Pencil, 35 by 20 cm (13 ¾ by 8 ins)

Provenance:  Jeffrey Bernard; Nicholas and Elisabeth Luard; John Constable

Exhibited: John Minton: A Centenary, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, July - October 2017 (catalogue: Fig 75, Illustrated page 71)

Eric Verrico was a student of Minton at Camberwell School of Arts and was known for his astonishing good looks. He features in several of the artist’s finest male portraits, including one formerly in the collection of Muriel Belcher from c.1947-48 (with the Fine Art Society in 2020) and a group portrait (Portrait Group, 1945, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel). The present work is a study for perhaps Minton’s finest portrait of Verrico, Boy in Landscape (Portrait of Eric Verrico), of 1948 now in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter (acc.144/1969). Verrico eventually joined the RAF in the late 1940s when he appears to have drifted from Minton. Frances Spalding wrote of him: “Eric Verrico was the one who most frequently posed for, looking as if he had stepped out of a Caravaggio. He was the most beautiful of ‘Johnny’s Circus’.” (Frances Spalding, John Minton: Dance Till the Stars Come Down, Lund Humphries, London. p.88). This fine drawing was once in the collection of the famous hard-drinking journalist Jeffery Bernard. Nicolas Luard acquired the work from Bernard where it later hung at Brynmeheryn, Ystrad Meurig in Wales, the house he shared with his wife Elisabeth, the celebrated cookery writer.