By William Morrison-Bell

A Brief Encounter with Gerald Wilde

After leaving university in 1978 I had no settled plan and was undecided about my future. For a while I returned to live at home but that soon proved a bad idea. Casting around for alternatives I answered an ad in Time Out and was soon heading off to Gloucestershire to work in the gardens of Sherborne House, a dilapidated Elizabethan mansion that was occupied by an organisation called Beshara.

I had no idea what to expect. Through friends I had an introduction to John and Kerima Hill who ran the gardens, but that was all. I knew nothing about the Beshara people (bliss was it in that pre-internet dawn to be alive and uninformed!) except that they followed a Sufi path, living a quasi-monastic life organised around physical work, study, meditation, and zikr (a form of devotional prayer based on chanting and rhythmic movement).

I spent my time digging, weeding, and carting muck. Off duty I hung out with other members of the community and joined in with whatever was going on. Most evenings were spent around the table in the enormous kitchen, and visitors would drop by. I remember being transfixed by the father of musician Arthur Brown (‘I am The God of Hellfire and I want you to burn!’) talking about using his psychic powers to locate lost bodies and sunken ships.

One such an evening a raving, wall-eyed man staggered into the kitchen dressed in a black suit that flapped around him like rags on a scarecrow. Nobody seemed bothered, and this alarming visitor was welcomed in as an honoured guest. I learned that he was Gerald Wilde, an artist who lived and worked in the old stable next to the vegetable garden. By day he was largely invisible, busy in his studio and occasionally poking his head out of the door like a timorous and pallid gnome. By night, sometimes having taken drink, he would stumble up to the big house, rant inarticulately, and sooner or later find his erratic way back to the stable.

Gerald had arrived at Sherborne in 1971 under the wing of John (J.G.) Bennett, who came to set up a spiritual academy based on the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. After Bennett died in 1974 Gerald continued to live there until his own death in 1986. His life at Sherborne was impoverished though settled, but it had not always been so.

Born in 1905, he worked briefly in a solicitor’s office before studying at Chelsea School of Art. His teachers included Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, both strong advocates for his work. He led a rackety existence in the 1940s around the pubs of Soho with a hard-drinking crowd of artists and writers including Francis Bacon (who he believed had copied his colours in the early days), Tambimuttu (the editor of Poetry London), and Julian McLaren-Ross (model for the dissolute novelist X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time).

He was also friendly with the Irish novelist Joyce Cary who, in a trilogy of novels including The Horse’s Mouth (later a film starring Alec Guinness), created the character of Gulley Jimson, a feckless artist who scrounges, lies and exploits his friends in order to get by. It was said that Cary had based Gulley Jimson on Gerald. This wasn’t so,  though there was something of him in the character – what Cary described as ‘the fall into freedom’ at any cost.

‘A mediocre caretaker of his own talent’ is an observation that could have applied to Gerald. A combination of instability and unworldliness made it hard for him to get by. He sold paintings for a few drinks or gave them away in order, he claimed, to feel liberated. A lot of his work was destroyed during the Blitz. There was a spell in a mental hospital followed by a period in the 1960s when he hardly painted at all. Unlike some of his better known contemporaries he had no talent for self-promotion.

Describing Gerald’s work isn’t easy. ‘I am not very good at collecting together thoughts,’ he said, ‘just dreams’. His earlier paintings are representational and sombre – a melancholy solitude permeates an interior called ‘The Brown Bedroom’; a lurid gouache of three  prostitutes from the mid-1930s evokes the exaggerations of George Grosz, or possibly Jack B. Yeats. By the mid-1940s his style is more abstract and expressive, ‘like close-ups of a fire seen through a grate’ according to John Berger. The colours are bold and garish (he preferred to paint under electric light), the subject matter obscure – ‘an art’, according to David Sylvester, ‘which has the exhilaration of a disaster just averted’.

‘My life may be miserable,’ Gerald said, ‘but I’m not’. And it’s true that his paintings of lumpy spacemen, twisty rope dancers and many legged clowns reveal an innocent and impish humour. Helpless and disorganised as he often was, he was also capable of working with discipline. He carried out commissions for Z. Ascher, the textile manufacturer, and one of his designs was worn by the young Princess Elizabeth on the Royal Tour in 1947.

You won’t find much of his work in public collections. The Tate has three paintings; others are with the Arts Council or in private hands. He remains relatively unknown – friends of mine who are knowledgeable about or work in the arts had never heard of him. Yet he was the creator of a singular and powerful body of work. In his own way he was also a survivor. ‘I won out! I won out,’ he claimed towards the end of his life. ‘They said alcohol would kill me, but I defeated alcohol.’ A victory indeed.

My brief encounter with Gerald (and also my time at Sherborne) happened at one of those times in life when the way is uncertain and the choices obscure, and it left a vivid impression. So I was excited when, in 2015, the October Gallery in London (a long-term champion of Gerald’s work) held an exhibition called From the Abyss. It was probably going to be the only opportunity I’d get to see so much of his work in one place and I resolved to make the journey.

I wasn’t disappointed. Two large rooms contained a collection of his paintings from the 1940s onwards. I took my time going round, absorbing the different moods, from the darker earlier works to the visionary later works. There were display cabinets with contemporary memorabilia relating to his career, and also unframed works on paper. I had a sense overall of inhabiting a creative maelstrom.

While I hadn’t gone to the exhibition expecting to buy something I did feel some regret on leaving empty handed but for the catalogue. I had seen an unframed work that had appealed to me, a playful gouache of plants and flowers. A couple of years later I was still thinking about it. The more I thought the more it felt like I needed to act. I contacted the gallery to enquire whether the work was still available. It was, and the price was reasonable, and without further ado I bought it.

For me a connection with the artist can make a difference – it becomes personal. I can’t claim that my connection with Gerald was anything more than fleeting and tenuous, but whenever I contemplate the exuberant painting now hanging on my wall I see that it was enduring.

Painting: Plants and Flowers, undated.

To see more of Gerald’s work, see the October Gallery website [/]

To find out more about Beshara and its history, see the Beshara Trust website [/]

William Morrison- Bell lives in a remote part of Northumberland where has had a lifelong connection with the land. In a former life he worked as a lawyer in industry. Now his time is spent between being self-employed as a farmer/land manager, various pro-bono activities, and spending as much time as possible painting in his studio.