FRANCIS HAMEL

Francis Hamel (Magdalen, 1982) meets me at the entrance to Lady Margaret Hall because I want to show him paintings by British artist Stanley Spencer, originally purchased by then college Principal Lynda Grier in the inter-war years. The first is called Cultivator and Grier paid £55 for it in 1937. It is a landscape still life, contrasting a red cultivator amidst overgrowing grass, a study in what is human and what is not, the constructed and unconstructed environment, rusty red and vivid green.

He likes it, beyond merely being polite, and is evidently very knowledgeable of Spencer’s generation of brilliant painters who all studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art in London in those effervescently lit but increasingly shadowed days] and years before the Great War. A period that seems more lit and more shadowed now than at any time since, a pale reflection of our own world in 2025.

Represented since 1995 by the John Martin Gallery in Albermarle Street, London W1, Hamel is also currently artist-in-residence at his former college Magdalen, having previously taught drawing at the Ruskin School. He explains that after we finish chatting he will give a life drawing class, and that there are plans afoot to offer a similar class to the broader student body at the Ashmolean Museum.

‘Each class has been completely oversubscribed. We had 55 students come to the first one, where at most we can only fit in 25. It seems to be hitting a particular need. Phones and all other distractions are put to one side and everyone is completely rapt in attention drawing a live model, doing this thing they have never done before, for two hours. It is rather incredible.’

Francis’ life spans town and country - Fitzrovia and Rousham, the village six miles west of Bicester and six miles north of Kidlington, beside the Cherwell River and framed by the grand house and spectacular garden designed by William Kent in the 1730s, still lived in by the descendants of the original Cottrell-Dormer family and in whose grounds Hamel maintains his studio and a cottage, where he lives with his family.

The backdrop led to a book of paintings produced during lockdown, accompanied by terrific essays by Tom Stuart-Smith, Joanna Kavenna and renowned garden historian Christopher Woodward. Critic Sarah Raven wrote of ‘crispness versus haze, definite lines balanced by softness, radiant light with cloud.’

To this we would add colour, but often as not is it governed by light.

On the last page of Francis’ new book The Oxford Paintings (Clearview Books, 15 March 2025), there’s a gorgeously sensuous dark blue sky, a summer sky one thinks, and the lit cloisters of Magdalen College (shown above right). Focus on the intrinsic colour of that light, it is ochre, brightening to orange, the bright yellowish orb of an actual light bulb in one place, further shadows elsewhere. But we all know what warmth that scene radiates, magnified by the distance from which it is viewed.

Going to school in Oxford as a kid, Hamel says he began to paint Oxford in 2000.

‘It was an antidote to all the landscape painting I had been doing at the time. Oxford is a sort of ‘structured landscape.’’

He tows his kit around in a bicycle trailer and sometimes stays on his brother’s barge in Port Meadow, always painting directly facing the scene with an easel.

‘My first Oxford collection from 2002, I was absolutely taken aback by the strength of response of the audience, their sense of ownership of Oxford despite often having no connection with the place as such. I was slightly taken aback by it.’

He explains that he is quite deliberate to include some of the street furniture, sometimes cars, sometimes bikes. Not slavishly and not archivally. But the pictures are true to their time. In one there are four Deliveroo/Just Eat bike riders waiting at the red light at the bottom of the High, flanked by a moped rider exhibiting the ‘L’ Plate, the surest sign of a cheap provisional license. A future art historian couldn’t mistake that with a decade prior to the 2020s. The square rucksack boxes used to transport the food become sculptural blobs here, in their own eccentric way visually arresting.

As with previous books, the words are no afterthought but a wonderful addition, in this case by overlapping contemporary at Magdalen Ronald J Caffrey (Magdalen, 1983).

Even though one could say the entire project – relating to Oxford - is an affair of the heart, no one can accuse Caffrey or Hamel of being overly sentimental.

Hamel says, ‘the colleges seem to exist in total defiance of each other, but incoherency is Oxford’s charm.’

Caffrey, meanwhile, hasn’t gone to Chat GPT and plonked out platitudes about honeyed stone and lawns, but seized upon sometimes awkward passages from long learning and reading, which are quite brilliant, occasionally a poke in the face too.

Early in the book a German visitor from the eighteenth century recounts an ugly Don and his equally ugly wife. Caffrey then uses the cue to remember a Don whose white short was never not blood-spattered from incompetent shaving. In other places Caffrey cites people who had a view of Oxford but no connection to it, perhaps trying to avoid it feeling too clubby. When we get caricaturist Max Beerbohm saying his piece, it concerns how Oxford made him insufferable.

Caffrey fantasizes about writing one of those letters to the Magdalen College Record, and instead of noting the birth of a child or marriage to another Magdalenian, he wishes he could say that he is in a maximum security prison in Columbia ‘for the foreseeable’, after some very agreeable years.

‘Having evergreen memories of Magdalen, I wanted to ensure that Old Members knew how much I would welcome a visit from any of them if they found themselves at a loose end in Bogota.’

That’s a literary device that works wonderfully throughout the book. The images look in from out. The words weigh the realities through recollection. Are our greatest affections for a person or place served up best from a distance? It is said that everyone leaves Oxford but Oxford never leaves them. It’s just there, waiting to welcome you back.

A favourite painting in the collection is of the surviving, almost landmark hawthorn that marks the first bridge across the Thames in Port Meadow. Verdant green yet a grey, painterly grey sky that could mean cool mist or stormy warmth (shown above left, Hawthorn tree on Port Meadow (2024). Again the distance from Oxford. And then juxtaposed, words by Elizabeth Jennings (St Anne’s, 1945), 'Port Meadow' (1969):

‘There is a river beside it and a duck-pond.

This is the children’s element, I think.

Above it is wide, wide sky.

I feel uplifted, I want to learn to fly,

To be beyond

This edge of life, this tremulous brink.’

Born in 1926 and dying in 2001, Jennings is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery. One of the greatest poets, earlier in her career a librarian in Oxford.

Much earlier, and set against the verdant chestnut tree that defines the Lamb and Flag Passage (shown right, The Chestnut Tree in Lamb and Flag Passage, 2024), is a passage by Keith Douglas (Merton, 1938), the World War Two poet who died three days into D-Day at the age of 24. He starts with summer, ‘holds her breath in a dark street / the trees nocturnally scented, lovers like moths/ go by silently on the footpaths. It goes through a full life span to end with ‘legendary figures’, we might imagine dons, for whom outside life is a ‘pretence’,

‘within, the leisurely immortals dream,/ venerated and spared by the ominous hours.’

So there is a sombre quality as well and of the foreshortening of time, of eighteen-year-old and wise don meeting in the middle. The rest of us muddle along but never forget the place, sometimes returning, mostly remembering. Hopefully with benevolence, a bit diffident, or as E.M. Forster put it in Howards End, 1910, ‘Oxford is – Oxford. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.’

As if to soften it, Hamel agrees that his love of trees permeates his treatment of the stones, including a majestic rendering of the acacia tree by Lincoln that sticks out a bit to break up the curving recession of the famous view down the High Street. A Thomas Hardy quote cinches the deal by contrasting the real people of Town with the unreal people of the Gown. Christminster, he implies, is the most lovable when it is spied from afar or through memory or through oil on linen. How marvellous.

Anyway, go to the exhibition at Magdalen or then in London; the book is something else and demands to be enjoyed. To Francis Oxford owes a collective debt of thanks.