Patrick Procktor

Patrick Procktor (12 March 1936 – 29 August 2003) was a British painter and printmaker.

Early life

Patrick Procktor was born in Dublin, the younger son of an oil company accountant, but moved to London when his father died in 1940. From the age of 10, he attended Highgate School – where his teachers included landscape painter Kyffin Williams – intending to read classics at university. However, his mother's income was insufficient to fund his further education and after a period working with a north London builders' merchants 18-year-old Procktor was conscripted into the Royal Navy where, during his National Service, he learned to speak Russian.

Procktor's work, primarily in oils, acrylics and watercolour, drew on pop art influences, but was also influenced by his travels. He visited Italy, Greece, India, Egypt, China, and Japan, among other places), and once declared "the light in Egypt is violet, in China daffodil, in Venice opalescent". He was also adept at print-making, producing a sequence to illustrate a new 1976 edition of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In 1984 he was commissioned to paint a reredos for the St John the Baptist's Chapel in Chichester Cathedral. His model for the various figures of St John was his friend the photographer David Gwinnutt.

Procktor's painting The Guardian Readers was used as the cover art for Elton John's 1976 album, Blue Moves.

Procktor was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1996 and died seven years later, aged 67. where he socialised with, among others, Derek Jarman, Francis Bacon, and Cecil Beaton (several of Beaton's photographs of Procktor are in the National Portrait Gallery; Procktor's own 1967 pen and ink drawing of Joe Orton is also in the Gallery's collection).

Despite his homosexual leanings, in 1973 Procktor married a widow, neighbour and restaurateur Kirsten Benson. She sold her restaurant (Odin's) to Peter Langan, and Procktor, Hockney, Bacon and Lucian Freud all provided paintings to hang on the walls of Odin's and Langan's Brasserie in return for hospitality. He appeared, as himself, in the 1974 Hockney biopic, A Bigger Splash.

An obituary in The Independent said of his death: