Whenever I visit one of my friends, 
my head instantly swivels in one direction – to the two fabulous drawings on each side of her fireplace. I find them so captivating. But then the subjects are two very extraordinary men.
Full marks if you have identified them as the uniquely flamboyant gay icon Quentin Crisp (left) and mad Jonathan Martin (right), famed for burning down York Minster in 1829.
Quentin, famed for his outlandish autobiography The Naked Civil Servant, would often pose nude for my friend and her fellow art students in London in the 1940s. The class included a dwarf called Ian Smith, who did this wonderful drawing which she later inherited from another class mate. She recalls:
“Quentin was notorious at the time and much valued as a brilliant model. In The Naked Civil Servant, he said he saw himself as trying to perfect the craft of posing. He was an amazing model, he would take up the most difficult and excruciating and interesting poses.”
Jonathan’s wicked grin and cross-eyed features were drawn by his own hand by him looking at his reflection in a mirror. He drew many copies while admitted to Bedlam, the world’s longest running psychiatric hospital, and captured his own insanity brilliantly.
He had used a pile of sheet music to set light to the choir stalls, saying he was not keen on the clergy in York, calling them “blind hypocrites, serpents and vipers of hell, wine bibbers and beef eaters whose eyes stand out with fatness”. Wonderful, vivid words!
He was saved from the hangman’s noose after the judge declared him insane; his renowned artist bother John Martin had also hired the best legal brief, Henry Brougham, who gained notoriety for defending Queen Caroline.
Jonathan accomplished many of these drawings to raise money while in hospital, and this original was snapped up in a Cambridge auction by Jean’s husband.
So two oddballs indeed. But they can rest assured that their fame – or infamy – lives on, their portraits couldn’t hang in a finer place.
