My friend Edmund Fairfax-Lucy, who has died aged 74, was a painter with a remarkable range of mind. The grandson of the writer John Buchan, he combined a philosophical attitude to painting with a love of building projects. He once confessed to having “a low riot threshold”, but at the easel the touch of his brush was gentle. Whether painting still lifes, interiors or landscapes, he sought to reveal a certain idea, experienced over time and disclosed by light. Many pictures, which appeared successful to friends, were erased and begun again in pursuit of that elusive vision.
Edmund was born in Oxford, the son of Alice (nee Buchan), a writer, and Brian Fairfax-Lucy, a soldier and writer. After leaving Eton, Edmund went on to study at the City and Guilds of London Art School in Kennington, south London, and thence to the Royal Academy Schools, where he flourished under the guidance of the Keeper, Peter Greenham. By the time he was 25, he had been elected to the New English Art Club, he was exhibiting at the New Grafton gallery (which continued to represent him until 2005) and selling to discerning collectors. From 1967 his paintings were hung in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for an unbroken 45-year span.
One patron, Sir Brinsley Ford, the last individual in Britain to acquire a drawing by Michelangelo, liked to say to visitors: “I cannot introduce you to Michelangelo, but I can introduce you to Fairfax-Lucy.”
To listen to Edmund himself talking about light in Dutch interiors, or expounding on the colour of Bellini or Bonnard, one felt in touch with a live tradition. Years later, he served as an imaginative master of the Art Workers’ Guild in London, reading a poem appropriate for the season at the start of each meeting, and inviting distinguished art historians to lecture.
In the 1970s he moved into a wing of Charlecote Park, the ancestral home in Warwickshire his family had gifted to the National Trust. There he successfully applied his knowledge of systems of proportion to create a formal garden in the forecourt to match the Elizabethan architecture.
The same regard for proportion and interval underpins his oil paintings, many painted in the familiar rooms of Charlecote or on the terrace at dusk. In Hanging the Silk, painted in Blickling Hall, Norfolk, the geometry is at once powerful and mysterious. In recent years that mysterious, almost metaphysical, quality becomes more evident as he found happiness painting in Ireland and on the Scottish borders.
He was married in 1974 to Sylvia Ogden and in 1986 to the writer and broadcaster Lucinda Lambton – both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Erica Loane, whom he married in 1994, and their sons, Patrick and Johnny.
