Riding to the rescue

As cuts in government funding begin to bite, the innovative Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn finds itself short of £350,000 a year, and its long-serving artistic director, Nicolas Kent, is standing down as a result. Into the breach has stepped 89-year-old philanthropist and Tricycle devotee Al Weil. He is donating 37 paintings (including ‘The Gulf of Salerno’, above) by an artist he has collected since the 1960s, the distinguished Victorian watercolourist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (1821–1906).

Brabazon was a man of means who didn’t have to sell his work to survive, but nevertheless created a body of paintings and drawings of rare sensibility. He travelled widely, painting and sketching as he went (‘I live for Art and Sunshine,’ he said), but didn’t exhibit his work until in his 70s, preferring to cling to the status of amateur. In his case ‘amateur’ meant passionate lover rather than unskilled.

D.S. MacColl, art critic of this magazine in the 1890s, was greatly impressed and thought Brabazon the best watercolour painter since Turner. He wrote: ‘His notation is in pure colour, and his handling is certain and delicate. His imagination, his knowledge of what he wants from a scene, is no less so. There is a cry of passion in the recognition.’ Sargent, too, noted his ‘gift of colour, together with an exquisite sensitiveness to impressions of Nature’. Al Weil’s Brabazon watercolours and pastels are on show at Pyms Gallery, 9 Mount Street, W1, until 8 February, after which they will be auctioned in aid of the Tricycle.