Gifting labours of Hercules

Gifted: 'Gulf of Salerno, Italy' by 19th-century British watercolourist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon

This week’s column is an exemplary tale of philanthropy; it is also the story of an improbable obsession across centuries, across a class divide, across an ocean.

When I heard that a benefactor was donating a valuable collection of watercolours to help save a theatre that both he and I admire, I confess I imagined him to be a financier, successful businessman or professional in a smart suit. I did not envisage a former metal cutter and union organiser in jeans and a colourful sweater, still full of raw energy at nearly 90.

Philanthropy is derived from one of the Greek words for love – the disinterested friendly love called philia, rather than the ferocious all-consuming passion called eros. You could say that Al Weil’s philanthropy derives from a passionate affair with the aristocratic 19th-century British watercolourist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon. Thus, these two kinds of love can unite and prove a vital force for good.

I spoke to Weil, surrounded by a smattering of Brabazons, in the foyer of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north-west London, which has been recently hit by a swingeing cut to its public funding. He related to me how, three days after his arrival in the UK from the US in the late 1960s, he started to pick up watercolours by the then undervalued artist for as little as £10 each. “After six months I had 12, so I took out a mortgage and bought more.” At one point, Weil owned more than 200 Brabazons.

Weil has an eye for quality and precision of technique, not surprising in a man who, in his first job, was required to cut metal to an accuracy of fractions of a millimetre.

Brabazon, he told me with a glint of steel in his eye, was “one of the few watercolourists ever to master the technique of simultaneously loading a brush with colour and Chinese white”. But who was this enigmatic figure, friend of John Singer Sargent, considered by Ruskin to be Turner’s natural successor?

Wealthy, cosmopolitan, scion of an ancient line and heir to estates in Sussex and Ireland, Brabazon could have echoed the ringing words sung by Tosca: “vissi d’arte”. What he actually said was that he lived for “art and sunshine”. At 23, he flouted his father’s wish that he should study law and decamped to Rome. At that time his artistic ambitions were divided between art and music, so he enrolled at both the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Accademia di San Luca.

One of the many kind and disinterested acts of his long bachelor life was to befriend and support the distinguished pianist and Liszt pupil Emil Sauer, then a struggling piano teacher in Hampstead, whose solo career he effectively relaunched. Sauer and Brabazon travelled around Europe together and performed music for two pianos, but Brabazon, though a fine musician, was not a virtuoso.

This Sauer anecdote reveals much about Brabazon. He was almost as much a traveller as an artist – and certainly a more adventurous traveller than his idol Turner; the best of the thousands of watercolours he painted have a wonderful debonair spontaneity and ability to catch the spirit of place matched by few other practitioners. But Brabazon did not take himself as seriously as fellow-artists such as Turner, Sargent and Ruskin. He bought himself a Velázquez and probably shared the great Spanish painter’s view that he was first of all a gentleman.

Brabazon only began exhibiting and selling his work in his 70s. When he died in 1906, aged 85, he was at the height of his fame. Unfortunately his reputation, and the price of his work, collapsed when more than 3,000 works were put on the market in the space of 27 months by his profligate heirs.

Weil is offering 35 Brabazons from his collection, to be exhibited next month at the Tricycle (subsequently at Pyms Gallery, Mount Street) and then sold at auction, with the proceeds going to his beloved (yes, more love there) Tricycle Theatre.

The Tricycle has always seemed to me an exemplary neighbourhood theatre, rooted in the culture and community of Kilburn, with its strong Irish and West Indian flavours, but extending beyond them, to embrace, for example, the politics of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, currently, the London riots.

The Tricycle has become known for quasi-documentary dramas, but I’ve seen fine productions there of plays by Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, as well as Shaw and Billy Roche. Some suspect that its funding has been cut in revenge for what this paper has called “the most politically audacious programming of any theatre in London” – a suspicion denied by outgoing director Nicolas Kent, who told me it was “more cock-up than conspiracy”.

Of course, Al Weil’s donation is a one-off act, not a model for arts funding. But I can’t help thinking that in these straitened times, when everyone knows that public subvention will be squeezed for years to come, his kind of intuitive generosity, born out of a great love of art, could be an inspiration to so many others.

harry.eyres@ft.com

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