The Madnesses of Vincent Van Gogh

...And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night

You took your life as lovers often do

But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you

(Vincent – Don McLean)

I’ve never been a fan of Don McLean’s music. He only ever wrote two noteworthy songs, and of those, American Pie is pretentious gobbledegook, and Vincent is syrupy shmaltz. Its lyrics regurgitate the tired old trope of Vincent van Gogh as a martyr to an uncomprehending and unfeeling world that could not recognise his genius. I’ve also never been a committed fan of van Gogh, despite seeing many of his paintings at the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, the Kroller-Muller museum at Otterlo (the world’s second largest collection of his works), and elsewhere. To me, his late pictures appear wonky and gaudy; his images diminished by being overused on merchandise. So the purpose of this article is not to present a Don McLean-like hagiography of Vincent van Gogh, but to critically explore his life and his art, his experience of mental illness and the obsessive efforts of modern psychiatry to explain that experience. I will also consider what may be regarded as the madness of his mythical afterlife as one of the icons of modern art.

Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889)

The Madness of Vincent van Gogh

Vincent was born in 1853 in a village named Zundert, in Brabant, the Netherlands. The van Goghs were a successful middle class clan – one of Vincent’s uncles was an Admiral in the Dutch navy and another (Uncle Cent) was a partner in the international art dealing firm Goupil and Cie. Vincent’s father, however, was a humble pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, spending his working life in small rural congregations in mainly Catholic areas. Consequently, the family was not well-off, and money would be an issue for Vincent throughout his life.

Vincent was highly intelligent, very well-read and a good linguist. He was articulate and expressed his innermost thoughts clearly in his extensive correspondence with his younger brother Theo and others (he used his letters to Theo as one might use a diary). His letters show that he had a deep-seated need for social companionship and love (and sex), and for a fulfilling purpose for his life. Unfortunately however, from childhood he had an extreme personality that meant that he never achieved those dreams. He was careless with his personal appearance and looked odd. He had poor social skills and lacked empathy with others. He was intense, not allowing those he latched onto any space. He was also argumentative and sure of his own opinions and browbeat those who disagreed with him. All his life he tried to form relationships with family and acquaintances, but sooner or later most were put off by his manner and behaviour and broke contact with him. The only person who did not reject him (though he mostly kept his distance) was his brother Theo.

By the age of fourteen, Vincent’s schooling was finished, largely through his inability to get on with his fellow pupils and teachers. When he was sixteen, Vincent’s Uncle Cent found him a job with the art dealers Goupil and Cie, at the firm’s office in the Hague. A few years later, his brother Theo also joined the firm, initially in the Brussels office. Theo thrived as an art dealer, rising to become head of the prestigious Paris office. Vincent, by contrast, performed poorly, and at this stage in his life showed limited active interest in art. He would have been quickly dismissed if not for his Uncle Cent. Instead, he was transferred to the London office, and later to Paris (before Theo went to work there), but would not (or could not) toe the line and was finally sacked in 1876, aged twenty-three.

By this time, Vincent was becoming increasingly religious – one of a series of enthusiasms that came and went during his life. Following a brief (and unsuccessful) spell as a schoolteacher in England, he persuaded his parents to let him study for the priesthood. Yet again, however, he failed to fit in and was forced to abandon this ambition. Still full of religious fervour, he became a lay preacher and missionary in the Borinage, a mining area in Belgium, where he lived among the poor inhabitants and tried to establish a religious community. Unsuccessful again, his contract was not renewed.

By now (1880) Vincent was twenty-seven and had failed at every attempt at a career. His religious fervour faded, but he had begun to show a greater interest in art, adding rough sketches to some of his many letters to Theo. His brother encouraged him to take up art seriously, and for the remaining ten years of his life, Vincent devoted himself to drawing and painting. He had no paid employment, and sold just one painting in his lifetime. He was supported financially for the decade by Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own salary.

Theo van Gogh was a complex character. On one hand he was a sophisticated and successful art dealer, with standing in his profession and a wide circle of clever friends (and mistresses). On the other hand he was himself emotionally needy and never escaped Vincent’s clutches. He allowed Vincent to manipulate him into sending increasing amounts of money with vague promises of reimbursement when Vincent became a successful artist. Although he mostly kept Vincent at arms length geographically, for two years (1886-1888) he allowed Vincent to live in his apartment in Paris, and was swept up in Vincent’s chaotic lifestyle, which embraced excessive drinking (particularly absinthe), eating junk food and making extensive visits to prostitutes. Both Vincent and Theo contracted syphilis – with later tragic consequences for Theo.

Having decided to devote his life to art, Vincent never wavered from that aim. With no training in drawing or painting, he largely taught himself, from books and endless practice. He had a few brief spells of instruction, first from a cousin, a respected Dutch painter named Anton Mauve; later at an Art School in Antwerp, and finally at the studio of Fernand Cormon in Paris, where fellow students included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In every setting, Vincent quickly fell out with his teachers, and did not get on well with other students. He was not a naturally talented draughtsman and never perfected the ability to accurately depict the human figure. However, he never stopped practising, spending copious sums on art materials, subsidised by Theo.

In the first half of the 1880s, Vincent lived in a variety of places in the Netherlands, sometimes in rented studios and sometimes with his parents, though his relationship with them was always stormy. This was partly a consequence of his typically eccentric love life. For a time, he was infatuated with a widowed cousin named Kee Vos, bombarding her with proposals of marriage and in the process alienating both her and many members of his wider family. Later, he lived in the Hague for some eighteen months with a former prostitute named Sien Hoornik and her two children. Theo finally persuaded Vincent to leave Sien, and following the break-up Vincent moved to Drenthe, an isolated rural area where he hoped to establish himself as a painter of landscapes and peasant life. After only a few months, however, he was driven away by poor weather and loneliness, the locals regarding him as an oddball and ostracising him.

In the Kroller-Muller museum in Otterlo, a room is devoted to Vincent’s paintings. On one wall are earlier works, mainly landscapes or scenes of peasant life, and uniformly dark in colour and form. On the other wall are the later works, in the brightly coloured, emotionally charged style that is today most associated with Vincent van Gogh. The contrast is startling, and perfectly encapsulates the development of Vincent’s art. In the years before moving to Paris to live with Theo in 1886, Vincent was heavily influenced by the works of Jean-Francois Millet and other painters of the ‘Barbizon School’. This was a group of artists who established a ‘colony’ in the small French village of Barbizon in the 1830s, painting landscapes and depictions of peasant life ‘en plein air’. As well as admiring their art, in his loneliness Vincent long dreamt of establishing an artistic colony himself. But Vincent would not, or could not, paint pictures with the facility of Millet and the others, who produced sanitised rustic scenes attractive to middle-class urban buyers. Despite Theo’s constructive criticism, Vincent’s early paintings, typified by his first ‘masterpiece’, The Potato Eaters (1885), were unremittingly dark in colour and tone, messily constructed, and with human figures that were little more than caricatures. Vincent sent The Potato Eaters to Theo hoping that he would find a buyer for it, but Theo knew better than to offer it for sale.

The Potato Eaters (1885)

In late 1885, Vincent left the family home and the Netherlands for good, driven out by conflict with his family (his father had died in March 1885), and the local villagers, who accused him of getting a peasant girl pregnant. He went to Antwerp in Belgium, enrolling at the Art School there, but soon alienated his teachers and fellow students. He seems to have had a depressive breakdown as a result, and following a vague invitation from Theo he turned up unannounced at his apartment in Paris, staying there for the next two years.

As mentioned earlier, Vincent’s stay in Paris did not do his brother’s health much good, and cramped his social life, as Vincent put off Theo’s friends with his strange and combative manner. Theo himself wrote in a letter that Vincent was, “impossible to get along with...since he spares nothing and nobody...Everyone who sees him has said: ‘C’est un fou’”. However, Paris marked a turning point in Vincent’s art. Theo introduced him to the work of the Impressionists, of whom Vincent had previously known little. Vincent started to paint like an Impressionist, his work making the transition from dark to light.

The art dealing firm for whom Theo worked, which had previously largely sold old masters and Salon painters, began to embrace avant garde art, with Theo van Gogh taking the lead. Through Theo, Vincent met Impressionist artists such as Camille Pissaro, and newcomers who came to Theo hoping that he would promote their art. Chief among these was Emil Bernard, who used his acquaintance with Vincent as a way of currying favour with Theo. However, he also introduced Vincent to Japanese art, whose bold, simple colours and clean lines combined with Impressionist influences to create Vincent’s late, most popular paintings. Another hopeful artist who crossed Vincent’s path at that time was Paul Gauguin.

