RONALD BLYTHE’s famous work Akenfield, published in 1969, along with later writings, had been a source of inspiration to me for some time. So, in 2008, I made a visit to the author, and he kindly let me draw and paint small studies of him for a show that I was preparing for that year in Dorset County Museum.

He was about 85 when I visited him at Bottengoms, the farmhouse on the Essex/Suffolk border which he inherited from his friend the painter John Nash. I found him gardening. Blythe smiled, shook my hand in silence, and led me inside for tea.

He was exactly true to his word(s) and everything I might have hoped: kind, generous, gentle, mercurial, sharp, witty, tremendously well read and learned, amused by the world, and deeply spiritual. As great people do, he showed me a level of hospitality and attention that I didn’t deserve. He made me feel as if I mattered, and he forgave my ignorance of so much that he knew and understood well.

It was one of those brief encounters of apparently small consequence which turn out to be quite profound, and I think of it still quite often.

Toby Wiggins RP, Study for Ronald Blythe, oil on canvas, 40 x 30cm, 2008

He was extremely generous with his time, and showed me around the ancient farmhouse and garden, and local villages and their churches, besides sitting for me to draw him. He gently talked of artists and writers, of the landscape, and of aspects of Suffolk life, at one point springing upstairs to return with two walking sticks — one that had belonged to John Masefield, and the other that had been John Nash’s. Nash’s was topped with a black ball held in a bird’s claw.

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