Exhibition review: The charm and dexterity of Sir Hugh Casson

It is nothing short of a miracle that this aptly titled exhibition could be shoehorned into just two rooms at the Royal Academy, such was the range of the irrepressible Hugh Casson’s work and influence during his lifetime. Architect, artist, designer and writer, he was a fireball of energy and a fount of ideas. He was described by one friend as ‘the golfball on an IBM typewriter’. Not the least of his multifarious talents was, indeed, making friends with anyone, from the casual visitor queuing for the RA’s latest exhibition to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, for whom he worked discreetly but tirelessly for many decades on a series of royal apartments, unaltered to this day. He carried the theme of friendship into his presidency of the Royal Academy (1976–84) by establishing the Friends of the RA, who now number more than 100,000 in the UK — there are many more in America — and who underpin the Academy’s finances to a crucial degree.

Many will recognise the charm and dexterity of Casson’s sketches and watercolours: John Betjeman said that he sketched just as most people hummed, going about their daily lives, but he was hardly encouraged in this at school: ‘Art was what a thick boy did on a wet Wednesday afternoon,’ he recalled. He depicts himself, comical, bespectacled and faintly bemused, in many of the letters and ephemera on display, and his facility as a draughtsman undoubtedly eased his entry to his chosen career as architect. He joined the modernist practice of his former Cambridge tutor Christopher (Kit) Nicholson in the mid-1930s, and was invaluable in his work as a camouflage officer during the war. His ingenious schemes convey the delight he took in devising convincing disguises for the portable RAF hangars sited on secret aerodromes, just as he had relished painting sets for student productions at the Cambridge Festival Theatre.