Then in February 1888, Vincent abruptly left Paris and settled in the little town of Arles, in Provence – no one knows why (there is no surviving correspondence with Theo from this time). He rented rooms in a building known as the Yellow House, next to a rough all-night cafe, and adjacent to a park that was a haunt of prostitutes and their clients. Subsidised by Theo, Vincent set up a studio and produced painting after painting in his new style, enchanted by the light and bright colours of the South. As elsewhere, the locals viewed him with suspicion (Paris hadn’t changed him), and his only acquaintances were some of the lowlife characters who frequented the cafe. However, he maintained his dream of a community of artists, and tried to persuade artistic acquaintances such as Emil Bernard to join him in Arles. He also cajoled Theo into trying to recruit candidates for a community. The only person who could be persuaded was Paul Gauguin, who was ambitious but broke, and came to Arles on condition that Theo subsidised him as well as Vincent.

Gauguin provisionally planned to stay with Vincent for a year, but left after just nine weeks (at the end of December 1888), finding Vincent’s lifestyle, his neediness and combustibility overwhelming. When he learned that Gauguin was leaving, Vincent had the first of what would prove to be a series of apparently psychotic breakdowns. He threatened Gauguin with a razor, and after he left, sliced off most of his own ear. In a delirious state, he knocked on the door of his favourite prostitute and handed her the ear. He was admitted to hospital in Arles, staying there for several weeks and remembering little about the incident.

On discharge, Vincent returned to the Yellow House and continued to paint, but experienced more psychotic or delirious episodes, and in May 1889 allowed himself to be admitted to a Mental Hospital in Sant-Remy-de-Provence, staying there for a year. The psychotic attacks continued; sometimes taking the form of stuporous episodes. On one occasion, in a delirious state, Vincent was found eating paint. In between times he continued to produce pictures, painting some of his best known works (including ‘A Starry Night’).

Starry Night (1889)

Vincent left the mental hospital in May 1890 (pronounced cured) and moved to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, some twenty miles from Paris, to be nearer to Theo, and also to Doctor Paul Gachet, a psychiatrist who had treated other artists. Yet again, Vincent resumed painting. Yet again, he struggled with companionship in Auvers, but he spent time over the summer with teenage brothers, Rene and Gaston Secretan, who were staying at the family holiday home. Vincent regarded them as friends, but they were more motivated by teasing or playing pranks on him.

During the turbulent time following the ear-cutting episode, two significant events happened far away in Paris. The first was that in April 1889 Theo married Johanna Bonger (Jo), the sister of a friend, and their son, Vincent Willem was born in January 1890. The second was the publication, also in January 1890, of an appreciative article about Vincent’s work by a young art critic named Albert Aurier (some of Vincent’s paintings had been displayed at Theo’s instigation at the Salon des Independentes and a group exhibition of Belgian artists known as ‘les Vingt’). As a result of the article, Vincent began to get some recognition among his fellow artists, and made his first sale, of a painting named ‘The Red Vineyard’. However, Aurier’s article related Vincent’s art to his social isolation and mental disorder, thus sowing the seeds for the legend of the ‘mad genius’.

Vincent was pleased by the positive review of his work, but was more concerned by the implications for his future of Theo’s marriage. As well as being preoccupied with his wife and baby son, Theo was also unsettled at work, and spoke of setting up his own art dealership – and he was increasingly worried about his own health. Vincent feared losing Theo and his financial support, and the consequences of his continuing psychotic attacks, and became more and more despondent. He pleaded with Theo to bring his family to Auvers, where they could all live together. Inevitably, Theo declined.

On 27 July 1890, Vincent took his painting materials into the fields, as he was accustomed to do most days. He returned in the evening, apparently in physical distress. His landlord asked him what was wrong and Vincent showed him a small hole under his ribs from a gunshot wound, and said, ‘I wounded myself’. There were no witnesses to the incident. When the police came to investigate, they asked him if he had intended to kill himself (suicide at the time was a crime), and Vincent replied, ‘Yes, I believe so’. Medical help was summoned, and Theo arrived from Paris. Two days, later, Vincent died of his wound, aged 37. He was buried in Auvers on 30 July 1890.

The manner of Vincent’s death raised questions that have never been fully answered, and which call into question the assumption that Vincent had committed suicide (needless to say, in the USA a group of conspiracy theorists believe that he was murdered). While Vincent had talked of suicide before, he never mentioned the possibility of shooting himself. He was not known to own a gun, and the weapon that shot him was never recovered. It was identified as belonging to young Rene Secretan, who denied knowing how Vincent had got hold of it. Vincent was shot in the abdomen, not the heart or the head as with most suicides. And when the first shot did not immediately kill him, he staggered home rather than finishing the job. The verdict of suicide suited everyone, apparently including Vincent. But years later, Rene Secretan, then in his eighties, gave an interview in which he stated that it was indeed his gun that had shot Vincent, and, without giving specific details, said that the incident was a prank that had gone wrong.

Six months after Vincent’s death, Theo van Gogh died in a Paris asylum, of an incurable neuro-degenerative disease. He was 33 years old.

The Madness of Vincent’s Psychiatric Diagnoses

Just as armchair detectives love to speculate on the identity of Jack the Ripper, armchair psychiatrists are fascinated by Vincent van Gogh. Some 150 mental health professionals have considered his case in the 130-odd years since his death, and he has been given over 30 different diagnoses. It is of course hard to properly assess a historical figure – one cannot interview, observe or get to know him, and cannot use modern psychological or medical tests. There is written evidence available, from Vincent’s copious letters, eye witness accounts and the surviving case notes of the doctors who treated him. But Vincent was garrulous and self-absorbed to a fault, and his letters reveal everything and nothing. Stories by people who knew Vincent were generally told long after his death – while he was alive few paid him any attention. And his nineteenth century doctors wrote to other sets of assumptions and diagnostic categories to those of today, and used terminology differently. None of this however has stopped speculation about his confusing mental state.

Disorders that Vincent has been suggested to have experienced include bipolar disorder, as evidenced by his mood swings from despondency to excessive energy and enthusiasm. He has also been labelled as having borderline personality disorder, which may have been behind his difficulty with social relationships, holding down a job and his successful manipulation of his brother. In his letters, he spoke fluent ‘therapy speak’, showing understanding of his problems while being completely unable to change – another characteristic of borderline personality disorder. He was also almost certainly an alcoholic, freely admitting to consuming large quantities of absinthe and cognac to blunt his feelings and get him through the day. In addition, he may have been experiencing mental effects of syphillis infection.

His psychotic or delirious episodes were diagnosed by his doctors as being caused by temporal lobe epilepsy, and that diagnosis was held to be valid for many years, before falling out of favour more recently. Other possible explanations for them are schizophrenia, catatonia or an acute stress reaction fuelled by alcoholism and nutrient deficiency. Opinions differ as to whether the attacks were a more extreme continuation of his previous difficulties, or a new mental illness.

In 2016, the van Gogh museum held an Expert Symposium on Vincent’s mental state. Its conclusions were suitably guarded. Each of the above conditions were considered possible, without coming to a definite verdict. Could Vincent be diagnosed more accurately if he was alive today? Well perhaps, but psychiatry is still a notoriously imprecise business. Psychiatrists often disagree about a diagnosis even if they have the patient in front of them, with a battery of test results, and are generally stumped when asked what actually caused the person’s disorder. And there is also no guarantee that the person can be treated, let alone cured. As a commentator pointed out recently, only one psychiatric condition has been reliably pinned down in the past hundred years, in terms of identifying a reliable diagnosis, cause, treatment and cure, with the result that the condition in question has more or less been eradicated. It is a neurodegenerative condition named General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI), which before the development of antibiotics was a common (and fatal) consequence of tertiary syphilis – and ironically what killed Theo van Gogh.

But this is not the end of the story, for in the last few years, two new conditions have been invented that have eagerly been applied to Vincent’s case. These are the ‘neurodevelopmental’ conditions, Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Both appear to fit Vincent like a glove. His lifelong difficulties with social skills, empathy and making friends are characteristic of ASD, as is his single-minded pursuance of notions or activities. At the same time, his chaotic lifestyle, constant production of swiftly completed paintings (sometimes one a day) and inability to manage money tick the boxes for ADHD. Vincent has become a poster boy for neurodevelopmental disorders.

So that’s that then. But in reality, ASD and ADHD are hypotheses, not solidly identified medical entities, like GPI. Vincent fits their diagnostic criteria – but those criteria are so broad that so do a significant portion of the adult population. Actual neurological mechanisms underpinning the ‘symptoms’ of these ‘conditions’ have not been discovered. While trendy at the moment, it is quite possible that in the future ASD and/or ADHD will go out of fashion, and new diagnoses will be mooted to explain the enigma of Vincent van Gogh.

