscape through the placing of trees, rivers and stone walls, all in fruitful relation and conjunction, identified and sometimes relocated by the eye of the artist who seeks to discover a visual pattern that is meaningful to him, and that can then be conveyed to the viewer. I have written elsewhere and at length about Horton’s enjoyment of the great tradition of British landscape painting, especially in its Romantic aspect; and how the work of such artists as Samuel
4. Lake
with November Trees
oil on board 53 x 76 cms 21 x 30 ins
Palmer, John Linnell and Edward Calvert, and more recent masters such as Graham Sutherland, the Nash Brothers, Eric Ravilious and Keith Vaughan, has been a lasting inspiration to him. But there are other, less evident, references to be noted and comparisons to be made. One that occurred to me only recently is with the paintings of the American visionary painter Charles Burchfield (1893–1967). Like Horton’s use of gouache, Burchfield used watercolour to invoke his highly individual interpretation of nature, and although his images have a mystical and almost pyrotechnic intensity (one thinks of Roman candles and Catherine wheels) that Horton’s rarely aspire to, there is a similar determination in both artists to investigate fully the mysterious land of the imagination. Burchfield wrote: ‘An artist must paint, not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so, he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him.’ Thus Horton’s paintings should not be thought simply mimetic and descriptive. His way of drawing and painting a tree or a river contains also an important symbolic component: the knowledge of all trees seen, all rivers stepped into, the banked experience of a lifetime condensed into a single motif. The time element is another less obvious aspect of Horton’s work. Although he paints the eternal recurrence of the seasons, with his chosen landscapes often depicted under ideal weather conditions, there are other less specific meanings to be discerned in the details. For instance, the frieze of wild flowers he often paints across the front of a composition, which always makes me think of the opening sequence of Mike Newell’s 2012 film of Great Expectations – low viewpoint, wide expanse of sky, marshes fringed by vegetation – also recalls the similar organisation of Paul Nash’s great painting Landscape of the Summer Solstice (1943). In this, the summer flowers, which all too soon will fall and decay, are a symbol of the transitoriness of life. That inbuilt mood of sweet melancholy is typical of Horton too. His scenes are filled with quiet enchantment. A few weeks after the publication in 2014 of my book on Brian Horton, I received an appreciative card from the distinguished art historian and TV presenter, Sister Wendy Beckett. While admitting that she could not always share my enthusiasm for all the artists I write about, she did agree with what I had said about Horton. She wrote: ‘I love landscape above all else, and Horton is a most evocative master. He expresses the seen so as to make us aware of the unseen.’ That is his greatest strength, and the reason why his work can look so modestly glorious. Andrew Lambirth February – March 2017
5.
Hereford Farm, Geese and Apple Trees
gouache 55 x 72 cms 211⁄2 x 281⁄2 ins
6. Peace
and Prosperity, Early Garden Snow
gouache 53 x 72 cms 21 x 281â „2 ins
7.
Wooded Paths and Winter Shadows
drawing 29 x 36 cms 111â „2 x 14 ins
8. Secret
Pathway
drawing 25 x 30 cms 10 x 12 ins
9.
Flowers in a Goldfish Bowl
oil on board 51 x 76 cms 20 x 30 ins
10.
Two Devon Hills
gouache 33 x 38 cms 13 x 15 ins
11.
River Valley, Rain Clearing
gouache 38 x 42 cms 15 x 161â „2 ins
12.
Rocky Stream, Snowdonia
gouache 36 x 43 cms 14 x 17 ins
13.
Cliffs in West Wales
gouache 36 x 42 cms 14 x 161â „2 ins
14.
L andscape with Cornfields and Stone Walls oil on canvassed board 69 x 47 cms 27 x 181â „2 ins
15.
Green Landscape with Hills & Dark Cloud, No. 1, Shropshire
gouache 37 x 44 cms 145⁄8 x 173⁄8 ins
16.
Sunrise, Cumbria
gouache 28 x 30 cms 11 x 12 ins
17.
