Patrick Procktor: The lost dandy

There was a time when the artist Patrick Procktor was as famous as his great friend David Hockney.

'You couldn't really mention one without the other. It was like Castor and Pollux. They were the dandy twins of the art world,' explains the art critic John McEwen in a new book, Patrick Procktor: Art and Life, by Ian Massey. The artists met when they were still at art school: Hockney at the more experimental Royal College of Art; Procktor at the Slade. It was February 1962, the sending-in day for Young Contemporaries, the annual exhibition showcasing work by selected students. 'We started talking, and we just became friends quickly,' says Hockney. We simply had a lot of interests in common – painting, literature, and being gay, then. Because most people were in the closet at that time.'

But despite this defining friendship, and despite his talents and successes – he was the star of the 1960s London art scene – Patrick Procktor's life was marked by tragedy and a gradual decline into anonymity and alcoholism, culminating in a fire that destroyed much of his life's work and left him destitute.

Flamboyant and controversial, in his prime the 6ft 6in Procktor was an unmissable figure on the bohemian party circuit. He was routinely clad in a fez and velvet slippers, with fingernails painted green. He was an outrageous wit with an affected drawl who was dearly loved by his friends, including the director Derek Jarman, Princess Margaret, the photographer Cecil Beaton and designers Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark. He painted such counter-culture luminaries as Mick
Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Terence Stamp and the playwright Joe Orton; he designed theatre sets; created album covers; painted a reredos for
the St John the Baptist chapel in Chichester
Cathedral; and travelled the world with his box of watercolours producing fine, if ultimately unfashionable, studies of Venice and China.

Procktor was born in Dublin in 1936, to Barbara and Eric, an accountant from London who had been posted to Ireland, and who died four years after Patrick's birth. An idiosyncratic, theatrical child, Procktor attended Highgate School, but left at 16 when the family money ran out. A job at a builder's merchant followed and then two years of National Service with the Royal Navy, where he trained as a Russian translator, which meant that by the time he arrived at the Slade School of Art in 1958, aged 22, he was older than most of the other students. His impact was immediate, as the artist Marc Vaux remembers: 'He was an extraordinary-looking chap – thin as a stick, and 20ft tall. He was very much an extrovert.'

Soon after his graduation, Procktor held his first solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery. He was only 27 and the show was a hit, with most of the work sold before it opened, making him an instant star. 'It was as if a sort of wonderful
butterfly had emerged from a cocoon. After that he became one of the best-known young painters in Britain,' explains his former school art master, the landscape painter Kyffin Williams.

It was with the proceeds from this exhibition that Procktor was able to acquire the lease of the first-floor flat at 26 Manchester Street, Marylebone, which was to be his home for the next 36 years. It was both a studio and a salon, and he invited friends such as Beaton, RB Kitaj, Frank Auerbach, Hockney and Birtwell to paint flowers on his bedroom wall and installed a fireplace sculpted on either side into the form of pineapples with nude men emerging from them. 'It was rather like going into a film set: as if you had stepped back into 1880,' remembers the painter André Gallard.

A towering dandy who exemplified a certain kind of Victorian English eccentricity very much in vogue in 1960s London, there was a time when Procktor could do no wrong. In the spring of 1964, the gallerist Bryan Robertson invited him to take part in an exhibition of young painters at the Whitechapel Gallery. The New Generation exhibition defined the progressive artistic mood of the day, and included work by Bridget Riley, Patrick Caulfield and Hockney. Lord Snowdon and his then wife Princess Margaret attended the private view and, to coincide with the launch, a selection of sculptures was displayed in the grounds of Kensington Palace and a glamorous party was held. Procktor and the Princess would become great friends, and she spent many evenings in the candlelit rooms in Manchester Street. 'He was very friendly with her, even when she was a worse boozer than him. There were certain qualities in those people, and perhaps in Princess Margaret, being a sort of failure, and a drunk and all the rest, that appealed to him,' recalls his friend James Kirkman.

Drinking would eventually contribute to Procktor's undoing, but before that there was
Gervase Griffiths. The former Gordonstoun head boy was a model and the lead singer with a psychedelic folk band of little note called Noah and the Quince. A swaggering, Jaggerish young man, he had Procktor smitten. For two years Procktor painted only Gervase, and when he was offered a one-man exhibition at the Nordness Gallery in New York in 1968, the whole show was devoted to this new muse. It was not a critical success, and when Procktor returned to London, Gervase travelled to Haiti with Patrik Steede, a friend of Derek Jarman with an interest in voodoo.

Meanwhile, the social whirl continued to spin. In May 1969 Procktor went with Hockney's dealer John Kasmin to Gilbert and George's 'sculpture' The Meal. Two thousand hand-made invitations had been sent out and the event took place in a hall with Princess Margaret's butler serving the food. Gilbert and George recall: 'After the dinner Patrick did outrageous impersonations of
Princess Margaret.'

'Patrick could be superbly outrageous,' remembers Hockney. 'He was confident of himself, of who he was. Ossie [Clark] had a somewhat flamboyant style, but without quite the wit or polish of Patrick.'

In 1973 Procktor surprised everyone by marrying and having a son with Kirsten Benson, a widow who lived beneath him in Manchester Street and who, with her husband, had run Odin's, the restaurant of choice for London's artistic set, which she later sold to the bibulous restaurateur Peter Langan (Procktor subsequently designed menus and painted a frieze of Venice for Langan's Brasserie). However, as the decade rolled on, Procktor's popularity and credibility began to wane. 'We always felt he was totally overlooked. Come the end of the 1970s, Bad Painting [exemplified by Julian Schnabel and Philip Guston] came in. And in a room of Bad Painting, Patrick's stood out,' explained Gilbert and George.

There was also a growing sense that all the artifice and affectedness had begun to eclipse the art itself. Procktor's preferred medium, watercolour, was too closely associated with maiden aunts and his themes of flowers and exotic landscapes, although often exquisitely rendered, did not chime with the times. Another negative factor was Procktor's aggression, exacerbated by his abuse of alcohol. His marriage was also deteriorating. He loved Kirsten and his son Nicholas, but he was undeniably homosexual, which undermined his relationship with his wife. Artist and Slade contemporary Richard Beer recalls a conversation with Kirsten at a dinner party, with Procktor and a young man opposite them: 'According to his wife, what knackered Patrick was his envy of David Hockney. That's really what killed him. He never got round that. They'd been running mates, imagine, and then one of you is almost the most famous painter around, and you're not.'