by Mary Horlock
For Joe it was too late. He had wanted to secure his place in this history. He had used ‘the claim’ to defer decisions, deflect commissions, to avoid going back to his old life as a jobbing artist. That initial hesitancy was a temporary solution, but then it became a resolution. For most of his life Joe had wanted an audience, but after two wars, two marriages and countless setbacks, he stopped. Perhaps, after all, concealment was better.
An artist has to make his mistakes in public – Joe felt he’d made enough. The disappointment over steel wool was the last. Perhaps he had expected too much, but his optimism was inbuilt – he couldn’t have got this far without it. It would persist in its own way, but he’d no longer seek an audience other than that which he found in his own home. He carried on painting, every single day, and he stopped worrying where it would take him. Each painting had a fresh potential and he could keep that alive for as long as he liked.
In his head, he could still achieve great things. In his head, the best was always still ahead.
Notes
CAB = Cabinet Papers
CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre
HO= Home Office
IWM = Imperial War Museum
PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records
TNA = The National Archives
WO = War Office
Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.
To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.
1 Sayer, Camouflage Game, p. 44
2 ‘Inventions used in War’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 28 November 1936, p. 7
3 F. Beddington in a letter, 12 September 1947, Barclay Archive
4 Charlotte Lewis in a letter to the author, 28 April 2008
5 C. S. Schofield in a letter, 8 October 1947, Barclay Archive
is for Zeal with which you apply These few simple principles – do have a try
Despite early predictions to the contrary, Maureen and John Barclay enjoyed a long and happy marriage. Neither of them had come from stable or straightforward families, but they created one of their own. John had a dry Scot’s wit, a gravelly laugh and a formidable repertoire of put-downs. With four daughters he was quickly outnumbered, and he was surprised by how much he loved it – a calm centre in an often turbulent sea of women. He and Maureen returned from Africa in 1973 and settled in Verwood in Dorset, in a house that was essentially an extension to the cottage where Dick and Nancy were living. That John organised the building of this extension personally is testament to his love for his wife. Two years later Dick died and Maureen became Nancy’s carer. John, meanwhile, lived at the other end of the house and kept himself busy brewing beer and building endless wooden chests to be dispersed amongst his grandchildren.
John Barclay was also a man of books. He read constantly. When he became less physically active he would spend hours researching his family history, and on the request of his youngest daughter, Victoria, penned his own life story. John enjoyed writing – long before he began his biography he was a fastidious keeper of diaries. Every night before bed he would sit at his small writing desk, take up his pen and record the day’s events. He never missed a single entry.
Growing up, I was naturally curious about what my grandfather wrote, but I knew well enough not to pry. I also kept a diary, the contents of which I guarded fiercely. What I found strange, however, was that where I went to great lengths to hide my personal jottings and even kept them under lock and key, my grandfather’s diary remained open on his desk, in full view, all day long. As far as he was concerned, there was no need to hide things away. John Barclay had no secrets.
But when he died in 2002 the careful balance in our family was disrupted. Maureen had always been so fit and able. It was a shock to discover her husband was not. The one thing John had hidden was his failing health. I had by then escaped Christie’s and was working as a curator at the Tate, doing the job I’d always said I’d do. I was organising a large retrospective exhibition of the painter Lucian Freud, which meant long hours in the gallery. I’d have to go in very early in the morning, the time Lucian preferred to meet, to discuss how the show was taking shape, what pictures should go where, and what colour the walls should be. As my grandfather was rushed to hospital for what would be the last time, I was standing in a gallery with Lucian discussing the importance of finding a particular shade of white. It couldn’t be too bright but neither should it be dull. It required a touch of dusk yellow, a hint of earth red, a dash of dove grey. I was amazed at the subtle differences and how much it came to matter.
At the time I was living with a painter who had, for several years, been based in America. Our relationship had taken shape around lengthy emails, letters and late-night phone calls, and for a long time we had seen each other only sporadically. It was exhausting and when I look back I cannot help but wonder if I wasn’t trying just a little too hard to fall in love with an idea and not a person. When you see someone infrequently and they live far away, it’s easy to let your imagination make up the distance. I wanted to love an artist, and perhaps the only way I could do this was from a distance and on paper. But now my artist was living with me and reality had come crashing in. He hated the fact that I was always working, and spending all this time with an older artist of great note, and an older artist noted for seducing much younger women. He needn’t have worried, but still our relationship was becoming strained. In the months before the exhibition opened he persistently told me how much he disliked Lucian’s work, and would offer a running critique on what precisely was ‘wrong’ with it. But he’d also spend hours in his small studio just across the Thames, brooding over his own paintings, which had yet to find an exhibition. I began to feel a little torn in two.