River Towy S Bend mixed media 38 x 47 cms 15 x 181â „2 ins
18.
Still River through Trees and Boulders
gouache 33 x 42 cms 13 x 161â „2 ins
19.
Summer Evening, Hills and Trees
gouache 33 x 39 cms 13 x 151â „2 ins
20.
Wooded Stream, November oil on board 53 x 81 cms 21 x 32 ins
21.
Bridge Amongst Trees
drawing 27 x 40 cms 101⁄2 x 153⁄4 ins
22. Sunlight
on Ancient Bridge
gouache 38 x 42 cms 15 x 161â „2 ins
23.
Trees above Tresco Harbour
gouache 33 x 37 cms 13 x 141â „2 ins
24.
Tresco Sunrise No. 1
gouache 30 x 36 cms 12 x 14 ins
25.
Tresco Sunrise No. 2
gouache 46 x 53 cms 18 x 21 ins
26.
Garden Sunrise
gouache 44 x 50 cms 171⁄2 x 191⁄2 ins
27.
Bridge Near a Grand House, Derbyshire
gouache 39 x 44 cms 153⁄8 x 173⁄8 ins
28.
Bridge with Setting Sun
gouache 38 x 47 cms 15 x 181â „2 ins
29.
Hills and River Bend
gouache 32 x 36 cms 121â „2 x 14 ins
30.
Trees and Hills in a Fertile Land
gouache 42 x 53 cms 161â „2 x 21 ins
31.
Estuary Pembrokeshire
gouache 44 x 53 cms 171â „2 x 21 ins
32.
Cotswold Sheep, Trees and Clouds
gouache 44 x 53 cms 171â „2 x 21 ins
33.
here Severns Waves Enfold W Pastures Green and Fields of Gold
gouache 44 x 53 cms 171â „2 x 21 ins
34.
Light House and Sun Set
gouache 36 x 40 cms 14 x 153â „4 ins
35.
Pastures Green and Fields of Gold
gouache 37 x 43 cms 141â „2 x 17 ins
36.
Stream Through Trees and Broken Rocks
gouache 36 x 50 cms 14 x 191â „2 ins
37.
River with Cornfield and White Clouds
gouache 44 x 53 cms 171â „2 x 21 ins
38.
Flooded Fields near Carmathen
gouache 42 x 51 cms 161â „2 x 20 ins
39.
Sunshine & Rain, Windermere
gouache 53 x 72 cms 207⁄8 x 283⁄8 ins
40.
Summer Stream & Hills, Pembrokeshire
gouache 46 x 55 cms 181⁄8 x 215⁄8 ins
41.
Pembroke Cliffs & Dark Horizon
gouache 43 x 53 cms 167⁄8 x 207⁄8 ins
42.
Garden, Late October, Taplow
gouache 41 x 46 cms 161⁄8 x 181⁄8 ins
Biography After National Service and a commission in The Lancashire Fusiliers, then Oxford University and Cheltenham College of Art, Brian worked in commerce for five years before returning to painting. He restored paintings for many years and painted his own only occasionally. It was not until 1983 when he was fifty that he eventually felt compelled to turn his attention entirely to his own work. SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2014 Messum’s, 8 Cork St., London
CHRONOLOGY 1933 Born Edgbaston, Birmingham. Third child of four. 1939 Moved to Worcestershire farm to escape air raids over Birmingham. 1947–52
Attends Shrewsbury School, moves to Cotswolds.
1952–54 National Service Commissioned into 1st Bn Lancashire Fusiliers 1954
Takes up place at Exeter College, Oxford to read P.P.E. Attends Cheltenham College of Arts.
2012
Messum’s, 8 Cork St., London
1956
2007
Messum’s, 8 Cork St., London
2002
Messum’s, 40 Duke St., London
1998
Messum’s, 8 Cork St., London
1957 Marries Sheila in January. Moves to Elibank Cottage, Taplow. Sophie born in November. Works at insurance with Lloyds of London.
