Henry Miller Fine Art is all about the personal and the intimate. The Walthamstow-based gallery specialises in artworks of the male form, a subject that fits with both of these adjectives, and the experience and journey of buying with HMFA is equally so.
The collection is very personal. I only buy what I like...
Previously a lawyer (and later a success story of the Art History Masters programme at Christie’s Education), Henry Miller had the idea for the gallery after personal experience proved the difficulty in finding a dealer – anywhere in the world – that catered to his love of male figurative pictures. “When I was working full time as a lawyer, I often didn’t have much time to go through endless sale catalogues, so I created the gallery I wanted to go shopping in myself,” Miller says.
Miller regularly exhibits in central London and at art fairs, but his collection is displayed all year round within the walls of his beautifully-restored East London Victorian home, which lends itself naturally to being a gallery space while giving potential buyers a real sense of what the art looks like in a domestic setting.
Gone are the cold, white walls of a gallery, the unnatural lighting and the stark interior spaces. Instead, a personal connection with the art can be made. Most buy art to hang in a house, and it therefore makes sense to witness it in a domestic setting before agreeing on the purchase. Within the ‘gallery’ space of Miller’s house, you are able to get an understanding of what it would be like to live with the art – something that Miller and his husband do everyday.
HMFA’s collection is as beautiful as it is varied. While the focus is on the male form, it is not restricted to any particular period, style, medium or country. You might find a 19th-century drawing by William Etty next to a 1920s painting by Edward Burra, or a 1960s Marino Marini lithograph with 1980s photography from Arthur Tress and new works by young contemporary artists. And it makes sense.
Buying is eclectic. How many of us only buy within a singular style or medium? Most of our homes are a reflection of the many interests and assorted tastes we have, and HFMA proves that this should be so. It’s nice to have variety and it looks good, too.
And though eclectic, the collection is tightly curated. “The collection is very personal,” Miller says. “I only buy what I like, because if it doesn’t sell, I have to live with it! It also means that sometimes it breaks my heart a little when they go!”
While the collection isn’t focused solely on gay artists, given the genre of the works on show, many of them are: Keith Vaughan, Duncan Grant, Paul Cadmus, Michael Leonard, to name a few. Miller has a particular interest in showing works that document gay life at a time when homosexuality was less socially accepted, even illegal.
Growing up, I was always interested in art, but especially where it met counter culture, Andy Warhol, Derek Jarman, that kind of thing.
Patrick Hennessy is one of Miller’s favourite artists, and he is represented by two works within the collection. Throughout his career, alongside his conventional output, Hennessy also created a body of work which was far more personal and, for its time, ground-breaking. He addressed issues of masculinity, sexual identity and homosexuality, which, for post-war Ireland where it was still illegal and considered morally repugnant, was highly extraordinary and extremely brave.
Often, the titles of hennessy’s paintings would obscure the ‘real’ meaning behind what was depicted. Atlas Beach, for those in the know, does not depict a beach, but the rooftop of a gay bar called ‘Charles Atlas Beach Bar’ in Tangiers upon which the figures are standing.
A recent addition to the collection is a beautiful and sensitive portrait of the artist Robert MacBryde from around 1938, completed by his partner, Robert Colquhoun. Known as the ‘Two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde met at the Glasgow School of Art in 1932 and lived together until Colquhoun’s death in 1962. The drawing, initially catalogued as simply Portrait of a Young Man has now been confirmed as being a portrait of MacBryde.
For those wanting to experience more of HFMA’s collection in person, circumstances permitting, the gallery will be at Battersea Decorative Fair from 22-25 October, The Winter Olympia Art and Antiques Fair from 3-8 November, and also at the Coningsby Gallery in Fitzrovia from 30 November to 5 December. The home gallery space is often open to events, and of course available by appointment.