Obituary: Peter Greenham

IN JUNE 1961 the Governing Body of Downing College, Cambridge, commissioned Peter Greenham to paint a portrait of FR Leavis, who was then about to retire as a fellow, writes Ian MacKillop (further to the obituary by Bernard Dunstan, 13 July).

In 1991, while researching a biography of Leavis, I wrote to Greenham, having heard that he was deeply absorbed by Leavis during the sittings, which lasted in all about 60 hours. He returned a long, careful letter, followed by another with additions and corrections. As a young man, Greenham knew the Roths slightly, the family of QD Leavis. When her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) came out he wrote to the Sunday Referee to defend the high intellectual principles of the book's thesis. 'It gave ordinary people a standard and an ally.' During the sittings in the college hall, Leavis was courteous, kind, 'never trivial'. 'He had the effect of making the sitting not merely an occasion, but something exalted.'

Greenham described Leavis as man full of suppressed energy, with a small tense body, his brown skin and the colour of his clothes (set off by a white shirt which looked fresh every day) giving him a keen and russet glow. Greenham wished Epstein had done his head. Leavis showed a surer taste in painting than many sitters, liking especially the 'majestic subtlety' of Augustus John's Thomas Hardy and Pissarro's Farm Girl in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Both artist and literary critic displayed touching modesty during this privileged episode. Leavis asked Greenham to give a paper on the paintings of DH Lawrence to a college society, and Greenham, rather unhappily, acquiesced because he feared that the portrait would fail if he didn't. Only once did Leavis ask if he could have a glimpse of the work in progress, as his wife had asked him about it.

The painting is now at Downing College, a unique picture perhaps, because it shows the 'smile of extraordinary sweetness' that impressed Greenham so much.