Blunt

Peter Foldes
Portrait of Professor Anthony Blunt
1947
oil on canvas
Courtauld Gallery, London

William Coldstream
On the Map
1937
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

"There was more to Blunt's affinity with Coldstream's work than politics. It was no accident that, as David Sylvester has written, the mainspring of Coldstream's painting was a 'holding back, a positive self-effacement', a refusal to impose himself on his work, which under normal circumstances would have been a shortcoming, but which Coldstream forced to his advantage. Those exact qualities were becoming, and would be, the hallmark of Blunt's own work, his writing, and ultimately his identity.  (Blunt never had his portrait painted, but a Coldstream Blunt would have been an intriguing portrait: the self-effacing by the self-effacing)."

 – this quotation and those that follow are from Miranda Carter's Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001), a fair and well-executed biography, despite Carter's odd unawareness that Blunt did have his portrait painted, by Peter Foldes – a work still held by London's Courtauld Institute (which Blunt served as director for more than a quarter century)

"What was pushing Blunt further to the Left was not politics but old family habits about belief. As for so many others, Marxism was for Blunt a substitute for religion. The only kind of belief that made sense to him was one that was radical and all-embracing. As the literary critic James Wood has written: The child of evangelicism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference: he is always evangelical. He rejects the religion he grew up with, but rejects it religiously. He is perpetually rejecting it, just as the evangelical believer is perpetually believing. He has buried belief but he has not buried the evangelical choice, which seems to him the only important dilemma. He respects the logical claustrophobia of Christian commitment, the little cell of belief. This is the only kind of belief that makes sense, the revolutionary kind. Nominal belief is insufficiently serious; nominal belief seems almost a blasphemy against earnest atheism." 

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"'The atmosphere was fervid. It was like a religious seminary,' recalled the art critic Brian Sewell, who also arrived in the early 1950s. 'We were taught and we believed.'  The commitment and passion that Blunt had once directed towards the quasi-religious theories of Clive Bell and then into Marxism were now invested in his belief that, as Michael Kitson put it, 'dedicating one's life to the pursuit and understanding of art was an eminently worthwhile thing to do', and the Courtauld should be the place to do it. 'There was a sense of adventure,' remarked the art historian and novelist Anita Brookner, another student of the early 1950s. 'It was a pioneering subject. Everyone was at the same stage of inexperience, and everything was a delight. It was a revelation. One never thought of cutting a lecture: one wanted to hear what was said. It was a golden age. We had the enthusiasm of neophytes. We all wanted to be like Blunt.'" 

Nicolas Poussin
Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well
ca. 1655
oil on canvas
(formerly owned by Anthony Blunt)
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

"A month or so later [in 1933] Blunt's love affair with Poussin was consummated with a purchase. At Duit's in Jermyn Street, behind Piccadily, he spotted a seventeenth-century painting of a biblical scene, Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well. It was attributed to Poussin. Since the artist was unfashionable and the painting quite damaged and of uncertain provenance, the price – £100 – was cheap. (Duit's had bought it at Christie's for £46 in 1929). Blunt had developed an eye for bargains. He had begun to build a collection of rare architectural books, bought for a few shillings in London and Paris, which at his death would be worth nearly £100,000. Unfortunately he did not have £100. He asked Victor Rothschild if he could lend him the money. Rothschild bought the painting for him instead, sending Burgess to pick it up. 'My father told me,' he later wrote, '– or my mother said my father believed – that if humanly possible, one should never lend people money as it almost invariably made them hate you. You should give them money if you could, and if it could be done without embarrassment.'"                  

