ALBERT HOUTHUESEN
1903 - 1979
Arranged by Richard Nathanson
Impressionist & 20th Century Art
Exclusive Representative for The Albert Houthuesen Trust
P.O. Box 515, London SW15 2WB. U.K.
Tel: 00 44 (0)208 788 2718
Fax: 00 44 (0)208 785 6345
Those works credited as 'AHT' belong to the Albert Houthuesen Trust.
The words beneath each painting are quoted from Walk To The Moon (click 'Introduction').
Unless otherwise stated, the painting medium is oil.
Inches precede centimetres.
Albert by his father Jean-Charles Houthuesen 1909 9 x 6 5/8 (22.8 x 16.8) AHT
My feeling for my father by me grew and grew. It became stronger and stronger.
And I think it would have done so naturally since he encouraged me. I remember going again and again into the attic in which he worked and being absolutely fascinated being there whilst he painted away. That was the world where I wanted to be. I remember wanting to be grown up and able to sit on the same sized chair and use the same sized table and palette. It was agony for me to have to climb onto the table to see the palette and what was on it. And my knees ached because I had to kneel on a chair to draw at the table. One drew all the time.
Certainly when I was eight, although like many another youngster, I had started to paint and draw before then, I knew I wanted to become a painter.
Apple 1917 4 x 4 9/16 (10.2 x 11.5) AHT
The first paintings I made were on cigar-box lids; and the theme, I suppose, was one of loneliness. They were of monks brooding over skulls and crucifixes in dimly-lit cells – romantic childish notions of men who thought. There were several of them and like many other things, they simply disappeared.
I was baptised in a Catholic church and I think that this early training and the early Christian ideas helped inspire these pictures. I attended the Priory Church in Hampstead; and for a brief moment I joined the choir and imagined that I was an angel. I did not sing like an angel and I was often very late. Mama quite literally believed that if I didn’t go to the church to absolve the sins of all of us, we should be damned into hell.
I was given the oil paints by the art master at Fleet Road School. The cigar-boxes were my father’s. And I broke up these mementos of Papa because I had nothing else to paint on. The first survival is this one apple on a black background. I remember thinking as I painted it that if the light was like that and there was another apple behind and another behind that, then the particular intensity of that light would gradually diminish and diminish. And to me, at that time, this was a very exciting discovery. To me now, this little painting is the product of a time that had to be secret and to oneself.
Nobody in the house made any comment. And if I took the apple up to the room where I painted it, it only meant that at that moment a boarder was away; and this tiny room was vacated and I worked on it by candlelight at night. Had I been in happier circumstances, I don’t think this painting would have been as introverted and secret a thing as it is.
Onion and Potatoes 1917 6 1/8 x 6 5/16 (15 ½ x 16) AHT
Just as the next one of a couple of potatoes and an onion is also rather a dark secret painting. And in the third picture of a lighted candlestick, I see something secret too. It’s as well they were, because other things that were public in the house were so mauled by idiotic criticism that I myself destroyed many of them. Afterwards, I painted some larger still-lives and other scenes and a very romantic self-portrait which were all destroyed.
I was absolutely two people. Once I started painting in that little room I led my own true life. All the other was an exasperation. Mama’s constant refrain was ‘Why doesn’t he work for his living’ – her attitude all her life. And she lived to be ninety-two.
Lighted Candle 1917 15 ½ x 12 (39.4 x 30.5) AHT
I had, by chance, noticed a board outside the Fleet Rd School with an advertisement for evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art. I went along and was told to bring some drawings; and to my intense joy, I was enrolled. I went every night from seven-thirty to nine-thirty. And that was my first experience of meeting other youngsters, many very amusing and bright youngsters whom I felt were years in advance of me. Some were as old as twenty and had already had vast experience.
I was already at St Martin’s when I painted this candle. It was very exciting for me to watch what happened to that piece of curtain which I had pinned against the wall when I lit the candle. For me it was a discovery. It’s an empty box and the last match has spluttered out. I remember thinking ‘It is like life.’
I imagine that this and many another picture of mine is influenced, to this day possibly, by what I saw of my father’s work. Papa had this imaginative side. He was fascinated by lanterns lit at night. This room – the isolation of it with the candle and the colour – is perhaps something of the same. One doesn’t think about these things at the time. But they’re there all the time, until the end of one’s life.