Or perhaps, the medicalisation of life will itself fall out of fashion, and like those who knew him in the nineteenth century people will simply shrug their shoulders and say, ‘C’est un fou’ – which roughly translates to, ‘He’s an arsehole’.

The Madness of Vincent’s Artistic Afterlife

We noted above that Vincent sold just one painting in his lifetime. When he died, his entire stock of paintings and drawings (some 860 oil paintings and over a thousand works on paper) came into Theo’s possession. Theo died just six months later, and his widow, Jo van Gogh Bonger was left with Vincent’s artworks. And that could have been that. Despite some positive attention given to those paintings that Theo had exhibited on Vincent’s behalf, there was no clear demand for his art, and apparently no one alive to promote it. Jo could have disposed of her cumbersome legacy, and Vincent would have been, at best, a brief footnote in art history.

But Jo had other ideas. She was an intelligent, cultivated, energetic and canny woman, whose role in rescuing Vincent’s art from obscurity has until recently been underplayed (when Jo and Theo’s son, V. W. van Gogh spoke at the opening of the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam in 1973, long after Jo’s death, he inexplicably did not mention his mother’s contribution). Jo began to act as an art dealer, to bring Vincent’s work to the market. She was apparently not motivated by money (she was comfortably off), but by her desire to provide a fitting memorial to Theo and Vincent. She cannily placed paintings on the market, and stoked up interest in Vincent’s work by accompanying them with extracts from his letters to Theo. Thus, as with Albert Aurier’s 1890 article, Vincent’s art was inextricably linked to his backstory. In 1905, Jo organised a major exhibition of Vincent’s work at the Stediljk museum in Amsterdam, and in 1914 she published her own translation of his letters to Theo. By 1920 the popular legend of Vincent van Gogh as a ‘mad genius’ was in place. It was reinforced by the publication in 1934 of Irving Stone’s novel ‘Lust for Life’, loosely based on Vincent’s life, and boosted further by the 1956 film of the book, starring all-American hero Kirk Douglas as a far too handsome and strapping Vincent.

So was Vincent a genius, mad or otherwise? He certainly adhered to Malcolm Gladwell’s dictum that genius requires at least 10,000 hours of practice (despite which his draughtsmanship remained imperfect), and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of art theory and contemporary artists from his extensive reading (Theo sometimes sought advice from Vincent when considering whether to promote an artist). His untutored mix of impressionism and Japanese styles, and his signature bright colours and wonky compositions are certainly appealing to popular taste, with or without his romanticised backstory. He has been credited as a key influence on the early-twentieth century European Expressionist movement, and on post-war ‘Neo-expressionist’ artists such as Anselm Keifer and Julian Schnabel.

At the same time, while Jo was trying to spark interest in Vincent’s art, not all art critics or dealers were equally impressed by his work. Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who brought the Impressionists to the attention of the public would not promote Vincent’s paintings (though to be fair, he disliked Cezanne and Gauguin as well). Roger Fry, the inventor of the term ’Post-impressionism’, included some of Vincent’s works in his seminal 1910 exhibition of the same name, but preferred the more formal and technically adept style of Cezanne and omitted Vincent from the 1912 follow-up exhibition. Later, the dealer Daniel Kahnweiler, who promoted Picasso and Cubism, censured a fellow dealer for advertising that he was interested in purchasing van Goghs, stating disdainfully that this was “the behaviour of an interior decorator, not an art dealer”. And in the 1950s, the influential American critic Clement Greenberg was uncomplimentary about Vincent’s ‘craft competence’, and questioned whether he could be regarded as a great artist.

By this time, however, critics such as Greenberg were on the wrong side of history. The popularity of Vincent’s art, fuelled by ‘Lust for Life’, had rendered all criticism null and void. Prices paid for Vincent’s paintings have risen exponentially, with the most expensive sold at auction to date being ‘Orchard with Cypresses’, painted at Arles in 1888, and fetching $117 million in November 2022. A canny commentator has noted that as the prices of Vincent’s paintings increased, critics became more positive about his art. Vincent van Gogh has become a genius by default.

Conclusion: The Madnesses of Vincent van Gogh – a Marriage of Art and Backstory

In 2025, the Turner Prize, the UK’s annual art prize, was won by Nnena Kalu, a 59-year old woman artist who is autistic (uncontroversially), learning disabled and has limited communication. Her art includes sculptures bound together with VHS tape and drawings of swirling, tornado-like shapes. Her victory was not universally approved of by the critics. Some saw little in her work that the other short-listed artists couldn’t do as well or better, and questioned the extent that the judges were influenced by her history of cognitive difficulties. Others came to Kalu’s defence, deeming her an original and exciting artist and a worthy winner and accusing the naysayers of prejudice against people with learning disabilities. As with Vincent, any sober consideration of her art was rendered moot by knowledge of her backstory.

So what can we learn from the life and afterlife of Vincent van Gogh? In my opinion, nothing. He was a one-off – a freak, if you will – a deeply disturbed and unsympathetic character with a unique and baffling array of psychiatric symptoms. He somehow taught himself to paint, and was lucky enough to have a brother and sister-in-law who devoted themselves to supporting him and promoting his art in life and after his death. The stratospheric popularity he has gained in the 130-odd years since his passing is the result of a unique coming-together of a highly romanticised version of his life story, and the garish, untutored output of his brush. We will never see his like again.

 

Key Reference

Naifeh S & Smith GW (2011) Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House  

Charles Saatchi: The Man Who Was British Contemporary Art

One Sunday afternoon in June 2013, a paparazzi photographer named Jean-Paul noticed the retired adman and art collector Charles Saatchi and his then wife, the TV personality Nigella Lawson, on a terrace of Scotts, a Mayfair restaurant. They were arguing, and Saatchi put his hand around Lawson’s neck, apparently throttling her, while she jerked back in alarm. Soon, Jean-Paul’s photographs were in newspapers and magazines worldwide. Saatchi urbanely referred to the incident as a “playful tiff” and insouciantly accepted a police caution. But soon after, he and Lawson were divorced.

It was a rare insight into the character of a notoriously private man. Saatchi rarely gives interviews and his spoken and written utterances are generally bland and uninformative. Despite a lifetime as a leading patron of contemporary art, he remains an enigma. He rarely appears at exhibitions in the gallery that bears his name, and fundamental questions about his relationship with the art that he collects remain unanswered. In particular: does he actually like the art that he buys, or is he just playing the market? And how good is he as a judge of contemporary art? In this article we will review Saatchi’s ‘career’ in contemporary art and explore these questions.

Where did the Money come from: Charles Saatchi, the Adman

Saatchi’s involvement with the world of art was financed by his career in advertising. He was born into a prominent Jewish family in Iraq in 1943. Soon after, his family moved to Britain to escape antisemitism. He founded his first advertising agency, CramerSaatchi, in 1965 and then Saatchi and Saatchi, with his brother Maurice in 1970. Through a combination of Charles’s creative understanding and Maurice’s business acumen, Saatchi and Saatchi became the largest advertising agency in the world. Its most famous advert was the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster campaign that may have helped the Conservative party win the 1979 General Election. But by the end of the 1980s, profits had fallen and an ill-judged attempt to buy the Midland Bank damaged the brothers’ reputations. They stepped down as joint Chief Executives of the company and in 1995 Maurice was ousted as Chairman. The brothers left to found a new agency, M&C Saatchi, which still operates today, though neither brother is still actively involved in the company. Saatchi and Saatchi also still exists, but the crown of the world’s largest agency has long been held by WPP, run until recently by Martin Sorrell, a former Saatchi and Saatchi finance director. His business career has left Charles extremely well off; at the time of their divorce, his and Lawson’s combined wealth was estimated at around £250 million.

Collecting Art in the 1970s and 1980s – and Selling it Too

Saatchi’s first art purchase was a piece by the American minimalist artist Sol LeWitt, in 1969. His taste in art during this period was heavily influenced by his first (American) wife, the late Doris Lockhart Saatchi, whom he met in 1967 and married in 1973. Doris had degrees in art and art history (Saatchi had left school with two O-Levels), and reputedly moved Charles’s collecting tastes on from old comics and jukeboxes. The couple accumulated a collection made up of works by British artists, along with a fine sample of American pop art and minimalism, and later ‘neo-expressionist’ works by the likes of Anselm Keifer and Julian Schnabel.

In 1985, the Saatchi Gallery opened in a disused paint factory in St John’s Wood, with exhibitions of artists collected by the Saatchi’s. At the time, Saatchi was unusual in Britain in showing his artworks to the public, rather than keeping them for himself, and his gallery hosted some of the first exhibitions in Britain of American contemporary art. The gallery moved in 2003 to part of the former County Hall building on the South Bank, then in 2008 to the Duke of York’s Headquarters building in Chelsea, where it remains.

