The Yorkshire Post

Portrait Of The Artist

We're lucky in this job. We get to sneak in first. People who have something to say to the world often invite you to their private places to say it. It's easy to become blasé about such access.

After enough time in this line of work you still appreciate the amazing differences between people and their lives, glimpsing things that are both unique but also universal among all the characters you'll encounter in a year. But you come to know both the unbelievably sad and the overwhelmingly joyful, as well as the everyday shades of life in between. Few encounters depart from the spectrum you know and recognise. Not many things make the superlatives gush forth.

But then, just as you're thinking this, something happens.

There's a village called Aberford in West Yorkshire, sitting snuggly against the A1. Just beyond the village, over a few cattle grids, past brooding sheep, beautifully gnarled trees and a preposterous mini Arc de Triomphe, is a little country house harbouring a large secret.

Walking into Anthony Christian's home, I can only liken to the scene in C S Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Lucy hides inside the wardrobe among fur coats and then falls out the back into the magical world of Narnia. When she returns to real life and tries to explain her extraordinary adventures, no-one believes her - until it happens to them.

Walking into the private world of Christian, you collide immediately with his version of the Dutch Master Phillips Wouwerman's Cavalry Battle, a copy of the original so authentic that the National Gallery (where he began copying it at the age of 10 in 1955) insisted on stamping it with 'COPY', so that no-one would ever buy it as the original. This painstaking work took six years to complete. Christian was allowed into the National Gallery to study the Old Masters (a privilege normally reserved for serious students over the age of 18) because of his prodigious output and precocious talent.

Turning a corner from the hallway, we come across his tribute to Jan Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Marriage Revisited, in which the 1434 masterpiece is consummately replicated, but for the discreetly placed erotic scene reflected in a small mirror in the background. Classicism and surreal mischief are hallmarks of many of Christian's works.

But he and his work defy definition. He will not let you pin him down to chronological story telling either. His drawing and painting embrace still life, the nude, classically inspired works, erotic art, portraiture, landscapes and studies of trees.

The walls of the living room are crammed with work spanning 45 years. Your eyes drink in the sensuous Rose Drapery, various aspects of his heavily pregnant first wife, Susan. You then spin around the room taking in a couple of dozen other works, representing various periods of the artist's life spent wandering the globe, from swinging sixties London to Morocco, Italy, New York, Paris, Bali and India, where he spent the past eight years living quietly in a southern mountain retreat. And now Yorkshire, the latest and unlikely settling spot for this wandering spirit, a man who believes that he is reincarnated from, among others, an artist pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. He also believes that at times his spirit has been inhabited by those of various Old Masters, who have used him as a "channel".

With him is his fifth wife, the flame haired Marian, also an artist of talent.

He's here so that more people may see his work. Eight years in southern India where there is no contact with the international art market have kept him away from the circuit. It's time for the children to learn about England, he says, and for England to know about Anthony Christian.

An interview as such is futile. He delivers fascinating monologues that flit back and forth across decades.

They are unnecessary. Panning your gaze once more across the walls the work speaks for itself. You have to acknowledge that few are blessed with these powers of draughtsmanship or riotous imagination.

Anything involving the draping of fabric or intricate detail like the crumbling bark of a banyan tree fools you completely into believing you could easily slip your fingers into it.

We don't know him because he went away 28 years ago. The early studies led to commissions for portraits from many of the rich and famous. Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, Patrick Lichfield, and members of the Rothschild family all sat for him. One day, the call came from Lord Mountbatten, who said he had had around 150 portraits done and liked none of them. "He asked me to lunch to discuss the portrait, and I said I'd come after lunch. He insisted I had lunch with him, so I asked if I could take my own food. He said 'fine'.

"I arrived and gave my earthenware container to the butler. We talked about many many things and got on very well. At lunch, while he was eating things larded in pastry and aspic, I ate my very simple fruit salad. At one point, I caught him looking at me intently. He said 'You know what I'm thinking, don't you?' I said 'Yes, you envy my simplicity.' He said 'That's right.'" Mountbatten liked the two drawn portraits, one of which is owned by the Queen.

When it came to capturing the likeness of Salvador Dali, things were fine until halfway through the first sitting, when the Spanish painter got up and began dancing crazily around the room.

"I told him he had to sit down, but he wouldn't listen. So I left. That was it, he was wasting my time."

Although Christian made some good money in those days, he soon tired of idle rich people who wanted a portrait only on their terms.

"They didn't want a likeness of what I saw. They wanted some fantasy version of themselves, and I found that increasingly sickening. Eventually, I decided to leave and embark on a physical and spiritual journey that eventually took me to India."

He has often lived in isolation, apart from the years he spent in Bali, when he sold well to the Asian market.

These days, he is torn between wanting acknowledgement in his homeland for his vast and astounding body of work, and a great reluctance to part with many of the hundreds of pieces in his collection.

"Deep down, I don't give a damn about selling, but one has to live of course. I work for God who gave me the talent, and every day there is something new to get excited about."

He is currently making drawings of some of the hundreds of ancient beech trees on the Parlington Estate, before their rotting wood is axed forever. Since starting the work, he has received commissions from people around the area who want a permanent record of favorite trees on their property. One of these intricate studies is likely to cost upwards of £5,000.

A couple of years ago, he was drawing trees in the street and in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Various people wrote cheques as he drew. His work has that effect.

All those years in the National Gallery, a stranger offered Christian £25,000 for Cavalry Battle, which he didn't take and still wouldn't because of its sentimental value.

But other works are for sale, and his whole collection will be on view at his home on Parlington Estate at Aberford, where he is opening a museum and gallery on October 23.