Catalogue | Two Lives in Colour: Fred Dubery & Joanne Brogden

It’s a case of third time lucky for my new book on the married artists and teachers Fred Dubery and Joanne Brogden, and I’m now struck by the very different volumes that would have been produced at earlier stages.

Dubery was a mainstay of the New English Art Club and the professor of perspective at London’s Royal Academy Schools (a post once held by the painter JMW Turner). We talked about my writing the story of his life shortly before he died in 2011.

Brogden – a sculptor and pioneering professor of fashion at the Royal College of Art, London – and I discussed a book on Dubery during her brief widowhood. Again, it didn’t happen.

The Dubery-Brogden estate then did a wonderful thing by committing a large award to the East Anglia Art Fund for scholarships in fashion/textiles and fine art at Norwich University of the Arts. 

And, with a big bequest of paintings to be sold to benefit the fund – which has backed a long and impressive line of exhibitions at Norwich Castle Museum – I was given a free hand to tell their story in a richly illustrated volume.

I had assumed that a fat file on Dubery would be sitting pretty in the library at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), London, but there was not a single reference to the RA Schools professor’s long tenure from 1984 to 1999, save for his regular appearances in the RA summer shows.

At this point, I realised it was in any case impossible to write about one of these partners of 46 years without giving equal weight to the other. The pictures are the visual narrative of their lives together – pleasure in the beautiful house and garden they created in Suffolk, and also in the joys of food, wine, friends and travel. 

In long college holidays, they toured all over Europe and beyond, lingering longest in France, where Dubery painted a morning picture and an afternoon picture, returning home with car loads of art.

The result is a double portrait, Two Lives in Colour. Brogden ran the show for Dubery’s benefit – giving him the space in which to work and handling every aspect of exhibitions, from framing to pricing, while still finding time to work on her sculpture.

We hear a lot about one (usually female) party in a creative partnership being eclipsed by the other in a crushing relationship perhaps amounting to domestic tyranny. For example, the painter Cedric Morris takes the lion’s share of credit for the East Anglia School of Painting and Drawing, but it was his partner Lett Haines – a painter and sculptor in his own right – who gave up his artistic career in order to run Morris’s.

But with Dubery-Brogden’s kinship, I found a positive lesson in the power of mutual support – as in the partnerships of their painter friends Lionel Bulmer and Margaret Green, and Diana Armfield and Bernard Dunstan. 

Anyway, the feisty Joanne Brogden would only ever do what she chose to do. Plus, it’s all there in the pictures – snapshots in the art of shared living.  

Ian Collins is the author of Two Lives in Colour. The exhibition is on at the Coningsby Gallery, London, 10-19 June, then at Holt Festival, 20-27 July