Many of his friends thought the artist Rex Whistler unlucky in what proved the last of his glamorous society patrons: Maud Russell was young, gorgeous, rich, had a huge country house, Mottisfont Abbey, and a vast room which she wanted him to cover with a mural – but she also knew her own mind.
Whistler’s brother Laurence, a glass engraver, said snidely that she wanted not art “but a superior kind of wallpaper”. However, a very different picture of their affectionate relationship emerges from a new exhibition at the house, now owned by the National Trust, and her diaries, which will be published for the first time next month.
Louise Govier, property manager at Mottisfont and curator of the exhibition, said: “Maud was married to a British banker but came from a German Jewish background and was always seen as something of an outsider. She was portrayed as constantly interfering with Whistler’s work, changing her mind and generally making the job a misery – but that was not the truth of the relationship in her diaries, and it’s good to have this chance to set the record straight. She was highly intelligent and very interested in creating a room in keeping with the history of the house.”
Whistler’s last great mural, fantasy gothic architecture covering walls and the ceiling of Russell’s huge drawing room, took far longer than expected. She tried to pay him extra, but he only accepted £100: she wrote in her diary that it was the first time in her life that anyone refused to accept her money.
The diaries – A Constant Heart, edited by her granddaughter and to be published in February by Dovecote Press – also reveal her sadness when he finally did finish.
Russell wrote: “I felt as if a loved person had left for ever, or as if part of the house I was living in had been suddenly pulled down.”
The diaries also record her grief at his death aged 39 in the second world war. He was killed on his first day of active service with a tank corps in Normandy.
The exhibition brings together paintings, letters, designs and photographs from the National Trust’s Whistler archive, the family archive at Salisbury Museum, and that of the Welsh Guards – most of which have never gone on public display. It includes childhood drawings and his last works – a design for his own tomb complete with weeping widow – and spectacular drawings dashed off on the backs of menus and hotel notepaper.
Whistler also had dream clients in the Pagets at Plas Newydd, now also a National Trust property, where he was given free hand to cover acres of wall with a landscape, jokes and family portraits.
Russell wanted something more restrained for Mottisfont. The exhibition includes rejected designs such as romantic landscapes and medieval kings and queens leaning from their niches. Only one tromple l’oeil niche in the finished room is typical of Whistler’s more whimsical work: a smoking urn and colourful volumes recording the dates he began and finished the job. He is said to have completed it in one afternoon while Russell was out of the house.
The niche also features her discarded glove and wedding ring, and the exhibition features his portrait of a sleepy-eyed Russell leaning back against a cushion, among paintings of society lovers or objects of unrequited love – including a naked portrait of Caroline Paget.
Evelyn Waugh is said to have based Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited on Whistler – but Govier believes both he and Russell had far fewer affairs than credited with. Whistler was welcomed as much for his charm as his talent in a procession of wealthy houses. The designer Cecil Beaton described his conversation as “enchantingly funny”, though he added: “No gossip – doesn’t know any. No sex talk – doesn’t think of it.”
Almost invisibly high on the walls of the Mottisfont room Whistler left a record of a crucial day: “‘I was painting this ermine curtain when Britain declared war on the Nazi tyrants. Sunday September 3rd. R.W.”
Whistler, who was offered camouflage war work, was determined to join active service. He died in July 1944.
Russell learned the news from Edward Sackville-West, cousin of Virginia Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. Russell wrote in her diary: “During dinner Eddy told me Rex had been killed in Normandy. I felt a great pang; but I knew he would be killed. Everybody knew it. Lovely Rex; difficult, strange, rare, unhappy Rex.”
• Rex Whistler: More than Murals, Mottisfont Abbey until 23 April
