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Painter of portraits, figures and townscapes, often with religious or
literary subjects. Born in London, he studied at Hammersmith School
of Art 1926-29 (where he met Ruskin Spear) and Goldsmith's College 1929-32
under Gardiner, Mansbridge and Bateman. He formed a friendship with
Kokoschka and exhibited at the RA from 1931, becoming RA in 1965.
He was an Official War Artist 1945-46, a tutor 1947-57, then Professor
of Painting at the RCA, 1957-73, where he was made Professor Emeritus
in 1973 and Senior Fellow 1983. He was awarded a CBE in 1962 and an
Honorary Doctorate from Edinburgh University in 1982. He became one
of the most popular of all teachers at the Royal College of Art. His
pupils included David Hockney, Peter Blake, Ron Kitaj amongst others
who went on to be hugely influential artists this century. He was a
close friend of many artists and was influential in ensuring Lowry's
election to the Academy.
Carel Weight exhibited widely and his public commissions have included
murals for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and "Christ & The
People" for Manchester Cathedral 1963. His work is represented
in a number of major collections, including that of HRH Queen Elizabeth,
the Tate Gallery, The Fitzwilliam and Ashmoleon Museums, the Imperial
War Museum, the Vatican collection and the British Museum. In addition,
his work is highly sought by private collectors.
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Blind girl
oil on board
signed
38.7 x 29.9 cm.
Provenance: with The Zwemmer Gallery, London where purchased by the previous owner (label to reverse)
£5,850 (within painted bespoke leafed frame)
This fine portrait, painted at the height of Weight’s powers, depicts a blind girl reading a book in Braille that is resting in her lap. In this powerful work, the subject of blindness allows Weight to examine a condition that lies at the very opposite polar extreme to his own experience as an artist: whereas his life and métier is dedicated to looking and to the close visual scrutiny of his subject, the Blind Girl cannot explore the world with her eyes, but must do so with the other senses available to her, namely sound, smell and touch.
John Everett Millais famously painted a nineteenth-century incarnation of The Blind Girl in 1856, a monumental work now in the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, and that composition is undoubtedly a model for Weight’s subject here. Millais’s celebrated work depicts two itinerant beggars, presumed to be sisters, and in his composition the elder, blind girl shelters the younger girl beneath the shawl that covers her head. Millais’s blind girl has a concertina in her lap, suggesting to the viewer that she has to resort to earning money by busking for those willing to listen and to leave her and her sister a few pennies.
In Weight’s painting, the dependency of the younger sister on the older is gone and the blind girl’s reliance on charity, implied by the presence of the concertina, is also dispensed with. Instead, Weight’s Blind Girl seems to be entirely self-sufficient in her quiet reading of the book on her lap. While the double rainbow that dominates the upper third of Millais’s work implies hope or the guiding hand of God in the lives of his two itinerant sisters, the quiet composure of Weight’s subject is also life-affirming in its stillness and the interior calm that his figure radiates.
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