Strange Discoveries: The Art of Denton Welch | John Swarbrooke Fine Art
I’ve been writing recently about several fey inter-war-to-mid-century characters: John Craxton, Edward Burra and Keith Vaughan. Now it’s the turn of the fey-est and most obscure of the lot: the writer and artist Denton Welch, the subject of a small exhibition at John Swarbrooke’s gallery on Fitzroy Square. The show notes claim that, such is Welch’s obscurity, that this is his first “in over forty years”.
To mark the occasion, the gallery has produced a smart, yellow-bound book, introduced by Alan Hollinghurst - our greatest contemporary writer-about-the-fey. Hollinghurst notes Denton’s “fierce solipsism… his overwhelming purpose [is] the record of his own needs, excitements and perceptions: not just things seen but the acutely subjective feelings they stir up in him”.
Accordingly, by far the strongest of the Denton works on show is a mid-30s self portrait, whose composition straddles the great inflection point of his life. A hand-written note on the back of the work notes “Denton Welch/ 1934 or 1936”. In the year in between, he was knocked off his bike and was massively injured; from then on, he was largely an invalid and he died a decade later, at 33.
There’s a chalky intensity in the colours of this painting, and in the wall-eyed expression in the subject’s elongated, El Greco face. His dark-rimmed eyes and prominent bones give us the impression of a suffering saint. And he did suffer, whether the suffering in the painting is prophetic or depicts the aftermath of the accident. Some photos of Denton in a nearby vitrine show him in later life, a haunted bed-bound waxwork in thick glasses. We feel his intense, raw pain.
Then again, Denton also painted a lot of densely worked chocolate-box landscapes, whose finicky prettiness seemed to me definitively queeny. An impression reinforced by the gallery’s knowing curatorial camp: putting early editions of the books on ornamental plinths, framing the paintings with plush sofas and flowers, and so on. Sold works are marked with sticky red stars: not the traditional dots. The intensity of the portrait above is washed away by this soft (delicately scented) soap.
Things get frothier still above a fireplace on the gallery’s ground floor, where hangs a dreamy oil by Luke Edward Hall - one of today’s most successful purveyors of feyness. (The self-portrait mentioned above is up the stairs.) It’s a painting commissioned by the gallery for the show, called Denton with Angel. The author is posed, glasses- and pain-free, against vines, gazed at by a golden cherub. Welch’s long, drawn face, his waxy pallor, is smoothed out and prettified.
In this way, we are given permission to put to the back of our minds the lonely pain of what’s upstairs. We give in to placid loveliness instead. A pity that Denton himself couldn’t do the same.
Strange Discoveries: The Art of Denton Welch is at John Swarbrooke Fine Art (London). 10-30 October 2025