In memoriam: Timothy Hyman RA
By Hisham Matar
Published on 11 September 2024
Hisham Matar on the artist’s passion for figuration, friendship and a life of the mind.
I met Timothy Hyman in 2000 – when he was 54 and I was 29 – through his wife, the writer and editor Judith Ravenscroft, who had turned up in my life just when I needed her. I had finished an early draft of what became my first novel and needed an honest assessment. She was learned, analytical and had the courageous clarity to cut through any nonsense. She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s a couple of years earlier. She lived with it for 26 years and died on 19 September 2023.
To speak of Tim is to speak of Judith. I remember the way his eyes turned soft and concerned whenever he looked at her, how he admired and worried about her, and how much love and energy she generated in him. Towards the end, Judith fell a lot, and those falls horrified Tim. He was always on the lookout, hoping to catch her. Eighteen days before she died, he made a pencil drawing of her face, eyes shut with horrific finality, and a wavering boundary as though it never was certain where she stopped and the world began.
In those early days of our friendship, Judith and I spent most of our time speaking about books we admired. Tim would drift in and out, make tea and was generous with his time – and with the butter. I liked his long coats and listening to him speak about Dostoevsky and the novels of John Cowper Powys. (A portrait of Powys forms the figure of Mid River: The Bearer, 1995-98; Tim’s Diploma Work in the RA Collection.) Tim’s passion for Sienese art was infectious. I learnt a great deal from him and his excellent book, Sienese Painting: The Art of a City-Republic. He encouraged me to go to Siena, and took the little I had to say about those pictures seriously. There was always that inescapable sense that here was a man who truly believed in love, friendship, art and the life of the mind.
I always returned to their yellow door on Myddelton Square, between Clerkenwell and the Angel, with a sense of private delight and anticipation. For a few harrowing days, I acted in a monologue at the nearby King’s Head Theatre and would go to Judith and Tim’s before the performance to calm my nerves. I would lie on their daybed and let my eyes roam the abundant wall of books. I remember one of Tim’s paintings on the adjacent wall: a London-scape, with the city streets, squares, bicycles, buses, cars and people all collected under a swirling firmament. A searching activity of lines and colours wanting to leave no detail behind. And all this action and activity was held and suspended in the picture as though to say, “Everything matters”.
Tim and Judith were married for 41 years, 34 of which were spent in their flat on Myddelton Square. At Judith’s memorial, Tim said, “We were living for one another”. Tim died on 7 September, nearly a year after Judith. It is very strange to lose a friend, stranger still when it is unexpectedly, in the midst of things, when we were far from done, when new things were still possible between us. I lost him, and we all have lost a profoundly beautiful artist.
Hisham Matar is a writer.
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