At the end of the 1980s, Saatchi abruptly sold much of his art collection, for a considerable profit. This act created waves in the art world, and began the accusations, never dispelled, that he was effectively an art dealer rather than a collector, motivated primarily by money rather than by a love of art, and using his gallery as a shop window to attract future sales. In mitigation, it has been pointed out that at the time his advertising business was not thriving, and he needed funds to pay for his divorce from Doris. However, his actions left a sour taste with some of the artists whose work he offloaded. The art market is divided into the ‘primary market’, where artists sell their new work, usually to a dealer, and the ‘secondary market’, where dealers and collectors sell to each other. Artists do not get any direct benefit from sales in the secondary market (or bear the losses if their work drops in value), but it can affect the prices they achieve for their new work. Saatchi had been in the habit of buying individual artists’ works in volume, and so selling many pieces all at once flooded the market, lowering prices for the artists’ new pieces, and sending a signal to the market that he believed the artists’ popularity may have peaked. One artist whose work he sold, the abstract painter Sean Scully, remarked, "He's really a commodities broker who has been let loose on the art world. He claims to love art, but his is the love that the wolf has for the lamb." The Italian neo-expressionist painter Sandro Chia went further, claiming that Saatchi had ruined his career, an accusation that has been oft-repeated. In response, Saatchi and his supporters pointed out that he had only sold seven works by Chia, not enough to significantly affect his market, and opined that if Chia couldn’t attract good prices for his new work it was due to the diminishing quality of that work.

Today, Scully remains one of the most popular contemporary artists in the world in terms of auction sales, and even Chia is within the top 350. But Saatchi’s clear out started a habit that he has continued, with him buying work, often in bulk, displaying it in his gallery and selling it a few years later. He has been termed a ‘specullector’, somewhere between a dealer and a collector, an art world character that he more or less invented, but which has proliferated worldwide in recent years.

Saatchi and the Young British Artists (yBas)

In 1988, Saatchi was invited to view Freeze, an exhibition of work by art students studying at London’s Goldsmith’s College. It was highly unusual for students to put on their own art show, and unheard for such a show to be attended by the country’s foremost contemporary art collector (Saatchi), along with senior figures from the Royal Academy (Norman Rosenthal) and the Tate Gallery (Nicholas Serota). The exhibition was organised by 23-year-old Damien Hirst, and included work by sixteen students, including Hirst himself and others who would come to dominate British contemporary art in subsequent years, including Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Fiona Rae. Saatchi - and Doris, to whom he was still married - liked what they saw and started buying work by members of the group and other young artists, including Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Chris Ofili. Starting in 1992, Saatchi put on a series of exhibitions at his gallery entitled ‘Young British Artists’ (subsequently abbreviated to ‘yBas’). The centrepiece of the first exhibition was Hirst’s The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, otherwise known as ‘The Shark’, the construction of which was funded by the Saatchis, who paid Hirst £50,000 for it.

The yBas became fixtures on the list of nominees for the Turner Prize and it was won by Saatchi-supported artists Rachel Whiteread (1993), Damien Hirst (1995); Gillian Wearing (1997) and Chris Ofili (1998). But the yBas’ fame did not really spread beyond the world of contemporary art until an exhibition staged at the august Royal Academy in 1997. Entitled Sensation, it was arranged by Norman Rosenthal and comprised works by yBas and other contemporary artists from Saatchi’s collection. The exhibition achieved notoriety for the controversial – and confrontational – nature of some of the works, such Hirst’s A Thousand Years, which comprised thousands of flies feasting on a rotting cow’s head; Jake and Dinos Chapman’s disturbing mannequins of children with displaced sexual organs and – especially – Marcus Harvey’s huge painting Myra, a depiction of a familiar police photo of Moors Murderer Myra Hindley, made out of hundreds of children’s handprints. The yBa formula – an attention-grabbing mix of pop art and conceptualism, reinforced by the outsized personalities of figures such as Hirst, Emin and Lucas, who combined the attitudes and behaviour of 70s punk rock with 80s ‘Loadsamoney’ culture, caught the popular imagination. Outrage in the popular media fuelled the fire, and the public visited the exhibition in droves - some 300,000 during its run. The yBas became – briefly – as feted as the contemporary Britpop bands (Oasis, Blur, Pulp etc) as symbols of ‘Cool Britannia’. The impact of The Shark and other yBa pieces has been credited by the critic Waldermar Janusek with providing the impetus for the establishment of Tate Modern, in 2000.

Sensation has been compared in its impact on the contemporary art world to the 1863 Salon des Refuses that saw the first stirrings of the Impressionist movement. But while the Salon des Refuses marked a beginning, Sensation was the beginning of the end for the yBas, who were felt to have already produced their best work. Certainly Saatchi himself thought so and, as we will see, was moving on to sponsoring other groups of artists. In 1998, Saatchi sold 130 works (5% of his collection) at auction, including pieces by Hirst, Whiteread, Lucas and Ofili, the total sale generating £1.6 million, which Saatchi said would be used to finance bursaries for art students. Subsequently, Saatchi sold many other yBa works. In 2003, Hirst bought twelve works back from Saatchi for much more than Saatchi originally paid him, and in 2005 Saatchi sold ‘the Shark’ to an American collector for around £7 million (remember he originally paid Hirst £50,000 to make it). In 2004, Saatchi let it be known that in his view, only Hirst out of the yBas would still be regarded as of lasting influence in ten years time.

Also in 2004, a huge fire at a warehouse rented by the art storage firm Momart destroyed some 100 artworks owned by Saatchi, including iconic yBa pieces such as Tracey Emin’s Everyone I have Ever Slept With, a tent embroidered with their names, and the Chapman brothers’ installation Hell. Saatchi was said to be ‘devastated’, but the reaction of the popular press was of glee and schadenfreude, with commentators opining that the lost works were so unskilfully made that they could easily be reproduced, and that any sense of loss that Saatchi felt would be swiftly assuaged by a substantial compensation cheque.

So did Saatchi cynically nurture the yBas during the 1990s so that he could profit from their notoriety? Certainly, his actions were in keeping with the ‘specullector’ model that he had developed in the 1980s. Protestations that his sales were to fund his gallery and to support new artists were met with scepticism. Inevitably he fell out with some of the yBa artists; in 2002 Hirst remarked, "I'm not Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey...He only recognises art with his wallet.” It is often said that Saatchi the Adman was attracted to the yBas as their more striking works looked like advertisements, eye catching images carrying simple messages, and regarded them in the same way, to be discarded once their impact had been made. Certainly, one of Saatchi and Saatchi’s most iconic adverts, the photograph of a ‘pregnant man’, made in 1970 for a health education campaign, could easily have been repackaged as a yBa artwork.

On the other hand, Saatchi’s involvement with the yBas did not really follow a clearly planned route. It is said that at first Saatchi was not particularly impressed by the original Freeze exhibition, and it was Doris who encouraged him to engage with Hirst and others. He did not dream up the term ‘Young British Artists’ (or ‘yBas’), it is attributed to the writer Michael Corris. If Saatchi seemed to be the only collector buying yBa art in the 1990s, it was largely because at the time he effectively was the market for contemporary British art – no one else in the UK was buying on anything like his scale, so Saatchi set the market by default. Even the Sensation exhibition was a lucky accident; Norman Rosenthal had a gap in his schedule, and at short notice (in art world terms) Saatchi offered to fill the gap with works from his collection, reputedly making some hasty last-minute purchases to bulk up the exhibits. While the yBas attracted all the headlines, they actually only made up around half of the 42 artists shown at Sensation.

And so, while Saatchi is sometimes credited with ‘discovering’ and controlling the careers of the yBas, the reality is more nuanced, with Saatchi’s contributions being sometimes more seat-of-the-pants than ruthlessly focused. It seems improbable that world-class self-promoters such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin would not have succeeded in the art world without Saatchi. No yBa careers were ruined by Saatchi selling their work. And twenty years on, Saatchi’s 2004 claim that only Hirst would be regarded as consequential in ten years time has proven to be wide of the mark. Today, while Hirst is fabulously rich, his artistic reputation is at a low ebb, while other yBas, such as Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville and, yes, Tracey Emin achieve both high prices for their work and continuing critical plaudits.

After the yBas – Diminishing Returns?

In 1998-9, while the afterglow of Sensation was still shining, and iconic yBa works such as Tracey Emin’s My Bed had only just been created, Saatchi held two exhibitions in his gallery of rather different young artists. The exhibitions were put on under the title ‘Neurotic Realism’, a term apparently coined by Saatchi himself, and included artists in their 20s or 30s, mostly British or working in the UK (and mostly male). A couple (Martin Maloney and Paul Davies) had been included in Sensation, but were not connected with the yBas; the others were essentially unknowns.