I loved my job and I loved working with artists; I also knew I was good at it. I admired Lucian – his work ethic, his perfectionism – and it didn’t matter that he could be difficult, since I was used to difficult. I had worked with plenty of artists before and many had become trusted friends despite their exacting standards. But Lucian was different. For him, closeness was carefully guarded. There were flashes, of course. He liked to talk and he was very good company, but he liked most of all to have control. I did not know his telephone number, and even if I had, I would not dare call him.
But one day Lucian telephoned me. It was an afternoon, not long after the exhibition had opened, and he asked me to stop in at his house on my way home from work. There was something about the American print run of the catalogue to be discussed. Evening visits were common since Lucian worked in shifts, switching between different portraits in the morning, afternoon and then later at night. I have never known an artist to work so hard and within such a timetable.
The very next day I was planning to travel down to Bournemouth to see my grandfather. He was by now very seriously ill and I knew that he might soon die. So as I left work that evening my mind was already far away. I was weighed down with worry over what tomorrow would bring. It must have been obvious, because within minutes Lucian asked me what was wrong. I explained about my grandfather and how the whole family was gathering to be with him. I felt rather embarrassed, but it mattered far more than any catalogue, or any exhibition, in that moment.
Lucian listened quietly.
‘So you are a close family?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But it wasn’t always that way.’
Then, almost seamlessly, I moved from talking of my grandfather, the sensible, caring accountant, to Joe, the insolvent artist and his fractured relations. Lucian was intrigued to hear about my great-grandfather, and we talked then for a long time about artists and families, and the complexities of the two. It was strange to be discussing such personal things when for months we had been meeting
in draughty galleries and talking mostly of lighting and lenders, but it felt important.
I had rarely mentioned Joe to other artists until then – there seemed little point, since nobody had ever heard of him – and I wasn’t particularly interested in reviving Joe’s reputation. But Lucian talked about the disappointments and difficulties of making art, the obsessive pursuit of making things real.
‘It is all a quest for truths,’ he said. ‘You hold out for what you don’t know.’
That’s when it struck me. I had spent years in the company of artists, and I had prided myself in the work that I did for them, yet all the while the one artist that really mattered would always elude me. He wasn’t great, he wasn’t famous, and he was already gone.
The next morning I travelled down to Bournemouth to say goodbye to my grandfather. He was conscious but heavily medicated, recounting fragments of family history with some urgency. He would die the following night.
‘I’m going to miss you all so much,’ he said, in a sudden flash of clarity. We reached the hospital just minutes too late. I remember seeing him lying peacefully with the covers up to his chin.
The nurse explained: ‘I’m so sorry, he’s just gone.’
Maureen reached out to stroke his pallid face. I knew her heart was broken, but she didn’t cry then. She simply ran her hand along the side of his cheek, the gentlest touch that lingered.
Back at home later, we stayed awake, keeping her company into the small hours, drinking John’s whisky and remembering his finest moments. Maureen was devastated but she stayed very calm because she understood something. Yes, John Barclay was gone and we missed him terribly, but we knew very precisely what and who we missed.
A few days later Lucian called again, and I sat on the pavement outside Tate Britain and told him what had happened. I explained about the midnight rush to the hospital and our all-night reminiscing. He said it was good that we were all together and I agreed, saying something about how, even though we no longer had my grandfather, we would still have each other.
Lucian was quiet for a moment, then he said: ‘I’m aware that I have rather kept family at a distance.’
I was struck by this admission, since I had met many of his children, and they all seemed well within his reach, and of course he had painted them.
‘Is it because of your work?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he paused. ‘But I have always felt it was better to leave everyone wanting more.’
Those words rang around my head.
When my grandmother talks about her father her eyes will fill with tears. She misses him because she has always missed him, and her grief is like a human presence – shifting and visceral. He is there but he is also not there; in his paintings, in her memories. The truth is, Joe has left us all wanting more.
It wasn’t long after John’s funeral that I remembered the diaries he’d written so religiously. There must have been so many, and I imagined that Maureen would have kept them safe. Choosing my moment carefully, I asked my mother where they were and what was to be done with them.
‘Mummy shredded them,’ came her reply.
I stared at her, open-mouthed.
‘She didn’t think we’d gain anything from reading them, and she was worried we might find something we didn’t like.’
I couldn’t quite believe that Maureen had felt the need to tidy her husband’s memory since his death. I was amazed there might be anything in those pages that would make us think less of the man we had loved. I was also confused. Why shred everything of my grandfather’s but hold onto so much from Joe? I am thinking of the big black file on his steel wool claim, the memos and notes on research that now spill all over my own little desk. What about the portfolios crammed full of ‘working drawings’, cartoons and figure studies that have been passed to me for ‘safe-keeping’?
Maureen had lost Joe years before. She blames herself for moving to Africa and not staying in touch, and so she holds on to every scrap of paper he ever wrote or drew on. She is pained by her father’s absence, but this absence has been everything. Now we look at his pictures, we hear her stories, and we fill in the gaps for ourselves. He is good and bad, sloppy and precise, selfish and genuine, loyal and a liar. He is given the most marvellous retrospective that is still in constant flux.
