Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
I rang up my old best friend, Luke-John, for a chat a few days ago and to ask him about his mum, Rose Wylie. She is 91 and this week becomes the first ever female painter to be given a solo show at the Royal Academy.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, her house in the village of Newnham, near Faversham, became a safe haven for me, and I used to stay there a lot. Rose and her husband Roy, who was also an artist and died in 2014, were just so dead cool. Neither was well-known, and they had little money, but they were seriously intellectual, seriously stylish and seriously good-looking. He had been to Goldsmiths and then been a student of David Bomberg’s at the Borough Polytechnic, and was doing a PhD on him at the Royal College of Art.
Roy and Rose were not dangerous in any obvious way, as creative people often are
She had been to Goldsmiths too, where they had met and within two weeks married. Roy and Rose were not dangerous in any obvious way, as creative people often are, but they did encourage me to see things differently, which can be fatal. Yet they did not make me feel hopeless, just hopeful. They were such decent, unpushy people and therefore the antithesis of how you are supposed to be to get on in our fucked-up, fuck-you society. Naturally, their neighbours thought them a little odd.
Soon after I met Luke-John, when I was 18, we threw a joint party at my divorced mother’s ground-floor flat in a Queen Anne mansion, in Barham, near Canterbury. It had no electricity or hot water because she had no money to pay the utility bills, and so the power for the disco came via an extension lead from the east wing, where Sir Reginald Goodall, the Wagner conductor, who was her suitor, lived.
What light there was came from candles and the fires in the various rooms. Lord ‘I am still with seed’ Hothfield, another suitor who lived with similar relics of aristocracy at nearby Broome Park, Field Marshal Kitchener’s former home, shuffled about from fire to fire doing the logs with a lighted cigarette permanently attached to his lips. My mother somehow cooked paella on a large camping gas cooker for 150 guests. Everyone agreed our party had been a real hoot, marred only by someone called Gawain, a 1st XV prop from my school, who kept wanting to beat up Luke-John because he was wearing eyeliner applied by his mum.
Roy and Rose put up with so much from us over the years: loud music (Rolling Stones, mostly) beneath their bedroom all night, regular drunkenness, constant use of Roy’s Renault 5 to hurtle about the narrow lanes of east Kent chasing life but risking death, or me saying stuff like ‘Oh come on Roy, be reasonable’ when he started charging us not just for petrol, but wear and tear as well. Only rarely did he snap. Rose never.
Luke-John and I ended up buying a house together in the Balls Pond Road, next to Maria the Greek and a lesbian pub we called The Dyke of Wellington, and we remained as thick as thieves, like a couple of gays, or Withnail and I, until women came between us.
Rose had given up painting to bring up her son and two daughters. She took it up again in the 1980s and only started to become famous in her seventies when in 2010 the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington chose one of her paintings out of the blue for its permanent collection, and then Germaine Greer wrote a paean to her.
Gradually, Roy came to feel that she was a better artist than him, which was not easy to deal with. He nicknamed himself ‘Max’ after the Von Stroheim figure in Sunset Boulevard who abandoned his own career to become the servant of Gloria Swanson.
Rose, the youngest of seven, whose father was director of ordnance for the whole of India and was said to have the best chauffeur in Poonah, calls herself a radical non-consumer. She has been on holiday just twice in her life and has lived in the same house for 50 years. She never learned to drive or use a record player. Twenty-five years ago, she gave up reading when she asked Roy if he had noticed a woman’s hair, but he had not because, as ever, he was reading a book.
‘She lets things be,’ says Luke-John. ‘She lets the trees close in on the house and even grow into it and does not feel an urge to get rid of spiders’ webs. I think she feels nothing will ever be achieved if humans try to advance or promote an agenda.’
Yet she is regarded as so interesting that luxury fashion brand Loewe chose her as a face for its 2025 ad campaign. Her paintings – which can sell for about £500,000 – have been exhibited in many of the world’s most prestigious galleries. She doesn’t know what is happening when she creates art but believes it has a ‘direct’ connection with God.
Says Luke-John: ‘She reminds me of those monks in the Himalayas cut off from the rest of the world, engaged in praying constantly, without whom, it is said, the world would come to an end.’
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