When John Moynihan was three and living with his painter parents in a flat off Primrose Hill he used to be terrified by nocturnal howls and squeals from the Regent’s Park zoo. Wetting himself, desperate to be ‘rescued from the labyrinths of an unspeakable jungle’, he was soothed by whoever happened to be around, sometimes the young Bill Coldstream, who would stand beside his ‘blabbering urine-moistened form, urging restraint’.
Initiated into parental artistic circles which extended, prewar, from St John’s Wood to the New Forest, Bloomsbury and the Euston Road, Moynihan was reared in a ferment of rows and realignments. His father, Rodrigo Moynihan, had an ‘Objective Abstraction’ phase – thick, pitted and unsaleable – and was apt to slope off to Soho in search of amusement. His mother, Elinor Bellingham Smith, drew for magazines and painted woebegones in school caps on misted river banks.
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