Meredith Frampton is the forgotten genius of British art

Encountered in reality, Frampton’s paintings emit charisma and grace, as well as a compelling, if unsettling, sense of the uncanny. Frankly, they are in a different league to almost all the other pictures by his contemporaries in the True to Life exhibition. Aside from anything else, the smooth polish of his flawless technique – often, he would work on a single painting for an entire year – is jaw-dropping. 

“Every period has its geniuses,” says art historian Sacha Llewellyn, who wrote a catalogue essay to accompany the True to Life show, “and Frampton is definitely one of the greats of British art. His impeccable technique would be admired in any age. He had vision – but he was also a visionary.”

‘Order, clarity and reason’

Despite the manifest brilliance of his paintings, though, many people today have never heard of Frampton. The artist died in 1984, just two years after his only solo exhibition, at the Tate. Back in the 70s, when Morphet was considering his work, Frampton was even more obscure.

“He really was in the wilderness,” explains Morphet, who remembers coming across Portrait of a Young Woman in the Tate’s picture store. Despite being “impressed” by it, he failed for years to convince his superiors that it should be promoted to public display.

“At that time, the Tate was fixated on this idea that what mattered in 20th-Century art was the forward movement from one progressive ‘ism’ to the next, a kind of handing on of the torch,” Morphet recalls. “And art like Frampton’s, which didn’t exemplify stylistic innovation, was regarded as having nothing to do with that story. That’s why I wasn’t allowed to show it.” 

It wasn’t until a new director of the Tate, the art historian Alan Bowness, took over in 1980 that Morphet’s idea for a Frampton retrospective was taken seriously and the curator undertook his journey to Monkton Deverill. Morphet recalls feeling moved when Frampton told him that, until then, he had believed he would die and be completely forgotten by posterity, “but now he realised that would not be the case.”