Teddy Millington-Drake

Millington-Drake was born in London in 1932. He was the son of Sir Eugen Millington-Drake, who was to be the British Minister at Montevideo at the time of the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, and grandson of the first Earl of Inchcape, the Chairman of the P&O shipping line and founder of Inchcape plc. He spent his early childhood in South America and was educated at Eton, where his art lessons were supervised by Wilfrid Blunt. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford but left the university in order to live and study painting in Paris. After completing his National Service in the Rifle Brigade and in part inspired by his sister Marie's anecdotes of her travels abroad, Millington-Drake embarked on a painting tour that took him to the Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Jonathan Hope who wrote Millington-Drake’s obituary in Independent notes that "He loved this part of the world: the soukhs, the street life, the sounds and colours, and was dazzled by the power and simplicity of Islamic architecture." In fact from an early age he travelled and painted all over the world, including Easter Island, where he executed watercolours of the Moai, the famous stone figures.[1]

There were three places with which Millington-Drake had a special affinity: India, where his mother's family had had connections since the 18th century; Italy, where his parents lived for many years after his father retired, and where he himself created one of the most beautiful houses and gardens in Tuscany, Poggio al Pozzo near Siena; and Greece, where he lived and worked for part of each year in Patmos, where St. John is said to have written the Book of Revelation

Millington-Drake was an exceptional architectural draughtsman, as his watercolours show, particularly those of Italy in his earliest days and of India, Italy and Patmos much later. His drawings of the great Victorian buildings of Bombay are outstanding examples of his skill.

However, in his late twenties Millington-Drake turned to abstract painting, influenced by the American Expressionists Cy Twombly, whom he got to know well in Rome, and Jackson Pollock. It was something he felt he had to do and the pain for an artist of giving up figurative painting and turning to this form of work is well described in his posthumously published memoirs, Shapes on the Horizon, where he explains how the often apparently random brush strokes on the paper are an extension of the painter's hand and arm and therefore of his very self, something completely personal and creative, and how this is not the case with figurative painting where the artist is reproducing, though in a very personal way, something which other people can also see.

Millington-Drake returned to the figurative style, concentrating for a time on still lifes and flower paintings. These linked his paintings with another great interest, garden design. As a result of his success with his own garden at Poggio he was commissioned to create two new gardens in Italy and restored the garden at Bellerive near Geneva, originally designed by Lanning Roper.

From 1953 onwards Millington-Drake exhibited regularly in London and in New York, Paris, Milan and elsewhere, and examples of his work, both figurative and abstract, are in public and private collections all over the world. He executed a number of murals and designed fabrics, carpets and ceramic plates with coloured geometric shapes which look like paintings. They were made by the Roman potter, Franca Pinna. He also wrote poetry and an anthology of his poems was published in Paris in 1977.

• Chatwin, Bruce; Chatwin, Elizabeth; Shakespeare, Nicholas (2010). Under The Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin. Random House. ISBN 978-1-40709-242-3.

• Artnet
• "An Artist in Tuscany". The Art of the Room. 18 October 2013. Retrieved 13 October 2018.