Hardly a still life for Haig

Published on Friday 14 March 2008 13:28

THE Ides of March have always had a bit of a bad press. And when you've seen off life-threatening illness and other near-death experiences, it would be easy to blame your March 15 birthday as having been somewhat portentous.

Yet tomorrow against all the odds, Lord Haig will celebrate his 90th birthday surrounded by family at his stately pile in the Borders, with a slap-up meal of lobster and champagne. Not bad for someone who was struck down by typhoid at the age of six, saw off dysentry and Hitler while a prisoner-of-war, and even now somehow manages to get up a narrow, winding stone staircase which leads to his painting studio, despite having to rely heavily on a walking stick thanks to the long-term effect of horse-riding accidents.

Such endurance smacks of the old-fashioned landed gentry's belief in duty and obligation, and attests to the family motto "Tyde what may", which refers to a 13th-century poem predicting there would always be a Haig in Bemersyde.

Born as his father, Douglas, the 1st Earl Haig was leading Britain's troops in the trenches of the First World War, what keeps George Alexander Eugene Douglas Haig – the second Earl and 30th Laird of Bemersyde – going is his art.

There are not many artists who live long enough to see one retrospective exhibition of their work, but next April there will be a second such event for the nonagenarian. The exhibition includes 56 of his works spanning a 60-year period, including portraits of himself and others which he painted with oils sent by the Red Cross while imprisoned in Colditz.

Sitting in the cosy ground-floor office of his home, he is so surrounded by inspiration from nature, in particular the Eildon Hills and River Tweed, that he couldn't possibly stop painting. "Well, you get to 90 and hope you'll carry on, but it's not so easy – apart from anything else it's difficult to get out and about. I did have a cataract removal operation last year, so that's made things a bit easier again in terms of seeing properly.

"You have to keep going and I've found that this exhibition has made one get down to it. It's very nice that the Scottish Gallery want to hold it – it was the first gallery I exhibited in after the war. I've produced some new work, and also repainted some older pieces which I've looked at and thought 'that's just not quite right'."

Escape is a word he uses often in reference to his painting. It's certainly brings a relief to the problems managing a large estate can bring – his income is mostly derived from fishing although he's hoping the new show will sell well, his work can fetch four-figure sums. But it was also his way of escaping as a child when ill-health saw him bedbound and then again when captured by the Nazis in 1942.

"My mother always encouraged me to draw and paint as a child because I really wasn't well enough to get involved in sports," he recalls. "I had typhoid when I was nine – that's when my father died. I couldn't run around, but I was always happy to paint."

At Stowe School in Buckinghamshire there was "great freedom", but at no time did he consider art as a career. "Art school just didn't cross my mind then, the only thing that did was going into the Army. It was in the blood."

Three years into studying modern history at Christchurch College, Oxford, he joined the Royal Scots Greys as a regular soldier on the eve of the Second World War. He was sent to North Africa where he was captured by Rommel's Afrika Korps near El Alamein, and it was during this time that he began to take painting seriously.

"I was sent to Italy first. It was difficult to paint then. The Italians wouldn't allow you to have tubes of paint because they could have had a map inside them," he laughs. "So I was mainly working with watercolours. When I got to Germany the Red Cross sent some oils through for people who painted. Strangely they always got through, whereas the food parcels seemed to go astray," he recalls.

Confined to a cell as one of Hitler's "prominenti" prisoners, which the German leader believed were well connected enough to help him post-war, he was so well-guarded there was no chance of real escape, so he turned to painting.

Many works were left behind on liberation, though, as the choice was taking his paintings or winter underwear.

It was during his time in the Army that his mother died, so he knew that after the war the care of Bemersyde was in his hands. "But it was full of landgirls so I couldn't go home. Instead I rented a cottage in West Sussex and painted."

He also took the time to finally go to art school, Camberwell, where he hooked up with the Euston Road Movement which included Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream, who became his mentors.

It will be his son Alexander, 46, who will inherit Bemersyde. A sufferer of macular degeneration (a loss of central vision) as is his sister Adrienne, 50, neither have been able to follow in their father's artistic footsteps, but his daughter Elizabeth, 49, is a stained glass artist.

He and his first wife, Adrienne Morley, also an artist, divorced in 1981 – the same year he married Italian textile artist Geroloma, who he affectionately calls Fruzzy. "We met in Venice when I was painting. She basically threw me out of the way when she was getting off a motorboat," he laughs.

He has no grandchildren, though, so it could be that the tide may finally turn against the family motto and there will be no more Haigs at Bemersyde. That, of course, is likely to be a long way off given the hearty longevity of the current incumbent.

Haig at Ninety, will be held at The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street, from April 9-May 3.