Some things I will remember about Tim Hyman’s memorial event at the RA this morning.

• One of his early drawings was of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings

• He thought he peaked at eleven

• He was taught at Charterhouse by Ian Fleming-Williams, the Constable scholar who had previously hired Howard Hodgkin as the assistant art master

• He did an exhibition in 2000 on the Carnivalesque which was structured round themes from Bakhtin – the Tumultuous Crowd, The World Turned Upside-down, the Comic Mask and the Grotesque Body

• His classes at the Royal Drawing School were always oversubscribed

• He will miss the great Sienese exhibition which will open at the National Gallery in March

In his obituary of Fleming-Williams, he describes how ‘the sense remained that, beyond any specific role, he was pursuing some disinterested, and less easily definable, quest’.

The same might be said of Tim.