Drawing to an end

ON February 4 1998 a dinner was held to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Francis Bacon at the Hayward Gallery in London. Among those present were Henrietta Moraes, Francis Bacon's voluptuous model of the Sixties, now in the last year of her turbulent life, and Maggi Hambling, one of Britain's best-known figurative artists. The two had met only once before, establishing little more than eye contact at a party in 1993. But this time, something more explosive was about to happen.

'Henrietta was wearing a sort of Indian robe,' Hambling recalls. 'As I approached her, she threw her arms open and gave me a big hug and a kiss, saying, "We must meet." ' And meet they did. First at a restaurant with friends, and then at Hambling's home. Shortly afterwards, Hambling received a letter from Moraes asking to borrow £400 to settle some 'annoying bills' and offering to work in return. Hambling's response was immediate. She sent the £400 and suggested that she could work by posing for her.

It had been several decades since Moraes, by now 67, had been painted by both Bacon and Lucian Freud, and had taken the artistic milieu and drinking dens of Soho by storm. 'I don't know what glamour is,' she once said, 'but I have it.' Direct, abrasive, garrulous, witty, attractive, mischievous and fearless, she lived for excitement and spurned authority.

However, poverty was never far from her doorstep; alcohol and drugs never far from her reach. As life went on, she became increasingly reliant on a small group of well connected friends, like an adored but troublesome mascot. In 1989 she was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and given three months to live if she kept drinking. She stopped, and set about writing her autobiography, Henrietta, published in 1994 to great acclaim. But in spite of becoming a minor celebrity and staying sober, she remained poor, living in a one-room council flat in Chelsea. Hambling's friendship and offer of work promised some necessary stimulation. So, although coy at first, she accepted, adding, with typical bravura, that she would 'only pose for geniuses'.

For Hambling, it was significant that the encounter with Moraes had taken place just two weeks after the death of her father, Harry, at the age of 94. During his last days Hambling had drawn him continuously from his bedside. Sitting in her south London studio, she explains, 'I felt a sense of urgency to get something down. . . to record what was happening. There, in front of me, was my father dying. All I could do about it was draw him.' After he died Hambling kept working, making paintings of him as she remembered him - standing with his walking stick, laughing, flirting. 'I suppose I was trying to turn grief on its head or something. Laughter is my lifeline. I don't understand how people go on living if they don't laugh. The enemy is sentimentality.' In any case, she could have found no better ally in cheating death of its sting than Henrietta Moraes.

On May 30 1998 Moraes made the journey to Hambling's studio to sit for the first time. 'She was going to AA meetings and was depressed. Yet she walked in and took me over.' Hambling became hypnotised. 'It wasn't just that she had eyebrows, lips and those cheekbones some people would give a million pounds for. There was this naked confrontation of the eyes. They were so deep. They looked straight through me to my soul, exposing her own at the same time. No deception, no mask, just there. She seized power with the ruthlessness of a Borgia. I became her subject rather than she mine.' Moraes sat for Hambling almost every Monday for the next seven months. While she sat, Hambling says, she was always 'totally present. Some people go off into another world or fall asleep. She made me laugh. I liked the way she described things. Everything was very particular. She saw things in an original way. She found my mascara hilarious, for some reason. But when I tried to tell her a joke, it didn't work.'

She was also a match for Hambling's imperiousness. One of Hambling's first oil paintings of her shows Moraes in profile, staring across a bleak white background. Hambling thought it wasn't working and took a break. 'Thank God that's done!' puffed Moraes. 'But it isn't,' corrected Hambling. At which Moraes climbed down, looked at the canvas and proclaimed, 'Yes it is. It's finished.' And so it has stayed.

As the weeks passed, the two became closer. Hambling, 55, who is famously bisexual, makes no bones about this. Instead of Henrietta, Hambling called her Henry. 'We fell in love,' says Hambling, 'and the work became a product of our relationship.' A visual diary was in progress and Hambling was in her element. 'Drawing is the basis of everything I do,' she says, and drawing from the figure is what she does best. Whether in graphite or charcoal, she works fast, marking the surface with flurried yet fluid strokes of the hand, trying 'to make one moment real'. With Moraes, she says, 'I was trying to get her intensity. I was also discovering her. Her broken nose (she told me some boyfriend or other had broken it for her), how the right side of her mouth was higher than the left, and how the right nostril was higher than the left. The right side of her face was optimistic, the left more tragic.'

