Charles Duranty; poet & painter
Hyfler/Rosner
Poet and painter with an eye for East Anglican landscapes
Philip Purser
Wednesday January 18, 2006
The Guardian
Charles Duranty, who has died of pneumonia at the age of 87,
was a poet, a publisher's representative and a self-taught,
self-deprecating painter who nevertheless sold more than
1,500 of his unmistakable water-colours over a span of 30
years. They were always imaginary East Anglian landscapes,
with huge fields and somewhere a tiny animal, traction
engine or human figure to give the picture a focus and,
quite often, its title. One 1984 exhibit was called "I tell
you it's going to rain, it's as plain as the nose on your
face" - and yes, over the golden cornfield the sullen light
of an impending storm can just be sensed.
Duranty was born in Romford, Essex, into a family which had
prospered in the East India trade. His grandfather had
shooting rights over 10,000 acres and a private box at
Aintree, but had fallen on hard times. His father had joined
the army during the Boer war and progressed up through the
ranks to a commission and a Military Cross in the first
world war. In civilian life he became manager of Tower
Bridge wharf in London's old dockland.
The young Charles was sent to St Lawrence college, Ramsgate,
a newly created public school and he earned his place in the
hockey first XI. Illness, however, left him medically unfit
for military service when the second world war broke out,
and he was drafted to work on a farm at Rayne, near
Braintree. The farmer put him in charge of a herd of cattle,
and Duranty acquired his lasting passion for the "vast
cornfields and low horizons" of Essex and Suffolk.
After the war he was determined to become a poet and had
verses printed in small magazines, anthologies and the
Listener. This pursuit was crowned with the publication, in
1954, of a collection, Audition, which was reprinted.
Meanwhile, Duranty had set up as a freelance journalist,
filing everything from art-house film reviews to the results
at London greyhound tracks. He moved to more gentlemanly
employment as a publisher's sales rep. He worked for several
houses, the last and longest spell with a firm whose
idiosyncrasies matched his own.
This was Duckworth, housed in an old piano factory in Camden
and run by the remarkable husband-and-wife team of Colin
Haycraft and Alice Thomas Ellis. Their list ranged from the
novels of Beryl Bainbridge, who had been an employee before
she burst into print herself, to learned tomes on animal
husbandry and ecology. By now a celebrated character in the
book world, Duranty airily left the provinces to others. He
would concentrate on the bookshops he knew and liked in
London. Somehow he succeeded in persuading them to order the
most daunting of offerings - one on Sheep and Man weighed in
at 4lb - and both the Haycrafts and Bainbridge held him in
high esteem.
In 1953 Duranty had married Vivian Marguerite Hadaway, a
Canadian he first glimpsed waiting at a bus-stop. He
maintained that a career as an artist only occurred to him
when, in 1962, he and Vivian moved into their newly built
house in Merrow, near Guildford, and he had no money to buy
pictures for the walls. Though he had been thrown out of art
classes at school, he declared he would paint some himself.
He started as he would go on, working from memory and
imagination, putting on the paint with all sorts of
improvised brushes, rags and pallet knives, and steadfastly
buying cheap, students' colours. In due course he was
invited to participate in an exhibition of Seven Surrey
Artists in Guildford; to his surprise, he sold three
paintings, and turned professional overnight.
In London, he exhibited at Roland Browse & Delbanco and
Heal's Mansard Gallery. He was a regular in the annual
Artists of Today and Tomorrow shows mounted by the New
Grafton, where he had a one-man show in 1970. He also had
one-man's at the Leicester Galleries (1969), Heal's Mansard
Gallery (1970) and at the Thackeray, in Kensington,
regularly between 1971 and 1992. He liked to mutter that his
high sales were due to his prices being lower than those of
other artists, but it was mainly because he turned out a
higher proportion of small works, some only a few inches
square. His work is represented in private collections all
over the world, one or two public galleries in Britain and
in the Government Art Collection.
In 1992 he ceased painting as abruptly as he had begun,
devoting himself instead to his remaining passions -
cultivating his garden and continuing his pretence at being
a curmudgeonly old pessimist. In truth, he was a kind and
amusing fellow who kept in touch with his friends through
long letters in immaculate italic script. He enjoyed good
pubs and food, and though he claimed to hate travel, he and
Vivian never missed their annual visit to Aldeburgh.
His pictures hang in the Wentworth hotel there and Vivian,
who died in 2000, is commemorated by a seat in the grounds.
They had no children.