I showed the candle painting at St Martin’s Sketch Club. The artist who gave the critique on that occasion being a painter called Harold Speed. This was painted very thickly on the canvas; and the class roared with laughter when he said that it was quite obvious that this painter had intended to make the candle-grease real by making it thick. It confounded me at the time because one does certain things quite seriously and then suddenly to hear a roar of laughter is upsetting. That is a vivid memory, that roar of laughter.
Inscribed by Albert on the back of the Candle picture:
The two holes in the canvas were caused by Mother putting her scissors through it – the malicious jabs of a madwoman. I happened to come in at that moment and she stopped immediately. I said nothing but felt profoundly unhappy.
These three still-lives simply happen to be survivals. And the wonder is that they have survived.
Supper at Emmaus 1927 30 x 41½ (76.4 x 105.5)
For once I had to be at College. And for one week, I didn’t care a damn whether or not Mother fainted. I was locked up in a little cubicle, as we all were, and left alone. That was why this was painted. And it is the only thing, other than those drawings, that comes out of my college years. I’m only sorry I couldn’t have purchased a decent canvas for myself. It was poor quality board and cheap student paints. But one tried to make something of it.
There were two subjects for this diploma Supper at Emmaus and Charity. But I’d already had my boots given to me. This mysterious walk back from the grave is an amazing subject. I couldn’t have imagined a more marvellous subject. At that time everyone spoke always of colour; and through sheer perversity, I used browns instead of greens, although I know this was painted in summer time.
I started painting straight away on this panel. I didn’t draw anything. I didn’t make studies. I didn’t square anything up. You see the thing and you paint it. It isn’t in any sense a literal translation. I didn’t think about ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘The Walk to Emmaus’. This is Keats’s Grove which by then had all become overgrown. These are the walls and trees that I saw there – the Dutch house, the sea that I knew. And these chairs that I remembered seeing in Holland were all things that I knew. These three are going to sit at this table. And whilst I was painting, I thought ‘This chair knows it is going to receive Christ and so it glows with a halo.’ I don’t really like talking about it, but I think that this is filled with the idea of a man who has come back from the grave. If you think of the immense robustness of some of the Italian paintings, this man has been crushed and he feels his way, just as these two discuss whether it can be the Master. And this table suggests an alter.
When one talks about philosophy in relation for instance to a picture like this, I think that every picture you make, every drawing you make, is a self-portrait. If they have anything in them at all, anything real, they must reflect something that comes from within.
All sorts of things were said about this picture. Arthur Simmonds, a Cotswold sculptor and puppeteer, a kind man, looked at it and said ‘You see the light and shadow you have on this head with the light falling from this angle, well that means this moon should be round the other way.’ A fellow student at once said to me ‘How have you worked out the perspective of those table legs?’ If it were right, then that back leg wouldn’t be visible.’ But to me, it was more important to make the perspective wrong for the sake of this piece of design. Afterwards, one saw this in picture after picture, really great ones.
I went to College absolutely thankful to have the chance to be able to work. But what I needed there was imaginative instruction. By that I mean you get more out of a student by giving him every possible encouragement you can. It’s a very, very subtle business. One was criticised whereas life itself was a desperate enough struggle. It wasn’t only me. I’m talking about this in quite a general way. It’s a very simple and natural situation. Artists to be any good must be inspired by some sort of fervour – it’s what makes a Rembrandt or a Corot or a Gauguin, a Seurat or a Monet – whereas at College, there was flatness in the teaching.
Had it been possible, I would undoubtedly have worked on my own. All one wants is a small private income, a roof over one’s head and even two meals a day. Because what you learn on your own and through yourself is really learnt. A great deal of teaching can only be something which is not in true accord with oneself.
Barn, Berthengam 1934 28 x 36 (78.1 x 91.5)
Trelogan became our honeymoon place. It wasn’t just a thing of a fortnight or even of one year. It was constant. One’s friends would jokingly say ‘Going back to the same place.’ And since we had no money, we had nowhere else to go. But it was lovely there. And through going back year after year, we came to know this amazing place with its colliers and farm workers; its marvellous skies and air full of bees and butterflies. I loved the countryside and I was in love with Vincent. And because one loved Vincent’s work, it was an encouragement to go on.
I would spend hours on the deserted shore looking and looking and looking. One was absolutely fascinated by the constant changing. There was something so fundamental and grand and petrifying. Had I not been to North Wales, I would still have painted some seascapes, but from going back every year, I gained a sense of the marvellous space there. The width and distance of the horizons. We had no regular routine but we rose early and Kate gave me three meals a day. That’s a most important thing.