And mostly remained so. If ‘Neurotic Realism’ was Saatchi’s attempt to invent a new popular art movement to succeed the yBas, it had all the impact of a Sinclair C5. Reviews of the shows were generally scathing, with critics finding the label amorphous and confusing and many of the individual artists second-rate (though two artists involved in the shows were subsequently nominated for the Turner Prize: Tomoko Takahashi in 2000 and Dexter Dalwood in 2010). The public stayed away. If, in showbiz terms, the yBas and Sensation was a Hit, ‘Neurotic Realism’ was a resounding Miss.

The ‘Neurotic Realism’ label was dropped quicker than a misfiring advertising campaign, but the exhibitions set a pattern for subsequent shows at the Saatchi gallery. Saatchi specialised in buying and displaying works by young artists, predominantly in traditional media (painting, sculpture, some photography), and with little pure conceptualism. While some of the photographers he supported explored social issues, there were few overtly political works (as one might expect from a man who reputedly helped Margaret Thatcher win an election). Images he favoured tended to be bright and immediate. His exhibitions leaned towards ‘art for art’s sake’, and there was less of a shock factor than previously, although in 2004 the press was stirred up by his inclusion of paintings by Stella Vine of heroin victim Rachel Whitear and an unflattering portrayal of Princess Diana. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century his gallery put on a series of exhibitions of ‘new’ British artists, picked up by Saatchi at degree shows and trade fairs. Stories abounded of Saatchi turning up at degree shows and buying all the works exhibited by an artist; sometimes paying full price and sometimes ruthlessly beating the hapless student down, apparently with little rhyme or reason behind his purchases. It was sometimes said that some young artists deliberately made works in ‘Saatchi style’ to try to attract his interest.

Few of the young artists he promoted have had stellar careers, and the feeling among some commentators was that Saatchi was continually searching for the ‘next big thing’ to cement his reputation as a creator of art trends. In 2009, he put his name to (but characteristically didn’t appear in) a television series called School of Saatchi, a reality show that aimed to find a new great young British artist (spoiler alert: it didn’t). He also bought, and put on shows of young artists from other countries: America, India and China. The most successful exhibition at the Saatchi gallery in terms of visitor numbers was 2008’s ‘The Revolution Continues, New Art from China’, which had 500,000 visitors (beating Sensation’s 300,000), but which included artists who were already becoming established in China and worldwide. Do I like ‘Saatchi style’ art? Not really, it is all a bit gaudy and trite for my taste; the sort of pictures one might see on the walls of a trendy hotel or restaurant. Easy on the eye but needing no more than a few seconds scrutiny.

Saatchi continued his ‘specullecting’ by regularly selling works after he had shown them. Following a well-received 2005 show called ‘The Triumph of Painting’, which featured established artists such as Martin Kipperberger, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, Saatchi auctioned many of the paintings, and a work entitled The White Canoe, by the Scottish painter Peter Doig, was bought by a Georgian oligarch for £6 million, far more than Saatchi had originally paid for it. The sale sparked increased interest in Doig’s work, which now regularly goes for seven-figure sums in the secondary market, although the artist ruefully reflects that he doesn’t see any of the proceeds. Saatchi could not claim to have ‘discovered’ Doig – he had won the Turner prize back in 1994 – and this sale possibly reflected good luck more than an expert eye for the market.

The relationship between Saatchi’s gallery and London’s other major venue for contemporary art, Tate Modern, has not always run smooth. Tate Modern opened in 2000, and in 2003, Saatchi moved his gallery from the wilds of St John’s Wood to the former County Hall building on the South Bank. It was now a short distance from the new museum, a move some commentators interpreted as provocative. In 2004, Saatchi let it be known that he had spoken to the Tate’s Director, Nicholas Serota, about the possibility of donating his collection to Tate Modern, to be displayed in a then-unused area of the building known as the Tanks. Serota apparently rebuffed the proposal, citing the cost of converting the Tanks, and doubtless concerned about the degree of influence that Saatchi would expect to wield. Time has demonstrated also that the Tate’s priorities are not those of Saatchi, with the former favouring art with a strong theoretical base and a social or political message (latterly embracing ‘woke’ themes), and being less keen than Saatchi on works that are visually striking.

In 2010, Saatchi announced that he was donating his gallery and entire collection, which at the time had an estimated value of £30 million, to the Nation. He anticipated that this offer would be gratefully received by the Arts Council, and indeed by the Tate. However, both those bodies sat on their hands, and the donation never materialised. While the details of the negotiations were not made public, there was once again suspicion as to Saatchi’s motives – did he want to rid himself of the expense of running his gallery and would he want to influence which of his artworks were shown and how? The proposal came to nothing, and in 2019 the management of the Saatchi gallery was taken on by a charitable Trust. Also in 2010,Saatchi founded ‘Saatchi Online’ (now ‘Saatchi Art’), an online platform for artists and the public to sell and buy art (all Saatchi’s ventures include his name, which may be vanity, but as an Adman, Saatchi understands the power of brands).

In 2024, Saatchi, now 81, sent three-quarters of his art collection, some 500 pieces, for sale by public auction through the online dealer Artsy. The proceeds were donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Typically, Saatchi did not explain why he had chosen to benefit this charity. The total proceeds of the sale were some £250,000, or an average of £500 per piece. Doubtless, Saatchi kept his more valuable artworks out of the auction, but it was a far cry from the £30 million his collection had once been worth. Scrolling through the images of the sale works online, it was notable how many of his purchases since the yBas have been of paintings that were visually impactful but by artists with small followings and low value.

Conclusion: Charles Saatchi – A Rich Man who likes a Flutter?

One day in 2004, shortly before the opening at his gallery of one of his many exhibitions of new young artists, Saatchi had a chance meeting with the critic Adrian Searle. Years of frustration came out as Saatchi fumed, "Let me write your review for you. I'm a cunt, this place is shit, and the artists I show are all fucked. Will that do for you?"

Searle’s subsequent review of the exhibition said much the same thing, though in 1,500 words rather than 15. Saatchi has never been a darling of the critics, who like to think that their motives are more pure, and their taste more acute than his. And by writing this article, I am setting myself up as a critic, passing judgement on Saatchi and his decades in the contemporary art world. Now he is in his eighties, Saatchi’s ‘career’ in art is largely behind him. He is no longer the only British patron of contemporary art, or even the richest. His collection has largely been sold off and his gallery is under new management. So what conclusions can I reach?

Well, there is no doubt that for several decades, Saatchi was the foremost patron of contemporary art in Britain, and a revolutionary figure in the art world. In the 1980s, he introduced leading American artists to this country, and was the only collector in Britain showing contemporary art in his own gallery. In the 1990s, he was midwife to the yBas, the most impactful contemporary art movement that the country has seen. He created the ‘specullector’ model of art patronage, and his example has subsequently been followed by art patrons worldwide.

Was he a great judge of art? His record of buying and exhibiting art in the years since Sensation would suggest not. Many of the shows of new artists that took place at the Saatchi gallery received lukewarm reviews. If he hoped to discover the ‘next big thing’ he was disappointed (although no one else has found the ‘next big thing’ either). But perhaps that was never the point.

Saatchi’s public utterances have been few and far between, and are generally dismissed as trite and disingenuous. He once said to an interviewer, "There's nothing complicated about me. There are no hidden depths. As Frank Stella said about minimalism, what you see is what you see." But perhaps he speaks more candidly about himself than he is given credit for. Talking to the same interviewer about his purchasing strategy, he said, I buy new art, and 90% of the art I buy will probably be worthless in 10 years' time to anyone except me. I don't know how much of the art I like is significant; I hope some of it is. Who knows what will last?...I do it for the pleasure of putting on shows”.

And perhaps that’s it. Perhaps Saatchi wasn’t trying to find the next big thing, he was just buying new art – lots of it – and giving young artists a chance. As we have seen, there was a ‘Saatchi style’ – brash, immediate, eye-catching, largely non-political, that his exhibitions after Sensation largely stuck to. Saatchi may (or may not) have known a lot about art, but he knew what he liked.

Similarly, perhaps there was less to Saatchi’s ‘specullecting’ than conspiracy theorists think. In 2009 he published a typically slight book titled, ‘My name is Charles and I’m an Artoholic’. But perhaps the (rather crass) title has significance – maybe Saatchi was addicted to buying art (Damien Hirst once said that he was “addicted to shopping”). At the end of the day, Saatchi was a rich man with an absorbing hobby – and rich men often like a flutter. And so, along with supporting young artists, Saatchi sometimes indulged himself by playing the market.

