Hold on to your Hat – Alison Healy on an artist who was not all that he seemed

The life of Bruno Hat is the stuff of fantasy. The reclusive German artist was reportedly discovered by Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing dynasty, in 1929. The story goes that he pushed open the wrong door in a shop in a Sussex village and found the artist’s avant-garde paintings. He was blown away by the originality and learned that they were painted by the shop-owner’s stepson. Guinness brought the wunderkind to his home in Westminster where he held an exhibition of 20 paintings for the art critics and glitterati. Bruno Hat quickly became the talk of London.

It was indeed the stuff of fantasy, for Bruno Hat never existed. He was a dream conjured up by Bryan Guinness and his friends, a group of socialites, dilettantes and creative types dubbed the Bright Young People. And only for historian and broadcaster Myles Dungan’s website, I would never have heard of Herr Hat’s exploits.

The idea to create the fictional artist seemed to have come from the poet Brian Howard, and the paintings were a collaboration between him and the artist John Banting. Variously described as quasi-cubist and surrealist, the artworks on display at the Guinness mansion were painted on bathmats and framed with rope.

The writer Evelyn Waugh pulled out all the stops when he penned the catalogue notes with the earnest and scholarly title: Approach to Hat. Fond of a pun, his pseudonym was A.R. de T. He likened Bruno Hat to Picasso and said he “may lead the way in this century’s European painting from discovery to tradition . . . Uninfluenced, virtually untaught, he is the first natural, lonely, spontaneous flower of the one considerable movement in painting to-day”.

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Tom Mitford, brother of the famous Mitford sisters, dressed up as the withdrawn artist, donning a massive moustache and dark glasses. He was almost rumbled when someone spoke to him in German. With a heavy heart, and an even heavier accent, he declared that he did not care to speak in German anymore as he had become a naturalised English citizen.

His sister Diana, who was Bryan Guinness’s wife, later recalled how the writer Lytton Strachey bought one of the paintings just to please her. Although many people were in on the joke, the hoaxers succeeded in pulling the wool over some eyes before happily revealing their prank.

Diana Mitford and Bryan Guinness were still newly-weds at that point but that marriage was famously short-lived. Her head was turned by Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists and she scandalised family and friends by marrying him and throwing herself into Nazi society. As Myles Dungan reminds us, she later went on BBC’s Desert Island Discs to extoll the virtues of her friend Adolf Hitler and to cast doubt over the fact that six million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Bryan Guinness had two sons with Diana Mitford, one of whom – Desmond – would become a hero in Ireland for his architectural conservation work. He bought Castletown House to save it from destruction in 1967, almost a decade after his purchase of Leixlip Castle. The Guinness heir brought a whiff of glamour to Leixlip by entertaining luminaries such as the Rolling Stones, Princess Margaret, and Marianne Faithfull.

At one stage in the 1980s, it seemed that no Leixlip resident could leave their homes without bumping into Mick Jagger in Tuthill’s newsagents, or Jerry Hall in Hynes’s hardware shop. Presumably she was buying a new fuse, after blowing yet another one at Jagger’s philandering.

Leixlip Castle opens for guided tours at certain times of the year so you can go along to marvel at the optimism that built an outdoor pool in north Kildare. You will see the doll’s house with the initials of Desmond’s granddaughter, the designer and model Jasmine Guinness, on the miniature plates. And your eye will be caught by the military bath where Jerry Hall posed for a photo that later appeared in the public realm. A copy of the photograph was kept beside the bath but disappeared along with some light-fingered visitor.

I don’t remember seeing any Bruno Hat paintings when I visited a few years ago, but they are very rare, according to Sotheby’s. The London auction house sold Still Life with Pears in 2009 for £18,750 (almost €22,000).

The catalogue noted that “the small and extremely rare group of paintings by ‘Bruno Hat’ are amongst the more enigmatic manifestations of British art in the years between the two World Wars”.

So even though he never existed, Bruno Hat still enjoyed more success in the art world than most of us will ever know.

A nice feather for his imaginary cap.