An interview with Michael Taylor, British Artist
Accompanying a new exhibition
I’m releasing this interview to coincide with Michael Taylor’s new exhibition at Portland Gallery, St James’ London.
The exhibition features still lives made in recent years. I had the great privilege of spending a weekend with Michael and Caroline to learn and look, and another great privilege, the chance to write the catalogue introduction.
The exhibition opens on the 5th of June and runs until the 20th of June 2025.
Michael Taylor is perhaps best-known as the artist behind Boy with Apple. This portrait of a boy stars in The Grand Budapest Hotel, widely regarded as Wes Anderson’s best film. In the painting, a young boy holds an apple with a peculiar, slightly comic gesture. He is framed by a deep red curtain, a stone wall, and a golden Latin inscription bearing the date. Boy is a pitch-perfect riff on the Northern Renaissance. It mostly borrows from Hans Holbein the Younger, though some things are out of whack: the boy wears a costume from about eighty years after that artist’s death.
The Northern Renaissance is never far from the art historical consciousness. It has given us many iconic images, like Holbein’s Ambassadors. Recently, there has been a spate of blockbuster exhibitions putting this chillier Renaissance in the foreground. In the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, we had the extensive Renaissance in the North: Holbein, Burgkmair and the Era of Fugger. In the Queen’s Gallery, Holbein has had another outing, with drawings and paintings on display, in Holbein at the Tudor Court.
In some ways, Michael Taylor’s work is a descendant of the Northern Renaissance. The artist spends months on each depiction of the human figure. The sitters are poised in interiors, with carefully arranged objects that seem pregnant with meaning. Boy with Apple is an extreme example in how closely it follows the Northern Renaissance. It is also, by some margin, Taylor’s best-known picture. A Google search of the painting yields printed posters, canvas prints, and even a printed cushion, rather like the Girl with the Pearl Earring by Vermeer. The problem for us, however, is that neither painting is representative of either artist’s work. The Girl is an exaggerated single figure, unlike the complex interiors that make up most of Vermeer’s corpus, while Boy with Apple is, in Taylor’s own words, “very much a one-off.”
Wes Anderson had a heavy hand in Boy with Apple’s composition, editorialising it not only before Taylor put brush to canvas, but also when the painting was essentially finished. Needless to say, these are unusual conditions to make a painting in, particularly for an artist who prefers to work in solitude. More importantly, Taylor has absorbed a lot more art history over his career than just the Northern Renaissance: this might be part of the story, but it’s certainly not all of it. Unlike the artists of the Renaissance, Michael Taylor is very much alive, and we can put our art historical ideas to the test. So, I interviewed him to investigate what his art is really about.
I asked Taylor whom he would choose out of Vermeer or Holbein. Holbein was an obvious provocation because of Boy with Apple; Vermeer is relevant for his use of optics, which came up later on in our discussion. Although they are both ‘realistic’ painters, and have that in common with Michael Taylor’s intense naturalism, they’re also fundamentally different. In Holbein, realism clashes with the formality and artifice of the Renaissance: think of abstract backgrounds and floating Latin inscriptions. In Vermeer, realism extends to the whole scene, which is domestic and believable.
For Taylor, the choice was clear: Vermeer. “Holbein, not so much. He never really interested me. I think he’s too cold. But the portrait drawings are a completely different matter.” Taylor went on to explain that it is the humanity of Holbein’s portrait drawings that set them apart: “They have a directness that connects you straight to the sitter, that's unique [in] portraits at that time. And if you think Elizabethan painting came after that! It’s gone back a century.” More than any pastiche, quotation or borrowing from history, it’s the human element that interests him.
