Artist David Gentleman has always loved Camden but now he has fallen in love with the county of Suffolk writes Ruth Gorb

THE distinguished artist David gentleman, who has drawn and painted some of the most beautiful sights in the world, confesses to a great affection for pigs.
In one of his new asset of Suffolk lithographs, the majestic church at Blythburgh serves only as a background to some singularly jolly pigs. Why does he (and for that matter, so many of us) feel so drawn towards them?
“They are,” he says, “so incredibly human. They’re the same colour as us – sort of pink. Their bottoms are not unlike ours. They get on well with one another – apart from occasional bouts of aggression. I see them as a reminder of a past link with other creatures.”
The pigs (and church) are one of the six specially commissioned lithographs of the county David Gentleman loves and knows so well. He is a man who likes to put down roots. Just as he has lived and around his present house in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, since 1956, so he has decided to stay put in his bolt hole in Suffolk.
He bought his cottage, which is half an hour north of Aldeburgh, 25 years ago when his children were small, and still feels the same surge of pleasure as he arrives there late in the evening and smells the fresh air.
Life there – “Sue (his wife) gardens, I paint” – is quiet and sweet.
What is it about Suffolk that casts such a spell? It doesn’t go anywhere, he says. “There is a sense of being cut off from the world and of not having caught up with modern life.” And his wife is Suffolk born and bred.
“Sue grew up two miles from Snape,” he says. “Her father, George Ewart Evans, was a social historian who alerted me to so much about Suffolk. His great achievement was recording the fishermen, and the old men who had laboured and lived on the land. His work was sympathetic and very unromantic. It was real.”
Much of the old Suffolk in those records survives, but David Gentleman admits to the changes. Aldeburgh is full of tourist shops. In his own undistinguished village (no shop, one pub) most of the nicer houses are bought by people like him – “but at least we look after them”.
The magic is still there, though, sometimes in the most unexpected places.
Two miles form the ferry at the small coastal town of Orford is a bizarre set of buildings known as The Pagodas. They are the subject of one of Gentleman’s lithographs, and for him are a chilling reminder of the Cold War.
“There is a heavy concrete roof with shingle on top and concrete supports,” he says. “They were for testing detonators for atom bombs. It is a very strange sight now. The shingle around them is very bleak, and there are bits of rusty tracking for vehicles to get over the shingle. They are almost like sea creatures.
“Inside, it is very chilling – like torture chambers. An abandoned place. The National Trust see it as military history. As I looked at it I felt the spirit of the Cold war. Some of it may have crept into that picture.”
Perhaps he found solace as he worked on his picture at Iken: a Suffolk idyll of a field that slopes down to the river: at the bottom of the field a line of ancient oaks, and looking between two gnarled trunks, in the distance, over the Marsh, one sees the medieval thatched church of Iken.
Another picture, another mood. From the unchanged tranquillity and beauty of Suffolk countryside, to the Maltings at Snape, setting of all the refined hurly-burly of the Aldeburgh festival. It was the 19th-century original Maltings that attracted Gentleman, and which are the subject of two of his lithographs.
His discerning eye picks out all the oddities in a scene, the bits of a building that don’t match, the remnants of walkways, some ducks walking across the foreground. There is a rat in one of the pictures. “When I was there, I saw a rat dragging a dead pigeon. ‘You don’t get Maltings without rats’, they told me.”
It is his gentle wit, his sensitivity to place and to history, that make David Gentleman one of our best-loved artists but also one international stature: a current travelling exhibition of illustrators puts him alongside, among others, Toulouse Lautrec, something that makes him chuckle with pleasure. The scope of his work is enormous: paintings, drawings, design, illustrated books, wood engravings. Has travelled all over the world, and brought back his own unique view of the landscape and architecture of faraway places. But if you live in Camden, and travel on the Northern Line, his Elenore Cross murals are there for us all to see in Charing Cross station.
He has done many lithographs in the past, and says it’s good to be in the harness again. He enjoys, too, drawing ‘on the spot’, although when he was working on a courtyard at Snape – a delightful garden with fruit trees under ivy-covered arches – the weather was so warm all his crayons melted.
No fear of that as he worked on a picture that for many embodies the spirit of Suffolk: The North Sea.
He drew it at very low tide to show the different levels of shingle and sand. There is a strip of the tops of buildings in the distance, and a look out for the life boat. It is very bleak – and very beautiful.

• The lithographs, an edition of 50 of each subject, are being exhibited at Aldeburgh from July 30 and are for sale at £400 each.