Glynn Boyd Harte

Artist and illustrator who made his life the vehicle of genius

Glynn Boyd Harte, painter, illustrator and musician: born Rochdale, Lancashire 1948; married 1972 Caroline Bullock (two sons); died London 16 December 2003.

Glynn Boyd Harte's song "Far Horizons" was selected by the painter Paul Hogarth for his Desert Island Discs, and played at his memorial service. It lyrically expresses Boyd Harte's sense of the excitement of distant things which was, in its way, a theme of his life and work.

The distance could be in time or space, sometimes both, particularly the Biedermeyer, Belle Epoque and Jazz Age. In rediscovering the poetry of these temps perdus, Glynn Boyd Harte became one of the most popular artists of the post-modern period in England. His lithographs of tablescapes, meticulously arranged with tram tickets, nostalgic packaging and cut flowers are defining images of their time. If their origin can be traced to a few pieces by David Hockney, they also represented a whole continent of memory and imagination that Boyd Harte discovered for himself and shared with his many friends in an extraordinary and rich life.

Glynn Boyd Harte was born in Rochdale in 1948. His father was a commercial artist and art teacher, and his grandfather a lithographic printer. The front garden path of their home was paved with old litho stones. Glynn grew up making toy theatres and playing the piano in local productions of Gilbert and Sullivan.

He attended Rochdale Grammar School and Rochdale School of Art. When he arrived in London at St Martin's School of Art as a student of illustration, the "far horizons" began to materialise, and he proceeded to the Royal College of Art (1970-73), where his tutors included Brian Robb, Edward Bawden, Paul Hogarth and Peter Blake.

Illustration was enjoying a revival, with a rich vein of irony and a love of technical perfection which guided Boyd Harte's work. At his Degree Show, Jonathan Gili spotted a drawing of a Staffordshire cottage which led to the publication by Warren Editions of a charmingly black-humoured book entitled Murderers' Cottages (1976). With an exhibition at the Thumb Gallery, introduced by Tom Stoppard, Boyd Harte was launched.

The Lennon-ish long hair and glasses gave way to a more 1930s look, usually involving waistcoats and checks, although the co- respondent shoes remained a constant of his personal style for ever after. In 1972 he married Caroline Bullock, herself an artist and historian, and they restored a corner house in Cloudesley Square, Islington.

As an artist, Boyd Harte was successfully represented by the Francis Kyle Gallery for a number of years, and later by Curwen Gallery where his one-man show "Apples and Artichokes" opened last week. He abandoned the more Surrealist aspects of his early work in favour of still-life, portraits and buildings, sharing in the rediscovery of architectural history in the 1970s.

In the early 1980s, he changed from coloured pencils to watercolour, and later tempera, working in a style that always spoke of his background in illustration. He could draw and shade with great skill, but the patterned flatness remained the abiding characteristic, with meticulously copied lettering. As an illustrator and artist, he was always interested in the narrative implications of his subjects, whether they were the paired shop-front lithographs titled Whips and Tools, or the references to admired precursors such as Bawden or Eric Ravilious.

His work as a book illustrator included a de luxe edition of John Betjeman's Metro-land (1977) and Temples of Power with Gavin Stamp (1979). These books revived hand-drawn lithography as a medium for book illustration, printed at the Curwen Studio by Stanley Jones. Boyd Harte's approach to building up layers of colour was perfectly suited to the medium and his contribution to lithography, although apparently retrospective in intent, is an important part of its historical development. The paving stones came home to roost.

In more recent years, Boyd Harte illustrated the complete novels of E. M. Forster and Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale for the Folio Society. He will surely be seen as the official artist to the Foodie movement of the 1980s, with books such as Edible Gifts (1982) and the complete styling of the Dolphin Brasserie at Dolphin Square, commissioned by Nicholas Crawley and James Stourton in the late 1980s. In the last month, he was excited by the prospect of illustrating Folio editions of Elizabeth David.

Boyd Harte was also an entertaining writer, accompanying his own lithographed illustrations in A Weekend in Dieppe (1981), Venice (1988) and Mr Harte's Holiday (1990), based on a few of the many painting excursions he undertook, the last being a tribute to Jacques Tati. Having sold his magnificent Georgian house at 29 Percy Street (where he was "executed" at a Mexican party in the sand-strewn basement, dressed as the Emperor Maximilian), Glynn and Carrie bought a house at Veules-les-Roses in Normandy and enjoyed a regular contact with French life.

