Les Invités de Marcel Proust

Alan Halliday

Alan Halliday, (b. 1952) is an internationally established British artist, (see The Dictionary of British Artists since 1945). Writing in The Times, the art critic John Russell Taylor said, “Halliday paints what obsesses him. His style is boldly calligraphic. Even his large-scale oil paintings depend largely on the definition of effective line while his smaller works in ink, gouache and pastel are built on a structure of amazingly fluid, spontaneous strokes of the pen; but they are in fact more than that. While the line may define the form, it is the colour which gives it form and life.”

Halliday has been a successful professional artist for more than 30 years, holding more than 100 exhibitions in the USA, Europe, India and the Middle East. His paintings are in the collections of the following London museums: Victoria & Albert Museum; the Theatre Museum, The Museum of London and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, USA. His work is acquired by collectors worldwide. Trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art at London University, (1970-74), Halliday was awarded a doctorate in the history of art by Oxford University in 1981. His first mentor was John Piper, the distinguished British neo-romantic painter. Piper encouraged the young artist to build up an extensive archive of sketchbooks to draw on for future use and summed up Halliday’s style: “an arrangement of painted marks, all on the surface and yet all in depth”

Halliday now lives in France, by the Loire. His work embraces large semi-abstract oils on canvas as well as works on paper. It is exhibited exclusively worldwide by Camburn Fine Art. The best interpreter of theatre performance since Walter Sickert, Halliday has produced a body of work which covers all the major ballet companies including the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky and the Royal Ballet; the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal National Theatre, the Peter Hall Company at the Old Vic and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, and dance companies abroad such as Maurice Béjart, Stuttgart Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, New York City Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet and English National Ballet where he is currently Resident Artist.

Some comments on Halliday’s paintings of the theatre:

“Halliday’s paintings have a freedom and lightness about them and get to the essence of the subject.” ~ Alan Bates, actor.

“His work has a verve and immediacy, brilliantly capturing the magic that is the very essence of the performing arts. Dancers, actors, singers are caught in the act with Alan’s dashing brush and pen”. ~ Derek Granger, film producer of Brideshead Revisited.

“Theatre is almost impossible to record, but Halliday’s paintings are alarmingly successful. They have the accuracy of observation, selectivity of memory and the intensity of imagination. They are what it was like.” ~ Philip Franks, RSC actor and National Theatre director.

For the Oscar-winning film, Shakespeare in Love, Halliday was on-set artist for four months during the making of the film at Shepperton Studios. The BBC also commissioned him to draw and paint their television adaptations of classic novels such as Tom Jones, Love in a Cold Climate, Great Expectations and David Copperfield. And in 1994 he was again commissioned by the BBC to draw all the concerts that season at the Royal Albert Hall, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the world-famous Henry Wood Promenade Concerts. Outside the theatre, over the years Halliday has been commissioned to paint scenes of disaster such as the war in Beirut in the 1990s; the IRA City bomb explosion in London; the burning of St. George’s Hall at Windsor Castle, and the Great Storm of 1987. Halliday also paints a wide range of other subjects in oil on canvas and gouache on paper. Technically, Alan Halliday is an outstanding draftsman and colourist who works by eye alone and has no need of a camera. He is one of the leading artists of his generation whose deep understanding of the past combines with a natural ability and fluency. This enables him to produce paintings of great beauty and power.

Here are some of Halliday’s works: