I love catching glimpses of artists' houses in old photos, as backgrounds in their paintings, or better still, through visiting house museums. There are, as far as I can gather, three loose types that these houses fall into. For our purposes here, I mention only artists whose broad shoulders carry us all, but we lesser mortals all fit into my admittedly porous categories in one way or another.

The first lot are the artists who don't care at all about beautifying their surroundings and merely view the space they are in as being the place where they make their art and occasionally sleep and eat and have sex. Think Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud or Picasso. Chaotic, jumbled or ugly spaces which feed directly into their work, often appearing in it but of no significant interest to them independently. Their great works seem to arise from the mess of their clutter and the roughness of their studios.

The second lot are artists who have perfectly plausible, if often highly sophisticated, tastes and who view their interiors as ways of either impressing society with their superlative social status (think Rubens, with his magnificent palazzo in Antwerp) or of their respectability (Rembrandt's conventional bourgeois townhouse in Amsterdam).

The third lot are those who create spaces that become works of art in and of themselves, whole interior worlds that are extensions of their art. These can be nuanced, composed spaces that subtly play with ideas, such as Monet's villa at Giverny and Magritte's house in Jette, Belgium, or they can be sculptural living objects, such as Gauguin's Maison du Jouir in Atuona. These spaces may appear in their works but are independently authored environments that ought to be seen as part of their oeuvre.

For many years, I thought I fit into the second category, with a spattering of the third. I viewed my interiors as a work that I was deliberately composing, independently of my paintings and drawings. I was, I thought, making an enjoyably liveable yet interesting historic house. Somewhere that reflected my aspirations, my historical awareness and my eye for an unusual or interesting object. Sadly, as is common with the theories we have about ourselves, I was mistaken. My house, in actual fact, hasn't stopped changing, often in radical ways, for an instant.

So it turns out that there is a fourth type of artist house, a far smaller category that is less easy to identify as their often elaborate decorations are prone to constant rearrangement. This lot of artists use their houses as testing grounds for their artistic ideas. As a result, their interiors, and sometimes their exteriors, are in perpetual evolution as they mirror the progression of their artistic interests. Here, think of Henri Matisse, whose rooms chart a move from Orientalism to near-minimalist abstraction. Or Emile Bernard, whose interior schemes meticulously document his ever-changing obsessions with early Christianity, the French countryside or the Egyptian souk.

Often wholly unaware, the choice of a new colour that I repainted a room with, the dainty decoration on a newly acquired Delft vase that I 'had to have', or the shape of a chair back that I waxed repeatedly, would creep into my artistic work a few weeks later. This parallel between art and house has meant a constant rearranging of objects and schemes. For a while, something that is the subject of intense focus may be relegated or elevated in status, and the rooms can suddenly change to predict looming shifts in my artistic practice. For example, as I began working more with layered colours for an exhibition of watercolours I did at the Soane Museum in 2021, the depth of colour and their often conflicting juxtaposition in my house also increased. Greys have become lilac. Over the years, the ever-increasing quantities of silver and Delft and Chinese porcelain have moved around like little marionettes in a toy theatre, through a relentless series of parades and solo spots on top of fireplaces, shelves, cupboards, gilded brackets and plinths. And then suddenly, I found myself giving Dreweatts a call and telling them to take the lot. It was curtains down on this particular performance. My choreographic routines had been through enough cycles, and time was up. So rather than ask myself whether I can live without my collections, which I have loved like a madman in my time, I should be asking myself what sort of work I will be making in future with my palette now wiped clean. It is a process made easier knowing that Dreweatts will do their best to ensure that my former dancers are going to cultured, creative homes and will soon form part of the interior palettes of like-minded individuals.

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Auction Details

Tuesday 9 January 2024, 10.30am GMT
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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