Andalusian farm

Hillier, Tristram, Leda and the Goose. An Autobiography, Longmans, Green, London, 1954.

Spalding, Frances, ‘London: Tristram Hillier at the Royal Academy’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 125, no. 965, Aug. 1983, pp. 508–10.

Usherwood, Nicholas, A Timeless Journey: Tristram Hillier 1905–1983, Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, 1983.

Andalusian farm, 1949, is typical of Tristram Hillier’s mature painting style, exemplifying his distinctively meticulous approach to materials and method. This painting is deliberately and precisely painted with crisp contours delineating every form. Every texture has been defined with care, from the rough rendered walls to the soft earth and smoothly painted open sky. These elements each contribute to the intense, hyperreal quality Hillier was known for.

An unpublished manuscript by Hillier, written circa 1980, describes his preparation and painting methods in detail. His exacting methodology began with the canvas preparation, well before he conceived of his compositions:

I take great pains in preparing my canvas as I consider the correct surface to be half the battle in the construction of a picture. I purchase the finest and smoothest primed canvas I can find and have it stretched for me. This saves much labour of which there is a great deal to follow. Commercial priming is never satisfactory – one would need apprentices under surveillance in the studio to make it so. Consequently, I use sand-paper to achieve the smoothest surface possible without damaging the warp and the weave of the canvas. Then I apply two more coats of my own priming, sand-papering after each coat. This surface dries very quickly so that within twenty-four hours I can apply two coats of Foundation white, sand-papering again after each coat has had time to dry, and that is a matter of a week. The next step is to paint the canvas with Titanium white and leave it to dry for about a month, and finally I apply another coat of Titanium tinted according to taste. Normally the final tone of my canvas is a warm flesh tone or an equally warm grey, and the canvas should then be smoothed with very fine sand-paper.

I can’t imagine anything more awful than being confronted with a pure white canvas or an unprepared surface. The canvas must then be allowed to dry for about four months, so that for the whole operation one needs about six months. Each year I set aside a couple of weeks at an interval of several months between each week, to prepare some thirty or forty canvases so that I may always have a stock to draw upon.

It is a laborious and expensive process which is unlikely to enlist many disciples.¹Usherwood, Nicholas, A Timeless Journey: Tristram Hillier R. A. 1905–1983, Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, Bradford, UK, 1983, p. 17.

Most of Hillier’s description of his preparatory technique can be observed in this painting, though there are some departures. As he states, the canvas is a commercially pre-primed canvasA large piece of canvas that has the priming applied before cutting to size and stretching. This could be completed in the artist’s studio and, from the late nineteenth century, was often carried out by commercial manufacturers. – a finely woven linen of high quality – and the artist has applied his own additional groundA layer(s) of opaque paint applied to a support to provide suitable colour, texture and absorbency on which to paint. Also called priming. layers after the painting was stretched. There is no hint of the canvas weave in the surface texture, which is perfectly smooth because of the repeated sanding between preparatory layers. One of the inconsistencies was found through analysis of the paint with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF)An analytical technique used to identify elements present in a material, which for paintings can be suggestive of the pigments or other inorganic materials used. It is non-destructive, meaning it does not require taking a sample., which did not detect any titanium, but there was substantial zinc, suggesting he did not use titanium white pigment, as he describes, but rather zinc white. The final ground layer, visible near the edges of the painting, is not tinted as he says but is bright white. The high key palette seen in this painting would be best achieved with a white ground, so perhaps Hillier departed from his norm for this reason. This and the pigment differences may simply be due to slight modifications Hillier made to his methods over time.

Hillier’s manuscript continues to describe his painting method:

I start my picture by drawing in the composition, as I have already said, with a fine sable brush using white paint and turpentine, from drawings already made on the site. With this medium it is easy to correct any errors as one works. In the case of still-life or one of my rare portraits I paint directly from the subject drawing in my composition first, but without any ‘squaring’ of the canvas. With landscape, having drawn in the subject in more or less detail according to the subject, I start with the painting of the sky and this must be done with large hog’s hair brushes, swiftly and with bold strokes, using small sable brushes around the perimeter of architectural features in order to preserve as far as possible the original drawing. After this I smooth the painting of the sky with a large flat brush to obtain an even surface, and during this process some of the drawing is inevitably effaced; but, with care, enough should remain to serve as a guide.

