THE DIARIST’S ART Philip Hook is struck by the variety of fascinating journals by artists over the centuries, which reveal a private side of the individuals who were writing for themselves rather than the public I have always been interested by painters who can write. Some artists of course remain resolutely mute, unable or unwilling to express themselves verbally. That doesn’t make them less good painters. One doesn’t demand of writers that they should paint in order to give the fullest account of themselves; if one did, only a relatively small number would qualify to be taken seriously: August Strindberg, Victor Hugo, Edward Lear and John Ruskin; perhaps also Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Morris. But because I enjoy diaries I am particularly drawn to painters who keep them. In research
for my recent book Breakfast at Sotheby’s (2013) I began scouring the shelves of The London Library for examples. I found a surprising number of artists who kept records of their day-to-day lives, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, from Albrecht Dürer to Keith Haring. What makes artists diverting diarists is that the solitude demanded by painting can breed a certain eccentricity. Artists’ diaries are valuable first-hand despatches from the bohemian front line, intimate records of the anarchic, obsessive, destructive and sometimes downright comic ways in which creative people
Eugène Delacroix, Femmes à la Fontaine, 1854. © Sotheby’s. 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
live. As early as 1555 Jacopo Pontormo is interspersing an account of his painting of the frescoes in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence with neurotic notes about his own diet and digestion. Three hundred years later Gustave Courbet confides that whenever he finishes a painting for exhibition it brings on his haemorrhoids. The essential quality of a diary is its immediacy, what Virginia Woolf calls ‘the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along … the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of