Taylor has worked with figures from the very beginning of his career. His formal training began in 1970, when he started his BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. His art education, however, stretches back to his early teens. Taylor’s father, an accountant with an array of hobbies including photography and ancient music, had a keen interest in 20th-century painting. Hence, he had “a very well stocked bookcase. He had all the Penguin Modern British Painters.” The young Taylor would “rummage” through the reproductions and found artists who captivated him. At this stage, none of the artists were Old Masters. They were the big names of modern British art: Stanley Spencer, Edward Burra, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, and so on.
“It was the [Stanley] Spencers I liked looking at most. The way he organised things into such fascinating patterns, just ordinary things in a room or in a hedgerow.” There is an undeniable link to Taylor’s work in Spencer’s interest in the interior, and in deliberately arranged compositions. One painting, however, stands out in Taylor’s journey, Girl with Roses, by Lucian Freud. Again, it was reproductions in books that brought the artist to Taylor’s attention. “I remember asking my art teacher at school who this wonderful painter I’d never heard of was. Turned out he’d known him at the Royal College, and remembered him walking into the room on his hands [!].” Prior to his early encounter with Freud, Taylor says he “was just drawing things I wanted to as a child does, you draw a ship because you're interested in the ship. Or you draw a train, but [Freud] made me realise that there was something more going on.”
Girl with Roses is certainly a forceful painting. The picture’s subject has huge almond-shaped eyes, typical of early Freud, which stare a thousand yards just to the left of the viewer. Her pale hand hovers over black velvet, and she seems to be gripping the rose by the thorns. The painting commands attention, and begs questions. Likewise, it is the intensity of the human presence that is the most consistent feature of Michael Taylor’s work, right through to his mature paintings. Look at the bulging eyes in his Model Steam Engine (Self Portrait), (2004). Just off-centre, his eyes burn into the viewer's gaze, and are wittily juxtaposed with the circle of his steam machine, the round head of the sculpture behind him, and the pom-pom of the mahlstick propped up behind it.
An early Lucian Freud may have inspired Taylor with his life task in his early teens—to make arresting depictions of people—but the task isn’t yet finished. Candidly, he pointed out that “I’ve always found [painting people] incredibly difficult. For a long time I avoided painting faces altogether—which may sound strange coming from someone who makes portraits.” He described how he has recently re-started going to life classes, something which he hasn’t done since Goldsmiths in the 1970s.
Practice and humility stand out in Taylor’s career. After his course at Goldsmiths, he resolved to try and paint for a living: “I thought: ‘I’m either going to be a bus driver, or give this painting thing a go’. So I spent months painting a self portrait in a kind of 17th-century style, and I worked in a pub in the evenings to fund it.” His first break came quickly when he was picked up by a gallery based in Florence, but with a rather strange working relationship: “[The gallerist] just used to send me money and say ‘send me some pictures’—an extraordinary thing to happen to a 21 year old.” Painting ‘on demand’ soon became a curse: “I began to find it very claustrophobic and restrictive. [The paintings] were very realistic pictures, the surface was very tight and defined.”
At this point, around the early 1980s, Taylor moved to a former chapel in Dorset and he began to react against his own work. “I had a lot of space. I recklessly let go and consciously abandoned the way I'd been working. I produced larger and larger and more and more unsaleable pictures.” The works produced in this period were heavily distorted, more ambiguous and more challenging than anything he had produced before. The works were not a commercial success: “I painted us into debt.” For eighteen months, Taylor abandoned painting entirely, swapping roles with Caroline, his wife, as he became a house husband and she worked full time to reverse their troubles. “You do need a very supportive partner to get through a creative life,” he points out.
Caroline is integral to the oeuvre in other ways: she has collaborated in the work from the very beginning as a model and sitter. Notably, Caroline is a calligrapher and heraldic artist: the couple clearly shares meticulousness and an interest in the history of images. In a pleasingly medieval twist, it was Caroline’s manuscript arts that saw the couple through financial turbulence, as she worked as the illuminator for Bournemouth Crematorium’s books of remembrance.
