Brian Hagger; Painter of London street scenes
Hyfler/Rosner
The Independent
11 May 2006
David Buckman
Brian Ernest Hagger, artist: born Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
29 January 1935; married 1964 Anne Richardson (one
daughter); died Norwich 18 March 2006.
The artist Brian Hagger never made a national reputation,
but he created a body of work that can never be matched. His
paintings of the dowdier Chelsea and Fulham area of London
in the 1960s and 1970s and later of unfashionable Brighton
are a valuable record of everyday streets and shops long
swept away by modernisation. The honesty and attractiveness
of his images ensured him steady sales.
He was born in 1935 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, the only
child of a manager in the retail hardware trade. When
Brian's art teacher spotted his talent and urged him to go
to art school, Arthur Hagger suggested he become an
architect, a more secure living. But the architectural
practice approached instead wanted someone who had already
been trained, and Brian joined Ipswich Art School. There he
happily studied from 1952 to 1956, teachers including Colin
Moss and Philip ("Pif") Fortin.
After National Service in the Army, Hagger attended the
Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Carel Weight,
Ruskin Spear, Ceri Richards and Colin Hayes. Hayes thought
highly enough of Hagger's work to include examples of it in
his 1965 manual The Techniques of Oil Painting.
By that time Hagger had been married for about a year, to
Anne Richardson whom he had known from his Ipswich days and
met again when she was working at the Royal Academy of Arts.
After the Royal College Hagger set out to be a full-time
painter. The urban realism of Walter Sickert had long
attracted him, reinforced through his Royal College tuition
from Ruskin Spear.
The Haggers lived in a Redcliffe Square bedsitter. Anne
Hagger recalls:
We did our shopping in Fulham market. When I was working
Brian would go out with his rucksack and while shopping take
photographs or do drawings of the small local shops.
Occasionally an old shop-front was being replaced with
plastic signs, which he found irritating. If he was too long
drawing a shop, the shopkeeper would come out and say:
"You're not from the council, are you?"
During a Royal Academy Summer Exhibition a customer told
Anne: "I buy paintings down on the railings, at Green Park."
Hagger thought he would give this a try:
He was so ashamed that he used to hide out of the way, only
signing his oil on board with an H. When he began to be
successful, he bought canvases, put the prices up and signed
them with his name.
One American, Oscar Lerman, liked Hagger's work so much that
he invited him to exhibit at the new Bramante Gallery he was
opening, in Stag Place. This introduced Hagger to many
notable collectors. He had four solo exhibitions there
between 1968 and 1971.
When Lerman returned to the United States and Bramante
closed, Hagger offered his work to the Thackeray Gallery.
There he had four more one-man exhibitions, between 1972 and
1975, one a sell-out. The owner, Priscilla Anderson, was
particularly amused when after the exhibition clients, keen
to see exactly where their pictures had been painted, set
off in their cars to find the spot.
Hagger's last solo show in 1976 was at the Langton Gallery,
appropriately in the World's End area where he had regularly
painted. He had found so many subjects there that he had to
abandon the idea of depicting the East End, which would have
provided similarly rewarding material. "Between leaving
college and 1976 I produced around 350 paintings of London,
mainly Fulham and the unfashionable end of the King's Road,"
Hagger said.
He adopted the same approach while living in Brighton from
1974. The Haggers had decided it was time to buy a house and
chose the Sussex resort. Hagger regarded Brighton as "London
by the sea", and the fact that it was one of Sickert's
haunts was an added attraction.
Family circumstances prompted a return to East Anglia in
1979, where the Haggers settled in Norwich. Brian had shown
on occasion at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. He also
exhibited with the Furneaux Gallery in Wimbledon, Phoenix
Gallery in London and Lavenham, and annually with the
Norwich Twenty Group.
While in Brighton he had taught part-time at Salisbury
College of Art and in Norwich he did more teaching at Great
Yarmouth College of Art and Design and through it adult
education classes. Latterly, Hagger turned more to drawing.
He did paint Norwich and East Coast scenes, but told me a
few years ago: "I have not yet found a theme to replace the
London series."