Painting the great and the good

Anthony Palliser's portraits get to the essence of a person, and it helps when you're friends with half of Europe, he tells Lara Marlowe

Anthony Palliser's love affair with Ireland began decades ago, with a chance encounter at a society wedding in Paris, on an island in the Bois de Boulogne.

"There was a punt to and from the island," recalls Garech de Brún, a wealthy patron of Irish arts and traditional music. "Anthony and I found the punt very agreeable, so we went backwards and forwards until the punters threw us off." Palliser became a regular visitor at Luggala, the estate in the Wicklow mountains which de Brún inherited from his mother, Oonagh Guinness. There, the Anglo-Belgian painter met, befriended and painted other guests.

In 1981, when de Brún married an Indian princess, the daughter of a maharaja, Palliser was his best man.

In the early 1990s, de Brún and Palliser were drinking at the bar of the Ritz hotel in Paris when they ran into Charlie Haughey and entourage. The taoiseach and his friends ended up in Palliser's studio, admiring his paintings. The architect Arthur Gibney invited Palliser to exhibit at the Royal Hibernian Academy, which he did in 1993.

The Mountains at Luggala, painted from a visit to de Brún's Irish home, is one of Palliser's finest landscapes. "When I do landscapes, I fall in love with one specific place," he explains. "And I fell in love with this hawthorn tree, which is the only tree for miles. Garech told me with great solemnity that no one in Ireland cut hawthorns, because that's where the fairies live. It's been battered by the winds and the elements, but it still stands, in the surrounding magnificence of the mountains."

De Brún owns several of Palliser's paintings, but he was most impressed with the series of 13 Large Heads,which the painter exhibited at the Ricard Foundation in Paris in 2005. "Those huge portraits are absolutely extraordinary. I don't think I've seen anything quite like them," de Brún says. "When Anthony hung them in the Ricard exhibition, they were devastatingly impressive." Palliser was despondent about the art market when he started the Large Heads, and told his American wife Diane, "I am going to paint huge, unsellable pictures." If there has been a shadow over Palliser's charmed existence, it has been the struggle to pay the rent on the couple's ground-floor apartment in a leafy lane off the rue du Bac, and for the generous dinners they regale their many friends with.

The painter is the son of Sir Michael Palliser, long the permanent undersecretary of the British foreign office, and Marie Spaak, the daughter of Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian statesman who was one of the founders of the European Union. One great-uncle was the screenwriter for Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion. Another was the writer who "discovered" Magritte and Delvaux.

But Palliser's distinguished family left him no material wealth; he describes himself as "a starving artist on a diet" and is proud to have kept the artistic faith through hardship. "The show at the Ricard Foundation two years ago changed things; I'm in the black for the first time since I was 18," he says. He has since received commissions from two of France's wealthiest families, the Rothschilds and the Bouygues.

Bill Whelan, the Irish Grammy-award-winning composer for Riverdance,tagged along to one of the Pallisers' dinner parties about four years ago. He purchased a sensual nude, and the men became friends. Palliser painted the view of Twelve Pins from the Whelans' home in Connemara, and Bill's wife Denise commissioned a drawing of her husband's face.

"Anthony's portraiture has a way of telling you something about the person," says Bill Whelan. "It's not just representative. He seems to be able to catch something essential. When my children saw the picture of me, they said, 'Oh my God. That's you, Dad. And not in the same way a photograph is.' I found it extremely unsettling. It wasn't like looking in a mirror. It was like looking at yourself." Palliser has also painted Maurice Cassidy, a close friend of Whelan and the manager for Riverdance, and is about to paint Paddy Moloney, with whom de Brún founded Claddagh Records.

"Garech is very much the pivot, the great introducer with everything Irish," says Palliser. De Brún also proposed that Palliser do a series of Irish poets. "Ireland is probably the only country where you could say, 'Irish poets'," Palliser comments. "If you said 'French poets', you'd be rather stretched." Palliser's most recent portrait is of the Irish poet John Montague. "He has a very weathered face, and incredibly blue eyes, but usually the eyes are just slits and he constantly looks as if he's about to burst into fits of laughter," Palliser says.

He is to paint Thomas Kinsella soon. After de Brún gave Kinsella a copy of Palliser's book, the poet sent "a perfectly adorable letter about how proud he'd be to be painted by me. This is unthinkable in any country but Ireland. How seriously people take themselves in England."

Something about Derek Mahon fascinated Palliser, who has drawn and painted the poet five times. "He came out fairly tortured," Palliser admits, looking at one painting. Palliser writes poetry himself, and says he was so impressed by Mahon's work that it inhibited him. "The breadth of Derek's poetry was such that - a bit like the first time I saw Goya - I was completely knocked off my horse and I said this to him and he looked at me very sweetly and said, 'But Anthony, there are many ways of doing this'." Mahon visited the Pallisers in Diane's home town of Savannah, Georgia, where they spend several months each year. Palliser was thrilled when Mahon included a poem dedicated to him and Diane, titled Savannah Dock, in his volume of Art Notes, along with poems to Magritte, de Staël , Braque and other great artists.

Mahon describes Diane in one of Palliser's paintings: "There you are, coming from your wooden wharf/as if in a photograph or a home movie./Perhaps you've been for a swim, a lazy sail/on the great river . . . " The Irish poet understands the tranquillity that Diane has brought to the painter: "Be life as gentle in your scented air/and the art flourish that you nourish there/in peace and quiet, far from the marketplace." Palliser loves the disregard for social class and absence of snobbery in Ireland. "If I'm admired, it's for my work, not because I'm in the National [Portrait Gallery in London]. They don't like someone just because they're in a great gallery or something. The important thing is the work, and getting on with people."

Palliser had to convince Graham Greene to allow himself to be painted for the National Portrait Gallery. "The last thing in the world he wanted was to be painted," he recalls. "I persisted and he finally relented - I suspected because my father was then at the foreign office, and is a Catholic."

Palliser went to Greene's home in Antibes every morning for five days. "Around noon he'd say 'opening time' and we'd go to the kitchen and make a dry martini, and then we'd go and have lunch [at] Chez Félix . . . When he walked me to the station, he told me he thought it was going to be a nightmare, but it proved to be quite pleasant. As I waved goodbye from my train window, I thought, 'I'll love this man forever'. And indeed, every time he came to Paris, which was two or three times a year, we'd always meet up." The list of Palliser's friends and portrait subjects reads like a who's who of contemporary European culture. The actresses Charlotte Rampling, Kristin Scott Thomas and Helena Bonham Carter are among them, along with the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. How does he know so many famous people, I ask him?

"It just happens. Literally," Palliser replies. "Fame in itself doesn't interest me, but a fair number of famous people are famous for a good reason." He tells of his godfather, a learned Belgian diplomat named André de Staercke, who was a close friend of André Malraux and Brigitte Bardot. "How do you know all these incredible people?" Palliser asked him. "André said, 'Once you know one of them, you know them all'." Palliser's gift for friendship and conviviality is almost on a par with his artistic talent. In his poem A Painter's Luck, he wrote of his delight in painting and sheer joie de vivre: "A sleeping city watching a girl/A musician lost in noise/An angry cat/Friends that died/Lovers married long ago/Lucky me/There I was/And painted that."