• We held our first exhibition of Michael Taylor’s paintings in our gallery in Cork Street back in 2006, and it proved such a success that we returned to Michael’s studio later that year for further ex-catalogue works. His stunning composition, ‘Attic Room, 1997’ was one of the paintings we came across, and it sold immediately. We are delighted to have just re-acquired it.

  • Michael Taylor, Attic Room, 1997
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  • Until fairly recently Michael’s compositions were heavily influenced by the attic room in which he painted – the slanting eaves and beams above, the cracked floorboards with their suggestion of light below, the uneven and flaking whitewashed walls. And within these intimate confines his strange and highly personal iconography would gain in resonance. ‘Attic room, 1997’ is a painting of huge complexity, defying the natural laws but with a perspective all of its own as the central forms intertwine and behind them the vertiginous staircase climbs in a not entirely logical manner up to the attic.

  • Meanwhile, Michael’s painting ‘Cello, 2019’ (also titled ‘Towards silence’) is recognizably a much more recent work, not least because of...

    Michael Taylor, Cello, 2019 (or ‘Towards Silence’)

     

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    Meanwhile, Michael’s painting ‘Cello, 2019’ (also titled ‘Towards silence’) is recognizably a much more recent work, not least because of his having moved house. The lightness and airiness of the room does not diminish the poignancy of the painting. Michael recently described it on Instagram as “the first painting I did in the new studio … I now find something touchingly melancholy about the little Caroline (his wife) out there on Fordington Green glancing up out of the past at our window. The child’s cello turned face to the wall was suggested while attending the premier of John Tavener’s beautiful and haunting piece for four string quartets ‘Towards Silence’ in Winchester Cathedral.”
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  • In 2001 Michael painted an exquisite and intense portrait of the composer Sir John Tavener. It is one of four...

    Sir John Kenneth Tavener

    © National Portrait Gallery, London

    In 2001 Michael painted an exquisite and intense portrait of the composer Sir John Tavener. It is one of four paintings that Michael has in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which re-opens to the public on 22nd June 2023 after a three year refurbishment.