Charles Baudelaire, as 'imagined' in Swift's Eccleston Square studio, oil on board, c.1959 (juxtaposition with self-portrait in the same studio below?); Swift apparently claimed his studio was haunted by Baudelaire.
(poor quality reproduction)
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In the pages of X and in his writings generally, may be seen also the influence of Charles Baudelaire, which was profound. In what I believe to be his only imagined work, painted from the Nadar photograph to which I directed him, he has acknowledged this influence. Baudelaire stands in Swift's own studio, behind a table strewn with his brushes and jars, the workaday clutter of the space in which art is created. Swift was a literate, but not a literary painter. - Anthony Cronin, IMMA Retrospective Catalogue, 1993The painting he did of Baudelaire’s ‘presence’- for lack of a choicer word- in his London studio, show his intellectual allegiances, and are a strange balance of imaginative eeriness with mater-of-fact description; the accurately rendered studio clutter in fact is oddly reminiscent of the ‘Kitchen Sink School’, much discussed about that time by John Berger and others. Yet the poet’s imago seems almost wistfully at home there, and it is a fairly safe assumption that Swift had in mind the very similar bohemian studios which Baudelaire had frequented in Paris a century before. - Brian Fallon, Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, 1993
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