Ruskin Spear studied at the Hammersmith School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art (where he subsequently taught between 1948 and 1977). Excused military service in WWII on account of childhood polio, he instead took part in the ‘Recording Britain’ scheme initiated by the government at that time. 

The work of Walter Sickert (1860-1942) was a strong influence on Spear throughout his career.  Sickert’s fascination with the low-life scenes of Camden Town is reflected in Spear’s own life-long interest in painting scenes of everyday life in his native Hammersmith. Spear’s style soon developed into a highly recognizable one of casual, informal observation. He also developed a successful practice as a portrait painter, but even these pictures he imbued with a sense of the improvised rather than the carefully arranged. His sitters are presented as people glanced at swiftly or even taken unawares. Like Sickert before him, Spear liked the newspaper photographer’s ‘snapshots’ of people; indeed some of his portraits were worked directly from newspaper cuttings. But all of Spear’s portraits tend to show the sitter in unposed, unguarded moments. His sitters were drawn from the whole range of society. He would paint the ordinary man-in-the-street one day and then the next he would be called upon to paint Harold Wilson, John Betjeman or Laurence Olivier. Spear’s oeuvre forms a distinctive body of figurative art in post-war Britain and his work hangs in numerous public collections. In London there are holdings at Tate Britain, The Imperial War Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.  Among the provincial galleries, Bristol, Nottingham and Sheffield have good representations. A number of universities also chose Spear to portray their senior academics. He was particularly popular with Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, and Spear’s portraits can be seen hanging in their public spaces today.

Despite its conventionally neutral titling, Study against a Black Background was instantly recognizable at the time of its initial exhibition as a portrait of the M.P. Enoch Powell (1912-1998).  Powell was one of the United Kingdom’s most brilliant and controversial twentieth-century politicians. He was educated at Trinity College Cambridge, where, after taking a double first in Latin and Greek, he remained briefly as a fellow. He was then appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney at the remarkably young age of 25. When WWII broke out he returned home, enlisting as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment although he was soon seconded to Military Intelligence. He saw no action, but initially was closely involved in the strategic planning of the defeat of Rommel in North Africa. In 1943 he transferred to Intelligence in Delhi, working first with Mountbatten and later in 1944 providing intelligence support for General Slim’s Burma campaign. Remarkably, he finished the war as a Brigadier with an OBE, an extraordinary rise from his status as private at its beginning.

Returning to England after the war, Powell set his sights on politics. After one failure in the general election of 1947, he was elected as the member for Wolverhampton South West, a seat he held until 1974. Thereafter, disenchanted with the government of Edward Heath, he resigned from the Conservative Party and was elected instead for the constituency of South Down where he sat as an Ulster Unionist until finally losing his seat in 1987. His three most notable political posts were Financial Secretary to the Treasury (1957-58), Minister of Health (1960-63), and Shadow Secretary of Defence (1965-68).

In this present picture, Ruskin Spear shows us Powell delivering what was probably not his most important speech as a politician, but certainly the one by which most people remember him today: the so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech, delivered in Birmingham on the 20th April 1968 at the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. At the time, there was a bill on race relations going through parliament that proposed to make discrimination on racial grounds illegal.  

Powell took this opportunity to rail against large-scale immigration to the country, which he felt would soon overwhelm the population if not controlled. He specifically targeted Black and Asian immigrants from the Commonwealth countries. In this speech - a subject still debated today - Powell stated his view that: “We must be mad, literally mad as a nation” to allow immigration on such a large scale. Quoting Virgil, he continued: “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. This incendiary metaphor, picked up almost universally by the press at the time, is how the speech is remembered and referred to today.