English painter Michael Wishart was BOTD in 1928. Born in London to a prosperous publishing family, he was brought up at Pulborough in Sussex. As a child, he developed a crush on a blond German boy named Harm, who was interned at the local prisoner-of-war camp. A childhood friend of aristocrat Pauline Tennant, he began socialising the Gargoyle Club in London by his early teens, meeting and befriending Pauline’s eccentric homosexual uncle Stephen Tennant. Educated at private schools, he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Anglo-French Art School in London and at L’Académie Julian in Paris. In 1950 he married the painter Anne Dunn, with whom he had a son. The marriage, perhaps unsurprisingly, was not a success, and they divorced in 1959. He had his first major exhibition in 1956, presenting landscape paintings in the Neo-Romantic style. Recognising the limitations of his talent (he called himself “a dedicated dauber who holds his hat upside-down and is sometimes surprised to see a rabbit fall out of it”), he adopted bohemian life, befriending Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and David Hockney and exploring London’s underground gay scene. Like Tennant, he became known for his baroque dress sense (matching a kilt with ecru lace and his grandmother’s jewels), effeminate drawl and tendency to name-drop. He spent much of his later life in France, America and North Africa, occasionally giving lectures in art history which he would prepare for with two dry Martinis and “a little amphetamine”. His 1977 memoir High Diver caused a mild scandal with graphic descriptions of his bohemian (read: homosexual) lifestyle. He died in 1996 aged 68. His second memoir, Injury Time, has yet to be published.

He died in 1996, aged

John Michael Wishart, artist: born London 12 June 1928; ); died London 28 June 1996.