Selected Works, National Trust's Foundation for Art

MARTIN YEOMAN
Selected Works
National Trust's Foundation for Art
Mompesson House, Salisbury

Foreword by John Cornforth.

'It is both appropriate and a particular pleasure to devote the third summer exhibition at Mompesson House to Martin Yeoman, because he was one of the young artists who inspired the National Trust's Foundation for Art.

The Foundation grew out of the collecting activities of a small group of people associated in different ways with the National Trust. They wished to encourage young painters through providing them with opportunities to work at Trust properties, through easing their way with permissions and arranging other facilities, and at the same time sometimes acquiring records and impressions of places and people and the work of the Trust.

By the time the Foundation was established, Martin Yeoman was known to almost all those involved, but, as so often has been the case, it was Sir Brinsley Ford who was the first to become interested in his work while he was a student at the Royal Academy Schools in the mid-l970s. Sir Brinsley has continued to encourage him through buying his work and providing him with key introductions and recommendations, a role that is crucial for most young painters in their post-student years when the going is so hard. It is during those years that the modest help the Foundation is able to give may be so valuable.

This exhibition is also modest in that it is largely drawn from the work by Martin Yeoman that is owned by the Foundation and those associated with it. It is intended to show the development and range of his work over the past 18 years, but it has proved surprisingly difficult to organise, because a number of pictures that Martin Yeoman would have liked to be considered have disappeared, while owners of others do not appear to realise how support for a painter should continue after a purchase has been made.

The point about support in the post-student years can be seen in Martin Yeoman's career. Born in l953, he did not have the chance to go on to art school after he left school, and it was only after a long trip to India in l973-74, when he survived by selling his drawings as he travelled, that he decided to explore the possibility of becoming a professional painter. So, in search of advice he took his portfolio of Indian drawings to the Royal Academy, where he was doubly fortunate, because he was seen by Walter Woodington, the Curator, and introduced by him to Peter Greenham. Both recognised his exceptional promise, and Peter Greenham suggested that, if he could manage to take a day a week off work (which at that time was a pub in Reading), he should attend the weekly life class in Oxford organised by his wife, Jane Dowling (whose work was the subject of the l992 exhibition). Over the months that Martin Yeoman attended that class he showed his drawings to Peter Greenham, who invited him to be a guest student at the Royal Academy Schools, and a little later introduced him to Sir Brinsley.

In the autumn of l975 he began a three year course at the Royal Academy Schools supported by a mature student grant; and that was extended when he was offered a fourth year in l978/79. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in l976. As a result of making a few sales he was able to travel abroad, first to Italy in l976, and then to Spain in 1979, thanks to Sir Brinsley's travelling scholarship for students at the Royal Academy and other schools.

In December l979, he married Adele Spencer whom he had known since her schooldays. Adele was a great support as well as being very beautiful, and not surprisingly she was the inspiration of some of his most moving drawings and paintings. She remains a loyal friend.

Life after the Schools was to prove much tougher, but for the first year he was helped by winning the Greenshield Scholarship, a Canadian award to encourage figurative painting, and that enabled him to paint full time and give up his temporary job of sweeping up in a garage. To help him Sir Brinsley commissioned a family group of nine figures inspired by Ingres's drawing of the Lucien Bonaparte family, but it was too ambitious a project that never got beyond the stage of preliminary drawings. Among the successful ones are those of Augustine Ford and Mrs Francis Ford (Nos. 40 & 41).

Martin Yeoman's association with the National Trust started in l983 when Christopher Wall, then the Regional Representative for the Thames and Chiltern region, suggested to him that he might enjoy painting at Basildon Park, (No.18) which was near where he was living, and arranged the necessary permission for him. A little later he suggested that Martin Yeoman might respond to Ashdown, (No.19) a magical place high on the Berkshire Downs; and that led to a series of small views. In l987 the Foundation arranged for him to go to The Vyne in Hampshire (no.26) and to Wallington (No.21) in Northumberland. Whereas he finds that exteriors allow his imagination to roam and they are always influenced by the weather, interiors of uninhabited houses lack a sense of life and do not 'speak' to him. Straight commissions he also finds restrictive valuing more highly the facilities to paint and the possibility of a sale at the end, as happened last year when the Foundation, with a view for this exhibition, arranged for him to paint in Salisbury: the Foundation acquired two pictures (Nos.34 & 35).

In l985 he contributed a group of drawings to an exhibition of Six Young Artists at Agnew's. In the autumn of that year he went to Venice for what proved to be the first of seven trips lasting for several weeks, responding to the time when the light often gives the city a mysterious poignant quality. Over the years he has done many highly desirable pictures that capture the sense of Venice looking in on herself, but since they sell rapidly, they tend to disappear without even a photograph as a record.

Early in l986 Sir Brinsley introduced Martin Yeoman to the Prince of Wales, who had consulted him about young artists, and since then Martin Yeoman has accompanied the Prince on three trips, first to the Middle East in l986, then painting with the Prince at the end of his Far East Tour in l989, and then finally travelling with the Prince and Princess to India and Nepal in l992. Naturally they were remarkable experiences, but tight royal schedules do not always create a relaxed situation in which a painter can settle down to work. One day when Martin Yeoman slipped away to work, he spotted a man sitting in a wheelbarrow, whom he started to draw: that led to his arrest, because, unfortunately, the background turned out to be a police station (No.47). After the first Middle East trip a more relaxed trip to the Yemen was arranged for him, and it was then that he did much of the work in the exhibition devoted to his two tours at Agnew's in l987.

Martin Yeoman has always worked hard at portraits, first drawings - and these are in a wide range of mediums, including burnt cork and silver point - as well as in oil. Among the drawings on view is one of Adele done in l978 in burnt cork (No39) and of James Brind in l984, an evocation of a Renaissance portrait drawing in oak gall ink over burnt chalk (No.46). In l988 he was commissioned to do a drawing of Sir Alan Hodgkin, the Cambridge Physiologist, for the Order of Merit series in the Royal Collection (No.48), and in l992 he was asked by the Royal Household to draw the Queen's grandchildren as a present to Her Majesty to mark the 40th anniversary of her reign, a group exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in l993. His series of portraits in oil start with one of his father done in l980, during the period of his Greenshield award (not on view) and more recently he has painted Dr Hugh Montefiore, then Bishop of Birmingham (no.6) and E V Norrell, coxswain of the Royal Yacht, a picture commissioned as a retirement present for him by the crew of Brittania (No.8). It is interesting to compare these formal portraits with that of Hilary Baehr (No.7), which was a commission, and that of Louise (No.11), a Royal Academy student, whom Martin Yeoman asked to sit for him.

At the time he was inspired by Courbet to combine figures together, and the result was Two Girls (No. 10), whom he originally met in Katmandu and who later agreed to sit for him in London: a picture that seemed to represent a new stage in his work.

In the last two years he has started to etch and to sculpt. His first head was of Sir Brinsley Ford and rightly that is shown in the exhibition (No.54). At times there is a brooding, almost melancholy quality in his portraits and also in his landscapes, particularly those in Wales, but he has become as accomplished a painter as he is a draughtsman, and his work has a depth to it that constantly draws one back to it and enriches one's life.'

John Cornforth, February l994