‘I have a slight empathy with dust. If I see it I don’t rush to clear it up.’ Rose Wylie looks about the dining room of her 17th-century cottage in Kent, where she has lived for some 50 years. It has a cold brick floor and a ceiling of slanted glass panels, which look as if they have never been cleaned. Yellowy November light streams through the glass, softened by watermarks and the dark blotches of lichen and dead leaves. Outside, the garden has been left to its own devices, and presses close to the house, a lattice of shoots and branches. Some have snaked in at the windows and up to the ceiling, where they have dried and are now festooned with cobwebs. More sprigs of foliage have been stuffed into vases and placed along the windowsills; these, too, have dried into apricot-coloured crispness. On the table, as if arranged for a still life, is Wylie’s breakfast tray: mismatched coffee cup and saucer, crested Folkestone jug, two-handled silver sugar bowl, and the remains of porridge in a blue-edged scalloped dish. The effect of all this is a kind of well-worn, shabby elegance. Wylie, with her dark lipstick, green cardigan and choppy grey hair, smiles mischievously, and waves away the mess.
I’m visiting the painter at home as she prepares for ‘Let It Settle’, an exhibition at the Gallery at Windsor in Vero Beach, Florida (28 January–30 April). It’s one of three international shows in 2020, proof of her ever-blooming reputation. Though she’s quick to reject the focus on her age – ‘I just think it’s unnecessary, it doesn’t matter’ – her late-life success is remarkable. She first studied art in the 1950s, but gave it up in order to look after her children, only returning to the Royal College of Art for an MA in 1979. For more than 10 years, she worked in obscurity, the paintings stacking up on the floor in her studio, until she began to be noticed for competition entries. Then recognition came quickly. In 2014, she was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize; three years later, she had a retrospective at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London; and last year, at the age of 84, she received an OBE for services to art. ‘Suddenly, it all came together,’ she says. ‘But the work is no different, and I’m no different.’