The sky is the most rapidly executed passage in any of my pictures. Even on a large canvas it takes me no more than about three hours, and I have always found it a mistake to attempt any subsequent alteration. The remainder of my painting is done almost entirely with sable and this has led people to complain that there is so little indication in my work of the brush stroke. Well, they can’t have it both ways. There is not much brushwork to be seen in Van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfini.

It will be a very earnest student who bothers to read of my method and a courageous, perhaps foolhardy one who tries to follow it. Not that it is difficult but because it is an exercise in patience which is not a universal character of our times.²Pery, Jenny, Painter Pilgrim: The Art and Life of Tristram Hillier, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2008, p. 88.

Hillier uses a variety of artists’ tools to great effect in Andalusian farm. The sky is painted exactly as Hillier writes about it; the strokes from the thick, coarse brush he mentions are visible in raking lightIllumination from an oblique angle used to highlight fine morphological features of the object surface. (see below). He references brushes made with hair from a sable, a small mammal native to Russia; exceptionally fine paintbrushes can be made from the hair of its tail. This type of brush would have been necessary to create some of the fine lines of the architecture, such as the bricks (see below). Here, Hillier has used a blunt point, likely the end of his brush, to scratch away wet paint to add further detail. A palette knife and brushes were proficiently used to create the rendered walls, and the paint of the foreground is gently blended to describe the dry dusty earth.

Hillier’s laborious attention to detail and patience was not in vain from a preservation standpoint, as this painting remains in pristine condition today. There is barely a crack in the paint film; the pigments used show no sign of colour shifting or fading, and the canvas is still strong and supple. The painting was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1953 through the Felton Bequest within a few years of Hillier completing it and has never undergone any major conservation treatment.

Despite his calculated and precise preparations, Hillier reworked almost the entire composition of Andalusian farm after completing a previous version. Underlying paint layers can be visualised using infra-red reflectography (IRR)An imaging technique that uses an infra-red camera to capture an object illuminated with infra-red light. Many paints are transparent to infra-red radiation, and others absorb or reflect them. Depending on the materials the artist used, the resulting image, called an infra-red reflectogram, can reveal features not visible to the naked eye such as underdrawing or changes, as well as make distinctions between pigments, or clarify inscriptions. , and in this case what lies below the final painting is somewhat unexpected.  Most of the contours of the architecture show a slightly different form: at least two small buildings and a tree near the left edge were eliminated, and the foreground once had many small rocks casting sharp shadows and was a warmer mustard yellow colour rather than the beige tones of the final version (see below). Most strikingly, a figural group in the central foreground was completely painted out. A man on horseback conversing with a woman in a long skirt and wide-brimmed hat, possibly with a child by her side, were once the focal point of the picture (see below).

In the lower right corner of the final painting is Hillier’s signature, with no date. IRR also reveals there is another signature alongside this one that was painted out, this time accompanied by a date of 1949 (see below). Artists generally apply their signature upon the completion of a composition, so the presence of this earlier signature suggests Hillier likely considered a former stage of this painting finished, at least for a short time. 1949 is the same year the final work was recorded as complete, so these alterations were made within a year of the earlier signature.

The revelation of these changes offers a tantalising glimpse of the creative process behind this work. Most of his changes tend to reduce the composition to its essential elements, eliminating many of the smaller details. Had he not painted out the figural group, it would have been a rare inclusion of animated human presence in his work from this time, and a sharp contrast to the silent stillness presented in the final version which is in keeping with his most affecting paintings of eerie deserted spaces. He was known to prefer to keep the human element at a distance in his pictures, saying, ‘I’ve always dreamed of a world without men, which would be an awfully pleasant place’.³ibid.

Caitlin Breare, Conservator of Paintings, National Gallery of Victoria