. . . and now for the Vin Olympics

On the occasion of the 2016 Olympic Games we present Ronald Searle's 'Vin Olympics' created in 1984 for John Goelet's  Clos Du Val and Taltarni wineries.

Original courtesy of Peter DeSeve

On the reverse of one of the original drawings is this scratched out version of the above. Searle was quite prepared to discard a finished drawing if it the composition didn't work for him.

Searle Down Under

Over the course of his career Searle did several assignments on an antipodean theme, not the least of which were the 'wine' drawings for the Australian arm of wine-maker John Goelet's vinery business Taltarni and Moonambel.

For Sports Illustrated (Nov 1st, 1971) he illustrated  John Underwood's article 'Poms, Butcher-Birds and Bogeymen' . The original article is archived here

'Australian Race Crowd' Sports Illustrated 1966

Wine Speak

It's no secret that Ronald loved wine! In the Channel 4 news footage of him around his 90th birthday he delighted in admitting 'bubbles give me ideas" and I can attest from lunching with him that copious glasses, bottles even, were consumed.  A different bottle accompanied each course- a light rosé, champagne, a chilled red- it was a pleasure to see a connoisseur indulging his guests and a task to keep up!
On my last visit chez Searle I was amused to see his shopping list consisted of only one item. . .

Here's an interview from 2007 where Ronald indulges in some winespeak.  It's a revealing read; we see even in his eighties Ronald's joie de vivre was matched only by his prodigious work ethic and his distaste for wine snobbery and the Riviera set is hinted at too.

One of the world’s most brilliant cartoonists is also an impassioned wine lover. Jeff Cox meets a man who loves wine and hates pretensions.

'You may not recognise his name, but you’ll instantly recognise Ronald Searle’s wickedly energetic style. Scratch this cartoonist and you’ll also reveal one of the world’s most impassioned wine lovers.


Searle minces neither words nor images, but his barbs are so witty they cause as much delight to his audience as discomfort to his subjects. In the prologue to his 1983 book, The Illustrated Winespeak, he calls the majority of wine writers ‘that grotesque international band of snobbish inarticulate sponges, incapable of thinking beyond their incestuous little circles, [and who] do as much harm to the world of wine as they do to the language’. This fills me with confidence for our encounter.

If Searle comes equipped with sharp words and pens that bite hard, he’s earned the right to use them. He was born into a working class family in Cambridge in 1920, was drawing fairly well at five, and earning his living with his drawings at 15. Income from his drawings put him through art school. World War II intervened, and in October 1941, he shipped out for Singapore. One month later, Singapore fell to the Japanese and for almost the next four years, he managed to stay alive in a Japanese prison camp despite unimaginable horrors, beatings, malaria, beri beri, and a guard’s pickaxe in the back. (His memoir of the time, To the Kwai and Back, has just been reissued by Souvenir Press.) During those horrible years, he never stopped drawing.


‘When I returned to England in 1945, my first ambition was to indulge,’ he says. ‘Since then, I think I’ve eaten in virtually every restaurant of interest, standing, quality and value in London, Paris, Berlin and New York. After scanning some 60 years of wine lists at a certain level, it’s inevitable that some understanding of perfection in wine would brush off. I’ve drunk my way through some remarkable bottles and am still standing.’

Like all great artists, his work (pictured right) embodies the seemingly disparate qualities of careful control coupled with total freedom, never more evident than in his books on wine, Winespeak and Something in the Cellar... His quivering tipplers, buxom ladies and caricatures of wine drinkers are immersed not only in wine, but in explosions of mayhem, joy, and desperation. He pokes fun at everyone in the world of wine – straight to the nose of the pretentious. He achieves this with only one eye – his left. ‘And I am notoriously left-handed,’ he says. ‘With that hand I manipulate my steel-nibbed pens, my brushes and my sculpting tools.’


After many years living on the Left Bank in Paris, he and his wife Monica ‘settled in Provence some 30 or more years ago in a tiny village 2,000 feet up in the mountains – as far away as possible from the Cote d’Azur and its repellant so-called people.

‘Our village is almost entirely medieval, and our house has a vaulted cellar from the 11th or 12th century where the temperature remains constant throughout the year. The 400–500 bottles ranged in it contain little exotica. Deliberately. We can no longer face entertaining at home and stick to local restaurants. So the wines we have are for daily drinking. Of course there are a few great-year Yquems, some Krug, and Roederer Cristal. But most are for short-term enjoyment.


‘Here in the south we tend to drink cool. We have a lovely Rhône rosé that goes with anything: Domaine Remejeanne from Cadignac/Sabran.’ Other favourites he cites are Henri Bourgeois’ Sancerre rouge and blanc , plus his ‘remarkable’ Pouilly-Fumé.’

