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Robert Farquhar
Man with a Bowl - Mid 20th Century Modern British Portrait Oil Painting
c.1960

$1,304.95

£950

€1,112.73

CA$1,792.94

A$1,950.02

CHF 1,033.44

MX$23,365.30

NOK 13,134.47

SEK 12,032.96

DKK 8,317.24

About the Item

A superb mid 20th century modern British oil on canvas portrait of a man with a bowl, by Robert Farquhar. The artist is very interesting - an artistic genius who spent 32 years in prison, he won several art prizes and gained several high profile patrons, including Sir Hugh Casson, president of the Royal Academy. The work is highly original and possibly depicts a chef. Signed lower right and in very good condition. Artist: Robert Farhuqar (British, b. 1937) Title: Man with a Bowl Medium: Oil on canvas Size: 26.5 x 15 inches (68 x 38 cm) During his 32 years in jail for jewellery and antiques thefts, Bob Farquhar's artistic talent was recognised and nurtured. He won awards and the backing of a host of patrons, including a former president of the Royal Academy. On leaving prison for the final time 25 years ago, he set up a London gallery but 10 years ago he vanished and stopped painting. Now an exhibition of 20 newly commissioned paintings by Farquhar is to open in a gallery on the south coast thanks to the dogged belief of a woman who delivered a takeaway meal to him in a one-room "hovel" and noticed photocopies of his work hanging above his bed. Farquhar served many sentences of four, six and seven years. As a young burglar he could, said a fellow ex-prisoner admiringly, "run up the side of a building". By his own account he was totally amoral: in his brief bursts of freedom, his aim was to live life in the fast lane – "Have now and pay tomorrow, I didn't care. I didn't consider it." If that had been all there was to Farquhar, his story would have faded as the ex-cons with whom he shared the years inside died off. But Farquhar could paint. He also had an exceptional IQ. "With a different background," the head of education at one prison told him, "you could have been an academic." Farquhar, a half Gypsy, was married for five years to Sylvie, a ballerina and solicitor's daughter, with whom he lived in a furniture van. He picked hops, worked on farms, sold watercolours, but Sylvie couldn't take "doing her toilet in the woods". She stood to inherit £4m, but only if she divorced him. Farquhar was reconvicted, and Sylvie broke her promise to wait for him and remarry. Later he had two children – both still teenagers whom he sees – by another woman. By the time he was released for the final time in 1985, he had won three Koestler awards, presented to prisoners for exceptional art created in jail. He had also gathered an array of patrons, including the late Sir Hugh Casson, president of the Royal Academy and chairman of the Koestler Trust, who – according to his daughter, Carola Zogolovitch – admired Farquhar's "anarchic" spirit and his pictures that conveyed "the claustrophobia of prison life". Supported by backers like Casson, Farquhar ran a gallery-cum-hostel for ex-prisoners near Waterloo in London. He himself became a Koestler judge touring prisons. Even then he was scarcely conventional: visitors recall a bucket in his office used as a chamber pot – "it was four floors up to the toilet", he explains. When his landlord wanted a share in the gallery, Farquhar moved on, roaming England in a London taxi, his home for a year. Then 10 years ago, Farquhar disappeared. That is, until last August when Josie O'Rourke, a bookie's manager and former private eye, was asked by a friend who runs a cafe to deliver a meal to a "miserable old sod – he doesn't speak". At first, she thought the ground-floor bedsit was derelict, but she discovered a "little old man with a beard". He answered all her questions with staccato "yeps". Hanging from a string above the bed were photocopies of paintings that caught her attention. Having established that Farquhar was the artist, she found that she could not get him out of her head. She returned and gradually built up a rapport, persuading Farquhar to let her hawk his dog-eared portfolios round local art galleries. All his originals had long since been sold or given away. From the Yellow Pages she drew up a list of galleries, among them the Hastings Arts Forum in East Sussex. The Forum is a membership gallery to which 500 local artists belong and a catalyst for arts activity. It was the perfect match: the volunteer manning the gallery that day, Sid Benyon, had himself been inside. The Forum chairman, Tony Lyons, ex-army officer and Kensington antiques dealer, gave the thumbs-up, and the gallery's "angels" agreed to bear the cost of hiring the space. The gallery committee liked Farquhar's paintings of prisoners and prostitutes in King's Cross who had sheltered him when he was on the run. Farquhar set to work to create 20 large paintings for an exhibition that opens this month. He had not touched a brush in nine years, but has slowly recaptured both his enthusiasm and his skill. O'Rourke scoured Hastings, finding sponsors for materials and frames. Farquhar, now 73, is a poignant figure, bent over by a twisted nerve in his spine (he has an electric buggy and needs a stick to walk). He has a straggly beard and his hair is tied in a ponytail. His messy room is redeemed by the canvases he is working on and a small photograph of Arthur Koestler. Farquhar was in a children's home at nine; Wormwood Scrubs prison at 14, sewing mailbags while waiting to be transferred to a detention centre. He played truant during the Blitz (his home was the Thames estuary town of Erith); learned to read and write aged 20 during his first long sentence. Later he teamed up with another prison artist, the late Jim Gilbert, to rob churches and even Wells Cathedral. The pair came together through an arts charity set up to support former prisoners. Gilbert, at 6ft 4in, was a forceful, imposing man, with a string of sexual conquests. He landed them both with seven-year sentences when the police found a map on which Gilbert had neatly ringed all the churches they had robbed. "Jim was a bully," says Farquhar. "I wouldn't have gone on a desert island with him." Despite his own failure over 50 years to take advantage of his brains and talent – he went to art school at one stage and had a Cork Street gallery show – Farquhar has utter faith in the redemptive power of art. "I've seen terrible villains whose lives changed when they picked up a brush: they are not villains any more," he says. "I believe in what the Koestler Trust is about – helping people." Farquhar's paintings are penetrating, almost surreal, reminders of the thin divide between inside jail and out. There is a fraudulent city gent, half in prison garb and the other half in a suit with umbrella beside him, and beyond the bars a moonlit St Paul's and the City; a wrongly convicted prisoner next to Edvard Munch's Scream; men waiting in predawn gloom to be "ghosted" to other jails. Farquhar knew the lonely hours counting bricks in his cell wall, and it shows. Could he have done differently? He dodges the question but says he would advise any young person at risk of wasting his life to "learn, read and study and listen to classical music – it touches the soul and makes us question who we are and where we are going. There's more to life than gold chains and Bentleys." O'Rourke says Farquhar is a changed man since he picked up his brushes again – his mental and spiritual resurrection is "like Lazarus". Gone are the monosyllabic answers, replaced by an articulate analysis of his own and other ruined lives. He is thankful to be back in the wider world, rescued by the chance delivery of a café meal. "I'll meet again old friends who once believed in me," he said of his coming exhibition. "A lot of people have my paintings. Maybe I'll get a West End show like I had years ago."

Creator:
Robert Farquhar
Creation Year:
c.1960
Dimensions:
Height: 26.78 in (68 cm)Width: 14.97 in (38 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Period:
1960-1969
Framing:
Framing Options Available
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Sevenoaks, GB
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU1955215442382

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