Peter Doig, Canal Painting, 2022โ2023, on the cover of issue no. 243. ยฉ Peter Doig. Courtesy of the artist and TRAMPS; photograph by Prudence Cuming.
For the cover of our seventieth-anniversary issue, we commissioned a painting by the artist Peter Doig, of a boy eating his breakfast beside a London canal. Our contributing editor Matthew Higgs spoke with Doig about his influences and fried eggs.ย
INTERVIEWER
How did the cover image come about?
PETER DOIG
Iโd made a birthday card for my son Lockerโa more cartoony version of what became the painting. I quite liked the subject: heโs sitting at a cafรฉ on the towpath of the canal in East London.ย Everyone who knows London knows the canalโwe take it for granted. I canโt think of any paintings of it, but it seems to me a sort of classic painting subject.
I started working on the image alongside a big painting I was making for an exhibition at the Courtauld. I was thinking about how my work relates to the Impressionist galleries there, which contain Cรฉzanne, Gauguin, Daumier, Van Gogh, Seurat, et cetera. I had begun many of the paintings before I was invited to make the exhibition, but most of them had a long, long way to go before being finished. Iโd brought all my paintings to my London studio from New York and Trinidad, and all of a sudden I had more paintings in progress than I think Iโd had in probably thirty-odd years. It was quite exciting in a way, but then I had to make an edit, to decide which ones I was going to concentrate on, because I was getting carried away and I was never going to finish everything. The canal painting was the one very, very new one. Thatโs why I liked it for theย Reviewโand because, although I thought of the image as very much a London painting, somehow after I made it I was reminded of Paris, and of French painting more than of English painting.
INTERVIEWER
Is it important that the viewer knows the boy is your son?
DOIG
Perhaps for people who know him. Iโve got quite a large family, and so itโs important to me that when I make a painting that depicts one of my children, the others can relate to it and feel that they understand why I did it. In the painting of Locker, I wanted to capture a person at that stage in life, the way Cรฉzanne did when he used his son as a model. Another one of the paintings in the Courtauld exhibition features my daughter Alice in a hammock surrounded by greenery. I began working on the painting in 2014โI know that because I recently found a photograph of Alice standing in her primary school uniform looking at it when I very first started it. I finished it this year in my studio in just a few hours, after having returned to it after all those years. One of my other kids saw it and said that I had absolutely captured Alice at that age. Thatโs why I left it not quite finished, with translucent tonesโI wanted it to feel almost ghostly. Sheโs now a grown woman, and it captures the passage of time.
INTERVIEWER
Whatโs the significance of the canal?
DOIG
The canal, up until fairly recently, was a place of dread. After the industrial revolution, the canal no longer served the buildings on it, so for a long time stepping onto the towpath at night meant risking a mugging or worse. That has changed and is changing. The paintingโs setting is a real cafรฉ very close to where we live at present,ย and where Iโve spent quite a bit of time over the last few years, looking westward at the view through the bridge. Sitting there I realized how beautiful it is, and how much like a painting it is already. I also thought of paintings by Manet and othersโpaintings of railways and train stations, with figures in the foreground.
INTERVIEWER
The Impressionists painted some of the earliest depictions of what we understand as modernity.
DOIG
I was looking at Manetโs painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergรจre. Behind the girl at the bar, there are two globes in the background, two spheres. Itโs not obvious at first, but they are electrical lights, and Manet painted them in very, very sharp focus, whereas everything else in the painting is quite blurred. I suppose at the time Manet made the painting the viewer would have been really surprised by this very modern element entering a work of art. In my painting, the eggs are a bit like thatโin a way, the eggs are the most contemporary thing in the painting.
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Matthew Higgs is a contributing editor of The Paris Review.