Miner 1938 30 x 25 (76.2 x 63.5) AHT
In the evening, I would watch the colliers walking back from the Point of Ayre Colliery.
It was the first time I’d seen these fellows. They came into that village absolutely black so that until eventually I came to know them, and saw them washed, I couldn’t recognise them as being the same men. I would just begin to ask one or two colliers if they would sit. They simply laughed. They thought it was the funniest thing and disappeared into the Afoncoch.
These colliers were wonderful to look at. They all went to Chapel and sang like mad.
And almost without exception, all the children played the piano and were marvellous musicians. I used to listen to their singing; and I loved being with David Lloyd. He would say one evening ‘We’re going to have a choir practice in such and such a place. I’ll take you along.’ He had a little car, or we would go by bus, and hear these colliers singing wonderfully – the very same men from the village whom I’d known on nodding terms.
When I returned to London with the collier paintings and drawings, I was at once accused of being a communist. A collier’s is not at all a happy or enviable job. It’s a terrible job. But the reason why I drew and painted these men was simply because, to me, they looked remarkable.
Yew Tree and Sheep’s Skull begun 1938 28 x 36 (71.1 x 91.4) Inscribed in pencil on the stretcher: AHT
Wednesday 4th June With sadness in my heart Worksop July 3rd I sign on as a farm labourer
I knew I would be quite unfit for the army. I remember walking into a barn on a farm in Letwell, called South Farm. It was a large barn and very blue and dark inside because the great doors were closed. There was a small window and another door on the south-side. On the ground, which was also blue-grey in colour, was a sheep’s skull and a fragment of a huge yew-tree root which they had dug up. I just painted these things as they were. It was a very broken-up time. I carried these things around with me and whenever I had the chance to do anything I did. I just clung to my drawing and painting.
Voyage 1940-54 36 x 48 (91.5 x 122) AHT
I was rejected from the army on health grounds. I was no good – Grade 1V, the lowest I believe. I was examined in Mansfield and there we all were, around fifty men, with just our trousers and shoes on. I was shocked to see how pathetic this man looked, and how old that one looked. And what a gnarled, emaciated worker, or what a tough, powerful young man or a broken man this one looked. Then to realize that this extraordinary, motley crew of men were all born in the same year, really put the wind up me.
I began Voyage in St John’s Wood and carried on in Letwell, Loversall, Tickhill, Chatham Street, Oxted; and then finally here where the shell and convolvulus were painted. Working on it again and again, even sometimes during a migraine, helped to keep me sane. The magnolias against the blue were the first things I painted. It wasn’t changed in a large way, but in such small, subtle things, all the time, which made a great difference. I like the way the title is in French as it is in English. This magnolia is beginning to open. This one is more fully open. This one is really open. And this one is going. The figure ‘Fate’ carries out these shapes. A picture like this has its own law and these shapes make themselves.
Wreck of The Early Hope 1960 36 x 48 (91.4 x 122)
This is as I imagined a junk to be which is wrecked on these rocks. It took three weeks to paint and I call it Wreck of the Early Hope. It is in relation to my struggle and finally getting here. As a child, these boats attracted me. I must have seen them on small coloured Japanese prints that Father had. It only struck me the other day that this picture may have come about through these great red lacquer screens and chests which I first saw at Fry’s and loved.
I think these junks are so beautiful. And I have always thought of them as being something very ancient, very primitive and very frail – ready to be smashed on any rock and every ill that life holds. Yet I have the feeling that they are as eternal as an autumn leaf which curls up and becomes like a thin brown sea-shell and remains
so for years and years. I marvel at the journeys these incredibly frail-looking boats make. When men have been such fools as possibly to knock this world to pieces so that there may not even be the metal boats we have, then – if people survive – these wooden boats will come again. To me, they are at once fragile and eternal.
As a study this junk would be very wrong. It is the fragility of this shell-like shape held hard upon these rocks which, to me, is the wreck of my early hope. And I like to think that this light which travels all the way round and gives it this shape, is symbolic of the fact that though one may be a wreck, one has attempted to do something. That in itself is a sacred thing and one’s duty.
A Toute a L’Heure 1960-67 oil and collage 48 x 60 (122 x 91.4)
After an operation I destroyed a number of drawings and paintings. Much later, returning to the workroom, I found everything in it covered thick with dust. As I picked the fragments up, each canvas shape made a clear silhouette upon the worktable. This was made from one canvas. Lying alone in the antechamber, hearing snatches of a conversation in French ‘a toute a l’heure’ were the last words overheard before losing consciousness.
