Timothy Hyman, RA, one of Britain’s leading figurative painters, has died aged 78. His powerfully expressive paintings and deeply insightful art writings will leave a void in the UK art scene.
Hyman, born in 1946 in Hove, Sussex, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he developed his practice. His subsequent work reflected his fascination with the human condition and delved into the complexities of urban life against the cosmopolitan backdrops of cities such as London. His works, luminous rather than celebrations of colour and form, drew on traditions from Italian Renaissance art to modernist masters such as Stanley Spencer, whom he greatly admired.
Hyman was foremost a portraitist, though best known for his minutely detailed and panoramic narrative renditions. Inspired by, among others, Beckmann and Hopper, Hyman investigated his relationship and mythological-with the city he lived and worked in. He incorporated a vibrant palette, distorted scale, and multiple perspectives to achieve an inventive effect.
Hyman was elected a Royal Academician in 2011 in recognition of his contribution to British art. His paintings have been widely exhibited and celebrated for their observation, imagination, and storytelling fusions. His works frequently depict the chaotic beauty found in urban life and human dramas. They often encompass everything from intimate domesticity to grand metropolitan vistas.
Hyman was a very accessible art historian and critic. His scholarship flowed from a deep-seated involvement with narration in art, nowhere more evident than in his popular books on artists such as Sienese Painting: The Art of a City-Republic and Panoramic Survey The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century. His writing was enthusiastic for the modest and often-pressed cases of those working outside dominant modernist traditions. His erudite, sympathetic writings cast new light on the practice of painters such as Pierre Bonnard, Balthus, and Bhupen Khakhar, of whom he wrote at length with enormous warmth.
But beyond criticism, Hyman was a well-liked teacher and tutor. Decades of teaching at the Slade and the Royal College of Art instilled a mark on generation after generation of young artists. He encouraged students to invest the whole gamut of human emotion and experience in their work.
His wife of more than forty years, the writer Judith Ravenscroft, died in 2023
Hyman has shown his work extensively in the UK, Italy and India and won the National Portrait Gallery Travel Award in 2007. He is a figurative painter, writer, curator and lecturer. A recognised authority on Sienese painting and the work of Pierre Bonnard, he has published acclaimed monographs on both subjects. He has written extensively on art and film, regularly contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, and curated exhibitions at the Tate, ICA and Hayward galleries.