David Gommon's portraits of Basil Bunting
Two little-known portraits of Basil Bunting have been reproduced in a new book on the work of the British artist David Gommon by Philip Vann.
Mostly known for his visionary, often phantasmagorical landscapes, David Gommon (1913-87) also painted striking portraits of creative people he knew and admired, such as Basil Bunting, whom he met at a conference on Ezra Pound at Durham University in March 1979. Gommon’s art was enriched by his love and appreciation of poetry (in particular, works by John Clare, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot), and by his friendship with figures such as poet-artist David Jones and Edwin Muir.
He returned to Durham in July 1979, staying in one of the colleges to paint Bunting’s portrait. Vann quotes Gommon’s account of the visit: ‘It was for me a very happy experience getting to know Basil Bunting and hearing about his early days in Paris, and later in Italy, with Pound. He had such an attractive Northumbrian lilt. He was just eighty years old.’
There are many photographs of Bunting taken at various times in his colourful life, but Gommon’s two portraits are among very few painted by artists he sat for. Vann’s book includes a photograph of Gommon standing with one of the two portraits on an easel. This portrait – see below – shows Bunting sitting in a chair with the words BRIGGFLATTS superimposed in ghostly David Jones-type lettering over the wall behind. The whereabouts of this portrait (oil on board, 100 x 76cm) are unknown.
The other portrait (oil on board, 75 x 101cm, private collection, see top of page) shows Bunting sitting in profile at a window with a view of an idealised Northumbrian landscape. Vann links the appearance of a thrush amid oak leaves behind him with Bunting’s poem ‘A thrush in the syringa sings’ and as symbolising Bunting’s insistent belief that ‘poetry, like music, is to be heard’. The background might have been what Bunting would have wanted to see through his window in 1979 when he was marooned for three of his late years in a box-like modern house he hated in Washington New Town, which did at least have a young oak tree just outside. But he was able to spend his final years back in rural Northumberland two years after these two portraits were painted, firstly at Greystead Cottage, Tarset, from 1981, and then at Fox Cottage, Whitley Chapel, Hexhamshire, from 1984 until his death in 1985. David Gommon also painted at least one landscape in Northumberland: Vann’s book includes a reproduction of his remarkable painting of a windswept Dunstanburgh Castle (1984), with gulls soaring above and crashing waves below.
[With thanks to Philip Vann for permission to reproduce the two Bunting portraits.]
David Gommon by Philip Vann (with an essay by Karen Taylor) was published by Sansom & Company in October 2025 and can be ordered direct from the publisher via this link or from Amazon.
Basil Bunting’s Complete Poems is available from Bloodaxe via this link and the separate edition of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (including audio CD and video on DVD) via this link.
[14 January 2026]
