Henrietta Moraes: Two Sides

Of the many pictures that exist of Henrietta, the photograph above captures best how I remember her. It was used to illustrate a piece by Kate Bernard, which appeared in the November 1994 issue of Harpers & Queen.

It is certainly much more true to my memories than the Francis Bacon paintings of her, which ignore her warmth, intelligence and good humour. Bacon himself explained that the reason why he preferred to paint his friends from photographs was that he thought they would perceive the “distortions” he practised on them as “forms of injury”.

The title of his exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, “Human Presence”, seemed to me an odd choice for an artist whose most celebrated theme was the inhuman, whose tendency in his painting was actually to distance himself from human presences, whether through working from photographs, or through his trademark pursuit of the grotesque.

As I stood before a large portrait of Henrietta, I saw a striking picture that is worth many millions of dollars in the international art market, but which had transformed her into a caricature. Her love of the theatrical meant that she would have been happy to participate in Bacon’s Grand Guignol, but the painting offered little obvious insight into what she was actually like.

Visiting the gallery, I couldn’t resist for old time’s sake, taking a selfie with her portrait, but the act made me only regret that I had never thought to take one with the real Henrietta when I had the opportunity to do so thirty years ago.

“This whirligig of horrors is the best Bacon show I’ve ever seen,” wrote one reviewer, but the Henrietta I remember was someone who sought to defeat her demons rather than yield to them. Working for her publisher Hamish Hamilton during the early 1990s, I got to know a person who was drama-prone but extraordinarily resilient. I recently wrote about a bad fall she had suffered while promoting her book. After posting the piece, I discovered her own unpublished account of the episode, which has the charm that Bacon, in his acts of painterly defamation, preferred to keep off the canvas:

Henrietta was feeling years younger, she was getting better. It was a good time. It was wonderful to see her, no longer the object of other people’s manipulation, speaking for herself. After having written a much praised memoir, she was able to look forward to a fulfulling future as a writer. But she needed encouragement to stay the course. In recalling the situation thirty years later, the “timeless Beatles number” I find myself humming is “Help!”

After her book was published, I continued to ring her every weekday afternoon until I left Hamish Hamilton at the end of 1996. Adjusting to a freelance life meant that I subsequently got in touch much less often, which, looking back, I regret hugely, because I can see now, in a way I did not appreciate enough then, that a regular positive word, whether from me or from her other friends, had been very important to her. It had been the absence of such encouragement that had, long before, incubated the self-destructive side that Bacon latched on to in his paintings of her.

Henrietta’s friend John Deakin provided Bacon with the photographs that were his raw material. In the exhibition, a contact strip was displayed in a glass cabinet opposite the portrait of Henrietta that resulted from it. After having received his brief for the photo-session from Bacon, the instructions Deakin gave Henrietta were: “Throw yourself back on the bed and abandon yourself.”

But that was only one side. The other side was the Henrietta who had saved herself – who, in her own words, lived “from day to day, sober and hopeful”. So she continued for a while, which I wish had been a lot longer.