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Scrawled on the door to Maggi Hambling’s Suffolk studio are the words ‘Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood’. When you consider Hambling and her work – the roiling sea paintings, the penetrating portraits, her
War Requiem series – it comes as no surprise that she confronts the making of it with something akin to a battle cry. But those Shakespearian lines also seem an apt exhortation for an artist who has, on occasion, had to suffer the slings and arrows of public indignation and media broadsides.
I’m visiting her at home in a small village near Saxmundham, less than a week after the official unveiling of her sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft in east London. ‘Yes,’ Hambling says grimly, ‘I thought that subject might just touch upon our conversation…’ The work now standing on Newington Green is the result of a 10-year campaign, spearheaded by the journalist Bee Rowlatt, to give the author of