‘I wrote him a letter and posted it under the sitting-room carpet when I was nine,’ recalls Victoria. ‘I wanted to tell him I liked his paintings.’ Their house in Africa contained many of Joe’s oils and etchings, but there were no pictures of the man himself. We perfected him in his absence. To my mother, who was the only grand-daughter to meet him, he was precisely what an artist should be – fascinating, idiosyncratic, obstinate, charismatic. Mary, too, ‘the artist’s wife’, had a magical aura. ‘I felt intimidated by her – I decided she was bohemian . . . posh but sort of slumming it for the sake of art. I never felt that I matched up to her standards, I thought that was why I was never introduced to any of her family.’
Maureen had visited Joe and Mary a few times over the years. There had been occasions when she’d been back on leave from Africa, but she’d always travelled alone to Marlow. Why she had kept Joe a secret from her children is something she still struggles to explain, but after years of being kept in the dark herself, she was perhaps more disposed to the idea of it. She also wasn’t sure where she stood with Joe and Mary, and she wasn’t sure how they’d respond to four lively granddaughters. Afraid of upsetting the balance of things, she once again kept quiet, repeating what was now a clear pattern. Thus it was only Patricia, when she was almost an adult herself, who would be taken to meet her grandfather.
It was very strange for Joe. He had spent years seeking some kind of official acknowledgement and now it was being asked of him. The idea of another artist in the family, his young grand-daughter, didn’t sit too well. This was when he muttered those famous lines.
‘Art? What has art ever done for us as a family?’
Maureen shakes her head, as if still smarting from the exact intonation. She took it to mean so many things and didn’t try to reply. My mother, happily oblivious to all that had gone on, was quick to brush it aside. Joe and the elegantly dishevelled Mary were too fascinating to resist. After that she would go to Marlow as often as she could, though she never mentioned this to her younger sister, who remained in Africa. Of course she still wanted to be an artist, and those weekends only made her want it more.
‘But according to Joe, there were too many art schools churning out too many artists. He was worried they had no real prospects and it was all too hard, competing in the marketplace.’
The fact that Joe was against anyone else in the family studying art shows his disappointment. Underneath all that cheerfulness, there were shadows.
‘I never saw that,’ my mother assures me.
But just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Joe put on a good show. The trouble was, he never had one. He would paint every day, but with no exhibition deadline there was never a reason to finish anything. Patricia became accustomed to a merry-go-round of pictures on easels. A painting would be put aside for months, only to be taken up again and focused on exclusively. Joe worked on some canvases for years, going back over them endlessly, blending colours and adding details, scraping off paint and starting again.
Abbott Thayer, the ‘father of camouflage’, was notorious for constantly making adjustments to his paintings. A work might be almost near completion and then suddenly packed away for months or even years, and finishing a picture became horrendously difficult. Even when he had sold a painting it was not unusual for him to write and ask to have it returned so that he could make improvements, and he was known to go to the train station at night, uncrate a painting destined for a client and work on it by lantern light. With his personal standards set impossibly high he was always doomed to fall short. He was also frequently misunderstood. In later life he took issue with restorers who
attempted to alter the appearance of certain canvases, explaining that any ‘imperfectly executed part’ was ‘tuned to, harmonized with, every other part of the canvas’.1 It’s as if he were still thinking about camouflage.
In August 1939 Joe wrote to Mary about his painting North Sea, ‘a supreme masterpiece’ according to Freddie Beddington. It was shut away for the duration of the war and then installed in his studio in Marlow and renamed The Wave. Charlotte Lewis, James and Margaret Meade’s daughter, remembered him working on it. ‘Joe was obsessed with this painting. At one stage whenever I went there it had either been resurrected or was in a state of semipermanent alteration . . . Sometimes Joe would ask me to come to the studio and stand me in front of the painting, sweep his closed hand over the sea and then open it up to reveal paper fish he had cut out!’2 There was one very significant later painting. Joe decided to paint the Henley Regatta. Charlotte’s brother Tom was to be rowing for his Oxford college so the event had special significance. Joe threw himself into it, determined to capture each detail and even borrowing Tom’s cap and blazer to match the colours. It took him far longer than he’d expected and the finished painting, shockingly bright and crammed full of life, is unlike any of his other works. It is more like one of his old battle paintings.
Not long after this, Joe suffered his first heart attack.
My great-grandfather had been through two wars; his body was finally failing. But I will not think of Joe as old or slow, struggling to get down the stairs and squeezing out each breath. I want to keep him with Mary, smiling in the sunshine in his garden in Marlow. Now I visit my grandmother at the nursing home and wheel her outside so she too can feel the warmth of the same sun. We chit-chat about the usual things, then she recounts a ‘set piece’ or two about Joe. Occasionally tiny details emerge that I had otherwise missed, but the basics remain unaltered.
