Portrait of Eric Verrico is a major work from a series of portraits of the sitter executed by John Minton between 1945-48. This portrait has rarely been exhibited in the last five decades since the artist’s Commemorative Exhibition in 1958, when it was in the possession of the notorious Soho club owner, Muriel Belcher. The work is concerned with the transience of youth and beauty, a significant theme of Minton’s oeuvre. This piece is comparable in scale and quality to some of the artist’s best portraits now held in museums, and is a particularly fine example of Minton’s output in years following the end of the Second World War including Portrait Group, 1945 (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel); Cornish Boy at a Window, 1948 (Government Art Collection, London); Boy in a Landscape (Eric Verrico), 1948 (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter) and Robert Hunt, 1947 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).
Minton’s portraits were always of people he was close to and often of those he was attracted to. In a 1952 lecture, the artist explained: ‘I do not believe you can paint any old thing…It will only happen if it is really done with love.’ Eric Verrico was one amongst a group of young people in Minton’s expansive and diverse social circle, known as ‘Johnny’s Circus’, who were painted by him in the post-war years. He became close to a number of his students whilst teaching and through his paintings of them he struggles with his legitimacy as a figurative artist and his desire to remain relevant to a younger generation.
The portraits he produced from 1946 to 1949 are a potent demonstration of portraiture as anxious expression. The self-reflection of the sitters and the ‘touching and melancholy impermanence of all physical beauty’ can be read as autobiographical. In this work he has even manipulated Verrico’s facial features to look closer to his own.
[FAS catalogue Twenty Twenty, 2020]