Adrian Mitchell

Adrian Mitchell
pencil
61 x 37.5 cm
1987
National Portrait Gallery

Satie Day/Night
screenprint
48 x 32 cm
1987
National Portrait Gallery

This text is taken from Tom Phillips’s own account in The Portrait Works (1989),  p. 52-53

The idea of making a portrait of Adrian Mitchell grew out of our work on his play Satie Day/Night, for which I made the sets and costumes. After a few preliminary drawings I started on the canvas itself placing Adrian in his favourite chair in front of the poster I designed for his play.

Eric Satie himself in the poster is shown as a Jack-in-the-Box so the idea of toys became a theme that I warmed to, since one of Adrian's chief characteristics as a poet is roughly to have retained the child in himself.

At one sitting Adrian arrived as I was working on the Turneresque sky that forms the surround to Curriculum Vitae IX and envied it as being more interesting than the otherwise uneventful wall in his own picture. Since he had brought a model aeroplane which we thought to add to the picture it seemed reasonable that it should have a small patch of sky to fly out of.

Suddenly the scrap of sky began to grow. It spread behind Adrian and surround Satie who surprised me by reappearing on the other side of the canvas behind the sitter's elbow.

The last touches to the picture took the form of signatures. Adrian's characteristic trademark of an elephant appears on his shirt-pocket and is faithfully adapted from a drawing that he made specially on the back of an envelope. Since the poet's world is not completely represented without, somewhere, the presence of Celia his wife, I put her initials on the side of Satie's box, in apposition to the number twenty-four which Adrian had asked me when we started the sittings to work into the picture in some form.