Let us leave the last word to Saatchi himself. In a 2009 interview, he summed up his thirty years’ involvement with contemporary art:

“I buy art that I like. I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art….What matters and survives is the art”.

“I’ve Lost My Spotted Cow” – In Search of English Folk Song, Part One: From the Beginning to the 1960s

 

“The Spotted Cow” is number 956 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It is included in nineteenth and early twentieth century books of English traditional songs that were collected by musicologists who were concerned that they were dying out. It first appeared on a record by the Norfolk folk singer Harry Cox that was released in 1966, and then on a record by the Copper Family of Rottingdean in Sussex in 1971. In both cases it was sung unaccompanied. There are many more recordings, in a range of instrumental arrangements. I first heard it on Steeleye Span’s 1972 record Below the Salt, played on electric instruments, and I sing it myself from time to time. On the face of it, “The Spotted Cow” is a classic traditional song of rural lust, with the cow in question having a double meaning. But the scholar and folk singer A. L. Lloyd suggested that it was actually written in the early eighteenth century by a London hack writer for performance at entertainments in the famously louche Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, before being taken up elsewhere.

And that, in a nutshell, is English folk song. Throwaway ditties from the nineteenth century or earlier that caught the imagination of generations of singers in pubs and social gatherings and were passed on and on until eventually being written down by earnest middle class antiquarians and subsequently recorded by modern professional folk musicians – and kept in the mix by rank amateurs such as myself. The unknown songwriter who first penned it would doubtless by astonished to learn that his creation is still being been sung, catalogued, rearranged and subjected to scholarly analysis three hundred years later. Building on this example, in a brace of articles I undertake the not inconsiderable task of giving an overview of English folk song, its history and its peaks and troughs of popularity.

What is English Folk Song?

Much ink has been spilt on this question, not helped by the term being used for two different genres of song. The term originally referred to ‘traditional’ songs such as “Spotted Cow”, that were first written by unknown songwriters in the nineteenth century or earlier, and which became the music of the mainly rural labouring classes. They were passed orally from singer to singer before being ‘collected’ in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by middle class dilettantes who were seeking to prevent them from being lost to industrialisation and urbanisation. Then in the second half of the twentieth century, the term began to be applied to contemporary songs written and performed by young ‘singer-songwriters’, usually accompanying themselves on guitars or similar instruments, and often on social or political themes, overwhelmingly from a left-wing standpoint. The ‘folk revival’ that began in the 1950s embraced both genres of song, and then diversified in terms of subject matter, arrangements, instrumentation and playing styles. Today, there is a bewildering diversity of songs and accompaniments that come under the broad banner of folk, and the term has to be applied pragmatically. So, folk songs are labelled as such if they are performed in folk clubs or at folk festivals, by musicians who identify as folk singers; or which appear on records in the ‘folk music’ section of the few remaining record shops, and on ‘folk music’ playlists produced by music streaming companies. As we will see, this means that a lot of artists or songs today get categorised as folk that would never have been recognised as such by early folk pioneers. But diversity has won the day – as the eminent folk singer Eliza Carthy puts it, “a folk song is any song that can be sung in a pub”.

English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh Folk Music Compared

The nations of the British Isles each have their own folk music, but differ in the part that it plays in their culture and national life. In Scotland and Ireland, folk music has long been an integral part of national identity. Scottish traditional songs began to be collected and recorded in the early eighteenth century, much earlier than in England, and poets, in particular Rabbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott used traditional themes in their own works. In the twentieth century, ‘modern’ folk songs, such as ‘Flower of Scotland’, written by Roy Williamson of the Corries, have reached far beyond the folk world. Scotland and Ireland also have rich stores of traditional instrumental music, that have transcended their origins as tunes for dancing. ‘Sessions’, where folk musicians get together to play tunes are common in pubs and community centres across both countries.

In England, by contrast, traditional folk music has rarely been mainstream. Most peoples’ knowledge of English folk song extends no further than the recollection of being in a class of children singing sanitised lyrics in primary school, accompanied by the music teacher on her piano. English traditional songs are regarded as exotic things, performed by men with serious beards and their fingers in their ears. Similarly, English traditional instrumental music is only played to accompany garishly clad morris dancers and the like. English pop and rock bands that include elements of traditional music are few and far between, and have a specialist following, while in Scotland, bands like Runrig and Skerryvore attract large mainstream audiences.

Why is traditional music a minority pursuit in England, but widespread in Scotland and Ireland? I’d hazard three reasons. First, Scots and Irish have long expressed their national identity through traditional songs, that often have a patriotic air, or otherwise celebrate their countries history (not to mention their dislike of English high-handedness). Second, traditional instrumental music has a central place in Scottish and Irish culture, with ‘sessions’ an integral part of musical life, while in England it has never really transcended its country dance roots. And third, Scottish and Irish music, well, sounds better. Their melodies and tunes are more attractive or foot tapping, their lyrics are more meaningful and poignant and their range of instruments and arrangements make the music more interesting. English folk songs, by contrast, are often pedantic, and can sound too much like hymns (it is perhaps no coincidence that the only traditional English songs to become widely known are Christmas carols). English dance music is four-square and plodding compared to the jigs and reels of Scotland and Ireland (by the way, in this article I will concentrate on English folk song rather than folk dance, for the simple reason that I bloody hate dancing). Of course, there are some great songs and tunes that have come out of the English tradition – I wouldn’t be writing about it if there weren’t. But to me most English traditional music lacks the immediacy, emotional thrust and popular appeal of the best Scottish and Irish music, and therefore remains a minority pursuit.

The comedian Billy Connolly, who began his career in folk clubs in the 1960s, had his own take on the difference between Scottish and English folk:

“The Scottish clubs liked entertainers and English clubs liked educators. They seemed to like to be educated by the traditional unaccompanied songs. It was like Brussels sprouts, supposed to be good for you”.

What of Welsh traditional music? It has tended to have a low profile, often hidden behind the Welsh language, and subsumed within the pageantry of the Eisteddfod. Welsh musical life has also focused more on the many male voice choirs that are a distinctive part of the nation’s identity. There are singers and musicians who explore Welsh traditional music, in both Welsh and English, but as in England, Welsh folk music is not mainstream.

Origins and Collectors

The fine autobiographical novel ‘Lark Rise to Candelford’ is a fictionalised account of author Flora Thompson’s childhood in a rural Oxfordshire community in the 1880s. In it she describes a typical evening in the village pub, the ‘Wagon and Horses’. The men of the village, after a hard day’s labour in the cornfields, would gather in the pub to talk, smoke and drink a half pint of beer – all that their meagre wage would afford them. Women and children were of course excluded. The evenings would often end with a singaround, with each contributing a song, ‘to oblige’. Thompson provides the lyrics of some of the traditional folk songs that resounded through the cosy taproom. There were chorus songs like ‘The Barleymow’ (Roud index number 944), a drinking song that lasted as long as the singers wanted it to. ‘King Arthur’ (Roud 130) was another chorus song; the version Thompson includes actually came from a mid-nineteenth century collection of nursery rhymes. The narrator of ‘My father’s a hedger and ditcher’ (Roud 846) is a woman complaining that no one wants to marry her; the villager who sang it in the pub was a bachelor. The older men present would sing lengthy ancient ballads such as ‘Lord Lovell’ (Roud 48; Child 75) or ‘The Outlandish Knight’ (Roud 21; Child 4 – I will explain these numbers later, suffice to say they designate that the songs have all been collected and catalogued). The songs would have been sung unaccompanied – none of the men could play instruments, still less come up with appropriate arrangements.

As these are all traditional songs, by definition we don’t know who wrote them, but someone must have. Doubtless, some had their origins in rural communities, composed by noted singers and passed on down the generations. Others, like ‘The Spotted Cow’ mentioned earlier, probably came from hack songwriters in towns and cities, who were in effect parodying rural life. As such, they were related to ‘Broadside Ballads’. These were songs, often on contemporary themes, that were written by professional songwriters, published on printed posters and sold in London and other towns for performance at local entertainments. Broadside ballads shared subject matter (crime, lust, current affairs, war, etc) and tunes with folk songs of unknown provenance, and today tend to be lumped together with them as ‘traditional songs’.

Flora Thompson’s account of the singarounds at the ‘Wagon and Horses’ is probably a fairly typical example of how folk songs were performed and disseminated when England was a largely rural nation. But it also showed that change was coming, for it was the older men who sang the traditional songs – the young men scorned them and preferred the contemporary popular songs emanating from the Music Halls. By the 1880s, Britain was becoming an urbanised nation, and the culture and tastes of the cities were spreading into the countryside. Traditional song was in danger of dying out.

