My friend Timothy Hyman, who has died aged 78, was an artist, writer and teacher. His canvases and drawings celebrated his love of London, reflecting his allegiance to the north and east of the city.
As a teenager, Timothy was introduced to artists and writers destined to shape him – Sienese painters, Pierre Bonnard and John Cowper Powys – and made a solo trip to Siena in 1963, aged 17.
In the same year he entered the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where the prevailing orthodoxy was antagonistic to the figurative tradition. A stay in New York in 1969 to study “the New American painting” confirmed him instead in “the Old European”. Drawing saved him, he said, as he sought a language for his painting, and he began to draw in the street. He had discovered William Blake and Thomas Traherne, two visionary artists with whom he identified deeply, and had a friend in Derek Jarman, whom he met at the Slade and who shared his interest in the “romancing of the city”.
In the late 1970s, Timothy became a contributing editor to Artscribe magazine, going on to write more than 250 articles, essays, catalogue introductions and reviews for a range of publications and exhibitions. He was an early member of the Powys Society and would become its chairman (2010-21) then president.
Throughout the mid-80s to the 00s, he taught part-time in art schools (the Slade, the Royal College of Art, Saint Martin’s School of Art), and in the Baroda (now Vadodara) group of artists at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India, where he made several important friendships. His monograph on the artist Bhupen Khakhar was published in 1998.
In 1979, Timothy was asked to curate Narrative Paintings at the ICA. He had his first solo show in 1981, and more than a dozen more would follow. In 2000, he was crucial to the setting up of the Royal Drawing School, a not-for-profit organisation in Shoreditch, London, and taught there until recently. He curated Carnivalesque (Hayward Gallery, 2000), was lead curator for the Tate’s 2001 Stanley Spencer retrospective, and co-curated the major exhibition British Vision (Ghent, 2007-08). In 2011, Timothy was elected to the Royal Academy.
Thames & Hudson published his monograph on Bonnard (1998), Sienese Painting (2003), and The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century (2016), an alternative history of 20th-century art. Another book, about English medieval illumination, was left unfinished at his death.
Born in Hove, East Sussex, and brought up in London, Timothy was one of the four children of Alan Hyman, who was a writer, and Noreen Gypson, and he went to Charterhouse school in Godalming, Surrey.
He first met Judith Ravenscroft, who went on to become a writer, when they were both in their teens. Judith became his muse after they met again in the 70s, and his wife in 1982.
A generous, uncompromising and reliable critic, Timothy was deeply committed to his pupils, fellow artists and innumerable friends.
Judith died in 2023 and Tim’s twin brother, Anthony, died in 1999. His siblings Nicholas and Miranda survive him.