After his pause in the early 80s, Taylor started again, but his work synthesised the calm and precision of his early phase with some of the distortion and ambiguity of the latter. In 1983, he had his second major career break, which was winning the National Portrait Gallery’s annual award. Surprisingly, the winning picture was one of his more heavily distorted canvases, and he was sceptical of entering—but did so on Caroline’s advice. His win proved a “lifeline” to his career and motivation, at a time when painting the human figure was deeply unfashionable.
Through continued experimentation, Taylor developed an unusual technique. At the beginning of a painting, he draws many “diagrams”—not sketches—from his imagination “on bits of paper in cafes, pubs.” He keeps working through these until the design stops changing, at which point the composition is arranged in real life. Rather un-like Holbein, who relied heavily on his drawings (even noting on them what colours to use), real life observation is king for Taylor. On canvases he has stretched himself, he uses white over a toned priming to model figures in ‘negative’. Then, each part of the painting is brought more or less to completion in sequence, rather than roughing out the whole.
Ideally, he would have live models or sitters in front of him for the whole process. Given his paintings take months to produce, it’s not surprising that most are unable to commit. So, Taylor uses a novel bit of technology: 3D photographic transparencies. These ‘resurrect’ the sitter in front of him, so he can keep working. The transparencies consist of two photographs, taken from the point of view of each eyeball. The brain stitches the two images together to create the illusion of depth and texture, far weightier than a two-dimensional photograph. “In an ordinary photograph shadow detail, form, highlights and reflections get lost. But with a stereo photograph [...] you can actually see the veins beneath the surface of the skin.” He observes that “getting the texture right” is key, because “you can get away with quite outrageous distortions then.”
Is this another parallel with Vermeer? I brought up the controversial subject of the artist’s use of optics: did he use the camera obscura? “It seems difficult to believe he didn't.” I agree. Taylor points out one of the compelling bits of evidence: “the size of the images on the retina are disproportionately different [as in optical instruments]. You can see that in some Vermeers: where things in the foreground are far too big, and things in the background are far too small.”
Where the distortions of shape and size in the 17th-century painter came from his reliance on optics, the distortions in Taylor’s work come from his imagination. Another crucial difference is that Vermeer seems to have used optics to fix a composition in place at the very beginning. Taylor never uses stereographs to start a painting, only as an aid partway through.
Michael Taylor is clearly engaged with the history of his discipline. But the analogies between him and the painters he has looked at in his long career are inexact. As I speak to him, he’s working on a series of still lives which feature minutely observed ceramics as the ‘sitters’ of the paintings. The glazes on the pots are sumptuous, and one could spend hours looking at the bounced reflections, subtle transparency and craquelure on them.
Taylor mentioned Giorgio Morandi to me as another favourite artist of the 20th century, and the meditation on pots is a parallel. The parallel, though, is inexact. There are reminders of life in Taylor’s recent paintings that wouldn’t appear in a Morandi. A beautifully observed radiator and skirting board lurks in one image; another has a cutting of Tillandsia, with leaves reminiscent of a swimming squid. When Taylor sent me these works by email, he gave a tongue-in-cheek but rather apt postscript: “still life, still hope.”
Michael Taylor’s work reminds us of so many disparate points in art history, without being pinned to any one of them. This is to his credit. It should never be obvious exactly who has influenced a mature artist. In Taylor’s work, memories of the Renaissance and 17th-century optical realism are both present. What propels the work emotionally, though, is a sincerity and psychological force peculiar to modernist art.
If there is one thing that unites thousands of years of image-making, it is the desire to create a living presence that outlasts our fragile bodies. It cannot just be an accurate depiction. As Taylor put it, “there's a primal instinct to make a likeness. I don’t mean that in the way of the right shaped nose, I mean the likeness of things we love, or fear or need, like handprints on the cave wall. It goes right back. And you can't get rid of that.”
Michael Taylor, Still Life, Portland Gallery St James’ London, 5th-20th June 2025.