A village in rural Oxfordshire, not far from where Flora Thompson witnessed (from outside) a singaround at the 'Wagon and Horses'

Enter the intrepid band of folk song collectors - men (and some women) who travelled the country to visit rural communities and write down songs from local singers. Between the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many collections of traditional songs were published, having been collected by the likes of Lucy Broadwood, Alfred Williams, Maud Karpeles and others. Classical composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger and George Butterworth also collected traditional songs, and included their tunes and lyrics in their own compositions. But the doyen of collectors was Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), who collected over 5,000 songs and tunes, was a leading light in the nascent English Folk Song Society and founded the English Folk Dance Society (they later merged into the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS)).

Between them, the pioneer collectors gathered and wrote down thousands of songs, and today’s practitioners would have little to perform without their efforts. However, it is possible to criticise their approach to collecting. They could be selective in what they wrote down, discarding songs that they deemed inappropriate and sometimes altering lyrics. They concentrated on rural areas, ignoring the songs coming from industrial towns and mining areas. They were sometimes not very interested in the singers, and failed to include information about their backgrounds, or the context of their songs. Some singers may well have been selective in what they passed on to the middle class, and sometimes rather high-handed collectors. And there was a lack of diversity, with songs by women and people of colour being under-represented. We will probably never be able to retrieve what the early collectors ignored or discarded – but there are still thousands of songs for modern performers to explore.

That exploratory work has been made easier by efforts made to catalogue and categorise traditional songs. An early attempt was made in the 1880s by the American academic Francis Child, who published a collection of 305 English and Scottish ballads (narrative songs that tell a story), giving each a number – we have noted the ‘Child numbers’ of a couple of songs above. In recent years, a professional librarian, amateur folklorist and glorious obsessive named Steve Roud has catalogued and numbered nearly 25,000 folk songs, including their origins, variants and recordings. The ‘Roud Index’, again mentioned above, is today hosted online by the EFDSS and is available for all to search.

The efforts of the early song collectors may have saved many songs from being lost, but did not significantly raise the profile of English folk music. As we have seen, a few songs and tunes were taken up by classical composers, or by school teachers, often in sanitised versions (a classic example is the song ‘No John, no’ (Roud 146), which was originally much saucier than the bland version I remember singing at primary school). But in general, folk songs did not catch the popular imagination, and most were left to gather dust in the archives of the EFDSS.

The Beginnings of the Post-War Folk Revival

In the early 1950s, interest in folk music began to increase, through the efforts of a new generation of collectors, who could use recording equipment, and disseminate their discoveries through radio and television. Early leading lights in this revival were Peter Kennedy, whose father Douglas had followed Cecil Sharp as head of the EFDSS, and Alan Lomax, an American musicologist and song collector who came to Europe to escape the McCarthy witch hunt years. They realised that there were still some traditional singers scattered around the English countryside and recorded them on early reel-to-reel tapes. Singers such as Harry Cox and Walter Pardon, both from Norfolk, and the Copper family of Rottingdean in East Sussex, a long-standing folk music family who sang in harmony, became minor celebrities through appearing on the BBC. In 1953, Lomax hosted a television series named ‘Songhunter’, which featured performances from folk musicians from a number of traditions. The programmes were broadcast live, which troubled his producer, a young man named David Attenborough, who was concerned that the amateur musicians might be overwhelmed by the occasion, and sought ways of putting them at ease. A memo exists in which Attenborough requests that beer be made available in the studio while the Copper Family were playing, to improve their performance – the mark of a young man of rare insight and initiative, who should go far!

A young David Attenborough requests beer to lubricate the voices of the Copper Family

In the late 1950s, Kennedy and Lomax compiled a monumental series of L.P.s of their field recordings titled ‘The Folk Songs of Britain’. Sadly, however, Kennedy made the decision to maximise the number of singers featured, meaning that many songs were represented by brief extracts, sometimes from multiple performers. This approach drastically reduced the records’ enjoyment as a listening experience.

Peter Kennedy and Alan Lomax's monumental series of records of British folk songs. I bought the lot in the early 1970s, but found them such hard going that most of the discs have never been played. Any offers?

Singer Songwriters Arrive from America

We noted earlier that the second meaning of ‘folk song’ refers to newly composed songs, often on social or political themes, and generally sung accompanied by a guitar or other acoustic instruments. This genre of music had its roots in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States, where the guitar and banjo became the instruments of choice for black blues composers and singers, and later for white writers and performers such as Woody Guthrie. In the 1950s many American blues and folk musicians, both black and white, came to Britain for concert tours, including the Weavers, whose main songwriter was Pete Seeger (a Harvard drop-out whose songs included ‘If I had a hammer’ and ‘Where have all the flowers gone’), and the folk-blues artists Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. Young British performers flocked to their concerts, and started writing their own ‘folk songs’. In the mid 1950s, a uniquely British genre of music named ‘skiffle’ became briefly prominent. This was a guitar-based amalgam of American-style folk-blues and trad jazz, whose leading figure, Lonnie Donegan, had a chart hit with an arrangement of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’. Skiffle was soon replaced by rock and roll as the popular music of young Britons, but it brought the guitar to Britain and helped kickstart the British contemporary folk movement.

An early English advocate of the guitar in folk music was an academic physicist named Dr. John Hasted. Today largely forgotten, in the 1950s he was a leading light in skiffle and the folk revival, as a collector and disseminator of songs, and as a performer.

The Rise of the Folk Clubs

Traditional and contemporary folk music came together, sometimes uneasily, in the folk clubs that proliferated across the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a grassroots movement, organised by amateur volunteers, who took over rooms in coffee bars, pubs, parish halls and the like so that young people could sing and listen to folk songs. By the late 1960s, it is estimated that there were over 300 folk clubs in London alone. There were (and still are) three types of folk club. Some were ‘concert clubs’, that had a programme of paid professional, or semi-professional performers, with support coming from ‘residents’, regular attendees of a high standard who acted as warm-ups to the main act. Other clubs held ‘singers nights’, where anyone could take the stage as a ‘floor singer’ to sing a couple of songs. Sometimes clubs swapped roles, with concert clubs holding occasional singers nights, and singers clubs sometimes booking a paid performer. The third, less formal type of club held ‘singarounds’, where attendees sat in a circle and took turns to sing a song. Many clubs embraced both traditional and contemporary folk music, and allowed a range of instruments, but some clubs insisted on traditional songs only – and some of these required participants to sing unaccompanied.

In the early 1960s, the grassroots nature of folk clubs extended to the lives of the young professional performers. Most started off as floor singers, taking their turn at singers’ nights, attracting the attention of the club organiser and being booked for a concert night. Their careers were furthered by word of mouth; there were fewer top class performers than clubs looking to book them and good artists could quickly find themselves with a full diary. Many travelled from club to club by train (a surprising number of leading folk musicians can’t drive), or hitch-hiked, and often slept on the settees of club organisers.

Young English artists started to make their mark, some concentrating on traditional song, others writing their own material. Leading traditional singers included Shirley Collins, who in the 1950s assisted Alan Lomax with collecting songs (and became his lover); Oxford-educated June Tabor, and Martin Carthy, who embraced guitar accompaniment as well as a creative approach to arranging traditional songs. Groups of harmony singers built on the legacy of the Copper family, including the Watersons from North Yorkshire (later joined by Martin Carthy when he married Norma Waterson) and the Young Tradition, whose roof-raising approach presaged the development of folk-rock in the late 1960s. Young traditional singers generally had very different backgrounds to the countrymen and women whose songs they sang – Martin Carthy was raised in Hampstead and before dropping out of education to pursue music was destined to read classics at university, while June Tabor represented her Oxford college in University Challenge.

June Tabor on University Challenge, 1968

Early folk songwriters included Sidney Carter (who wrote ‘Lord of the Dance’); Cyril Tawney, a former submariner who specialised in songs of the sea, and Ian Campbell, who led a Weavers-style acoustic band and ran a folk club in Birmingham (his song ‘The Sun is Burning’ was covered by Simon and Garfunkel). Another popular group was the Spinners, from Liverpool, who also ran their own club. Then came the likes of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, who took guitar playing to a new level and later came together in Pentangle, Ralph McTell, Harvey Andrews and Robin and Barry Dransfield. And despite Billy Connolly’s ‘Brussels sprouts’ jibe, there were English entertainers who combined songs with comedy, such as Mike Harding, Tony Capstick and Richard Digance. Scottish and Irish artists of course also visited England (and vice versa), including Nigel Denver, Alex Campbell, John Martyn, Christy Moore and...Donovan! In practice, it was of course difficult to distinguish English contemporary singer-songwriters from Scottish, Irish and Welsh. There were some differences in subject matter (and accents), but little in style, and I will not be precious by excluding them from this account.

