Arthur Studd, 1863 - 1919

Usually introduced as, ‘an English first-class cricketer, painter and art collector’, Arthur Studd’s life was both privileged and extremely interesting. Many years ago, I described Studd as, ‘fascinating and elusive’ – and I cannot really alter that judgement. He was born into a wealthy family, educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge and his first successes were in the cricket field, when he played for the MCC in the late 1880s. All his life, Studd was a man of independent means. And yet, he was also an artist who became friendly with, and fascinated by the work of, some of the most radical and contentious artists of the period.

In 1888, after Cambridge, Studd - like so many ambitious and progressive art students of the period - went to study at the Slade, at a time when the School was still under the direction of Alphonse Legros. This French artist was renowned for insisting that his students should draw from life (rather than from the cast), working quickly, developing their ability to look critically, memorise and capture the line, shadow, gesture and movement of a place or a person. As I find myself observing over and again, this pattern of teaching was an essential ingredient for the development of a distinctive style of what might be called British Impressionism: focusing on light and colour - like the French Impressionists - but also distinguished by a more insistent love of line, of the individuality of a particular figure or place, of the narrative of human relationships. For many of these students, the lure of France, where some of the most assertively radical art was being practised, was also irresistible. Accordingly, in 1889, Studd set off for Paris, where he signed on to study at the Académie Julien. Established in Paris in 1868, the Académie Julian - like the Slade - became a major anti-establishment art school, in opposition to the official Ecole des Beaux Arts.

When Studd attended the Académie Julien, he would have found the young Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis studying there, as well as numerous students from elsewhere in Europe and America. Also amongst the French students was Paul Sérusier who, in Autumn, 1888, left Paris for the village of Pont Aven, in Britanny. There, in this former fishing village - in an area remote from the busy, industrialising heart of France, where Breton was usually spoken instead of French and where local people still wore traditional, picturesque, costume - an artists’ colony had been flourishing since the 1860s. Sérusier, with a letter of introduction to Paul Gauguin (who had first made the trip to Pont Aven in 1886), took guidance from the older man, working in the woodland near Pont Aven - the romantically named Bois d’Amour - and produced a small and remarkable painting, The Talisman (now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Sérusier followed Gauguin’s advice to avoid a naturalistic rendering and, instead, to intensify and simplify the scene he saw before him: the autumnal leaves are bright gold and flame; the shadows cast by the trees are ultramarine. When Sérusier returned to Paris and took his picture with him, it enormously influenced Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis. And, it seems, Arthur Studd.

In 1890, Studd visited an even smaller and more remote village in Britanny, Le Pouldu, where Gauguin himself had retreated in the same year. It is clear that Studd was influenced by Gauguin, simplifying and reducing his depiction of the natural world. Studd’s friendship with Gauguin continued in the following years and, in 1897-8, they both travelled to Tahiti, to which Gauguin had first retreated - in a romantic search for a place even less touched by the modern world than Britanny (though he quickly found Polynesia ‘tainted’ by Europe) - in 1891-93. Until his death in 1903, Gauguin remained in French Polynesia, where he produced some of his most powerful paintings. In contrast, Studd’s little Tahitian pictures are much more reticent. He did simplify his forms, but - unlike Gauguin’s richly resonant colour - Studd’s colours are modest and subtle, his pictures small in scale. This lends his work an intensely mysterious quality. In fact, what we see here, is probably due to the influence of quite another artist: James McNeill Whistler. Studd had met Whistler in Paris in 1892 and, from 1894, back home in London, Studd was Whistler’s neighbour, in Cheyne Walk. The two worked closely together, Studd in open admiration for ‘the Master’, painting alongside him in Lyme Regis and Dieppe. Instead of Gauguin’s primary colours, his highly stylised - even self-indulgent, romanticised? - preoccupation with the exotic women and landscapes of French Polynesia, Studd was beguiled by Whistler’s more delicate and complex management of touch and colour, the reduction of incident to a moment of intensity. Certainly, Studd bought a number of Whistler’s works - paintings on canvas and little panels as well as pastels and lithographs - for his own collection. Three of his most important purchases - Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl; Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights; and, the most extraordinary, Nocturne: Blackand Gold - The Fire Wheel - were left by Studd to the nation and they now form an important part of Tate Britain’s collection.

For the rest of his career, Studd’s work continues to hint at the importance of the simplified form derived from Gauguin; but, above all, it is infused with the elusive mystery and poetic power of Whistler’s work, and lent a degree of sombre refinement which is Studd’s own gift.