Timothy Moore

Looking for an excuse to have another try with Photoshop, I found this old portrait of the composer Tim Moore, for many years my landlord in Cambridge.

I think I have better preserved the lines from the sketch this time, although the pencil drawing itself is a little overworked and dense in parts. The colours are from Photoshop’s palette and were only quickly added.

And what colours! Just in case anyone’s wondering, the turquoise T-shirt under a claret-pink corduroy exterior is quite accurate. Timothy Moore, who lived in the scruffy basement of his town house while the rest of us inhabited rooms in the floors above, was a genuine, unconscious eccentric. The son of the Philosopher George Moore, and the nephew (I think) of poet T. Sturge Moore, there was more than a whiff of Bloomsbury about Tim. That and recycled cigars (one butt rammed into the end of another) and heart stew. He was a gentleman, a champagne communist (which, sadly, made him vulnerable to his tenants), and a believer in a cashless society, phonetic orthography and Jazz for children.

He died in 2003.