For someone aged 86, Searle’s workdays are long, a testimony to his love of drawing – or perhaps his inability not to draw. ‘I drink quite a lot of Champagne. My daily dose is an extremely delicate, delicious, quite cold Billecart-Salmon brut rosé around noon. Otherwise – as I am working more or less from 9am to 6.30pm – I don’t drink until dinner.’

His irreverent attitude towards wine and the people who love it is so refreshing that his friend of 20 years, John Goelet of Clos Du Val in the Napa Valley and Taltarni in Australia, uses Searle’s drawings in winery promotions and even on labels of special bottlings. ‘Sure,’ Searle says, ‘there are those who think wine is God-like and shouldn’t be sent up. But wine is all things to all men, and the basis is that of love of the grape.’


Asked to elaborate, he continues, ‘Every wine drinker has his own exclusive – and to him or her unique – insight into perfection in the bottle. It’s all very egotistic in that wine drinkers/snobs/connoisseurs are totally convinced that their special bottle is the One and Only, into which they have the insight.’




As a child in a modest family in East Anglia, wine was not in Searle’s world. But long ensconced in Provence, it is part of the rhythm of life. ‘In our small village, wine is drunk as an essential part of the meal, without pretension. At noon the village is silent. Everyone is at table: the masons, the gardeners, the workers in the fields, the labourers, the children, the postman, the drain cleaner. The chat, if any, is about food or crooked politicians. A table wine from the local minuscule ‘Superette’, a wild boar stew, bread, cheese – that’s it. Wine here – and probably all over the French countryside – is a part of life. And after all, isn’t that the root and the basics of the grape and the natural enjoyment of it?’


Tasting Notes


What did you drink last night? 
With the remains of a cold chicken and a tomato salad, half a bottle of Beaujolais (Juliénas 2002 from Domaine Gérard et Nathalie Margerand), sent by a friend.


What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a bottle? 
This family does not go in for exotica. The most it has ever spent was on two bottles of Yquem 1967 which, I am often told, was a year of years. It was also the year we were married. I can’t tell you how much was paid because it was a present from Monica.


What’s your Desert Island wine?
The above, naturally'

From Decanter

Cru Café Capetown, South Africa has a Searle 'WineSpeak' mural.  According to Grape 'the Castelein brothers went so far as to fly to France and pay handsomely to obtain the rights to display Ronald Searle's wonderfully abandoned and imbibing characters in their new Cru Café wine bar and restaurant.'

WOSA elaborates on the story: 'the artist is notoriously reclusive - and "dangerous with his pen" according to fellow artists and corporations foolish enough to commission work. He's fiercely private, "his bite and bark are equally ferocious", he doesn't use email or a cell but does have a post box in London - which is how the owners of Cru Café tracked him down to a village in Haute Provence.

Two South African restaurateurs, brothers Jacques and Tom Castelein (former owners of Tasca de Belem at the V&A Waterfront), were determined to exhibit Searle's caricatures - so Tom flew over to France to talk to him. Living up to his quirky reputation, Searle idiosyncratically granted reproduction rights in exchange for a rare vintage of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1961 (with artwork by Georges Mathieu) - an appropriate deal for Cru Café, a wine bar named after a vineyard of superior quality. Tom flew back to London, sourced the wine, then, several thousand pounds the poorer, returned to France to present the highly-prized bottle to Searle. '

Mint

 Thomas Rowlandson

Thomas Rowlandson sketching a concubine

Thomas Rowlandson embracing a concubine

George Cruikshank, pen and black ink sketch, over graphite, France, 1977

A preparatory sketch for a series of medals commemorating caricaturists from the 16th to the 19th centuries

Searle made this study of George Cruikshank (1792-1878) for Six Fathers of Caricature, a series of medals struck by the French Mint from 1976-77. The other artists commemorated are Carracci, Ghezzi, Hogarth, Gillray, and Rowlandson. All the related drawings are in the Department of Prints and Drawings , while the medals themselves were presented by the artist to the Department of Coins and Medals of The British Museum.

Cruikshank was a celebrated caricaturist in nineteenth-century England; succeeding Gillray as the country's leading political cartoonist. Today, however, he is best known for his illustrations to Charles Dickens's novels. The source of this sketch is a portrait by Daniel Maclise, the most frequently reproduced portrait of Cruikshank, published in Fraser's Magazine in 1833. Cruikshank disliked the portrait; he became a vigorous teetotaller and objected to Maclise's depiction of him sketching in a tavern, seated on a beer barrel with a tankard and pipe beside him. Searle's final design shows Cruikshank sitting outside on the barrel amidst a riot, the tankard removed.

