You don’t need to be an architect to make a house. Christopher Thompson conjures them up in paintings, and unlike architects, he gives each of his stand-alone buildings the distinctive characteristics of its occupant that only time can bring. He does it with painterly precision and creates poetic moods from melancholy to absurd, with references that reach from the Dutch Golden Age to contemporary street culture. There’s a fantastic selection (in oil and signed limited editions) in the Walthamstow-based artist’s current solo show, Other People’s Houses at the Glasshouse Contemporary, Hackney, where I talked with him about his work.
When Thompson was 18, a visit to the National Gallery ‘that was only to kill some time’ turned into ‘a revelation’. From then on, he had to paint. Ever since attending the Royal Academy School in the 90s, that’s all he’s done. His output wasn’t always houses, as he explains: ‘I used to paint things around me — portraits, groups of figures, urban scenes. Buildings would appear, a river, topiaries. I started to look at buildings differently, maybe it was a lock-down thing. And I thought, why don’t I paint the house on the corner of the street? And it became a character, it came to life’.
About four years ago, he painted the same building that appears in Vermeer’s The Little Street. ‘I focused on taking it out of context, putting it by a canal’ says Thompson. (Although Delft is full of canals, they’re not seen in the 1658 masterpiece). Thompson continues: ‘This is the point where I made the paintings very different from the streetscapes I’d been painting’, Thompson continues. ‘There’s a mood here, but I felt it needed something else, something to animate it a little bit more’. His son suggested putting his cat in the picture — ’people loved the idea of the cat, almost reflecting who the owner of the house is’. As we shall see, the black-and-white cat has since appeared, even if occasionally as just a mere shadow, in just about every one of Thompson’s 104 house pictures so far.
Vermeer is an enduring influence on Thompson, along with Magritte, whose surrealistic hallmarks he sometimes riffs on. The influence is more subtle in many other works. For example, The Falconer’s House, which features a falcon and a fox as well the cat, and The Cat Lover’s House with its mural of multiple cats in dynamic positions, both have a Magritte-like sky with Moon and clouds (they ‘elevate the drama’, Thompson says), while the building’s facade faces us straight-on, not hidden in darkness but rising clearly from its reflection in the water. This compositional structure, which Thompson habitually uses, is the same as Magritte’s in the iconic Empire of Light painting series (1939 onwards) which depicts a night-time house under a daylight sky. That brings us to another painter who was inspirational to Thompson.
Right up there with Vermeer and Magritte, he cites Algernon Newton, an overlooked twentieth century English artist who could capture the timeless yet ephemeral atmosphere of deserted urban settings. Newton often painted canal scenes. His Surrey Canal at Camberwell (1935) even anticipates Magritte’s house illuminated by a streetlamp while the day is yet to pass. After encountering Newton’s landscapes in a book, Thompson saw that particular canal painting at the Tate, and it left its mark. Both artists tend to portray modest early nineteenth century houses. In Thompson’s The Silent City (‘quite a brooding painting’, he comments) the house rises from a sloping street instead of the horizontal plinth-like line of the waterside, and captures a similar melancholy to that Newton found. Even Thompson’s Painter’s House ‘was almost like a homage to Newton and his canalside houses’. Interestingly, Newton’s House by a Canal (1945) also features a cat, but that’s a coincidence and unlike the Thompson cat, it’s purely white.
While some of Thompson’s houses are fine works of architectural description, such as the grand Georgian Notary’s House or the confident pink Zookeeper’s House with its outsize roof, most of the house facades are plain, and recently they have become a second canvas for Thompson. ‘I see murals as an extension of seeing paintings in a museum, to look at and inspire you’, he says.
Three paintings, arranged to suggest a triptych on a wall of Glasshouse Contemporary, use lush, rhythmic patterns based on nature as murals. On The Printers House, the pattern is a William Morris (and the cat, like Schrödinger’s, is split into two states, in this case at the painting’s sides). On The Huguenot’s House, the pattern is by Anna Maria Garthwaite, who worked almost two hundred years ago with Huguenot silk-printers who had fled France to a house in Fournier Street, Shoreditch, which is depicted. The Designer’s House carries another William Morris pattern. ‘There’s a liveliness to the patterns’, Thompson comments. But there’s also a nod to the radical positions of the pattern designers — Morris was a social reformer who famously challenged industrialisation and promoted craftsmanship and design with the Arts and Crafts movement, while a century earlier Garthwaite smashed the male domination of the time to become world famous for her designs.
Thompson says he’s ‘always been drawn to people’s faces (and) personalities’, and he has a talent for painting them. Murals have given him the opportunity to bring that to his houses. While some faithfully reproduce and amplify gorgeous characters from classical painting, such as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pear Earring on The Jeweller’s House or Francesco Hayez’s passionate couple from 1859 snogging at The Lover’s House, we also see characters from today. Another young couple are separated across two paintings, Nightfall and Daybreak which each have one building. They are mirror reflections but in different colours. The man and woman turn away from each other, giving a sense of withdrawal. Perhaps Thompson has nailed the flakiness of contemporary romance, or even alienation. Thompson’s most recent portrait of his son is on The Raver’s House (top picture) and his mood, too, is serious. It could be that he’s deep in a creative reverie, connected to the urban tags and graffiti below him.
Another work that speaks of the street is the gritty, almost Edward Hopper-esque Publican’s House. Below a black wall where a red neon sign signals the bar, the mural is at ground level and it sequences a cat jumping down. The idea came from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies published in his 1882 book Animals in Motion – ‘I had so much fun painting the cat’ he adds.
There’s fun to be found in other houses too, such as The Showman’s House revealed through stage curtains, and the show’s even more whimsical work, The Archeologist’s House. ‘It came out of nowhere’, Thompson says — and it’s nowhere to be seen. That’s because it’s buried underground, in the company of other buried objects including a Tyrannosaur skull. Only the cat seems to know…
Every single building Thompson has painted is based on a real one, but relocated and infused with its own mood. ‘They’re imagined reality, filtered through my mind’, explains Thompson. It’s always interesting seeing where other people live. In Thompson’s work, that experience becomes an exploration of the characters that occupy not just the spaces inside their houses, but the bricks and mortar structures themselves. Each Thompson house has its magic, as if in a dream.
Other People’s Houses is at Glasshouse Contemporary until 19th April 2026
All images Christopher Thompson, courtesy of Glasshouse Contemorary and the artist, except photo of the artist by Herbert Wright