American singer-songwriters also played English folk clubs in the early 1960s. Bob Dylan visited briefly in 1962, then returned in 1964 as a superstar playing concert halls. Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Jackson C. Frank also did the rounds. In 1964, Paul Simon toured British folk clubs, stole ‘Scarborough Fair’ from Martin Carthy and supposedly wrote ‘Homeward Bound’ on Widnes railway station (I’ve never understood why Widnes celebrates that song, as it is plain from the lyrics that Simon hated Britain in general and Widnes in particular).

The Folk Police

The folk revival of the 1960s was a youth movement, with folk briefly overtaking modern jazz as the music of students and like-mined young people, before itself being sidelined by rock music in the 1970s. But the early years of the revival were dominated by two older performers: the forty-something Ewan McColl and the fifty-something A. L. (Bert) Lloyd, both (like Alan Lomax) avowed communists. Between them, they had an outsized influence on the shape and direction of the English folk song revival.

A.L. Lloyd (1908-1982) had street credibility in the folk world, for as a young man he had worked on an Australian sheep farm and crewed on an Antarctic whaling ship, before settling in London as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. He was a self-taught musicologist (like his successor Steve Roud) and became an authority on the traditional music of Britain, Australia and Europe. He also became a noted singer, and from the 1950s his folk club appearances and records set the standard for the performance of traditional songs. He also acted as musical director for Topic Records, the leading folk label, nurturing the careers of many young artists.

Ewan McColl (1915-1989) eked out a career as an actor and playwright in left-wing theatre groups, before being introduced to traditional music in the 1950s by Alan Lomax. He formed a working, and romantic partnership with Peggy Seeger, younger half-sister of Pete Seeger (she later became his third wife), and they founded one of England’s first folk clubs, the London-based Ballads and Blues club, which later became the Singers club. Like Lloyd, McColl sang and recorded traditional songs (they made several albums together, though generally did not sing together). Listening to their albums from the 1950s and early 1960s today is a rather ennervating experience, as the recordings were stark and simple and the arrangements sparse compared to today’s complex and heavily produced styles. Both either sang unaccompanied, or with minimal instrumentation: in Lloyd’s case often just Alf Edwards’s concertina and for McColl, Peggy Seeger’s banjo.

Unlike Lloyd, McColl also wrote songs, completing over 300 in all. His best known compositions were ‘Dirty Old Town’, ‘The Shoals of Herring’, ‘The Manchester Rambler’ and ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, a love song that he wrote for Peggy, which became a chart hit in 1972 for Roberta Flack.

Bert Lloyd was a clubbable, open-minded personality, who carried his deep knowledge of folk music lightly and encouraged young performers such as the Watersons to find their own approach to traditional song. He was also not above occasionally altering the lyrics of traditional songs to make them sound better. Ewan McColl, by contrast, was opinionated and dogmatic, and inclined to hold that there was a ‘right’ and a ’wrong’ way to perform (his way was right, of course). He ruffled many feathers at the Singers club by insisting that performers only sang songs from the part of the country (or world) that they came from, a rule that many found over-restrictive. He was supported in this policy by Peggy Seeger, who later in life defended it strongly, believing that without it performers would all gravitate towards American folk music, and British music would be lost (other leading clubs did not seem to find this a problem). McColl himself was in a good position to break his own rule, as he had been born James Henry Miller in Salford, the son of Scottish parents, and he airily performed and recorded both English and Scottish songs.

Some of the abiding stereotypes of English folk can be traced back to Ewan McColl. The roots of the “beards and fingers in the ear” jibe can be seen in the photograph reproduced below. The beard is unmistakeable (he wore one all his life), but he is not actually putting his finger in his ear; like many who sang unaccompanied, he cupped his hand over his ear, so that he could hear himself better and help keep in tune. However, many outside the folk scene saw it as an affectation. The reputation of the folk world as one of priggishness and cliquishness can also be traced to McColl and Seeger’s ban on ‘foreign songs’ and McColl’s insistence that there was a ‘right’ way to sing folk songs. In the 1960s, he and Seeger set up a clique (there is no other word for it) called the ‘Critics Group’, which was a small group of performers approved by the couple who were invited to their house in Beckenham to share songs – and be lectured to by McColl. Membership of the Critics Group was an honour afforded to few, and naturally caused resentment among those excluded from the inner sanctum.

The face that launched a thousand folk stereotypes. Ewan McColl with beard and his finger in over his ear

McColl and Seeger weren’t the only ones who were felt to take folk song too seriously. As we have mentioned, other clubs had an exclusive policy, insisting on traditional unaccompanied songs only. Some in the folk world believed that traditional songs should only be performed with the lyrics, tunes and style of the original source singers. The musician and writer Bob Pegg likened this approach to butterfly collecting. Rather than being living, dynamic and changing things, folk songs were to be humanely killed, frozen in time and stuck on pins, ignoring the fact that the versions collected from nineteenth or twentieth century sources represented just one step in the songs’ journeys. The best performers in the 1960s, such as Martin Carthy, his collaborator, violinist Dave Swarbrick and the Watersons (encouraged by Bert Lloyd), took the alternative view that traditional songs could and should be arranged, adapted and sometimes revised for the next stage in their journeys. The epitome of this philosophy was an album released in 1964 named ‘Folk Roots, New Routes’, in which Shirley Collins sang traditional songs accompanied by the jazz and blues influenced virtuoso guitar playing of of Davy Graham. Revolutionary for its time, it presaged the later work of Pentangle and Fairport Convention. Needless to say, McColl and the Critics Group disapproved.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan caused a sensation by performing the second half of his set with an electric band (The Band!) Hardcore folkies such as Pete Seeger deplored this development. On a subsequent UK tour, Dylan brought the band to Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, where between songs someone in the audience shouted ‘Judas!’ Dylan, naturally, was unmoved and ‘folk-rock’ was born. (The concert was recorded and released as an ‘official bootleg’, and the shout can be plainly heard, as can Dylan’s reaction. At least two men have claimed to be the heckler. Quaintly, at the end of the concert, as the audience is filing out, the National Anthem plays over the PA system).

Ewan McColl, of course, strongly disliked Dylan’s approach, and the Singers Club and Critics Group continued along the true path. However, it shouldn’t be assumed that the Singers Club was a dour, sterile place. It attracted large and enthusiastic audiences, who enjoyed joining in the choruses, and the atmosphere was relaxed, with much laughter. But it represented one extreme of the folk music spectrum, and other clubs were available.

The leading alternative was Les Cousins – the name, for complicated reasons was French, but it was usually pronounced like an English bloke called Les. It opened in 1965 in the basement of a Greek restaurant, appropriately in Greek Street, Soho, and was run by Andrew Matheou, the son of the restaurant owners. It became the venue of choice for young singer-songwriters and guitarists, as well as welcoming traditional performers. A veritable Who’s Who of the principal British (and American) folk and contemporary artists took to its stage during its seven-year lifespan, sometimes contributing to its legendary Saturday all-night sessions (which provided a useful alternative for some out-of-town musicians to finding digs for the night). Deep breath:

Al Stewart, Diz Disley, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Davy Graham, Sandy Denny, Trevor Lucas, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Wizz Jones, Alex Campbell, Roy Harper, Alexis Korner, The Young Tradition, The Dransfields, Michael Chapman, Peter Sarstedt(!), John Martyn, Jackson C. Frank, Ralph McTell, the Strawbs, Plainsong...

Oh, and Nick Drake, who was put on at four o’clock in the morning because he was so boring. All of these are today worthy of the folk Hall of Fame, while the members of the Critics Group are largely forgotten.

By the late 1960s, the folk revival was at its peak. Folk clubs were booming and packed. Traditional songs were being sung more than at any time since the nineteenth century. Contemporary singer-songwriters were attracting the attention of major record labels and mainstream audiences; their albums were selling well and some, like Paul Simon, Cat Stevens and Ralph McTell, even pierced the singles charts. The Cambridge Folk Festival was first held in 1965, and was followed by others, while folk acts were among the line-ups of early Glastonbury festivals. But as sure as skiffle was replaced by rock and roll, folk began to lose its mainstream cachet, as the original revivalists grew older and younger artists looked to other musical genres – such as punk rock. In Part Two, I will chronicle the ups and downs of English folk from the late 1960s to the present day, and will reassure readers that English folk music isn’t dead...

..yet.

Further Reading

Bean JP (2014) Singing from the Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs. London: Faber & Faber.

Pegg B (1976) Folk: A Portrait of English Traditional Music, Musicians and Customs. London: Wildwood House.

Roud S (2017) Folk Song in England. London: Faber & Faber.

Young R (2010) Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. London: Faber & Faber.