Annibale Caracci

Annibale Carracci, study for medal, formerly in an album; head and shoulders of male figure, turned to front, looking to right, and wearing a hat

Pier Leone Ghezzi

Pierleone Ghezzi, study for medal, formerly in an album; half-length male figure, seen in profile to left, wearing a hat

Ghezzi and Lambertini, study for medal, formerly in an album; Pope Benedict XIV seen from behind sitting in a chair and holding an open book, standing before him Pierleone Ghezzi with his hat off

Pierleone Ghezzi, study for medal, formerly in an album; whole-length male figure, turned to right, and sitting with drawing board on his lap

Antonio Pisanello - 23rd FIDEM Congress Medal 1992 Bronze, struck
Commissioned by FIDEM (Fédération Internationale de la Médaille) in silver and bronze

'Searle wittily subverts the traditional medal format. Normally there is a portrait on one side and a symbolic image representing the virtue or achievements of the sitter on the reverse. When this medal is turned over, the reverse reveals the back of Pisanello's head.'





James Thurber-

British Art Medal Society (BAMS)

Charles Dickens

Searle made his first medals for the Paris Mint in the early 1970s. He has since executed several medals for BAMS, of which this was the first.




Searle's medal of James Boswell continues a literary theme that began with his medal of Edward Lear, modelled in 1975 and issued by the Monnaie de Paris, and has been apparent in two of the artist's BAMS medals: those of Charles Dickens and Samuel Pepys medals, which appeared in 1983 and 1984 respectively. On this witty new medal Boswell, the biographer of the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson, is portrayed on one side, pen in hand, whilst on the other he chases after the great man, notebook in hand so as to catch the doctor's bons mots. Like the earlier Dickens medal, the Boswell medal is being issued in two versions, both as a struck two-sided piece and as two large electroformed uniface works. The latter have been taken directly from the models produced by the artist in 1999, and their issue by the Society has been made possible by generous sponsorship from David Silich.


Samuel Pepys Esqr. Searle's witty view of the celebrated diarist.
1633-1703, facing portrait with Pepys taking an extravagant though humble bow on the reverse: BAMS issue 20, 1984, 71.5mm, high relief struck bronze













Bernini Getting the Message from the Angel of the Baroque. Searle's vision of the inspiration of the great Italian sculptor.





The artist has written that the medal can be seen as 'either a weeping paperweight, a tearful, fearful, separation object, a cry-by-night loveletter weight, or simply as an ex-voto, because it all turned out well in the end.'





The medal harks back to the artist's war-time experience as a prisoner-of-war working on the Thai-Burma railway. The artist wrote that he had tried 'to retain a certain naivety of interpretation rather in the spirit of medieval Dance of Death imagery. The approximate anatomy that one encounters in so many gothic frescoes has been applied to the anonymous bodies that make the sleepers of the railway line.'

L'Humour

This medal marked a new departure as the first of Searle's works to be conceived as a cast rather than as a struck medal.

The Taltarni Wine Award, 1993

The Taltarni Vineyards instigated an award for services to Australian wine industry and commissioned the artist Ronald Searle to design the prize medal. This example of the medal was presented to the Museum both of a medal related to the wine industry and as an example of late twentieth century medallic art.


Obverse – A cartoon-like representation of Bacchus, the god of wind, riding a Kangaroo with the legend TALTARNI AUSTRALIA and the signature of the artist.





Medal commemorating Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) and Trafalgar. Obverse: Bust of Nelson in uniform wearing a cocked hat bearing the Chelengk plume. (Right) signature of 'Horatio Nelson'; (left) signature of 'Ronald Searle'. Reverse: Nelson mortally wounded supported by Britannia and Captain Hardy on the deck of the Victory. Legend: 'Trafalgar HORATIO NELSON 1758-1805.'

Watteau

Tim Bobbin (John Collier 1708-1786)

Le Capitaine Francis Grose (1731-1791)

Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708)

Romeyn de Hooghe, study for a medal, formerly in an album; male head, turned slightly to left and looking to front. 

After Hendrik van den Bos 1978

Searle at seventy

The artist described this medal as a 'Medal in Commemoration of a Mini-drama. No. 1 in a series of Great Classical trivialities', and added 'I feel that it is rather appropriate that there can be an occasion when a satirist can deflate himself publicly and take a little of what he likes to deal out to others!' The snake around Laocošn forms the figures '7' and '0'.

William Hogarth, study for medal, formerly in an album; almost three-quarter length male figure, turned to right, and holding "The Meaning of/Beauty"

"Gillray/& Mrs Humphrey"

James Gillray and Mrs Hannah Humphrey, study for a medal, formerly in an album; both drawn in caricature, and both sitting at a table, Gillray playing cards, Humphrey holding a large sheet of crumpled up paper

Charles Philipon, study for a medal, formerly in an album; head and shoulders of a male figure, head seen in profile to left. 1978

Jose Guadaloupe Posada, Ronald Searle, La monnaie de Paris.

Sources: British Museum, Ebay