Somerset Maugham Weekend 3 – The Old Shanghai Brothel Madam

(Sorry – due to being at the Perth Writers’ Festival and now in Adelaide for their arts festival I’m posting this a little late – let’s think of it as a long weekend) Let’s finish of my little Somerset Maugham weekend in tribute to the man himself and to Selina Hastings’s terrific biography of the old fella. In 1949 Graham Sutherland, a great artist of WW2 perhaps best known for his Christ in Glory that hangs in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, painted Somerset Maugham. He was in good company; Sutherland’s other well known portrait was of Churchill. Now whether you like the portrait or not is a matter of personal taste; Maugham apparently didn’t like but then he was, to be fair, quite vain about his looks and he was starting to get on a bit by 1949 and in his mid-seventies. Maugham looks grand enough, painted at his home at St Jean Cap Ferrat.

There are Chinois touches to the portrait to recall Maugham’s intrinsic literary link to the Far East throughout his career – the Chinese bamboo stool he is sitting on, the background yellow designed to recall a Buddhist monk’s robes. Apparently it took ten one hour sittings. Maugham’s friends were asked their opinion of the portrait. For the purposes of this blog the comments of Maugham’s old friends from his pre-WW1 Paris days, the artist Gerald Kelly, are most fun:

“you look like the madam of a brothel in Shanghai”

Maugham’s reaction is not known

PS: the portrait now resides in the Tate Collection