One evening this week, a taxi took Rose Wylie to the Royal Academy of Arts, but it dropped her off round the back. “I said, ‘this isn’t right. I want to go to the front’. The driver was surprised,” she tells me. The reason? The 91-year-old painter wanted to see the banner bearing her name that currently hangs across the front of the building, where her work is on show in a major exhibition. “I wanted to see it lit up,” she says, with a wry laugh. “I love it.”
The response to The Picture Comes First, which is full of exuberant canvases several feet high – and several times the size of their minute nonagenarian creator – has been glowing. “Guaranteed to leave you in a better mood than when you arrived,” said Time Out. “There won’t be a more invigorating exhibition all year,” wrote The Telegraph in a five-star review. Wylie this year features on The Independent’s annual influence list for International Women’s Day, for her trailblazing career in the art world. When I call her landline at her home in Kent, the week after the show’s opening, she describes herself as “completely happy” about it all.
