Portrait bust of Walter McGeough Bond (1908-1986)
Duncan Johnston (1924 - 2000)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1966
Materials
Bronze
Measurements
457 mm (Height); 266 mm (L)
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565216
Summary
Sculpture, bronze; portrait bust of Walter Albert Nevill (Tommy) McGeough Bond (1908-1986); Duncan Johnston (1924-2000); 1966. A portrait bust of Walter McGeough Bond, by the sculptor Duncan Johnston, who worked largely in wood and metal, but also carried out occasional portrait commissions. This is one of thirteen sculptures by Johnston that Walter McGeough Bond owned and lent to an exhibition of his collection of mainly modern paintings and sculptures, held at the Ulster Museum in 1966.
Full description
A bronze portrait bust of Walter Albert Nevill (Tommy) McGeough Bond (1908-1986) by Duncan Johnston, depicting the subject facing forward, wearing a jacket and tie, and with a short moustache. Signed by the sculptor in the wax model on the sitter’s left lapel, ‘DJ’ in monogram. Set on a rectangular wooden base. Walter McGeough Bond, the last private owner to live at the Argory, was a passionate collector of contemporary art, although most of his collection did not come to the National Trust and has been dispersed. The portrait of him by the sculptor Duncan Johnston is precious therefore not only as a fine portrait of the donor of the Argory and its collections, but as a rare surviving work from McGeough Bond’s collection of contemporary art, which contained a large number of sculptures by Duncan Johnston. Johnston was born in Liverpool and trained in commercial art at Liverpool School of Art. During the Second World war he served as a physical training instructor in the Royal Marines. After demobilisation in 1946, Johnston moved to London where he lived and worked for the remainder of his life, and gradually took up sculpture for his profession. It seems that his ‘war time experiences during adolescence influenced his career in that he developed a mania for independence and a passion for philosophy.’ (Hamilton Gallery, London, exhibition flyer, 4 November 1980). Johnston was entirely self-taught as a sculptor, learning alongside his job as a teacher, one of his major inspirations the work of Jacob Epstein. Working entirely alone and without assistants, Johnston had his first exhibition in 1960 and began to exhibit more regularly in the following decade, mostly at the O’Hana Gallery in London, but also at the Edinburgh Festival in 1964. Johnston had a long-standing interest in sculpture for blind and partially-sighted people, organising a number of ‘Multi-Sensory Exhibitions’ across the UK. In his later years Duncan Johnston began to work almost exclusively in wood, becoming fascinated by the properties of lignum vitae, an especially hard wood from the Caribbean and South America. Lignum vitae was the wood employed by the Jamaican sculptor David Miller junior (1973-1977) to sculpt his ‘Head no. 4’ (NT 565218), displayed in the Library at the Argory, across the room from Duncan Johnston’s bronze portrait bust of Walter McGeough Bond. This portrait of was one of no fewer than thirteen works by Duncan Johnston shown at an exhibition of the McGeough Bond collection at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, in 1966. Whereas it was commissioned from the artist, the other loans to the exhibition had all been bought at the Edinburgh Festival exhibition in 1964. They included work in bronze, lead and steel, as well as a variety of woods, lignum vitae, ebony and elm. The immensely elegant Ebony Figure no. 2 (no. 137) was chosen for the front cover of the Ulster Museum catalogue. However, the most important work by this strongly individual sculptor exhibited by Walter MacGeough Bond in 1966 was Johnston’s 'The Agony of Man', in lignum vitae and metal (no. 148). This impressive sculpture was apparently at some point given back to Johnston by Walter McGeough Bond, as were perhaps some or all of the other works by him bought in 1964. In 2008 'The Agony of Man' was placed on display in the entrance hall of the Winsford timber merchants, Smee Timber. That company no longer exists and the subsequent fate of the sculpture is unknown. Jeremy Warren September 2022
Provenance
Commissioned by the sitter, Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Marks and inscriptions
On sitter’s left lapel, in monogram:: DJ
Makers and roles
Duncan Johnston (1924 - 2000), sculptor
References
MacGeough Bond 1966: The MacGeough Bond Collection. An exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of W.A.N. MacGeough Bond, Esq., exh. cat., Ulster Museum, Belfast 1966, p.24, no. 149.