Nicolas Poussin
Landscape with a Man pursued by a Snake
ca. 1643-44
oil on canvas
(formerly owned by Duncan Grant, then by Anthony Blunt)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal

"Blunt's spirits were also lifted that autumn [1963] by the rediscovery of a long-lost Poussin. A Courtauld student, Sarah Oppenheim had spotted it on a trip to Charleston farmhouse to meet Duncan Grant and study his paintings. Grant and Clive Bell – both now rather doddery – still lived at Charleston, and showed her a painting hanging over the mantelpiece. The picture, which Grant had bought in Paris for £40 forty years before, was a landscape with a man pursued by a snake. Roger Fry had told Grant it was probably by an artist close to Poussin. Oppenheim asked Bell if Blunt had ever seen it. Bell thought not. Would Blunt be interested in seeing it, he wondered. Oppenheim resolved to ask Blunt on her return to London. A few weeks later, she accompanied Blunt to Charleston – his first visit in thirty-five years. Blunt immediately recognized the painting as a Poussin. 'We all just stood there looking at the painting in silence. After a while, he turned to me, put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Thank you, Miss Oppenheim." That was his way of saying that the painting was "the real thing".' He took the picture to London to have it X-rayed, and wrote to Grant, 'I can only say that it is giving me indescribable pleasure, as I have it propped up facing my desk, and it has been universally acclaimed by everyone who has seen it as obviously by Poussin.'  Grant said he would need to sell the painting – Charleston was extremely damp and in need of renovation – but he wanted it to go 'to someone who loves it'. Blunt had it valued at Colnaghi's, Christie's, the National Gallery and Tomás Harris. It was Colnaghi's, the most reputable dealer in Bond Street, which came up with the highest figure, of £12,000. It was obvious that Blunt longed to have it, and in early January 1964 he asked to buy it, pleading that he might be allowed to pay for it in three annual instalments – and keeping studiedly reticent about the fact that Colnaghi's Roddy Thesiger had put in his letter of valuation that the painting might easily get £15,000. Grant agreed.  . . .  At the end of January, Blunt sent his first cheque for £4,000 to Duncan Grant – telling  him that he had never written one for so large an amount – and delightedly took possession of his Poussin."

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"Blunt retired from the Courtauld in 1974, aged sixty-seven.  . . .  Retirement meant leaving the Courtauld flat, Blunt's home for over twenty-five years (though more or less every visitor now commented on the appalling spartanness of the kitchen and the frightening primitiveness of the lavatory). Blunt and Gaskin moved into a flat in a dreary 1930s block in Bayswater called Portsea Hall, equidistant between the Courtauld and Blunt's childhood home in Paddington. To pay for it and to supplement his pension, which was around a seventh of his Courtauld salary, Blunt had to sell one of his Poussins. After much hesitation and deliberation, he chose to part with the painting he had bought from Duncan Grant nearly ten years before. Inflation and rising art prices had driven the value of the painting, bought for £12,000, to over £100,000.  Grant viewed this with 'philosophic forbearance', which led some to feel that he had been cheated."

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"As for Blunt's best-loved possession, Poussin's Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, that too was shadowed by its association with him. Blunt had wanted to leave the painting to the nation, and his executors hoped it would be accepted in lieu of death duties. The usual criterion for acceptance was whether a picture was sufficiently pre-eminent. The Sunday Telegraph reported that the Rebecca might be refused on the grounds that it had come from Blunt. 'This possibility is, however, discounted in heritage circles.' The government hemmed and hawed over the offer for over a year before the Arts Minister, the Earl of Gowrie, rejected it. (There was a certain irony to this, as in 1976, as a consultant for Thomas Gibson Fine Art, Gowrie had approached Blunt offering to buy the Rebecca on behalf of another party who, he said, was willing to pay around a quarter of a million pounds for a painting 'of the character and quality of yours'.) This left Blunt's executors with a problem: they needed a large and available sum to pay Blunt's upcoming death duties. If they could not sell the Poussin, something else would have to go, Blunt's flat most probably, leaving Gaskin homeless. For a moment they considered the unpalatable possibility of selling Blunt's unfinished memoir, to whoever would pay the most for it, and for several days various interested parties scrabbled to try and buy it."

"In the end, an old enemy of Blunt's, Michael Jaffe, director of the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, who had long wanted a Poussin for his museum, bought the painting for £192,000 – a good price, as it had at one point been valued at £350,000 – scraping together the money from a bequest left by Blunt's old mentor Andrew Gow and a grant from the Pilgrim Trust. Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well hangs in the Fitzwilliam today. Visitors to the museum have no way of knowing to whom the painting once belonged."