My painter uncle had his wife’s support. He needed Brian Sewell’s criticism

I have spent a day committing to oblivion by far the greater part of a man’s whole life’s work.

I have spent a day committing to oblivion by far the greater part of a man’s whole life’s work. Let me start this story at the beginning.

Donald Young, my uncle, died 21 years ago. Lung cancer killed him at 66, an age he was lucky to reach, given the pipe he had puffed at almost continuously since he was a teenager. The only other thing he had done continually since youth was paint. A working-class boy with a bad stammer, he had taken a scholarship to study at the Slade school of art in Chelsea, and from then until his death (there was a half-finished painting on the easel) he kept painting: on canvas, and when money was short, which was for most of the time, on hardboard. It was all he did.