Craigie Aitchison

Aitchison was deeply fond of birds. He allowed uncaged canaries to fly about his home in Kennington and birds are a recurring subject in his work, occurring in still-life, landscape, portrait and crucifixion subjects alike. In this portrait, a green canary perches on a small branch, a complement to the portrait subject. The branch floats on the surface of the work; it is unclear if this is a graphic design, perhaps transposed from one of the artist’s vases, or if the bird is alive and studied from life. Aitchison’s reduced handling of the subject produces an ambiguity, making it unclear whether the bird is living, dead, or simply a figurine. The sitter in this painting is Alan McNaught, who sat for Aitchison in various portraits between the 1960s and the 1980s. The profile view was a recurrent device in his earliest portraiture, including Mr Georgeous Macauley (1963, Private Collection) and, later on, Yellow Portrait (1967, Private Collection), which depicts an unknown sitter. In these works, the sitter is laid flat against a coloured background – typically a battered screen in the artist’s studio space. Aitchison would explain that, beside their black skin, other colours ‘jump’ forward. A year or so before Alan McNaught with Bird was painted, the artist’s close friend Euan Uglow used the same profile view to depict a black sitter in Marigold (1969, Private Collection). This work appears to have been exhibited at the Compass Gallery in 1970 as Alan McNaught with Bird and again at Basil Jacobs Gallery, a year later, as Alan with Green Bird. The two works were listed as having almost identical measurements. The reverse of the canvas is inscribed 1971, which may suggest that it was altered and brought to completion after it was first exhibited at the Compass Gallery in 1970. Given the difference in the two listed titles, perhaps it was in this interval that the eponymous bird became green.