Illustration for Richard Wagner's Tannhauser by Willy Pogany

Illustration (c.1921)
Willy Pogany (Hungarian, 1882-1955)
From Tannhauser : A Dramatic Poem by Richard Wagner

Queer Saint : The Cultured Life of Peter Watson by Adrian Clark & Jeremy Dronfield

London : John Blake Publishing Ltd., 2015

I recently found this on my shelf. I purchased it in late 2015 but had put it aside. I should never have waited so long to read it! Clark and Dronfield have crafted an amazing biography that I read as voraciously as an intensely plotted novel. It includes everybody who was anybody of the time.

After Peter Watson finished at Eton, and having significant wealth, he traveled in Europe and the Americas, mostly with Cecil Beaton. Theirs was a solid friendship but Cecil always hoped for more. In the years leading up to World War II, like most gay artists and writers in Europe, Peter spent time in Berlin with the boys in the clubs à la Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories.

He had a home in Paris with an extensive art collection, including a particularly risqué work by Pavel Tchelitchew titled Bathers. The central nude figure seen from behind and below was modeled on Charles Henri Ford, best known for his novel written with Parker Tyler, The Young and the Evil. With the invasion of Paris by the Nazis, Peter was forced to flee and his art eventually fell victim to Nazi plunder.

Having returned to Britain for the duration of the war, Peter started a new literary and arts journal called Horizon. with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. It became well known for promoting works by British artists and writers at a time when the country really needed it. Horizon was also a particularly important vehicle for promoting George Orwell and his essays on politics and the war.

After the war, Peter focused on British artists, particularly young up-and-coming ones, helping to launch the careers of Francis Bacon, John Craxton, and Lucian Freud, among others. He supported many artists with homes, studios and living expenses well into their careers. He was also instrumental and doggedly devoted to the creation of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

The artists he was supporting weren't the only young men he supported. He had a long-standing romantic relationship with the now infamous Denham Fouts as well as Waldemar Hanson and Norman Fowler who was with Peter at the time of his mysterious death by drowning.

Peter Watson appeared as a character in two dishy novels, Lord Berners' The Girls of Radcliff Hall published in a private edition in 1932 where all of the characters are based on gay men but appear as lesbians in an all girls boarding school, and Michael Nelson's 1958 novel A Room in Chelsea Square originally published anonymously and taking aim at the relationships around Horizon (Peter Watson, Cyril Connolly, and Stephen Spender).

Narcissus by Lucien Freud

Narcissus (1948)
Lucian Freud (German, English, 1922-2011)
Ink on paper
21 x 13.7 cm
Tate, London