1995
Messum’s, 8 Cork St., London
SELECTED GROUP SHOWS Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions RWS Open Exhibitions 1989 2 Person Exhibition, Messum’s, 34 St Georges Street, London 1982
Group Exhibition, Messum’s, Beaconsfield, Bucks
1960 2nd daughter Serena is born. Starts soft furnishing business with friend to become ‘Horton and Hood Furnishings Ltd.’ 1963 3rd daughter, Clemency is born. Leaves furnishing to take up painting, dealing and restoring paintings. 1965– 66
Attends drawing class at High Wycombe College of Art.
1967
Family moves to The Old Rectory, in Taplow.
Cover illustrations for J. M. Dent & Sons “Everyman Library” of works by Dylan Thomas, Published:
1970 –1982 Restoring pictures, visiting sales rooms and painting occasionally, having 1st exhibition with Sheila at David Messum’s Gallery in Beaconsfield in 1980 and in 1982 a family show.
1991
“Under Milk Wood”
1982–1989 Paints more, restores less, gets accepted by RA.
1991
“The Poems”
1991
“A Dylan Thomas Treasury”
1989 3rd joint exhibition with Sheila at David Messum’s Gallery in St Georges Street, London.
1991
“Collected Poems 1934–1953”
1991
“The Loud Hills of Wales”
ILLUSTRATIONS
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1988 “Who’s Who in Art” 1988 Twenty Third Edition:“Horton, Antony Brian. Landscape painter in oil and gouache. Born Birmingham 21st August 1933. Son of E. Victor Horton M.C., JP; Marries Sheila Horton: three daughters. Education Shrewsbury School and Exeter College, Oxford. Studied Art at Cheltenham College of Art (R.S. Dent) Signs work: A.B. Horton or Brian Horton WORKS IN COLLECTIONS Painting and drawings in private collections in Europe and USA Welsh National Library PUBLICATIONS Andrew Lambirth ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ a biography.
1991 1st solo exhibition at David Messum’s Galleries in Beaconsfield and London. 1998 2nd solo exhibition at David Messum’s, Cork Street, London. 2002 3rd solo exhibition at David Messum’s, Duke Street, St James’s, London. 2003–2007 Group shows Messum’s, Cork St., London and R.W.S. open. 2007 4th solo exhibition at Messum’s, Cork St. London. Group exhibition at Albany Gallery, Cardiff 2007–2011 Exhibits at West Wales Art Centre and R.W.S. 2012
Solo show at Messum’s, Cork Street.
Book launch of the book “Brian Horton, Blue Remembered Hills” by Andrew Lambirth. 2014
Solo show at Messum’s, Cork Street.
2017
Solo show at Messum’s, Cork Street.
Brian Horton Blue Remembered Hills Brian Horton Blue Remembered Hills
Brian Horton is a landscape painter who can trace his roots back through the history of English art. In Andrew Lambirth’s new and revealing book on the artist, he explores the great tradition of Romantic landscape painting in this country and the particular influences that have enabled Horton to progress from slightly awkward beginnings to develop an independent style and vision that mark him out as one of England’s most imaginative landscape painters. In this richly illustrated volume he is seen in context for the first time, to the great benefit and further understanding of his work. 160 pages, 108 colour illustrations.
Andrew Lambirth
£35
Andrew Lambirth, writer and art critic, has contributed to a wide range of publications including The Spectator, The Art Newspaper, Country Life, Modern Painters, RA Magazine, The Independent and The Sunday Times. He has written extensively on twentieth-century British art, and among his books are monographs on Roger Hilton, Craigie Aitchison, Maggi Hambling, Kitaj, John Armstrong, Margaret Mellis and David Inshaw.
opposite
43.
Twilight Estuary, Tide Returning
gouache 45 x 53 cms 17 3⁄4 x 207⁄8 ins back cover
44.
Coast Line, Isle of Skye
gouache 42 x 53 cms 161⁄2 x 20 7⁄8 ins
CDXXV
ISBN 978-1-910993-17-0 Publication No: CDXXV Published by David Messum Fine Art © David Messum Fine Art
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