Gerard Basset on Michael

Fig 12 (right) Waterloo Place, SWI (date obscured). An example of the spontaneity and freedom that began to permeate Michael’s drawings around this time under the influence of Charles Keene.

Fig 13 (below)

Michael’s pen and ink work also began to display a more impressionistic quality, as in this charming study of Beaurepaire House, near Basingstoke, which again was made into a Christmas card.

The Lowinsky Collection of Drawings by Charles Keene (1823–1891) – which may well have been the one that the 25-year old Michael bicycled to St James’s to see. It was a pivotal moment in Michael’s artistic development. Looking at his work, you feel it released Michael from the strictures of architectural drawings and allowed his pen to flow more freely – or, to use his words, ‘more loosely’. I did ask Michael to name other artists that he felt had influenced him but I couldn’t get him off Keene. I did try and drop the name of Edward Ardizzone, who like Michael was a master of line, but all he said was that he knew him, and ‘very good company he was’.

Keene himself bore an uncanny likeness to Charles Dickens (Fig 9), which is appropriate because what Dickens left to us in his descrip-