One Week With John Gulliver - 80th birthday bash for a colourful artist

Published March 25, 2010

IT was a book launch, art exhibition and an 80th birthday all rolled into one.
But it felt more like a street party.
And in some ways it seemed a little out of place in the almost rarified atmosphere of the gallery of The Fine Art Society in New Bond Street, Mayfair.
An hour after the scheduled start at 6pm on Tuesday evening,  more and more guests were still turning up, most of them great admirers, close friends or Camden Town neighbours of David Gentleman who, in the same breath, is able to produce highly acclaimed watercolours and book illustrations, designs of the Royal postage stamp, as well as, incredibly enough, radical posters that disturb high political circles.
Not, I suspect, that Gentleman would wish to be anything else.
For more than 50 years he has been accepted by the art world as one of Britain’s greatest artists.
At the same time, whenever   the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had to search for an eye-catching image for a poster it was to the quiet Camden Town artist they turned.
I assume the guest-list reflected the many sides of Gentleman whose 80th birthday it was.
An early guest was writer Michael Frayn who had been a close friend and neighbour for many years until moving in the late 90s to Richmond. He has been working on what promises to be a fascinating memoir about his father who had been a sales rep – in asbestos products.
Neighbours included Martina Thomson – her husband David wrote one of the most beautiful studies of Camden Town in the 1950s – Bol Stallard, an architect who felt Gentleman approached a landscape with the eye of an architect, and children’s writer Aliki Brandenberg.
A great admirer of Gentleman, Stanley Johnson, who lives in the Camden Town area, also turned up. A family connection would have also drawn him – his son Jo Johnson is married to Gentleman’s daughter Amelia, both of whom live in the Mornington Crescent area. I heard later that another friend of Gentleman’s, the writer Joanna Trollope, also turned up.
On the walls were dozens of beautifully detailed watercolours mainly of the countryside in Suffolk where Gentleman has a house.
Some of them have been reprinted in the book Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, a classic picture of a rural village with transcripts of conversations with local people, recorded by the writer George Ewart Evans.
Gentleman told me: “It’s a wonderful book – and required reading.”