Written by Albert on the stretcher, dated Aug 3rd 1967
The nurse had said to me with such alarm, ‘Pourquoi à toute à l’heure, cherie?’ And this picture came about very much through that particular experience and the odd over-hearing of this flirtatious conversation between the girl and the anaesthetist. She shouldn’t have left me and she came in and said ‘Oh, how are you, Mr Houthuesen?’ I said ‘Pourquoi à toute à l’heure, cherie?’ It was only my intention to pull her leg, but she was terribly alarmed so that the conversation itself must have been pretty serious. Perhaps it’s just as well that I didn’t know. Certainly it wasn’t a very amusing moment for me to be alone. It was a terribly hot summer and the anaesthetist, a wonderful looking young man came in, with a tight-fitting white cap, white boots and just a vest and apron – bare arms. We were on the top floor of the Gordon Hospital, and I saw all this against the light of the window with the tower of Westminster Cathedral behind him. The next morning when the same nurse came into the room, I said – not really realising what was going on – ‘Aha, à l’heure, à toute à l’heure ma cherie.’ But for modern surgery, I wouldn’t be here now, and able to talk my nonsense, sitting in this warm room with the cat occupying the armchair. One is eternally grateful to these dedicated men and women. There are saints among them.
I returned home after my operation, in a state of despair, and literally thought I was going to die. I deliberately destroyed a number of canvasses. The fragments were left on the table and in the wastepaper-basket. Afterwards, I was unable to work and didn’t go into the studio for a couple of months. Everything was covered in dust and there had also been one of these beastly fogs which leaves everything thick with black smuts of smoke.
I began to clear the fragments off the table; the shapes were all silhouetted and that gave me the idea to make something of these fragments. I collected pieces from a Melon canvas painted just after the war, and began to put them together. I envisaged something like this and marked on the panel where they were to be placed. It began with these outside strips; and Cath stuck most of these things down because I used to collapse.
A Toute à L’Heure is, I am sorry to say, the largest picture I have yet painted. I enjoy a largish canvas. I love it. But for me a 25 by 30 inch canvas can be very big. To paint something that size in a small room like this is quite a strain. You want space and a good light over the whole thing. The moment you are in a large and uncluttered room and you are faced by a large area of canvas or board then, at once, you feel you can tackle it. It’s purely a practical question. I always hope that a picture can be knocked on the head as soon as possible. Strike the iron whilst it’s very hot indeed – if you can. Sometimes it happens that a picture can grip you and become like an octopus – although I never remember thinking about it ‘I must do this because this isn’t strong enough, or because it’s too strong.’ I can’t tell you how one does it, such as it is. Whether a picture is large or small; and whether it takes a day or a year, it has, to me, nothing to do with the hoped-for expression. In one way, the painter should feel that he could go on with every canvas. Sometimes it’s just as well he does. I could go on with this, simplifying and elaborating certain things.
Up to the time we came to this house, I’d never really sold anything. I was getting on and still I hadn’t made a mark of any sort. After the operation, I was very weak. It’s rather dreadful to weep, through sheer weakness, some part of every day for eighteen months. But I have always had such a desire to draw and paint; and were it not for this, I think I would have gone long ago. From one point of view I sincerely hope I don’t paint another A Toute à l’Heure. With that canvas, in a small way, I had my say. And if I were going to say something about it again, it would be said in a different way.
Christ on The Sea of Galilee c.1963 8 x 36 (71.1 x 91.4) AHT
I used to like going to church. Most of it I didn’t understand but I always had this feeling that there was a great and profound mystery which had tremendous meaning. When you are a child and you read in the Bible of miracles, you wonder very much. Later all that changes and it becomes an amazingly imaginative idea of the world, based on truth, and written by great poets. Man, through this poetry, is trying to express about his life what is so terribly difficult to understand. He stands in mystery and through it he is trying all the time to understand.
At certain times, one may begin to make drawings and paintings of biblical things. The Bible is full of these tremendously imaginative ideas. They are profound symbols. The richness of the Bible is terrific. It is the greatest stuff that has ever been written.
