Michael Andrews Biography Reframes a Quietly Major School of London Painter
Christopher Lloyd’s new book, Michael Andrews: Painter of Masterpieces, argues for a painter whose reputation has long lagged behind the quality of his work. Michael Andrews (1928-95), one of the least familiar figures associated with the School of London, built a career that moved from postwar London scenes to Norfolk landscapes, Scottish summers, Australian rock formations, and, finally, the Thames.
The title comes from a remark by Lawrence Gowing, who said in 1980 that Andrews “paints hardly anything but masterpieces.” Lloyd, a curator, art historian, and former surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, uses that judgment as a point of departure rather than a conclusion. His book is organized in thematic chapters within a loose chronology, a structure that suits an artist whose work was shaped less by a single style than by repeated returns to place.
Andrews was born in Norwich and attended the City of Norwich School from 1939 to 1947. After National Service in the late 1940s, he entered the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where William Coldstream was then in charge. Early works such as “London Jazz Club (100 Oxford Street)” (1951-52), “August for the People” (1951), and “A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over” (1952) won praise from his tutors, while later city pictures, including the Shell Chemicals plant in Cheshire and London flats, balanced exactitude with atmosphere.
Lloyd emphasizes that Andrews’s pace changed in the 1960s. In that decade, as he moved through Soho society and the Colony Room, he began working more quickly. “The Deer Park” (1962) was finished in three weeks, while “Good and Bad at Games” (1964-68) took four years. That contrast captures one of the book’s central arguments: Andrews was not simply slow, but deliberate, testing how long a picture needed in order to register the contemporary moment.
The later chapters widen the frame. The seven paintings in the “Lights” series (1970-74), made with a spray gun and stencils, show how technical restraint could produce subtle effects. From 1975 until the 1990s, Andrews and his family spent summers at Drummond Castle in Perthshire, on the estate of the Baroness Willoughby de Eresby. There he painted deer, swimmers, and the human behavior he saw as inseparable from the natural world. “Melanie and Me Swimming” (1978-79), set in the Water of Ruchill near Glenartney Lodge, is among the most tender works from this period.
A visit to Australia in autumn 1983 led to paintings of Uluru and Kata Tjuta that are stripped of figures except for a few kangaroos, and saturated with light, color, and heat. Lloyd notes that these works met with a mixed reception when shown in London, Paris, Edinburgh, and New York. He also points to Andrews’s circumspect approach to portraiture, including paintings of Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Roger Daltrey.
After moving back to London in 1992, Andrews turned increasingly to the Thames, bringing the book to a close with a subject that joined his lifelong interest in place to a late, sustained attention to water, movement, and atmosphere. Lloyd’s study makes clear that Andrews’s relative obscurity has less to do with the scale of his achievement than with the slowness that once obscured it.