Towards the end of July, something prophetic happened. Quite innocently, Hambling had placed one of her props, a skull, on a stool, and drew it on the same sheet as her model's head. 'My God,' said Moraes, 'you've made the skull look more alive than me.' It may have been a joke, but soon Hambling began to notice her muse going through mood swings, and guessed she was secretly drinking.

Several drawings from that summer show Moraes looking rather cross. In some she wears a broad-brimmed hat. 'Henrietta's daughter, Caroline, told me she always wore hats when she was drunk,' says Hambling. 'Then, towards the end of September, the drink was driving her a bit mad, and she was sent to the Mental Health Unit at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for two weeks.' Friends who visited her say she was completely incoherent. When she came out she started to go to AA meetings again, but, perhaps realising the end was in sight, returned to drink.

'The drink was beginning to eat into her,' says Hambling. She was defying death. She knew it would kill her. There was something almost valiant about it.' For Hambling, who is no teetotaller, this created something of a dilemma. 'Obviously I tried to discourage her from drink. It was a battle between me and the drink, and in the end, the drink won. She had this thing about never being defeated.' As Moraes continued to drink, her behaviour became more unpredictable. A crazed look begins to haunt the drawings, and in some, drawn with Hambling's left hand, the model's head seems to break up as if combusting from the inside. 'When she was drunk she was monstrous.' By December she had become very fragile, drinking only water - 'Everything else,' says Hambling, 'came up.' But her sense of humour did not desert her. To the various suggested titles for her revised autobiography, she added Delightfully Still Henrietta after the logo on a bottle of Hildon spring water.

On January 5 1999, Hambling telephoned Moraes but got no answer, so she drove to Chelsea the next morning. When she saw what a state Moraes was in, she offered to take her to the doctor. 'I'm not going anywhere,' said Moraes. 'Come and give me a hug and a cigarette.' Then she asked how long it was before Oscar Wilde died that he had said 'that funny thing'. Referring to the wallpaper in a cheap Paris hotel, Wilde had said, 'This is a duel to the death. One of us must go, and I fear it must be me.' Moraes recited it perfectly, and died moments later. Her body was taken to the hospital where the doctor gave Hambling permission to make sketches. 'Her hands,' Hambling notes, 'which were enormous, became small surprisingly quickly after she died.'

On the morning of the funeral, Hambling went to the Chapel of Rest in Munster Road where she found Moraes swathed in gipsy clothes, a red hat and cowboy boots, clutching a wand in one hand, and in the other a small case containing pictures of her dachshund, Max, and Hambling, who by now had become Max's guardian. Her drawings and paintings of Moraes in her coffin show her looking distinctly cross, with one eye still open, as if keeping an eye on things.

Asked why she has been moved to draw and paint people close to her at death - the painter Cedric Morris (1982), her mother (1988), and her father (1998) - Hambling takes a deep drag on a Marlboro Light before explaining, 'Well, you're not going to see them for much longer, are you?' then adds, 'You can't get much more of a subject really.'

Just as her father had done one year earlier, so Moraes continued, as Hambling puts it, to 'inhabit' her. 'When someone dies you don't stop being close to them.' And so Hambling embarked on a series of paintings from memory: Henrietta Drunk, the blood vessels of her brain pulsating as she gets terrifyingly drunk, or Henrietta Laughing - head back and mouth open so you can almost hear the sound. She also made sculptures, the most recent of which is Henrietta Eating a Meringue. 'When she was told she was diabetic, she went in for these in a big way,' says Hambling.

But what was to become of all this work? 'No one was interested in drawings in this country,' opines Hambling. But last summer, the noted author and art critic, John Berger, visited her studio. He immediately recognised the drawings' potential. 'This must be a book,' he told Hambling. In his preface to this book, Maggi and Henrietta, published next month, Berger suggests that, as an act of unmasking, the drawings are comparable to those of Rembrandt.

Frances Carey, a curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum, visited the studio and earmarked Hambling's sketchbook of her father dying and two large drawings of Moraes for the collection. Carey believes Hambling to be 'one of the most considerable figurative artists working in Britain over the past 30 years'. She adds, 'Figurative art is not very fashionable, so her commitment to it is admirable. Although contemporary artists do deal with the subjects of death and decay, they do not deal with the death of an actual person. Hambling is not a portraitist, but she is very good at capturing the personality of the sitter, and these unflinching drawings are among her best.'

As we leave the studio, Max is snoozing in his basket. 'I still hear her laugh,' says Hambling. 'It's as though she's still here.'