Vogue

Spotlight

Anthony Christian-Howard is a new world's child who makes old world portraits with a precocious facility about which he is extremely and passionately prickly and proud. "I believe," he says fiercely, "in the technique of the renaissance masters. Just because we are living 400 years later doesn't mean we are necessarily better. I love Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt and, personally, I think Matisse can't draw."

He started copying from the age of 3; at first from The World's Greatest Paintings, in three volumes, and later, when he was ten, from the paintings in the National Gallery, where he was given permission from school to draw on two afternoons a week. Gradually he worked his way through the carnage and writhing horses of the great fighting scenes. He was too small to reach the top of the canvases, and the newspaper men had a field day with the story. "I was incredibly big headed - you really believe the papers after a time." He then met a strange, difficult Christian Scientist painter in the gallery, who took the infant prodigy under his wing and introduced him to the Renaissance masters. Soon he began to make his first originals, and school became rather less interesting. "I was incapable of mixing with people of my own age, so at twelve I just left and bummed around. I wasn't really living at home any more."

The late fifties, when Anthony Christian-Howard was growing up, was a period of the Café des Artistes, where the walls sweated, and kohl-eyed girls wore the latest Quant, and your ears rang to the plaints and triumphs of trad jazz. He wandered off the streets where he was occasionally begging, from the kitchens of large concerns where he was peeling potatoes, or from the butchers shop where he worked for a time, and into the steamy new Bohemian world the Café epitomised. At this time he began doing portraits in earnest, and travelled through Italy, France and Morocco pursuing ever elusive commissions and being snubbed by Dali to whom he went to pay tribute.

But his drawing was improving - "Something really happened and I could draw. A piece of drapery and a flower - it was the most beautiful thing in the world. And people! To me if you can communicate with someone, if you look into their eyes, in life, or in a picture, that is the most, if not the only, beautiful relationship." He's now 26 and specialises in portraits, which he prefers to draw rather than paint; swift and accurate and strongly contrasted, his work is virtuoso if not contemporary.