The Meeting of Theo and Vincent Van Gogh in Paradise 1974 acrylic, 48 x 36 (122 x 91.4) AHT
I knew Rembrandt long before I knew Vincent. In many ways Vincent is very different. Yet, in other ways, it amazes me how much alike he is – not because his things are like Rembrandt’s in this or that way, but because they are the man’s own character and bear the intensity of that character. You have only to look at his marvellous drawings – for instance that back view of an old couple. I could weep with the feeling in those things. The way the man’s heels on his poor, pathetic boots have been drawn. It’s absolutely like Rembrandt.
It’s extraordinary to watch the development of his work. How it becomes more and more his own. How I like The Sunflowers. Now they are gay pictures. Vincent would have loved doing them, and have felt that he really was doing his stuff. But I think even Vincent might have been staggered by the queues at his exhibitions now. It’s very odd what happens in life. His pictures are so wonderful and their particular wonder cannot really be described. You have to sense it for yourself.
If one can imagine Rembrandt and Vincent meeting, I don’t think they would have spent much time together. But they would have embraced. They are both the most compassionate of men. And Vincent through his feeling for people and for the whole human situation is, to me, a modern Rembrandt. It is the same blood.
Certainly Vincent was a very emotional man but not so in the superficial sense. When Vincent paints he’s a classicist; and the designs are classical. And when he is well, he was absolutely all there. Because he suffered from epilepsy, he had to drive himself to work; and to get something done. Like every great man he had a lot to say, and his situation must have been terrible beyond belief. Thank God for Rembrandt, he didn’t have that. And Rembrandt sparked from the very beginning as being someone different. Also one can see by the way he paints his mother and father and sister, that he’s really quite a happy young man. And the family are reasonably well off. Whereas Vincent was deeply troubled about being a terrible burden to Theo. That in itself was an agonising situation. All this was a tremendous strain upon Vincent. And sometimes one sees that in a way it damages certain pictures. But most of them shine through. From the beginning, one sees the intensity and sincerity of the man. And then gradually, the greater and greater freedom. He dies when he is thirty-seven, having done what he did in just over ten years.
Poet 1967 28 x 24 (71.1 x 61)
Sometimes my own things frighten me. This does. To me it is as if he has seen every disaster. Last night on the telly, I heard the Jewish cantor Koussevitzky. You listen
to that man, and you see the film the Germans – these particular ‘last solution’ people – made of the siege of Warsaw. And it’s heart-breaking. Once you’ve seen something like that, you can’t forget it. It’s so unbelievably horrible. It’s criminal the way that human-beings can behave. How can they? And at the same time you know that in the world these terrible things are happening. I can’t stand a man like Napoleon. The Napoleons or the
Caesars are, as far as I’m concerned, all in the same bag. What does all this business of power and ambition and success mean? It’s all politics. It’s terrifying to see the jealously that goes on around one. But apparently sane and reasonable people have these particular qualities – so help the others. I think perhaps the normal human-being growing up is all these things. Gradually you learn more and you develop. And you are as reasonable as you can be.
It is difficult to talk about, and that is crudely put. Man has these two sides. One thinks of the incredible genius of mankind, and yet one sees the ghastly way in which it can be used. Just think what a world this could be if every human-being could behave at least reasonably. I have met doctors and nurses who are very dedicated people and do a great deal of good. Working in this way has made them happier people; so it is really a very simple and direct thing.
The Fall of Icarus and The Triumph 1971-72 acrylic, 48 x 36 (122 x 91.5) AHT
For me the sun is a symbol of life and hope. The power and beauty of it inspires me absolutely. Yet to be in it withers me and I have to be in the shade. Like the sea it terrifies me. Icarus is really the painter. You can see the implication. This constant business of somehow having to stand on one’s feet – the moment one has enough strength – and go on. And the power of the sun in relation to anything we can manage to do. An idea grows, and with the ‘Icarus’, I thought about the eventual destruction of everything; and this constant desire to build and create which every reasonable human being has. An artist is doomed. Nothing comes to what he wishes it to be. It’s only a shadow of what he hopes for.
The legend is a most marvellous one. People have had these notions for thousands of years. These ideas have survived because of their profundity.
Walk To The Moon, Childhood Admonishment 1975
acrylic, 92 x 40 (234 x 101.5) AHT
Richard Nathanson is working on the artist’s catalogue raisonné: and his biography which will include an in-depth examination of the work. He would be pleased to hear from those with pictures and letters by the artist - also photographs and memories of him. Email: richard@richardnathanson.co.uk (00 44 (0) 208 788 2718).
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