A life on the tiles: Exploring the work of David Neal as artist and archaeologist

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 425

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Chris Prewett’s portrait of David Neal at work, holding a large drawing board between hand and hip, forms the frontispiece to David’s autobiography (see ‘Further reading’ below). That figure will be familiar to anyone who has worked on a Romano-British site in the last 60 years or who has watched a Time Team programme in which a mosaic has been discovered. Although these mosaics will have been captured through a full photographic survey, there is something richer and more truthful about David’s paintings, especially in the way they capture the slight irregularities and subtleties of colour that enrich even the simplest of pavements made of grey and white tesserae.

In his introduction to the autobiography, Mark Hassall asks whether these paintings cross the boundary between archaeology and art, and he compares David’s work to that of a similar artist-archaeologist who specialised in Romano-British mosaics: Samuel Lysons (1763-1819), the English antiquary whose works include engravings of the Bignor Villa mosaics and of the most accomplished of all the mosaics yet found in the province: the Orpheus mosaic from Woodchester in Gloucestershire.

Uncertain beginnings

David’s artistic talent was evident from an early age. Born on 16 August 1940 in Acton, west London, in the middle of an air raid (‘I was placed in a “cage” under my mother’s bed for protection from shrapnel and flying glass’), he was evacuated to Pontycymer, near Bridgend, in south Wales, where the landscape of the mining town was to him one big ‘adventure playground’. He returned to Acton as a four-year-old, in time to witness the ‘wild’ VE Day celebrations of the night of 8 May 1945, ‘when it seemed every person in London was on the streets singing and dancing’; the street party that followed was memorable for David’s first taste of ice cream.

Icy weather was to follow with the severe winter of 1946/1947, when the seven-year-old David transferred to Rothschild School and won some brushes and a set of watercolours in an art competition: ‘My first school prize but perhaps a glimpse into the future’. Moving to the new town of Hemel Hempstead in February 1950, David went to Leverstock Green Junior School in Pancake Lane, ‘a “country bumpkin” Victorian church-school with a playground at the front and a maypole at the back’. There, he was regularly caned by a headmaster who believed it was the only way to instil mathematical principles in a slow learner.

David was regularly caned… ‘I became scared to attend school [though] I never played truant, which I so desperately wanted to do.’

As a result, David ‘became scared to attend school [though] I never played truant, which I so desperately wanted to do’. The school, however, had one blessing – art lessons on Thursday afternoons: ‘Virtually every week I would be asked to stand in front of the class to exhibit my paintings, some of which depicted Kew Gardens.’ David recalls that his family often went to Kew for picnics before they moved out of London, and that painting the Rock Garden and Palm House from memory was probably his means of escape from the misery of school.