Artist portrayed Cornwall home as Eden where children could live as nature intended, but abuse of girls has now emerged
Barley Splatt, Graham Ovenden's estate on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, was an extraordinary place to be in the 1970s and 80s. The house was eccentric: a neo-gothic creation built out of Cornish granite complete with turrets and slit windows; the 22 acres of grounds – featuring lovely beech woods and a tumbling stream – were stunning. Ovenden and his wife, Annie, entertained artists, writers and musicians.
Children were encouraged to run free – and naked, in warm weather. They were also asked to pose for Ovenden: sometimes clothed, sometimes in the Victorian outfits the artist kept in dressing-up boxes, but often nude.
When he gave evidence at Truro crown court, Ovenden portrayed the house as a new Eden – a place where children could live as nature intended, unbound by the constraints of a modern world suspicious of nakedness in children. But, it has become clear, there was a darker side to Barley Splatt.
Ovenden was accused by four former girl models, now adults, of abusing them between 1972 and 1985. They told how he would blindfold them and force them to take part in a "tasting game" that ended up in tricking them into taking part in oral abuse. On Tuesday, Ovenden was convicted of six charges of indecency with a child, and one of indecent assault. He was acquitted of five charges of indecent assault, three of them on the direction of the judge.
Ovenden's right to produce candid images of children, often unclothed, has long been defended by fellow artists, and the interest the Metropolitan police has had in him for decades has been criticised. The artist himself continues to insist he has been set up by the authorities, but the jury clearly believed the testimony of some of the women who described abuse at Barley Splatt.
Now a white-bearded 70-year-old, Ovenden had an idyllic childhood in Hampshire. He grew up in a Fabian household, and the poet John Betjeman was a family friend. After school, Ovenden studied at the Royal College of Art and befriended the pop artist Sir Peter Blake, best known for creating the album cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Barley Splatt, to where Ovenden and Annie, also a talented artist, moved in the early 70s from west London with their two children, became a meeting place for the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a movement founded by the Ovendens, Blake and others as a reaction to the idea that art needs a social message.
In court, Ovenden claimed Barley Splatt had later been "stolen" from him by his estranged wife and son. He told the court he was "penniless".
Ovenden has said his main interest is in English landscapes. But what he became famous – and then notorious – for were his studies of girls. He created a series based on Nabokov's character Lolita, and had worked with Blake on a project around Lewis Carroll's Alice books. He was successful; his work can still be seen on Tate Online and has hung in some of the most famous galleries in Europe, the US, the far east and South America.
Ovenden argued in court that he had a "moral obligation" to show children in what he called a "state of grace". The idea of pictures of naked children being obscene was "abhorrent".
The jury was told that Ovenden was a man of good character, with no convictions, cautions or reprimands. But the subject matter of his art meant he was no stranger to the authorities.
In 1991, US customs seized images connected to Ovenden's collection of pictures of children called States of Grace. A legal battle over whether the images depicted sexually explicit conduct culminated in one of Ovenden's models testifying that she had modelled for the artist since the age of four and he had never acted in a sexual way to her.
But in 1993, police from the Met's obscene publications squad and Devon and Cornwall police arrived at Barley Splatt and took dozens of boxes of photographs as well as videos and books.
Models, their parents and artists spoke up for Ovenden. David Hockney wrote to the president of the Royal Academy: "The idea that children naked are not beautiful seems to me hideous."
Ovenden said at the time: "I have just been through the equivalent of being marked out as a 17th-century witch."
Ovenden's daughter, Emily, a singer, told the Guardian then that her earliest memories were of being photographed by her father. "We were always an open household and as young children would often run round naked … These pictures were just never anything to do with sex."
No prosecution took place, but the police were back in the mid-2000s, again seizing images and material. In 2009 Ovenden appeared in Truro crown court accused of making indecent images of children that had been found in a cache on his computer. The case was a stop-start affair, and in 2010 was thrown out by a judge. Ovenden claimed the police were "transfixed by childhood sexuality".
But police had not just been investigating him over the images: by 1993, officers were speaking to possible complainants. Ten years after that, four women claimed the artist had abused them when they posed for him as girls.
Parts of Ovenden's evidence in court sounded more like an art lecture than testimony in a child sex abuse case. He quoted from William Blake and Henry James. He told the jury that the ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a problem with nakedness – it was a Judeo-Christian hangup from the 17th century.
But some jury members visibly recoiled when they were shown two explicit images of child sexual abuse that were found by police on Ovenden's computer. He accepted he had created the images – composites of pictures from pornographic magazines and his own drawings – and said they were made for a project called Through a Glass Darkly that dealt with the corruption of the "state of grace".
Ovenden said he found the images "utterly vile", but they were the product not of a deviant mind but one seeking to confront evil in a "clear-eyed" way.
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