I am immensely sorry to hear of the death of Tim Hyman, an intensely serious, thoughtful and independent-minded artist, who was unusual in being as highly respected as a writer on art, including on Sienese paintings, as he was a painter.

He leaves out of his online CV, but not of his entry in Who’s Who, that he was at the Hall School and Charterhouse; which might not be relevant except that by the time he arrived at the Slade in 1963 he had, as he describes it, ‘already ingested a huge dose of 14th and 15th century Italian painting’ which ‘afforded me a kind of protection’: that is, protection from the orthodoxies of twentieth-century painting.  It is what made him such a good writer, but such an awkward figure in terms of art practice.

For some reason which I never understood, he and Judith were friends of the stage designer, Maris Björnson.  He also introduced me to the work of Bhupen Khakhar and I think it was thanks to Tim Hyman that the National Portrait Gallery acquired its portrait of Salman Rushdie by Khakhar in 1995.

He was a key figure in the foundation of the Royal Drawing School.  He certainly did a lot of teaching for it and was a member of its Academic Advisory Board.  I hope his views and ideas on drawing have been recorded because he was a properly intellectual practitioner.