Sir Wilfred Thesiger has sat for just two paintings of himself, 60 years apart. “This is the last one,” he said with deadpan conviction during one of the sittings as Francisco Centofanti worked on the new portrait.
Perhaps the greatest traveler of the 20th century, Thesiger is a complex man, with great pride in his race and background, yet with a reverence for traditional peoples and their simple, harsh lifestyles which he believes gives them qualities that the “softer” developed world has lost.
Francisco Centofanti started the painting in September 2002 and completed the portrait in eight sessions, the first taking five hours. “He was incredibly tenacious, just wanted to keep on going, quite tough in that sense. He seemed to want the challenge. At the end of the sittings I understood that he’s just a different breed of man.”
The portrait has received wide acclaim from critics and the public alike. It was selected for hanging from over 700 entries to the Annual Exhibition held by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters at the Mall Galleries in London. It was awarded the prestigious Carroll Foundation Award for young artists worth £3,000, which was presented by the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell at the private view of the RSPP at the Mall Galleries on April 30, where it can be seen until the exhibition closes on May 18.
The RSPP, founded in 1891, is devoted exclusively to the art and development of portrait painting. Past members have included noted portraitists such as Millais, Whistler and Augustus John.
“I really tried to capture what I saw,” said Centofanti. “Although his face is a map of the man’s psychology, I was more concerned with his relationship with the background.
“The memorabilia and the things he has collected gave a feeling of intimacy. I also wanted to put an image in the background — something personal. I didn’t know at the beginning an image of what. I found a picture in his room.” In the background of the painting is a picture of Thesiger’s beloved desert on the wall of his austere room. The colors and textures suggested the background of a desert, and Centofanti used them to introduce suggestions of Thesiger’s life into the portrait.
“On one of the walls was a picture and I enlarged it, so it begins to look like a window looking on to Thesiger’s background, or like a painting, a suggestion of a record.”
“I don’t think too much of the message when I do a portrait — I let it happen how it happens — but certainly the main thought behind it was his connection with the desert. It was very clear that was the one place he would like to be.”
Always an enigma, Thesiger has inspired and fascinated generations of travelers with his record of the life of the Bedu in the harsh vastness of the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. In typically economical style, the introduction to his seminal book “Arabian Sands” hints at both the fascination and the source of the enigma.
“A cloud gathers, rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passing of the year. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease. Yet men have lived there from the earliest times.” It begs the question, “Why?”
The answer to that lies in the desert and the life of the nomadic tribesmen who lived there. Thesiger lived and breathed the life for years: “I wished only to live as they lived,” he once wrote, “and now that I have left them I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming.” What followed was oil and technology.
Twenty-six year-old Francisco Centofanti was introduced to Thesiger when the travel writer Tahir Shah gave him a copy of “Arabian Sands.”
“After a few pages, I was hooked; I read the rest of his books and gradually formed the impression that here was a great figure, somehow lost in time,” he said. “The more I read, the more he became a hero figure.
“I managed to arrange to meet him and asked if I could paint his portrait. Somewhat to my surprise, it was arranged.”
The emerging British artist Francisco Centofanti trained at the Chelsea Art School and the Florence Academy, turning professional at the age of 23. In the same year, he was a finalist in the BP Award 2000, which brought added public recognition to personal talent. His portrait of Thesiger captures both the gravity and the enigmatic stillness of the man who twice crossed the Arabian desert on foot, and suspends in time both his real age — 92 — and his youthful vigor with warm worked-upon colors.
During the sittings Centofanti found the opportunity of meeting the great man greatly rewarding. “Sir Wilfred is extraordinary in every sense, but I was struck by his humility, his kindness and the qualities he attributes to his life with the Bedu. It is difficult to portray greatness and humility, but I hope they come through in this painting.”
Centofanti said that Thesiger enjoyed the sittings, which were a mix of conversation and long periods of silence. He sat, hands crossed and with a stare that hovers between distant and inward, both looking at and past the viewer. “The pose and the portrait have something of the enigmatic quality of the Mona Lisa,” said Alexander Maitland, Thesiger’s long-time friend and official biographer. “It touches the enigma of the man.”
It is this quality about the man and his history as well as the question of what motivated him to “live the life of his choice” that continue to intrigue and fascinate. Thesiger’s own simple answer that he so loved his childhood experiences in Ethiopia that he wanted to continue somehow doesn’t seem enough. It simply raises more questions than it answers.
“He would be staring out of the window while I worked on the portrait and once he said: ‘Did you see that?’ I couldn’t see anything but a road winding down and a line of trees in the distance. ‘Did you see that river, running down?’ I think he wanted to imagine he was somewhere else.”
Outside the window is a gravel driveway that shimmers in the sun, snaking in deceptive perspective toward the trees that surround the genteel nursing home where Thesiger now lives. In 1933, immediately after leaving Oxford, Thesiger followed the Awash River in Ethiopia to find out where it ended, solving one of Africa’s last geographical mysteries. During that time, he lived with the Danakil tribes and survived the attentions of the Afar tribes, who had massacred previous expeditions, on his wits and stamina. He was then only 23 years old and it was his first major wilderness journey. He published his experiences in 1996.
“Typically of Wilfred, he conducted himself during the sittings very much in the way he used to when he lived with the Bedu. He, like they, can chatter away when he wants to, but he finds no embarrassment in long periods of reflective, silent contemplation,” said Alexander Maitland. Francisco Centofanti’s portrait, “the last one,” neatly punctuates a life that has been far outside the ambit of most ordinary people, but the man and the enigma that make him and his life endlessly fascinating live on in leafy Surrey.
“The portrait catches the enigma of the man. It’s extremely rare to have a portrait of Thesiger that is outstanding. I think the 1944 portrait by Anthony Devas was one and, in its controversial way, the one by Derek Hill in 1965 was the only other one.”
- Arab News Features 8 May 2003