With the proceeds of his first book-jacket commission, Boyd Harte bought a grand piano for Cloudesley Square. Sharing a studio with the illustrator Ian Beck in Garrick Street in the 1970s, he found the perfect collaborator in a cabaret duo, under the name "Les Frères Perverts", specialising in French chanson, performing at restaurants, parties and clubs.

Boyd Harte also made his own musical settings for Metro-land, performed in the presence of Betjeman at the Art Workers Guild, which he joined in 1978, with megaphone and train effects. He was Master of the Art Workers Guild in 1996 and was responsible for its present scheme of decoration. In 1991, the Art Workers Guild Revels were revived by Anthony Ballantine, and Boyd Harte directed an evening under the title "The Triumph of Decency". This was followed by three full-dress pantomimes, Jack and a Dodo (1993), Aquajack, or Forty Thousand Leagues under Bogginton-on-Sea (1996) and Jack and a Beansprout (2002).

Oscillating between farcical under-rehearsal and total professionalism, including musical pastiches of Elvis, café-chantant and Rossini, with hundreds of cut-out fish or puppet vegetables in national costume, these were among Boyd Harte's Gesamtkunstwerken. One of his projects, for a musical on the life of Edward Lear, was hoped to reach the West End stage, but in the event provided another guild entertainment.

The listing of individual achievements fails to convey the totality of Glynn Boyd Harte's life, which, like Oscar Wilde's, was the vehicle of genius. It extended to his taste in decoration and collecting, his circles of friends and enemies (irreversibly and often unreasonably transferred from the first category into the second) and, not least, the warmth of the family life that surrounded him.

With a final watercolour exhibition that closed a circle with earlier still-life work, while also promising a fresh direction, his life, which had hung by a thread on several recent occasions, ended far too soon.

Alan Powers

As one of those (many?) who managed to fall out with Glynn Boyd Harte, writes Gavin Stamp, I could only watch the tragedy of his later years from afar: when hubris combined with an admirable ambition to restore a Georgian mansion in Percy Street led to near bankruptcy and partial exile in France.

My memories are of what was surely Glynn's happiest phase, when living in that so cleverly decorated and furnished Regency corner house in Cloudesley Square, where Glynn and Carrie held court, giving what now seems an endless succession of dinners and parties characterised, I fear, by much screaming and silliness but also by wit and music - often with Glynn himself performing on the grand piano while Carrie, ever loyal and sensible, quietly made everything work.

Glynn's style and tastes were calculated to infuriate the proto-Blairite Islington of that time, but there was more to him than affectation modelled on such predictable favourites as Ronald Firbank and Denton Welch. He had developed a knowledgable passion for Neoclassicism, before it was debased by The World of Interiors. He was certainly a dandy and was indeed posturing, camp, arch, brittle, waspish and opinionated, but he was also kind, generous and funny, in addition to being so talented and original in many different ways.

Glynn was also an entertainingly embarrassing travelling companion, fearless in both Leningrad (as it then was) and New York, especially when pursuing the best and most eccentric, Neoclassical buildings. It was when he was drawing such things that one was most aware of a fundamental seriousness and modesty behind all the posing.

To such heroes as Hawksmoor, Cameron, Stasov, Jefferson, Soane - and Lutyens - were later added the likes of C. Stanley Peach and E. Vincent Harris. That was after we collaborated on a venture which - typically - began as a joke one evening: a book about the electricity generating stations of London. The result was Temples of Power, illustrated with Glynn's lithographs - culminating in the chimney- campanile of what is now Tate Modern - and published by another Cloudesley Square habitué: Simon Rendall. (Another idea alas remained unrealised - "Architects' Deaths": Basevi falling off Ely Cathedral; Gaudi being run over by a tram - although perfect for Glynn's irreverent pencil.)

It all ended - for me - round about the time of a particularly disastrous party in Bedford Park at the home of another extrovert Master of the Art Workers Guild, the late Roderick Gradidge, when - I forget why - Glynn was dressed resourcefully as a golliwog and his blacked-up face was dramatically enhanced by the application of a plate of pudding pushed into it by my wife: never mind the reason, I have to record that the assault was well deserved.

I do now wish it could have been otherwise, so I was very touched to receive only last month a card from magnificent, long-suffering Carrie, in response to an enquiry about Glynn's precarious health; he had recovered, she said, and was working on "big joyful paintings, of melons, mushrooms, oysters, bread, etc, in celebration of life". And life, in Glynn's company, was never dull.