Relatively eccentric

My uncle Robin Ironside bewailed the demise, after the scandal of the Wilde trial and the early death of Beardsley, of the imaginative tradition which, he wrote, ‘had been kept flickering in England since the end of the 18th century, sometimes with a wild, always uneasy light, by a succession of gifted eccentrics’.

The truth is that he himself was one of those very eccentrics. Born in 1912 of a staunchly upper middle-class background, and after stints at the Courtauld and the Sorbonne, he landed, in 1937, the job of assistant keeper to Sir John Rothenstein at the Tate Gallery. Eventually, becoming frustrated at the boredom of a desk job, he gave it all up, moved into a sleazy flat near Victoria Station, and devoted the rest of his short life (he died at 53) to writing about art for magazines like Horizon and Encounter, and painting far into the night.