Michael Andrews: the one-time chronicler of late-night London who turned to nature

Probably the most famous picture by Michael Andrews is Melanie and Me Swimming. Painted in 1978-79, and today a beloved part of the Tate collection in London, it depicts the artist and his young daughter in a rockpool in Scotland. He treads water and holds attentively onto her arms, while she kicks and splashes about in an attempt to swim. Based on a photograph taken by a friend during a family holiday, it’s a tender image, with Andrews’s concern for his six-year-old daughter palpable.

The artist presents his own figure with his back to us — and in many ways, this is apt. Andrews, after all, was the quiet man of post-war British art. Unlike Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and other friends and peers of his in the School of London, he avoided the limelight. So much so that the British art historian Sir John Rothenstein once observed that Andrews ‘was in danger of being taken for a rumour rather than a person’. Renowned for his meticulous practice, he produced a total of only around 250 paintings and watercolours across his career.

Born into a Methodist family in Norwich in 1928, Andrews was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps as an insurance agent. However, he went on to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. There he was taught by the esteemed William Coldstream, who insisted on a sparing use of one’s oils and an objective approach to painting based on close observation.

Andrews soon came to reject Coldstream’s lessons as too restricting, even if his paint handling was never as free and expressive as that of an artist such as Bacon. He had his first solo show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1958. By the turn of the next decade, he had become an habitué of the city’s Soho area. Wheeler’s oyster bar was a favourite place to eat, and the Colony Room a favourite place to drink, usually in the company of Bacon, Freud and Frank Auerbach.

Along with the likes of David Hockney and Leon Kossoff, these men were members of the School of London, a heterogeneous group of painters with a shared dedication to representing the human figure — at a time when doing so was far from fashionable.

Andrews’s breakthrough works featured people gathered at parties or other social events, the most celebrated example being his conversation piece Colony Room I (1962). Set in the eponymous drinking den on Dean Street, it features various then-luminaries of the British art scene. Lolling on a gilt chair, wearing tight trousers and a shirt with a pink collar, is Bacon. He holds court, the writer-photographer Bruce Bernard being his keenest listener. Among others present are the artists’ model Henrietta Moraes, who can be seen berating the photographer John Deakin; and Freud, glass in hand, who stares straight at us, albeit with a glazy look suggesting his mind is elsewhere.

The whole scene is marked by a slight sense of detachment and ‘uneasy conviviality’, in the words of Andrews’s friend William Feaver (perhaps best known today as Freud’s biographer). There is none of the free and easy carousing with which the Colony Room of the 1960s is associated. Given the artist’s personality, this isn’t altogether surprising.

‘The social whirl fascinated him,’ wrote Feaver in his Guardian obituary of Andrews in 1995. However, as the artist himself stated, he was more of an observer than a participant. He enjoyed capturing behavioural dynamics at parties, where people routinely ‘put themselves to the test’ and ‘allow themselves to be judged. They perform… they increase in stature or flop.’

By the 1970s, Andrews had seen enough performances. In a striking change of direction, he now embarked on a seven-painting series called ‘Lights’, in which people are wholly absent. It depicts a hot-air balloon floating over a sequence of different landscapes — from the countryside, via a big city, to the sea. Inspired by Andrews’s growing interest in Zen Buddhism, the balloon is a metaphor for the self as it dispenses with the ego, gradually attaining spiritual enlightenment in the process.

To create what he called an appropriately ‘airy’ atmosphere for this series, he abandoned oil paints for thinned acrylic, which he applied using a spray gun. This would become a familiar practice for Andrews henceforth, and complement a trend in his art away from human subjects and towards landscapes. Which is to say, people increasingly disappeared from his pictures, as did signs of the artist’s physical touch on the canvas. The resulting ambience tends to be one of reverie.

In 1977, Andrews moved with his wife June and their daughter to rural Norfolk. The aim was to raise Melanie in a tranquil setting. Fortunately, Andrews found artistic inspiration in his new surroundings, as evidenced by his pair of pictures of the medieval village of Saxlingham Nethergate, SAX A.D. 832 — First Painting and SAX A.D. 832 — Second Painting, both of which have been sold at Christie’s.

He kept experimenting with novel techniques, too — one example being the photographic slides of different fish that he projected onto his canvases for the four paintings in his ‘School’ series (1977-78). These projections served as the basis for his compositions, each of which features shoals of fish swimming in water.

Andrews had bought an aquarium shortly before quitting London. However, ‘School’ amounted to a lot more than what he saw when he looked inside his tank. Melanie had recently started primary school, and Andrews was adapting to a new life affected by a system of uniforms, timetables and term dates.

In this series, fish — with their shoaling patterns and ‘uniforms’ of colour — offered a metaphor for collective human behaviour. In School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna, for example, one can see torpedo-bodied barracuda swimming in brilliant blue waters beneath a shoal of skipjack tuna. In School III: Butterfly Fish and Damsel Fish, in turn, yellow butterfly fish and electric-blue damsel fish cluster in a shadowy reef. Together, the four works explore the relationship between group and individual — or, as the artist himself put it, ‘how alike we all are and our propensity to stick together’.

In 1980, Andrews was the subject of his biggest ever exhibition, a retrospective of some 130 works at the Hayward Gallery in London. (A posthumous retrospective at Tate Britain in 2001 was slightly smaller.)

A few years after the Hayward show, he travelled to Australia, walking the six miles around the base of Uluru in the Northern Territory. This trip inspired a host of drawings, watercolours and paintings, including The Cathedral, The North East Face/Uluru (Ayers Rock).

Like most of his depictions of the mighty monolith, this picture captures its scale and solidity, as well as the artist’s sense of awe. Uluru has been held sacred by Indigenous Australians for millennia, and though people aren’t seen in Andrews’s works, their presence is implied. To refer to the sandstone rock as a ‘cathedral’ is to allude to its role in the legends, rituals and religious beliefs of the local people since time immemorial.

If one looks closely enough, human presence is implied in many of Andrews’s other landscapes, too. Witness the discreetly depicted telephone box and telephone poles in his two pictures of Saxlingham Nethergate; or the six tiny fishermen in Thames Painting: The Estuary, a picture from his final series, capturing different parts of the River Thames.

He and June moved back to London in 1992 — and before cancer ended his life three years later, aged 66, he took inspiration from the city’s great waterway. If it looks as though the tide has washed over Thames Painting: The Estuary, that’s because in a certain way it did: Andrews mixed a solution combining grit, sand and mud, and poured it onto his canvas, before using a hairdryer to blow the liquid about, like a wind blowing the tide.

Till the end, Andrews combined technical ingenuity with a philosopher’s outlook, always thinking about humanity’s relation to its environment, about our place in the world. Frank Auerbach went so far as to say of Andrews that ‘he paints only masterpieces’.

Led by the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal on 5 March 2025, Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online from 26 February to 20 March. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales