Anthony Green RA: Among Royal Academy Artists and Friends

0-8 % . % ', . '#)&.%")$- #.%(+*!+! ),$. (*-,$! ‘In this catalogue are a remarkable number of people who gave me a pat on the back.’ (Anthony Green)

‘I am proud to be one of Anthony’s Academician friends, to be chosen to take part in his show, for he is a brave painter, never failing to bring about another and another of his life enhancing works, what ever life throws at him. His work is unique and he shows it in a unique gallery.’ (Diana Armfield)

Copyright © Chris Beetles Ltd 2018 8 & 10 Ryder Street St James’s London SW1Y 6QB 020 7839 7551 gallery@chrisbeetles.com www.chrisbeetles.com ISBN 978-1-905738-83-0 Cataloguing in publication data is available from the British Library Researched and written by David Wootton Edited by David Wootton and Pascale Oakley Design by Jeremy Brook of Graphic Ideas Photography by Julian Huxley-Parlour, with the exception of: the frontispiece, © Ann Purkiss, and the exterior shots on pages 46-49, by Fiona Nickerson Reproduction by www.cast2create.com Colour separation and printing by Geoff Neal Litho Limited

Front cover: Anthony Green, The 17th Wedding Anniversary: Our Bedroom at Mole End [86] Front endpaper: Leonard Rosoman, Self-Portrait in Florence (Study) [10] Frontispiece: © Anne Purkiss, Anthony in his Studio, Title page: Diana Armfield, Christmas Flowers and the Box of Truffles, Llwynhir [37] Title verso: Anthony Green, Mary Arranging Flowers [88] Page 9: Bernard Dunstan, Private View [33] Back endpaper: Anthony Green, Green Park I: The 57th Wedding Anniversary [94] Back cover: Bernard Dunstan, Annette [23]

8 0 0B Anthony Green at the Royal Academy

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Edward Bawden

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William Dring

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Tristram Hillier

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Ruskin Spear

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Julian Trevelyan

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Leonard Rosoman

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Betty Swanwick

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John Ward

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Bernard Dunstan

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Diana Armfield

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Peter Coker

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William Bowyer

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Sydney Harpley

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Donald Hamilton Fraser

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Ken Howard

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James Butler

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David Tindle

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Olwyn Bowey

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Ben Levene

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Anthony Green

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L LJ MC I H GC This publication and the exhibition that it accompanies help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy of Arts, an institution that has been central to the visual arts in Britain since its foundation in 1768. More particularly, they consider the Royal Academy in the period since the Second World War, with a focus on the associations and achievements of the Senior Royal Academician, Anthony Green. During his lifetime, the organisation and its building have undergone many changes. From the condemnation of ‘so-called modern art’ by the outgoing President, Sir Alfred Munnings, in a speech in 1949, to the election of Tracey Emin as a Royal Academician in 2007, the RA has moved from being a bastion of tradition to a lively, popular, if unpredictable establishment.

The contribution of Anthony Green to the Royal Academy represents much that is positive about the institution in modern times and, for a number of reasons, he might be considered the best President that the Royal Academy has never had. Firstly, since 1966, he has exhibited his delightful and distinctive work without fail. Secondly, he has served on nearly all of the committees. Thirdly, he has built up a strong rapport with many of his fellow Academicians. And lastly, but not least, he has constantly demonstrated that he has the personality for such a role, in being outgoing, energetic and engaging.

Indeed, Anthony has been in the running for President on more than one occasion. Even when the selection method

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was more complex, he received a vote or two in both the 1984 and 1993 elections (Roger de Grey and Philip Dowson becoming the Presidents on those occasions). In 1999, he was among four Academicians who stood for President, and he made it to the final round. According to Martin Bailey, ‘he was then regarded as a “conservative” candidate, but one who could unite members at a difficult time when the Academy was facing serious administrative problems’ (Anthony Green: Painting Life, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2017, page 30). By the final round, Green remained as one of two candidates, losing only to the highly popular Phillip King. Then, when King resigned on health grounds, in 2004, Anthony stood again. Unfortunately, his support was more limited, and he withdrew after the first ballot (Nicholas Grimshaw eventually being elected). However, his presence had often been vital to the process.

The Royal Academy was on Anthony’s radar long before he began to exhibit at its Summer Exhibition. Kyffin Williams, Anthony’s art teacher at Highgate School, exhibited at the RA (from 1946), as did some of his teachers at the Slade School of Fine Art. Williams’s friend, BERNARD DUNSTAN, was elected an Associate of the RA in 1959, while Anthony was still at the Slade. Anthony remembers that both Dunstan and his wife, DIANA ARMFIELD, ‘were so kind and supportive … Bernard cast a fatherly eye over my early work, and even wrote a kind review of my 1974 exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, following its move to Bruton Place’.

Anthony began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1966, at the unusually young age of 26. He recalls that there weren’t a lot of 26-year old artists in the late 1960s who wanted to show at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It still had the mark of Cain on it. The sort of bloody-minded artists who were sending work in were the likes of KEN HOWARD and me – because we actually liked showing in public!

His first exhibits proved controversial among traditionalists, as he portrayed himself as Adam in The Expulsion from Paradise and Jesus Christ in Black Crucifix. However, Donald Coggan, the then Archbishop of York, pronounced that they were not ‘irreverent’ (as reported in the Evening Standard on 6 May 1966), and they had in fact been painted as personal reflections on his and his wife’s stillborn child. The controversy did not stop two of his three submissions being accepted in the following year; when he mentioned his one rejected work to RUSKIN SPEAR at a private view, Spear said that it was simply ‘no good’ as a painting rather than in any way provocative.

Anthony remembers that Spear was one of the first people at the RA to champion his work, and they certainly both aimed to entertain. In an obituary of Spear in 1990, Anthony was quoted as saying of him approvingly that, What he liked … was people turning up at the RA and buying a ticket and having a laugh with him at a bit of mackerel wrapped in newspaper or a jolly barmaid. He was a people’s artist.

(The Annual Obituary, Chicago: St James Press, 1990, page 74) Anthony was elected to the Royal Academy in 1971, at the age of 32, so becoming the youngest Associate at the time. As a Royal Academician, he was entitled to show up to six paintings at each Summer Exhibition, and he has always submitted something, usually four or five works a year. He had gained his position through the support of Carel Weight and Kyffin Williams, his former teacher from Highgate School. Williams had himself become an Associate only the year before, in 1970, alongside OLWYN BOWEY, and would become a full Royal Academician in 1974, in the year that WILLIAM BOWYER, Jeffery Camp and SYDNEY HARPLEY became Associates.

A particular grouping of artist friends developed at the Royal Academy at this time, and this helped provide a positive atmosphere for Anthony. Ruskin Spear and Carel Weight taught together at the Royal College of Art, and had established a friendship. In turn, Spear had taught William Bowyer at the RCA, and had then become a friend, living as he did close by him in Chiswick. Similarly, Carel Weight had taught Olwyn Bowey at the RCA, and had become her friend and neighbour, in Putney. These artists have shared with Anthony an ability to instil with intensity of feeling the most unassuming elements of English life and landscape, whether objects on a studio table, meat on a butcher’s slab, the interior of a greenhouse …

Of course, there were other, older Royal Academicians, for whom Anthony felt a more distant awe, including WILLIAM DRING and TRISTRAM HILLIER. At the time, he looked upon Dring as ‘an old codger, which is what I am now’, but appreciated increasingly that he had painted ‘some quite remarkably able academic group portraits – of families and businessmen – which is something that most artists that I know couldn’t do even if their lives depended on it’. He similarly revered Hillier, who was a very elegant gentleman and … painted that way. His pictures were so elegant and beautifully painted. They go beyond being academic. They have an originality about them, which he’s picked up en route from the Surrealists. He was a major British artist.

Though EDWARD BAWDEN was of the same generation as Dring and Hillier, he became better acquainted with Anthony, and they worked together on the Selection Committee for the 1974 Summer Exhibition. Anthony remembers that, you didn’t really talk to Bawden, because he was as deaf then as I am now. So you had to shout a bit, and he could be prickly. However, he had a totally dry sense of humour, dry to the east of dry, and was a fantastic artist … a master at every level.

Anthony developed a greater rapport with LEONARD ROSOMAN. As they had preoccupations in common, particularly a super-real use of space, they looked particularly carefully at each other’s work, and Rosoman paid Anthony ‘the greatest compliment that one artist can pay another’, by ‘buying one of my paintings’, The Kiss II

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(1972) (Catalogue Raisonné no AG172). This epitomises the ability of many of the Academicians of the time to appreciate and support each others’ talents, and so stimulate an environment of healthy eclecticism.

In 1974, Anthony’s closest friend since his days at the Slade, BEN LEVENE, was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. They developed a close bond with Jeffery Camp, whom Anthony has described as ‘a mate of mine and a lovely painter … the Modern Gainsborough’. (In later years, the circle would widen to include Timothy Hyman, elected RA in 2011, and Neil Jeffries, elected RA in 2013, and so create Anthony’s ‘four caballeros’.)

Anthony became a full Royal Academician in 1977, and donated The Artist, a large self-portrait of 1976, as his Diploma Work – all new members being required to make such a donation. The following year, in 1978, his election was marked by a retrospective exhibition in the Diploma Galleries of the RA, which charted the evolution of his art towards his inimitable, and highly personal, shaped paintings on board.

Though Anthony has not become President of the Royal Academy, he has served on nearly all of its committees.

He says that ‘I’ve usually been regarded as a steady hand, fairly good on committees and loyal to the Academy when we were going through some very choppy waters’ (quoted by Martin Bailey, op cit, page 30).

For eight years, from 2000 to 2008, Anthony was a trustee, and therefore a director of the Royal Academy, as a limited company, and a member of the Council. More significantly, he was Chairman of the Exhibitions Committee between 2007 and 2011. As Martin Bailey explains,

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In 2007, the Academicians were looking for someone to take over from Tom Phillips as chairman ...

It had proved difficult to find a successor, so Green reluctantly agree to put his name forward, and the Council elected him. (Martin Bailey, loc cit) Anthony remembers that ‘it was hell at the beginning’ because the longstanding, inspired but controversial Exhibitions Secretary, Norman Rosenthal, missed Tom Phillips, with whom he had developed a close working relationship. However, Anthony’s attitude is that ‘you should always stay, and give everyone an ulcer’, and, if he wasn’t initially ‘a genius at it’, he had ‘a loud voice and … could do it’. So, after a year, Rosenthal resigned, and was replaced by the ‘very talented’ Kathleen Soriano. He then enjoyed four happy years, doing ‘the best job I’ve ever had … They used to roll me out to make speeches, etcetera’. The exhibitions that they worked on together included ‘Treasures from Budapest’, which, in 2010, showcased the collection of the Hungarian capital’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Despite his belief that he has ‘no influence anymore’ at the Royal Academy, Anthony has remained active within its portals. He became a Senior Royal Academician in 2014, an honour given to those Academicians who achieve the age of 75. More singularly, in 2017, the RA mounted ‘Anthony Green RA: The Life and Death of Miss Dupont’ in the Tennant Gallery and published Martin Bailey’s monograph, Anthony Green: Painting Life. Visitors to the exhibition were confronted by the nine-foot tall assemblage, The Fur Coat: ‘Hazana’ (2005-14) (Catalogue Raisonné no AG574) – a startling, yet sensuous homage to his mother, which incorporated her actual mink coat, silk scarf and handbag.

Few could deny the overwhelming originality, either of this particular work, or of Anthony’s work in general, or fail to credit the Royal Academy with a long track record in nurturing native talent.

David Wootton, May 2018

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One of the most significant graphic designers of the twentieth century, Edward Bawden worked with ease between the fine and applied arts. Even before his appointment as an Official War Artist in 1940, he had established a reputation as a designer, illustrator and painter, and the output of his long career included ceramics, lithographic prints, murals, wallpaper designs and watercolours.

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Edward Bawden was born in Braintree, Essex, on 10 March 1903, the only child of the ironmonger, Edward Bawden, and his wife, Eleanor (nĂŠe Game). He was educated at Braintree High School and the Quaker High School, Saffron Walden, before studying at Cambridge School of Art (1919-21). At the Royal College of Art (1922-26) he worked under Paul Nash, who influenced his watercolour technique, and Ernest Tristram, the Professor of Design and mediaevalist, who inspired him more than any other teacher. Starting on the same day at college were Eric Ravilious and Douglas Percy Bliss who became close and life-long friends, and with whom he edited and handcoloured the studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; magazine, Gallimaufry. He was soon recognised for his talents as an illustrator and designer, particularly in his use of woodblocks, and won a travel scholarship to Italy in 1925. In the same year, he was commissioned by the Curwen Press to illustrate a booklet, Pottery Making in Poole. This successfully designed circular, with its drawings and pictorial map, was the start of a long and active association with the Curwen Press, and the relationship with the founder, Harold Curwen, was to be one of the most significant of Bawdenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life. He had his first West End exhibition with Ravilious and Bliss at the St Georgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gallery in SeptemberOctober 1927 showing 27 works, mainly watercolours.

In conjunction with Ravilious and Charles Mahoney, Bawden executed decorations in wax tempera for Morley College (1928-29), and later replaced them by himself, in 1958, following their destruction in the Second World War. Throughout the 1930s he taught at Goldsmithsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; College and the RCA while working as a commercial artist. In 1925, he and Ravilious rented Brick House at Great Bardfield, Essex, which gradually became the centre of a small group of artists geographically defined as the Great Bardfield School. On his marriage in 1932 to Charlotte Epton, another of his contemporaries at the RCA, they received Brick House as a wedding present from his parents. They had a son and a daughter, both of whom became artists. Beyond his artistic interests, he shared his love of gardening, swapping tips and plants with John Aldridge, Cedric Morris and John Nash, brother to Paul.

Before the Second World War he held solo shows at the Zwemmer Gallery (October 1933 and again in 1937) and at the Leicester Galleries (1938).

In March 1940, Bawden was made an Official War Artist and was sent with Edward Ardizzone across to Belgium returning with the Dunkirk evacuation two months later.

From July 1941, by sea around the Cape, he was in Egypt then Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Western Desert and, in February 1943, back to Cairo, from where he sketched and travelled with Anthony Gross. On his recall to England his ship SS Laconia was torpedoed 600 miles from Lagos. After five days in a lifeboat he was picked up by a Vichy French warship and interned at Mediouna near Casablanca for two months until released by the invading Americans. By the end of the year, he was back in the Middle East, meeting Feliks Topolski in Cairo, and being sent on arduous tours from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. Late in 1944 he was posted to Rome where he met up with Ardizzone and William Coldstream. He spent the rest of the war touring Italy with the allied troops, returning in August 1945 to his family in Cheltenham, as Brick House had suffered bomb damage.

(His great friend, Ravilious, had been lost in action in Iceland in 1942.)

Bawden was awarded CBE in 1946, and was elected a Royal Designer for Industry in 1949, an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1947 and a full Royal Academician in 1956. A tutor again at the RCA between 1948-53, he also acted as a guest instructor at the Banff School of Art, Canada (1949-50). Following the death of his wife in 1970, he moved from Great Barfield to 2 Park Lane, Saffron Walden. Continuing to work successfully until the end of his life, he received the Francis Williams Book Illustration Award for both 1977 and 1982. He exhibited at the Fine Art Society (especially in 1987), and died on 21 November 1989, at the time of a retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Imperial War Museums, Tate and the V&A; and The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art (The Lightbox, Woking), Fry Art Gallery (Saffron Walden) and The Higgins Bedford.

Further reading Douglas Percy Bliss, Edward Bawden, Loxhill: Pendomer Press, 1979; David Gentleman, rev, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bawden, Edward (1903-1989)â&#x20AC;&#x2122;, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 4, pages 396-397; Robert Harling, Edward Bawden, London: Art and Technics, 1950; Justin Howes, Edward Bawden. A Retrospective Survey, Bath: Combined Arts, 1988; J M Richards, Edward Bawden (Penguin Modern Painters), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946; Stephen Stuart-Smith, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bawden, Edward (b Braintree, Essex, 10 March 1903; d Saffron Walden, Essex, 21 Nov 1989)â&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 3, page 240; Tribute to Edward Bawden, London: The Fine Art Society, 1992; The World of Edward Bawden, Colchester: The Minories, 1973; Dr Malcolm Yorke, The Inward Laugh, Edward Bawden and his circle, Huddersfield: Fleece Press, 2005;

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‘Edward Bawden was a master at every level. He was an illustrator, a narrative artist … and an abstractionist. And, of course, he never went away. As the sixties rolled through, and reputations were trashed, Bawden was always there. He was always having exhibitions, and he was probably turning commissions down on a daily basis. He was a star as a human being and is one of those British artists that have got immortality.’

(Anthony Green)

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William Dring was a skilled technician, who produced realistic, restrained and smoothly executed images â&#x20AC;&#x201C; both as a painter in oil and watercolour, and as a draughtsman, particularly in pastel. While he developed a strong reputation as a sympathetic portraitist â&#x20AC;&#x201C; with sitters ranging from family members to the Prince of Wales â&#x20AC;&#x201C; he essayed a range of subjects, including landscape and still life.

William Dring, known familiarly as John, was born at 33 Kingscourt Road, Streatham, London, on 26 January 1904, the eldest child of William Henry Dring, a compositor for a daily newspaper, and his wife, Ellen (nĂŠe Croft). His younger brother, James, would also became an artist.

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Following schooling in Streatham, Dring studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, between 1922 and 1925, under Henry Tonks.

While there, he won several prizes and scholarships â&#x20AC;&#x201C; including those for decorative painting and figure drawing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and emerged as a fine draughtsman and painter. His fellow student, Grace Elizabeth Rothwell, known as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Grayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, would become his wife. He made his name with a mural decoration for the restaurant at Lordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, and this led to similar commissions from the architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Professor A E Richardson.

Following their marriage in 1931, William and Gray Dring moved to Hampshire and, by 1935, had settled at Kenelmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cottage, Shawford, south of Winchester. Together they would have one son and two daughters, including Elizabeth, who also became an artist. He taught at Southampton School of Art (and possibly the Southern College of Art, Portsmouth). During the decade, he not only established himself as a portraitist and genre artist in pastels and oils, but was also inspired by the Hampshire countryside to paint landscapes in watercolour. The success of these led to his election as an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1942. (He would become a full member in 1957.)

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Dring began to receive commissions from the War Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Advisory Committee. Then, in early 1942, he was appointed an Official War Artist to the Admiralty. He travelled extensively across Britain, producing pastel portraits in Portsmouth, Scotland and the Western Approaches. In late summer 1943, he received a second full-time contract that included more general subjects.

His third and final contract, in 1944, led him to produce portraits for the Air Ministry.

By the end of the war, Dring and his family had moved to Windy Ridge, Compton, west of Shawford (and this would remain his home for the rest of his life). Having been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1944, he soon became a noted exhibitor at the RA, and also took up a position as an assistant teacher at the Royal Academy Schools, where he gained a reputation for exacting standards. A decade later, in 1955, he was elected a full Royal Academician. He also exhibited with leading London dealers, especially Agnews.

Increasingly, Dring focussed on his work as a portraitist, and received many commissions for official portraits â&#x20AC;&#x201C; including Sir Oliver Franks in 1962 and the Prince of Wales in 1973 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as well as depicting royal occasions.

Agnews mounted a major retrospective of Dringâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work in 1990. However, he was unable to attend due to illness, and died later the same year, on 27 September.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Imperial War Museums and the National Maritime Museum.

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First absorbing the influences of Cubism and Surrealism, Tristram Hillier made a unique contribution to modern British art. He stopped painting in the open air, and produced drawings that he then developed into oils and temperas in the studio. Making use of sable brushes, he worked meticulously to create smooth surfaces that suggest silence and stillness. Whether landscape or still life, secular or sacred, his subjects are simultaneously detailed and spare, real and surreal.

Tristram Hillier was born in Peking, China, on 11 April 1905, the youngest of the four children of Edward Guy Hillier CMG and his wife, Ada (née Everett). His father went blind at the age of 30 and, on the advice of a friend, sought comfort in the Roman Catholic church.

Nevertheless, despite this disability, he rose to become manager of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

Soon after his birth, Tristram Hillier moved to England with his mother and siblings, and settled in Angmering, Sussex. He first attended a convent school at Cavendish Square, in London, where he was ‘the only male child among a multitude of little girls’ (as he describes in his autobiography, Leda and the Goose, London: Longmans, Green, 1954, page 20). Then, at the age of nine, in 1914, he joined his elder brother, Maurice, at Downside, the Catholic public school in Somerset. This became such a refuge for him that, for a while, he even considered becoming a monk. Such thoughts may have been affected by the deaths, in 1917, of both his mother and his brother, the latter during active service in northern France as a Second Lieutenant in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

Hillier left Downside early in 1923, and returned to Peking to study Chinese. While there, he and his father agreed that he should go into business and, to that end, he came back to England in the autumn and began to read Economics at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Then, soon after the death of his father in 1924, he left university without taking his degree and began an apprenticeship with Casselton Elliot & Co, a firm of accountants. His boredom with the tasks that he was set led him to doodle so often on his blotting paper that the cashier suggested that he take painting lessons instead. He asked the advice of his former headmaster, Abbot Sigebert Trafford, who responded by introducing him to the painter and illustrator, Charles Edmund Brock. On looking through his drawings, Brock encouraged him to show them to Henry Tonks, Professor at the Slade School of Art, in London, and Tonks immediately offered him a place.

Hillier moved into a small flat in Fitzroy Street, and began to work in the Slade’s antique room in March 1926.

Soon finding the days at the Slade too short, he also joined evening classes at Westminster School of Art given

by Bernard Meninsky. However, when he applied Meninsky’s geometric approach to his drawings in the life room at the Slade, he met with Tonks’s disapproval, and soon felt constrained by the Slade’s traditional methods.

In 1927, after 18 months at the Slade, Hillier took the advice of Meninsky to ‘Go to Paris’ – though only after he had spent the summer in the Mediterranean fishing port of Cassis. While there, he befriended a number of artists, including Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Ronald Penrose and Jean Varda. On arriving in Paris, he settled at a small hotel in the Rue de la Grande-Chaumière, in Montparnasse, and took classes along the street at the Académie Colarossi, before transferring to the Atelier André Lhote, in nearby Rue d’Odessa. While in Paris, he met many of the Surrealists, and began to absorb the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst, as well as that of Braque, Matisse and Picasso. These influences could clearly be seen in the works included in his first exhibition, held in 1929, at Galerie Barreiro, on the Rue de Seine. Two years later, in April 1931, he held his first solo show in London, at the Lefèvre Galleries, and from that date his work became popular with collectors.

During a stay in Cassis in September 1930, Hillier and Varda sailed across to Toulon, where they met with a group of artist friends centred on Edward Burra. These included Irene Rose Hodgkins, known as Georgiana, the daughter of an off-course bookmaker, who had studied at the Royal College of Art. She and Hillier began a relationship and, soon after their return to Paris late in 1930, she discovered that she was pregnant. They decided to leave the capital and, with the help of Roland Penrose, bought the Château de Mansencôme, a ruined castle in Gascony. More bohemian than Hillier, Georgiana agreed to marry only just before she gave birth to their twin sons, Benjamin and Jonathan, in 1931. Financial crises forced the family to return to England in 1932, and then led to the break up of the marriage, which was finally dissolved in 1935.

In 1933, Hillier consolidated his developing reputation as a leading British Modernist artist with his highly personal interpretation of Surrealism and Cubism. In February of that year, he held a second successful solo show at the Lefèvre Galleries, which had a catalogue with a foreword by his new friend, the South-African-born poet, Roy Campbell. Then, in the October, he was included in the important exhibition, ‘Art Now’, at the Mayor Gallery, curated by the leading critic, Herbert Read. By the end of the year he had replaced Frances Hodgkins as a member of Unit One, a new group of British Modernists that had been founded by Paul Nash (and also included John

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Bigge, Edward Burra and Edward Wadsworth, among others). The group’s only exhibition, including work by Hillier, took place at the Mayor Gallery in the spring of 1934. After Unit One folded in 1935, Hillier never again joined another such group.

Keen to go travelling again, Hillier would spend almost all of the remainder of the 1930s on the Continent. In the summer of 1934, he visited Greece with the artist and writer, Captain ‘Dick’ Wyndham, to meet up with the archaeologist, Seton Lloyd. Then, over the winter, he rented Max Ernst’s studio in Paris, though he soon found that he disliked working in a block of studios, in close proximity to other artists. So, in the spring of 1935, he bought a second-hand car and motored south, staying for a last time at the Château de Mansencôme before putting it up for sale, and then going on to Tossa de Mar, on the Costa Brava. There he formed a close friendship with the French Surrealist artist, André Masson. Together they went on a walking tour that ended in Madrid, and then joined Roy Campbell and his family in Toledo. Hillier returned to London in May 1936, two months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

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Despite taking a studio at World’s End, Chelsea, at the beginning of the summer of 1936, Hillier soon left England again. He went to Austria with Seton Lloyd, initially to take in the Salzburg Festival, and while there they came across the fellow Unit One artist, John Bigge, and his wife. The Bigges invited them to join them at the Schloss St Jakob am Thurn, where they were paying guests. At the Schloss, he met Leda Hardcastle, who had played small parts in a number of films, and was the daughter of Captain Sydney Hardcastle CB RN, retired naval engineer and inventor of a First World War torpedo. They soon fell in love and, after a brief engagement, married at the British Consulate in Vienna early in 1937. Settling in a small house near the Schloss St Jakob, they took many trips to northern Italy, where Hillier gave his new wife lessons in the history of art while absorbing the influence of especially fifteenthcentury painters. He began to experiment with a new approach to his art, no longer painting en plein air, but producing drawings that he then worked up in the studio.

In the autumn of 1937, affected by the changing political climate in Europe, Hillier and his wife made the decision to leave Austria and settle in France. Initially, they borrowed a cottage near Vence, in Provence; then, in the following summer, they decided to settle near Etretat, on the Normandy coast. Leda’s father bought them L’Ormerie, a small eighteenth-century château to the south of the village of Criquetot-L’Esnival. Georges Braque lived further east, at Vargengeville-sur-Mer, and became a friend at this time, Hillier having long considered him one of the finest artists of the twentieth century. Wadsworth – another admirer of Braque – stayed with Hillier in the summer of 1939, and they worked together around the coast right up until the outbreak of the Second World War.

In May 1940, Leda gave birth to their first daughter, Mary, in a nursing home in Le Havre. Only 12 days later, the German invasion of France forced Hillier and his family to flee the country and return to England. He became a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves, serving in the North and South Atlantic and then, as a liaison officer to the Free French Naval Forces, in Sierra Leone. In 1944, he was invalided out with the rank of Lieutenant.

At the end of the war, Hillier and his family went back to Normandy, only to find that L’Ormerie was an unrecoverable wreck. So they returned to England and, in the spring of 1946, began to look for a home in Somerset, eventually settling at Yew Tree Cottage, in East Pennard, near Shepton Mallet. A second daughter, Anna-Clare, was born in Wells in 1950. The rural location allowed both Hillier and Leda to pursue their pleasure in riding and, more importantly, provided him with a peaceful environment in which to pursue his art. Living only a few miles from Downside, he re-engaged with his faith, re-entering the Catholic Church and producing an increasing number of religious subjects. However, he still travelled, making frequent visits to Portugal and Spain. And, though he published an autobiography, entitled Leda and the Goose, in 1954, he remained productive for another two decades.

The results of this new phase were exhibited in London, both at regular solo shows at Arthur Tooth & Sons (between 1946 and 1973) and at the Royal Academy.

(He became an Associate in 1957, and a full Royal Academician a decade later.) A retrospective was held at Worthing Art Gallery in the autumn of 1960, and an exhibition devoted to his drawings at the Langton Gallery, London, in June 1973. Then, in 1975, a solo show was mounted by the Pieter Wenning Gallery in Johannesburg.

Tristram Hillier died in hospital in Bristol on 18 January 1983. A touring retrospective, entitled ‘A Timeless Journey’, accompanied by a catalogue by Nicholas Usherwood, took place between the June and December of the same year, and included the Royal Academy as its London venue.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Tate; The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art (The Lightbox, Woking) and Pallant House Gallery (Chichester); the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, CA); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney).

Further reading Martin Levy, rev, ‘Hillier, Tristram Paul (1905-1983)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 27, pages 227-228; Jenny Pery, Painter Pilgrim: The Art and Life of Tristram Hillier, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I never spoke to Tristram Hillier, but I was in awe of him. He was a very elegant gentleman and, of course, he painted that way. His pictures were so elegant and beautifully painted.

They go beyond being academic. They have an originality about them, which heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s picked up en route from the Surrealists. He was a major British artist.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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Beached Boats Following the end of the Second World War, Tristram Hillier began to travel again on the Iberian Peninsula. In 1947, he visited Peniche, a Portuguese fishing centre that lies northwest of Lisbon. He was attracted by the setting, in which a picturesque seventeenth-century fortress dominates a harbour and beach that are filled with a variety of brightly-coloured vessels. As a result, he made a number of meticulous pencil drawings, which, on his return to England, he developed into paintings for the

exhibition, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Paintings of Portugalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, held at Arthur Tooth & Sons in April 1948. The best of these, such as The Slipway at Peniche (Aberdeen Art Gallery, 1948), create surreal juxtapositions.

A decade later, in 1959, Hillier returned to the motif, and produced the present oil on board. It maintains the uncanny atmosphere of the earlier paintings, by playing with the relative scale of the fortress and the boats, and placing them in a strong light that casts long shadows.

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Bolters Bridge Bolterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bridge crosses the River Alham some two miles south of Tristram Hillierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last home at East Pennard, in Somerset. It is a rare survival of a Medieval stone multispan bridge, and is largely unaltered. Designed to take packhorse traffic, it is likely to have been made by Benedictine monks to facilitate their route between their properties at Glastonbury and Bruton. Having since been bypassed by modern transport networks, it now sits in almost eerie isolation, a quality that Hillier sought to accentuate in the present oil, painted in 1961. The leafless trees â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and particularly the pollards â&#x20AC;&#x201C; seem to suggest simultaneous absence and presence.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a wonderful landscape painting, with a brilliant use of abstracted water shapes in the foreground.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green on Bolters Bridge)

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MC I H GC< 5 N L G GF >> :> B NM 6 Whatever subject he was tackling â&#x20AC;&#x201C; be it human or animal, interior or townscape â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ruskin Spear observed it closely, and brought it to life, injecting an element of narrative and often humour. He cultivated his down-to-earth realism in the pubs and streets of Hammersmith, and passed it on to his many students.

Britain scheme to produce drawings of Roche, in Cornwall and, from 1942, from the War Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Advisory Committee to paint factories and other subjects. He continued to exhibit with the London Group (becoming a member in 1942 and president in the years 1949-50) and at the Royal Academy (becoming an Associate in 1944 and a full Royal Academician a decade later).

Styling himself â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;a working-class Cockneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Ruskin Spear was born at 16 Overstone Road, Hammersmith, London, on 30 June 1911, the only son and youngest of five children of Augustus Spear, a coach builder and coach painter, and his wife, Matilda Jane (nĂŠe Lemon), a cook. An attack of polio as a child gave him a permanent limp, so he attended Brook Green School â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;for physically defective childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, which is where his artistic talent was first recognised.

At the end of the war, Spear began to teach at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, before accepting a position, in 1948, at the Royal College of Art, where he continued as a visiting teacher until 1977. However, teaching did not inhibit his production and, in March 1951, he held his first solo show at the Leicester Galleries. In 1957, he was represented in an expanded version of the exhibition, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Looking at Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, which was shown at the South London Art Gallery before touring to Moscow â&#x20AC;&#x201C; where he attended the opening â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and Leningrad. Indeed, many of his works were exhibited internationally. Late in the decade, he undertook two unusual commissions: an altarpiece for St Clement Danes, in the Strand, in 1958, and four portrait murals for the Cricketerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tavern on the liner Canberra, in 1959. By this time, he had a high reputation as a portraitist.

At the age of 15, Spear won a scholarship to Hammersmith School of Art. Four years later, in 1930, another scholarship took him to the Royal College of Art, and he studied there under William Rothenstein, Gilbert Spencer and Charles Mahoney.

While at the RCA, Spear worked as an assistant to another of its teachers, Alfred Egerton Cooper. He was also influenced by Walter Sickert in his choice of low-life subject matter and satirical approach. Much later, his fellow artist, Robert Buhler, would reflect that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ruskin Spear has done for Hammersmith what Sickert did for Camden Townâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Ruskin Spear, RA, Royal Academy Retrospective Exhibition Catalogue, 1980, page 8). He would spend most of his life in Hammersmith, and frequently painted the seedier side of its streets and pubs.

Spear began to exhibit work regularly at the Royal Academy from 1932, while he was still studying at the RCA. Once he had received his RCA diploma in 1934, he supported himself by restoring pictures and teaching at various art schools, beginning with Croydon in 1935.

A gifted musician, he further supplemented his income by playing jazz piano in bars, clubs and dance halls. It was also in 1935 that he married Mary Hill. Together they would have one son, Roger (who was born in 1943, and in 1964 became a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band).

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Spear â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;sold Peace News around Hammersmith Broadway and persistently refused to see army doctorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (as quoted by Tom Cross in Artists and Bohemians: 100 Years with the Chelsea Arts Club, London: Quiller Press, 1992, page 147). In any event, his limp was likely to have prevented him from undertaking active service, and he spent increasing amounts of time confined to a wheelchair. He taught at St Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Sidcup and Hammersmith Schools of Art (the last until the 1970s), and added to his meagre income by making fashion drawings for Vogue. Then, from 1940, he received commissions from the Recording

In 1956, Spear met the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s model, Claire Stafford, when she was 16 years of age, and had a long-lasting liaison with her â&#x20AC;&#x201C; probably centring on the studio that he rented at 260 King Street, Hammersmith, from the character actor, Harry Locke. In 1957, Claire gave birth to their daughter, Rachel, who was long thought to be the younger child of Spearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife, Mary. Claire later became the keeper of tigers at London Zoo, and Spear produced a painting of a tigress and her cubs especially for her.

Nevertheless, Spear remained with his wife and, through the 1960s and 70s, they lived at 20 Fielding Road, while he worked at a studio in Bath Road. They moved to 60 British Grove in 1980. Around this time, he received increasing recognition, being awarded a CBE in 1979, and becoming the subject of a retrospective at the Diploma Galleries of the Royal Academy in 1980. The exhibition was a critical and popular success. He died a decade later on 17 January 1990.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Arts Council, the Government Art Collection, the Imperial War Museums, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts and Tate; and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery.

Further reading Mervyn Levy, Ruskin Spear, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985; Marina Vaizey, rev, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Spear, (Augustus John) Ruskin (1911-1990)â&#x20AC;&#x2122;, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 51, pages 760-761

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ruskin Spear was true to his vision, and had the fantastic ability to paint it almost at the speed of thought. He also occupies my space, because he was the first person that I was aware was a champion of mine at the Royal Academy.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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MC I H GC< -M B NM 6 Painter, printmaker, teacher and writer, Julian Trevelyan enlivened twentieth-century British art through his varied assimilation of elements of French avant-garde approaches â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not only the dreamlike and childlike aspects of Surrealism, but also the decorative colourism of Matisse and Bonnard.

Julian Trevelyan was born in Leith Hill, Surrey, on 20 February 1910, the only surviving child of the classical scholar and poet, Robert Calverley Trevelyan, and his Dutch wife, Elizabeth (nĂŠe Des Amorie van der Hoeven).

His paternal grandfather, Sir George Trevelyan, and his uncle, George Macaulay Trevelyan, were both distinguished historians.

4

Julian Trevelyan was educated at Bedales School, in Hampshire, before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1928, to study English. While at Cambridge, he became a member of a group of students who produced the magazine, Experiment, to promote an interest in Modernism. The magazine published his text devoted to dreams, in which he stated that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;to dream is to createâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. His friends within the group included Humphrey Jennings, who encouraged him to look at French painting, and particularly the work of the Surrealist, AndrĂŠ Masson. As a result, he left Cambridge in 1930, in order to study painting.

Moving to Paris later in 1930, Trevelyan rented a studio in Montparnasse. Initially, he joined the AcadĂŠmie Moderne, run by Fernand LĂŠger and AmĂŠdĂŠe Ozenfant.

However, he soon transferred to S W Hayterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s printmaking workshop (later known as Atelier 17), and there received a thorough training. While still in Paris, in 1932, he held the first of two joint shows with Robin Darwin at the Bloomsbury Gallery, which introduced his work to the London public. The second took place in 1934, following his return to England. In that year, he married Darwinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sister, Ursula, who was a potter. A decade later, in 1943, she gave birth to their only child, Philip, who would become a filmmaker.

In 1935, Trevelyan and his wife moved to Durham Wharf, Hammersmith, which would remain his home and studio for the rest of his life (and become the venue for his famous annual Boat Race parties). There he developed a distinctive approach to Surrealism, which was revealed, in 1935, in the first of the seven solo shows that he held at the Lefèvre Galleries. In 1936, he joined the English Surrealist Group, and had three works selected, by Roland Penrose, for the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;International Surrealist Exhibitionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, at the New Burlington Galleries.

Trevelyan had his consciousness raised, politically and sociologically, through his early membership of two organisations. The Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; International Association was founded in 1933, in reaction to the spread of Fascism, while

Mass-Observation was formed in 1937 (by Trevelyanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s friend, Humphrey Jennings, among others), to document ordinary life and beliefs. In participating in the latter, he spent time in Bolton and Blackpool, observing the scene, taking photographs and producing works of art, including industrial landscapes in collage and paint.

Early in the Second World War, in 1940, Trevelyan became a Camouflage Officer in the Royal Engineers, and served in North Africa and Palestine. When providing the personal information that would be inscribed on his identity disc, he declared his religion to be Surrealism.

Three years later, in 1943, he was invalided out of the army on psychiatric grounds. On returning to painting, he took a fresh approach that, in its looser handling and brighter palette, revealed his admiration for the work of Bonnard. His new work was shown at the Galerie de France, in Paris, in 1947, and in his last exhibition at the Lefèvre Galleries, in London, in 1948. In the same year, he joined the London Group, becoming its Vice-President in 1956, and remaining a member until 1963.

It was also in the late 1940s that Trevelyan discovered that his wife, Ursula, had fallen in love with a young Belgian sculptor, Norman Mommens. Though Trevelyan had agreed with Ursula that they would conduct a fairly open relationship, and had also engaged in affairs himself, he had not expected that such behaviour would lead to the break-up of his marriage. Following his separation from Ursula early in 1949, he took an extended trip to Sicily with his friend and fellow artist, Mary Fedden, and while there fell in love with her. On their return to London, she joined him at Durham Wharf, and in 1951 they married. He published a memoir of his early life, entitled Indigo Days, in 1957.

During the 1950s, Trevelyan essayed a new style, in which areas of flat colour were bounded by firm outlines.

While this was partly inspired by the work of Matisse, it grew more profoundly out of his engagement with etching. He taught printmaking at both Chelsea School of Art (1950-60) and the Royal College of Art (1955-63, becoming a Senior Fellow in 1986), and published the manual, Etching, with Studio Books in 1963. The development of this style was charted in solo shows at Gimpel Fils (1950), the Redfern Gallery (1952) and St Georgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gallery (1959) and in six exhibitions at the Zwemmer Gallery (1955-67). A retrospective mounted by the New Grafton Gallery in 1977, was the first of four shows that he held there. Later retrospectives were held at the Bohun Gallery, Henley, in 1983 (specifically of prints), and Watermanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Centre, Brentford, in 1986.

His achievement as an artist was marked by his election as an Honorary Senior Royal Academician in 1986.

He died in Hammersmith on 12 July 1988.

His work is represented in the Jerwood Collection, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal West of England Academy (Bristol), and numerous public collections, including Tate; and Durham University, The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art (The Lightbox, Woking) and the University of Warwick.

Further reading Mel Gooding, rev, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Trevelyan, Julian Otto (1910-1988)â&#x20AC;&#x2122;, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 55, pages 341-342; Philip Trevelyan, Julian Trevelyan: Picture Language, Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2013

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Julian Trevelyan was smack bang in the middle of Modernism.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;As an artist and a teacher, Leonard Rosoman was greatly influential. He showed the dramatic possibilities of white space and areas of intense shadow in drawing. Rosoman accomplished the difficult feat of being both a truly great black and white illustrator working in the commercial sphere, and a distinguished fine artist ... He is a wonderful colourist, consolidating his abilities as a draughtsman with a highly sophisticated use of the medium of paint. Scale, too, is never a problem, whether Rosoman is creating a tiny vignette for Radio Times or a vast mural for the Royal Academy, the space is designed and tensioned as exquisitely as in any Japanese image.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Martin Baker, Artists of Radio Times, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum/London: Chris Beetles Ltd, 2002, page 35)

44

Leonard Rosoman was born in West Hampstead, London, on 27 October 1913, the only child of the removals contractor, Henry Edward Rosoman, and his wife, Lilian (nĂŠe Spencer). His parents soon became estranged, and he spent much of his childhood living with his maternal uncles and aunt at a house in Priory Road, West Hampstead. He was educated at the infant school in Kingsgate Road, West Hampstead, and at Deaconâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School, in Peterborough (where he joined his mother and an unsympathetic stepfather). He studied under E M Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Rourke Dickey at the King Edward VII School of Art, Armstrong College, Newcastle Upon Tyne (part of Durham University) (1930-34), the Royal Academy Schools (1935), and under Bernard Meninsky at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (1934-37). As a student he was much influenced by Gauguin, Paul Nash and Edward Burra.

Before the Second World War, Rosoman illustrated his first book, J B S Haldaneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s My Friend Mr Leakey (1937), and taught life drawing and perspective at the Reimann School, Westminster (1937-39). Then, during the war, he served in the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, and helped form the Fireman Artists. In 1945, he was appointed an Official War Artist to the Admiralty, working with the British Pacific Fleet. His work from this period was exhibited much later, in 1989, in â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;A War Retrospectiveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; mounted by the Imperial War Museum.

After the war, Rosoman developed as a distinctive painter, illustrator and designer, characterised by an unusual, even ambiguous use of space, and often highly artificial colour. He was invited by his friend, John Minton, to teach illustration at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1947-48), and went on to teach mural painting at Edinburgh College of Art (1948-56). While there, he made his first drawings for Radio Times, produced his first significant murals for the Festival of Britain (1951), and designed the Diaghilev exhibition for the Edinburgh

Festival (1954). In 1956, he became a tutor in the Painting School of the Royal College of Art, and three years later began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1960, and a full Royal Academician nine years later.

During the 1960s, Rosoman absorbed the influence of some of his former students, including Peter Blake and Peter Phillips. So he enhanced his non-naturalistic palette by switching from oil to acrylic, and increased his use of framing devices. The results are well displayed in the series of paintings based on John Osborneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s controversial play, A Patriot for Me, exhibited in New York in 1968, and at Roland, Browse and Delbanco, in London, in 1969.

Between 1951 and 1961, Rosoman was the lover of Ginette Morton-Evans, then married to Kenneth MortonEvans, and they travelled together in France, Italy and Spain. The relationship ended when, having divorced her husband, she impulsively married Robin Darwin, rector of the Royal College of Art. Rosoman went on to have a six-year marriage to the Australian artist and costume designer, Jocelyn Rickards (1963-69).

Among other achievements, his work as a book illustrator included contributions to The Oxford Illustrated Old Testament (1968-69), and a number of commissions from the Folio Society, including Brave New World (1971).

Important decorative commissions include that for Lambeth Palace Chapel (1988). He was awarded an OBE in 1981.

In 1972, Rosoman began a relationship with the American pianist, Roxanne Levy (nĂŠe Wruble), whom he would marry in 1994. He died on 21 February 2012, aged 98.

His work is represented in the Royal Academy of Arts and numerous public collections, including the Imperial War Museums and the National Portrait Gallery.

Further reading Tanya Harrod, Leonard Rosoman, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2017; Angela Weight, Leonard Rosoman: A War Retrospective, 1939-1945, London: Imperial War Museum, 1989

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‘I admired Leonard Rosoman, loving the way that he bent perspective in order to increase, rather than distort, reality. We looked at each other’s work, and he paid me the compliment – the greatest compliment that one artist can pay another – of buying one of my paintings: The Kiss II [Catalogue Raisonné no AG172]’. (Anthony Green)

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Very early in her career, Betty Swanwick established herself as an illustrator and designer of great wit and invention, so complementing her friend and teacher, Edward Bawden. Later, she produced an extraordinary series of visionary watercolours and drawings in the tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, which led to her election as a Draughtsman Member of the Royal Academy.

Betty Swanwick was born on 22 May 1915, the elder daughter of Harry Swanwick, who developed as a marine watercolourist while serving as a Paymaster in the Royal Naval Reserves. She was baptised at St Peterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Church, Aldborough Hatch, near Ilford, Essex.

Swanwick was educated at a local LCC elementary school, and later at the Prendergast Grammar School, Lewisham, South London. She received her first lessons in art from her father, and was encouraged by her art mistress at the Prendergast. Her father died when she was 10 years old, a loss that threw her upon her own determination to develop as an artist.

40

During her formative years and into early adulthood, Swanwick would continue to live in South London, first in Forest Hill and then in Sydenham. At the age of 15, she entered Goldsmithsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; College School of Art, where she was encouraged by Clive Gardiner, the Headmaster, and Edward Bawden, her tutor. Four years later, she received scholarships to both the Central School of Arts and the Royal College of Art, and attended them at the same time as Goldsmiths.

Swanwick received commissions even before such friends and contemporaries as Carel Weight and Denton Welch.

As a result of seeing her work at a student exhibition at Goldsmiths in 1936, Frank Pick commissioned her to design her first posters for London Transport, and other projects soon followed.

In the same year, Swanwick returned on a part-time basis, to teach Illustration at Goldsmiths, as a successor to Bawden. Highly talented â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and highly respected by her students â&#x20AC;&#x201C; she taught at Goldsmiths through the Second World War, and became a full-time Senior Assistant in the Illustration School in 1948. During this post-war period, she developed her range as an artist, painting watercolours and murals, providing illustrations for books and periodicals, and designing further posters.

Having begun to illustrate books from 1939, Swanwick produced her own texts, for both children and adults, from 1945. Describing her idiosyncratic social comedies for adults as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;novelettesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, she populated them with largeheaded wide-eyed figures with tiny feet. Though they hardly hinted at her later, more spiritual preoccupations, the images amply demonstrated her instinctive wit, her

innate sense of design and her skilful draughtsmanship.

As a whole, the publication of these books marked an important step towards the recognition of her originality, John Betjeman calling Hoodwinked (1957), â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;strange, startling, funny with a weird beautyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

In 1950, a rare solo exhibition at The Little Gallery provided a showcase for Swanwickâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s anthropomorphic watercolours, which combined her love of animals and sense of fun in the most delightful way. Her mural designs, for venues such as the Festival of Britain (1951) and the Evelina Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hospital (1955), were equally successful manifestations of her jaunty early style.

Soon after the retirement of Clive Gardiner from Goldsmiths in 1958, Swanwick became aware that the new Principal, Patrick Millard, was introducing changes in methodology that favoured the avant-garde. Most damaging for Swanwick was that drawing in general, and illustration in particular, was marginalised. Increasingly ostracised by those who represented the new order, she would seek solace in artistic certainties, and so carried with her a facsimile of one of Samuel Palmerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sketchbooks. She eventually resigned as Senior Lecturer in 1970, and left her home in Greenwich for Downgate, Tidebrook, Sussex.

By this time, Swanwick was working increasingly on largescale figurative watercolours and drawings, and exhibiting them regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Gradually receiving some recognition, she was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1972, and a full Royal Academician seven years later. She was also elected a member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1976.

In the poetry and intensity of the late narrative pictures, there is a level of achievement that suggests that Swanwick had overcome earlier anxieties. Yet there was something in her character that stopped her being as well known as she might have been. She preferred to spend her time working â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and, as a perfectionist, completing work with difficulty â&#x20AC;&#x201C; at home, and in the company of her dogs, her cats and Jobo, her African Grey parrot.

On returning to Greenwich in 1973, Swanwick taught again at Goldsmiths for one day a week and continued to do so for five years, by which time she had settled in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Swanwick died in hospital, in Tunbridge Wells, on her birthday, 22 May 1989. She left her money to four charities: the Celia Hammond Animal Trust, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Royal College of Art and Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery.

Further reading Judith Collins, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Swanwick, Ada Elizabeth Edith [Betty] (1915-1989), artist and art teacherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 53, pages 443-444; Brian Murphy, The Art of Betty Swanwick, Oxford Polytechnic, 1989

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s totally improper, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a lovely, lovely thing.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green on Panel for a Smoking Room in a Club)

In publishing and promoting Paddy Rossmoreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s monograph, Betty Swanwick. Artist & Visionary, in 2008, Chris Beetles has done much to revive interest in this highly imaginative and quintessentially British artist.

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: B NM John Ward was a painter and draughtsman of exceptional quality. While best known for his portraits, he was a prolific and wide-ranging artist, who produced a significant body of illustrative work.

John Ward was born at 2 Gruneisen Street, Hereford, on 10 October 1917, the youngest of seven children of the antique dealer and picture restorer, Russell Stanton Ward, and his wife Jessie (nĂŠe Watson). His father died when he was 11 years old, and money was then short, with his two elder sisters providing the family income. He was educated at the local infant school before moving to St Owenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School, where he was influenced by the headmaster. At the age of 15, he began to study at Hereford School of Art (1933-36), and then in London at the Royal College of Art (1936-39; 1946-47).

There he studied under Gilbert Spencer, Barnett Freedman, Percy Horton, Charles Mahoney and Alan Sorrell, and won a drawing prize. He made close friends with a number of fellow students, including Jehan Daly.

41

On the outbreak of the Second World War, Ward and Daly both enlisted with the Royal Engineers. In 1942, Ward was attached to the headquarters of the 3rd division as a draughtsman, designing pillboxes for the Kent coast.

He remained with the division for the remainder of the war, taking part in the D-Day Landings and serving in the Netherlands. He drew his fellow soldiers and also gave them lessons in drawing. During this period, he met his future wife, Alison Williams, who was working as an ambulance driver in the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

At the end of the war, Ward returned to the RCA to complete his studies, and won a travelling scholarship. In 1948, he received a four-year contract from Vogue as an illustrator, and so produced many fashion drawings and sketches of interiors. In the same period, he taught part-time at Wimbledon School of Art.

From 1962, Ward developed a close connection with the Royal Family, making sketches of life at Balmoral, and giving lessons in watercolour to Prince Charles.

In 1981, he was commissioned to paint the wedding between Charles and Diana. Painting many establishment figures led to his election as VicePresident of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters during the years 1980-85, and his appointment as a CBE in 1985. A retrospective was held at Agnewâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, London, 1990, and later solo shows at Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox from 1996. He resigned from the Royal Academy in 1997 as the result of offensive remarks made by the Exhibitions Secretary (as he told Chris Beetles in conversation). In 1991, he had published The Paintings of John Ward.

While referring to book illustration as his recreation, Ward always responded seriously to commissions, and his achievement in the field should, in itself, be enough to secure a posthumous reputation. Initiating his career as a book illustrator with Cynon BeatonJonesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Adventures of So-Hi in 1951, he worked particularly closely with Laurie Lee (including Cider with Rosie in 1959), Richard Church (including The Little Kingdom in 1968), H E Bates (including three volumes of autobiography in 1969-72) and Joyce Grenfell (including George, Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Do That in 1977).

John Ward died at Bilting on 14 June 2007. His daughters, Celia and Charlotte, and his son, Toby are also artists.

His work is represented in the Royal Collection and numerous public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery.

Further reading Simon Fenwick, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;John Wardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], Guardian, 21 June 2007; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;John Wardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2007; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;John Wardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], The Times, 22 June 2007; Andrew Lambirth, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;John Ward: Painter of Exceptional Abilityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], Independent, 16 June 2007

In 1950, Ward married Alison Williams, and together they would have four sons and twin daughters. Initially, they lived in a studio in Glebe Place, Chelsea, but he soon tired of London and, in 1952, they moved to Folkestone, in Kent.

Nevertheless, through the decade, he consolidated his reputation as a painter and illustrator, becoming a member of the New English Art Club (1950), the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours (ARWS 1952; RWS 1986), the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (1952) and the Royal Academy of Arts (ARA 1956; RA 1965). He held a one-man exhibition at Wildensteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in 1954, and subsequent solo shows at the Maas Gallery from 1964.

In 1957, Ward and his family settled at Bilting Court, a Tudor house near Ashford, Kent. By that date, he had already produced a mural for the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian, in the nearby village of Challock (and would produce another in 1999).

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Hubert, or The Lonely Woodcutter Soon after he was demobbed in 1946, John Ward was prompted by a friend to produce this set of illustrations, possibly to a French or Belgian story â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ward having been in Belgium at the end of the Second World War. They emulate the delightful styles of Edward Bawden and John Nash, both of whom were teaching at the Royal College of Art while he was a student. However, never published, they were given to another friend, and remained lost for many years, being rediscovered in a chest in the attic of Wickham Manor Farm, Winchelsea, East Sussex, in 1996.

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;A very nice man and a very lovely artist, John Ward did everything with an economy of styleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

(Anthony Green)

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: B NM : Bernard Dunstan was brought up in the tradition of Degas, Sickert and Vuillard, and established himself with intimate figure subjects and landscapes in paint and pastel. A member of both the Royal Academy and the New English Art Club for many years, he was much loved and greatly respected.

Bernard Dunstan was born in Teddington, Middlesex, on 19 January 1920, the son of Dr Albert Dunstan, Chief Chemist with the Anglo Persian Oil Company, and his wife Louisa (nĂŠe Cleaverley). He was educated at Colet Court, the preparatory school for St Paulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, and then at St Paulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s itself, where his art teacher was Erik Sthyr.

During his last year he attended evening classes at Chelsea School of Art. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he went to the Byam Shaw School of Art, where he studied under Ernest Jackson. Later the same year, he went to the Slade School of Fine Art, during its evacuation from London to Oxford, and studied under Allan Gwynne-Jones, among others. While there, he met Diana Armfield in the life class, her textile design course having closed. Though rejected by the Royal Air Force on account of his eyesight, he was admitted to the Royal Observer Corps in 1941, and spent the rest of the war in Oxford, mapping flight movements and bombing raids.

Brought up in Degas-Sickert-Vuillard tradition, Dunstan established himself with intimate figure subjects and landscapes, which he began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy (from 1945) and the New English Art Club (becoming a member in 1946), among other institutions.

Both the RA and the NEAC would become central to his professional life. In 1946, he moved to Bristol, to take up a teaching position at the Schools of the Royal West of England Academy (RWA). At the close of the 1940s, he was elected to the membership of the RWA (and would act as its President between 1979 and 1984).

the wider public in a series of books, including Learning to Paint (1970), Painting Methods of the Impressionists (1976), and an edition of John Ruskinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Elements of Drawing (1991). A book on his work, with his own introduction and commentary, entitled The Paintings of Bernard Dunstan, was published by David & Charles in 1993.

Becoming an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1959, and a full Royal Academician in 1968, Dunstan was much loved and greatly respected by both the public and fellow Academicians, and continued to exhibit there until his death. He also held regular solo shows at Roland, Browse and Delbanco (between 1952 and 1970), and later at Agnews. In addition, he had a long association with Wales, spending much time at his second home at Llwyn Hir, Parc, near Bala, in Gwynedd, exhibiting at the Royal Cambrian Academy, and holding a joint retrospective with his wife, Diana, in Welshpool, in 1988. His international reach is suggested by two artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residencies, which he held (with Diana) at Perth, in Western Australia (in 1985) and Jackson, Wyoming, in the United States (in 1989).

Bernard Dunstan held a show with Diana Armfield at the Royal Academy in 2015-16. He died on 20 August 2017.

His work is represented in The Royal Collection, the Royal West of England Academy and numerous public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery.

Further reading Christopher Masters, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bernard Dunstanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], Guardian, 10 September 2017 Chris Beetles Gallery exclusively represents the Estate of Bernard Dunstan

While Dunstan was in Bristol, Diana regained contact with him, having seen a painting by him at the 1947 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. They married in 1949, and moved into the studio at 7 Lambolle Road, Belsize Park, the home of Dianaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s elder sister, Kay. In the early 1950s, they settled in Kew, living first at 17 Lichfield Road and, from later in the decade, at 10 High Park Road. Together they had three sons: Andrew (in 1950), David (in 1952) and Robert (in 1955; who sadly died in 2007).

Through the 1950s and 60s, Dunstan taught at a number of schools in the London area: Camberwell School of Art (1950-64), the Byam Shaw School of Art (1953-74), Ravensbourne Art College (1959-64) and the City and Guilds of London Art School (1964-69). He also educated

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bernard Dunstan and Diana Armfield were so kind and supportive. One of Bernardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best friends was Kyffin Williams, who taught me to paint. As a result, Bernard cast a fatherly eye over my early work, and even wrote a kind review of my 1974 exhibition at the Rowan Gallery.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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An admirer of Bonnard and Vuillard, Sickert and William Nicholson, Diana Armfield turned from design to painting early in her career, and has worked for over seven decades in a range of media to produce a strong body of harmonious images.

These encompass sensitive botanical still life compositions, atmospheric landscapes and evocative figure groups.

Diana Armfield was born in Hightown, Ringwood, Hampshire, on 11 June 1920, the younger of two daughters of Joseph Armfield, a Quaker who was the director of the Vale of Avon Iron Works, and his wife, Gertrude (nĂŠe Uttley). Her uncle was the artist, illustrator and writer, Maxwell Armfield. She attended Bedales, a co-educational independent school in the village of Steep, Hampshire, and there she studied art with the inspiring teacher, Innes Meo. She was also affected by a meeting in Paris with the influential French textile designer, Paule Marrot. Though she did not take art for her school leaving certificate, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;it was always assumed that I would go to Art schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, she has explained (to James Fairweather in 2013).

Diana Armfield attended Bournemouth Art School for one year, the highlight of which was a trip to the Soviet Union with a group of teachers. She then went to the Slade School of Art, during its evacuation from London to Oxford, and responded well to the combination of theoretical and practical teaching. While there, she also met fellow painting student, Bernard Dunstan, who would become her husband. In 1942, she left the Slade without taking her diploma in order to undertake war work as a Cultural Activities Organiser for the Ministry of Supply. However, the lack of a diploma did not stop her receiving a place at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1947. Studying under Bernard Adeney and Dora Batty in the textile department, she soon founded her own textile company with fellow student, Roy Passano. They involved themselves in all stages of the process from design to sales, and showcased the results at galleries in South Molton Street (1947 and 1948) and at the Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; International Association. Their work was also sold through such top retailers as Healâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, and their clients included the architects, artists and designers, Eileen Agar, Misha Black, Wells Coates, Duncan Grant and Milner Gray. The Victoria and Albert Museum acquired examples of their work in 1949 and, in the same year, 20>D#<A@)?C;9D?@D-7,,CA BNA NLJ N NLN IK 8NI M H 6 @ N HJ K @JNFNL < 20J 0D M7 MG LNKLK ? E 9 , HJ ; NI E M

they both became members of the Society of Industrial Artists. Then, in 1951, their partnership reached its culmination, when they were invited to contribute to the Festival of Britain and had three of their first wallpaper designs launched by John Line & Sons.

Armfield-Passano operated from a studio at the bottom of the garden belonging to Dianaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s elder sister, Kay, at 7 Lambolle Road, Belsize Park. This also became her first home with Bernard, following their marriage in 1949.

When she gave birth to their first son, Andrew, in 1950, they moved into an upstairs flat. Then in 1952, on the birth of their second son, David, they moved to Kew. With the birth of their third son, Robert, in 1955, the family became Dianaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s priority. And, as her business partner, Roy Passano, had migrated to Canada, her creative life was put on hold.

In 1958, Diana Armfield was able to revive her skills as a designer, and supply wallpaper patterns to Cole & Son, Lightbown Aspinall and Shand Kydd, as well as John Line & Sons. However, manufacturers had become more interested in novelty than quality of drawing, and she did not enjoy the new environment as much. In 1959, she began to teach drawing at the Byam Shaw School of Art, and then, as she remembers, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the principal announced that I would be teaching painting as well as drawing the following term â&#x20AC;Ś Bernard quickly made me an easel box and we went to Arezzo in Tuscany together for two weeks, painting every day. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never looked back!â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (quoted in Fairweather 2013). She continued both to design and teach until 1965, but painting increasingly absorbed her, and from that year she took it up full time, also beginning to exhibit the results regularly at the Royal Academy. An article that she published in The Artist in 1966, entitled â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;An Introduction to Designing Wallpapers and Fabricsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, brought the first phase of her career to an end.

Exhibiting in many mixed shows through the 1960s and 70s, Diana Armfield was elected a member of the New English Art Club in 1970, a member of the Royal West of England Academy in 1975, and also an Associate of the Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy, in 1973. She began her close association with Wales when she and Bernard

25

bought Llwyn Hir, in Parc, near Bala, in Gwynedd, and she held solo shows at the Tegfryn Gallery, Anglesey, in 1975 and 1978.

Beginning to be represented by the London dealer, Browse & Darby, in 1979, Diana Armfield was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society in 1980 and, from 1981, served as a Governor of the Federation British Artists (an association of nine leading art societies, including the New English Art Club and the Pastel Society). In her burgeoning role as a leading figure among traditional British artists, she also produced a number of guides, including The Simon & Schuster Pocket Guide to Painting in Oils and The Simon & Schuster Pocket Guide to Drawing (both 1982), and Drawing and Painting in Oils (two Mitchell Beazley handbooks, both published in 1983).

During the late 1980s, her profile was further raised by two international artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residencies (with Bernard Dunstan), some significant commissions and a retrospective exhibition (also with Bernard). The first artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residence took place in Perth, in Western Australia, in 1985, and the second in Jackson, Wyoming, in the United States, in 1989. The commissions included one from the National Trustâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Foundation for Art in 1988, and another from the Prince of Wales in 1989, to paint

the interiors and gardens of Highgrove, his home in Gloucestershire. The retrospective was held at the Davies Memorial Gallery in Welshpool, in 1988. Her achievements were crowned by her election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1989 and as a full Royal Academician in 1991.

During the last two decades, Diana Armfield has continued to exhibit widely and frequently, and has held a number of solo shows, including those at Browse & Darby (2000, 2006, 2010), the Royal Cambrian Academy (2001, 2011), The Albany Gallery, Cardiff (2001, 2006), Sheen Gallery, London (2004), the New Academy Gallery, London (2005) and the Mall Galleries, London (2013). A joint show was held with Bernard Dunstan at the Royal Academy in 2015-16.

Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including the V&A (textile work) and the Royal West of England Academy (Bristol).

Further reading James Fairweather, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Diana Armfieldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, www.bedales.org, 2013; Julian Halsby, The Art of Diana Armfield, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1995; Ngozi Ikoku, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Late Floweringâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Crafts, January/February 2001, pages 38-41 [an article on her first career as a designer]

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The camellia is a brave shrub; its blooms come singly in November, testing the season. They defy the first frost, but from then on, through the cold and wet of winter and spring, which turns the flowers from pink to brown, they then hung out again and again a new flush of perfect blooms.

This painting was from around Christmas time, a bunch brought in to be placed by the ironing board with its dangling strings.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Diana Armfield)

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5 L .M 7 C M/ E6 E > MC I H GC< 5 N L G GF 6: ?E ‘One of the foremost realist painters in England …

Coker will be remembered for the refreshing nature of his astringent vision, for his consummate mastery as a draughtsman, painter and etcher, and as a proud and vigorous inheritor of a great artistic tradition.’

(Frances Spalding, Independent, 20 December 2004) Peter Coker was born in London on 27 July 1926, the only child of Edwin Coker, the manager of a wholesale confectioner’s, and his wife, Elsie (née Goode). He grew up and attended schools in Essex, and first worked under his father. When he became a studio assistant with the publisher, Odhams Press, he was able to study part-time at St Martin’s School of Art (1941-43), and he returned there (1947-50) following wartime service in the Fleet Air Arm and the Education Corps. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1950, the year in which he began four years of study at the Royal College of Art. He married Vera Crook, a mathematics teacher, in 1951, and she would give birth to their only child, Nicholas, a year later.

Though Peter Coker was a contemporary of John Bratby and Edward Middleditch at the RCA, his work related only briefly to the raw figuration of the Kitchen Sink School. This was signalled by his paintings of a Leytonstone butcher’s shop which were included in his highly successful first solo show (held at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1956). His development as a landscape painter originated in his first encounter with the canvases of Gustave Courbet on a trip to Paris (1950). By the mid 1950s, he was an established landscapist in the French manner, working from the motif on the coasts of Normandy (1955) and Brittany (1957), and drawing inspiration from such contemporaries as Nicholas de Stäel. Later in the decade, he revived the spirit of Barbizon in his paintings of Epping.

Coker moved with his family to Manningtree, Essex, in 1962, and added occasional appearances at Colchester School of Art to teaching at St Martin’s. Nevertheless, he concentrated on his work, and made time for painting trips to France, the North of England and Scotland. He held solo shows at the Zwemmer Gallery (1960s), the Thackeray Gallery (1970s) and Gallery 10 (1980s), and continued to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy.

He was elected a Royal Academician (ARA 1965, RA 1972), and had his early images of the butcher’s shop presented at the RA in 1979, one of an increasing number of public retrospectives.

From 1972, Coker made several visits to Bargemon, Provence, during which he gradually accepted the character of the South of France, and integrated its startling light and colour into his established palette and handling. Late in the decade, he applied this approach to

an ideal motif, in beginning a series of paintings of the garden of the Clos du Peyronnet, Menton. Following the death of his son, Nicholas, in 1985, he stayed at Badenscallie, Ross-shire, Scotland. There he began an impassioned series of landscapes, extended on subsequent visits, which focussed on salmon nets drying at Achiltibuie. These reaffirmed his essential identity as ‘a northern painter’, which had actually become more strongly emphasised by his contrasting achievement of painting the south. The many studies and paintings inspired by both Mediterranean France and the West of Scotland comprised important elements of such recent retrospectives as that of drawings and sketchbooks at the Fitzwilliam Museum (1989) and that of paintings and drawings at Abbot Hall Art Gallery (1992).

In October 2002, Chris Beetles mounted a major retrospective of the work of Peter Coker and, at the same time, launched the artist’s authorised biography. The beautifully produced hardback book, with over 250 illustrations, contains contributions from Richard Humphreys (Tate Gallery), John Russell Taylor (The Times), and David Wootton (Chris Beetles Ltd). The book includes a comprehensive biography and chronology, essays, appraisals of his work, a catalogue raisonné and lists of his exhibitions and sketchbooks.

While the monograph and retrospective were being planned, it seemed that the artist’s career might have been drawing to a close. However, the joint project revived his energies significantly. This was manifested by a range of new work, which was shown at Chris Beetles Gallery during spring 2004. The motifs are mostly familiar, being drawn from existing sketchbooks, and range across France and encompass Britain. Yet the handling was freer than ever, and the palette more vibrant – accomplishments of which Peter was justifiably proud. This display was complemented by an exhibition of recent Parisian subjects, touring to Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield.

Peter Coker died in Colchester, Essex, on 16 December 2004.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Tate; and Museums Sheffield.

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02 â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;As a student, I went to see Peter Cokerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s carcass paintings at the Royal Academy, and his exhibitions at the Zwemmer Gallery.

And I always wanted to see what he was doing.

He was a real painter, a painterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s painter.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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LJD NIIN G M C 1 5 E6 E : MC I H GC< 5 N L G GF ?> B NM E Through his landscapes, figurative scenes, portraits and still lifes, in oil and watercolour, William Bowyer sustained a fine traditional strand in British painting. He became particularly associated with brightly-hued scenes of the Thames at Chiswick and the Blyth Estuary in Suffolk. For many years, these were among the highlights of the exhibitions of the New English Art Club, of which he was the Honorary Secretary, and the Royal Academy, of which he became a Senior Academician.

William Bowyer, generally known as Bill, was born in Leek, Staffordshire, on 25 May 1926, the son of Arthur Bowyer, a union official, and his wife, Emma (nĂŠe Fitch).

The familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main income was derived from a hat shop that was run by his mother, and in which worked his sister, Elaine, who was 14 years his elder.

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Bowyer received much encouragement in his talent for art from both his parents and his school art teacher. As a result, in 1943, he entered Burslem School of Art on a scholarship. In the following year, as the Second World War intensified, he readied himself for military service, and hoped to join the Royal Navy. Instead, he was conscripted by ballot to work at Sneyd colliery, near Burslem, as one of Ernest Bevinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bevin Boysâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Though he initially worked at the coalface, he was transferred to the office when it was discovered that he was a talented cricketer, and should be readily available to play for the colliery XI. At the same time, he took evening classes at the art school.

In 1945, Bowyer moved to London in order to study painting at the Royal College of Art. He befriended his teachers, Ruskin Spear and Carel Weight, and met his future wife, Vera Small, who was studying sculpture.

They would marry in 1951, settle in Chiswick, and have two sons and a daughter. Though Vera did not pursue sculpture, she successfully made and sold soft toys in order to help support the family.

Balancing painting and teaching, Bowyer worked at Gravesend School of Art and Crafts through the late 40s until 1951, and there numbered Peter Blake among his students. He then held a similar position at Walthamstow School of Art. Aligning himself with social realism of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Kitchen Sink Schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, he painted street markets and circus animals, among other subjects. However, though he won the City of London Art Award in 1963, few of his early works survive. Some were destroyed in a fire at a store, while others disintegrated under a tarpaulin in the garden of 12 Cleveland Avenue, Chiswick, his home from 1963 until his death.

In 1968, Bowyer became the Honorary Secretary (in effect the President) of the New English Art Club, a position that he retained for 30 years, during which time he led the ambition for financial, as well as artistic, success. Between 1971 and 1982, Bowyer was also of Head of Fine Art at Maidstone School of Art. Despite this responsibility, he developed his style during this decade, heightening his palette and loosening his handling, so combining the influence of English Romantics, such as Constable and Turner, and the Post-Impressionists. He applied this particularly to landscape and urban motifs, including river scenes of the Thames at Chiswick, and coastal scenes of Walberswick, in Suffolk, where he regularly holidayed.

Beginning to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy, he was elected an Associate in 1974 and a full Royal Academician in 1981. This recognition encouraged him to leave Maidstone and paint full time.

Though best known as a painter of landscapes in oil, Bowyer also worked in watercolour and produced portraits.

He was a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

His portraits include those of Arthur Scargill, the President of the National Mineworkers, and Viv Richards, one of the greatest cricketers of all time, both of which were acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1988, and touch on important and lasting experiences. In the same year, the MCC commissioned him to paint the bi-centenary game at Lordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cricket ground. He himself played cricket for the Chiswick and Old Meadonians Cricket Clubs.

In 1993, Bowyer bought a cottage in Walberswick on the Suffolk coast, and this gave him the opportunity to increase his output of seascapes and coastal scenes, and so confirm his status as a master of British landscape. In 1997, a stroke affected his mobility, but did not halt his artistic activity; rather it ushered in a gentler, more poetic phase of painting. Elected a Senior Royal Academician in 2001, he received a major retrospective at Messumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gallery, in Cork Street, in 2003. This was actually his first solo show, he having managed his career through group exhibitions, private sales and major commissions up until this time.

Bowyer died on 1 March 2015, and was survived by his wife and children. His two sons, Jason Bowyer RP PNEAC PS and Francis Bowyer PRWS NEAC, are also artists.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Royal Academy.

Further reading Christopher Masters, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;William Bowyerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], Guardian, 19 March 2015; [obituary], The Times, 20 March 2015

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;As someone who has often tried to paint forsythia, I can say that this is the most masterful still lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green on Studio Table)

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The work of Sydney Harpley always surprised and delighted: dancers, acrobats, girls on swings were posed and executed with equal audacity and elegance. Establishing the single female as his favourite subject while still a student, he rose to become the most popular sculptor, not only among Royal Academicians but among all who exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions.

Sydney Harpley was born in Fulham, London, on 19 April 1927, the son of Sydney Frederick Harpley, an electrical engineer and cabinet maker, and his wife, Rose (nĂŠe Harrison), a milliner. He grew up in Dagenham, and spent the war years as an evacuee in Berkshire and Bedfordshire. Though talented in both art and music,

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he left school at the age of 14 to take up an apprenticeship as an electrician. He went on to work at an American air base, and would later cite aircraft as a formative influence on his artistic development, describing planes as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;sculptures in spaceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Even more instrumental in his decision to become a sculptor was his encounter with the carved head of Ramases II, in Cairo, during National Service with the Royal Engineers (1945-48). On his return home, he took evening classes in drawing while working at a factory in Roehampton making artificial limbs. In 1951, he became a full-time student of sculpture at Hammersmith School of Art, and two years later began to study under John Skeaping at the Royal College of Art. While still a student, Harpley established the single female figure as his favourite form. He exhibited examples at the Young Contemporaries and at the Royal Academy, and sold his first pieces to the National Gallery of New Zealand (Little Girl) and the artist Fleur Cowles

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(Seated Girl). In 1956, the year of his first marriage, to the illustrator, Sally Holliday, he returned to Hammersmith as a part-time teacher, and began to receive commissions for portrait busts and public figure groups. (Though he had two sons and a daughter with Sally, their marriage was dissolved in 1968.)

In 1963, Harpley fully established himself, being elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, and winning a competition to create a portrait memorial to the South African statesman, Jan Smuts. (The Jan Smuts Memorial still stands in the Company’s garden, Cape Town.) His first solo shows, in Cape Town and Johannesburg, soon followed.

From 1972, Harpley taught part-time at Leicester Polytechnic, and while there met his second wife, Jo, an art historian specialising in costume, who became one of his favourite models. Marrying in 1981, they moved to Radigan Farm, Somerset (1986) and then to a neoclassical manor house in County Kilkenny, Ireland

(1989). At the height of his career, Harpley was elected a Royal Academician (ARA 1974, RA 1981), and twice won the Visitors’ Choice Prize at its Summer Exhibition (1978, 1979). He had a number of successful solo shows, including two at the Chris Beetles Gallery in 1987 and 1990, and internationally in Breda, Antwerp and Amsterdam in 1974 and 1975. He died in Dublin on 9 March 1992.

Chris Beetles Gallery exclusively represents the Estate of Sydney Harpley, and is currently preparing a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s sculpture for publication in the near future.

‘As well as enjoying his girls on swings and hammocks, I remember particularly that Sydney Harpley came up to me, at the Royal Academy in 1982, and kindly congratulated me on my painting, The Enchanted Garden: Twentieth Wedding Anniversary [Catalogue Raisonné no AG273].’

(Anthony Green)

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M I - GNILM & K E E MC I H GC< 5 N L G GF ?: : -M M C D LM E B NM E > His boldly-handled and richly-coloured semi-abstracts, influenced by the School of Paris, established Donald Hamilton Fraser as one of the most distinctive British Modernist painters of the immediate post-war generation.

Though he was of Scottish descent, Donald Hamilton Fraser was born in London on 30 July 1929, the son of the antiques dealer, Donald Fraser, and his wife, Dorothy (nĂŠe Lang). During the Second World War, his family moved constantly and, while he spent some time at Maidenhead Grammar School, he often had to change school. Nevertheless, he developed an interest in literature, reading voraciously and writing poetry, and he began to train as a journalist with Kemsley Newspapers.

During a period of national service in the Royal Air Force (1947-49), Fraser became increasingly interested in the visual arts, and studied at St Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School of Art, first in evening classes and, on his release, as a full-time student (1949-52).

His precocious ability to gain external commissions provoked the envy of some of teachers, but soon led to his first solo show at the prestigious London gallery, Gimpel Fils, in 1953. Gaining a French government scholarship to Paris, he lived in the city in the years 1953-54, a brief but formative period that had a significant influence on the development of his work. It was also in Paris, at the British Embassy in 1954, that he married the graphic designer, Judith Wentworth-Sheilds, whom he had met at St Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. (Together they would have one daughter.)

which contrasted with the semi-abstraction of his landscapes.

Two retrospectives of his work were held in London in the summer of 2009 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; at Arthur Ackerman and the CCA Galleries â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not long before his death on 2 September.

Further reading â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Donald Hamilton Fraserâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], Daily Telegraph, 4 September 2009; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Donald Hamilton Fraser: Painterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], The Times, 19 September 2009; Clare Hinton, Donald Hamilton Fraser. A retrospective: metamorphosis not metaphor, Tilford: CCA Galleries/Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2009; William Packer, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Donald Hamilton Fraserâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], Guardian, 7 September 2009

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On returning to London in 1954, Fraser supported himself by writing for Arts Review, while establishing himself as a painter.

His ability to devote himself fully to his art was marked, in 1956, by a solo show at Galerie Craven, in Paris. Then, in 1957, he took up an invitation from Carel Weight to teach at the Royal College of Art for one day a week; he continued to do so for 25 years, becoming a Fellow of the RCA in 1970, and an Honorary Fellow in 1984. He became one of the most prolific and widely exhibited of British artists, with his work being shown nationally as well as throughout America and Japan. In addition to Gimpel Fils, he frequently held solo shows at Paul Rosenberg & Co, in New York (the American dealer of Nicolas de StaĂŤl, whom he admired).

In 1969, Fraser and his family moved to Henley-on-Thames, and settled into a pair of converted cottages that would remain his home until his death. From 1977, he would hold solo shows locally at the Bohun Galleries. Exhibiting increasingly at the Royal Academy, he was elected an Associate in 1975, and a full Royal Academician a decade later, becoming Honorary Curator in 1992. He held a number of official roles: Honorary Secretary (1975-81) and then Chairman (1981-87) of the Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; General Benevolent Institution; a member of the Royal Fine Art Commission (1986-99); and Vice-President of the Royal Overseas League (1986-2009).

A highly civilised man with interests in literature and music, Fraser was particularly knowledgeable about ballet, writing a book on the subject, entitled Dancers (1989), and producing many drawings and paintings of dancers in a naturalistic style,

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34 â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I looked upon Donald Hamilton Fraser as one of the great artists of the 1940s and 50s. I thought this was what a young artist should aspire to. I loved his work in part because he managed to escape his Englishness and was influenced by the School of Paris, and especially Poliakoff and de StaĂŤl.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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LJ -M 8 B - 81 5 -B.& FM E MC I H GC< B NM E 5 M7 KKM M7 5 K; HLN= E > Ken Howard is one of Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best-loved artists, his light-filled landscapes and studio scenes being always greatly anticipated by visitors to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

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Ken Howard was born in London on 26 December 1932, the younger of two children of Frank Howard, a Lancashire-born mechanical fitter, and his Scottish wife, Elizabeth (nĂŠe Meikle), who took in lodgers and worked as a domestic cleaner. He and his family spent his earliest years in a flat in Alder Grove, Cricklewood, moving to a house in Review Road, Neasden, when he was about six years old. While still a child, he determined to become a painter, and received inspiration and support from Robert Whitmore, his art master at Kilburn Grammar School, during the years 1944-49. It was Whitmore who encouraged him to study at Hornsey College of Art, where, between 1949 and 1953, he applied himself and made excellent progress, arguably becoming the star of his year. As a result, he gained the confidence to apply early for the Royal College of Art, and received a place. However, he could take it up only after he had undertaken two years of National Service, in which he served with the Royal Marines at Plymouth, in Devon.

During this time, he regularly attended life classes at Plymouth Arts Centre, and its organisers, recognising his talents, offered him his first solo show. Consisting mainly of portraits of Royal Marines, his exhibition sold well and received some national press coverage. Consequently, he received a number of commissions, including one by the Royal Marine barracks for a portrait of the wife of General Cornwall. More negatively, he arrived at the Royal College of Art, in 1955, with too much of a reputation, so that he was initially singled out for criticism by some members of staff. He also felt that his social realist approach to painting was greatly in contrast to the interest shown by many fellow students in Abstract Expressionism. The situation improved in the second year, when the more supportive Carel Weight took over as Professor of Painting, and he was better able to respond to the teaching, including that of his tutor in drawing, Rodney Burn. In his third year, he succeeded in gaining an Italian government scholarship, which allowed him, on finishing at the RCA in 1958, to study in Florence for up to a year. This would be his third trip abroad, he having twice visited Spain while a student.

During his time in Tuscany, sharing a studio in the village of Viuzzo di Monteripaldi, he met the German student, Christa KĂśhler. She was his first love and, much later, his second wife (by which time she was an established artist known as Christa Gaa).

On his return to London, in 1959, Ken Howard taught almost full-time for a year across four art schools: Ealing,

Berkhamsted, Harrow and Walthamstow. He then kept on his days at Harrow and Walthamstow, particularly enjoying the calibre of students at the latter, which included Ian Drury, Peter Greenaway and Bill Jacklin.

The head of Walthamstow, Stuart Ray, encouraged him to exhibit at the New English Art Club, and he became a member in 1962 (serving as President from 1998 to 2003).

In 1962, Ken Howard also married Annie Popham, a dress design student at Harrow, and they took a flat in the Kingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Road, Chelsea. When she finished her studies at the RCA, they settled in Hampton Hill, Richmond, first buying a small cottage, and later moving to a large house.

During this period, he produced illustrative work for a range of clients, and showed work with exhibiting societies, including the Royal Academy, and dealers, including Wildenstein and the John Whibley Gallery (holding solo shows at the latter in 1966 and 1968). As a result of his winning first prize in the Lord Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Award, in 1966, he was invited to join the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. Beyond London, Plymouth Art Gallery held a retrospective in 1972. Two years later, in 1974, his marriage to Annie was dissolved. She went on to become the director of a large fashion company, and married another designer. He regained contact with Christa.

From 1971, Ken Howard was represented by the New Grafton Gallery, and held eight solo shows there over a period of two decades, as well as others internationally.

In 1973, he was asked by the Imperial War Museum to work in Northern Ireland, the first such commission made by the museum since the Second World War. For about a decade, he would work on and off with the British Army in the province and internationally. Among his many major paintings of the period, Ulster Crucifixion won a prize in 1978 at the John Moores exhibition, Liverpool. He also worked independently on landscapes.

While retaining his London studio, in South Bolton Gardens, he spent more time at his other studios in south-west England: in Sampford Spiney, on Dartmoor, and Mousehole, in Cornwall. In 1981, he was elected to the Royal West of England Academy.

In the early 1980s, Christa Gaa joined Ken Howard in London. When he won first prize in the Hunting Group Award, in 1982, she suggested that they spend the prize money on a painting trip to India. The results included a solo show in Delhi in 1983. In the same year, he was elected to the membership of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours and â&#x20AC;&#x201C; of particular importance to him â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as an Associate of the Royal Academy. He became a full Royal Academician in 1991. While exhibiting regularly at the societies of which he was a member through the 80s and 90s, he also held numerous solo shows, including

several at the St Helier Gallery, Jersey, Lowndes Lodge Gallery, London, and the Brian Sinfield Gallery, Burford.

He was finally able to marry Christa in 1990, though sadly she died in 1992. Almost a decade later, in the year 2000, he married Dora Bertolutti.

Between 2002 and 2017, Ken Howard was represented by Richard Green, and held solo shows at his gallery almost annually. Remaining as active an exhibitor as ever, he has also garnered a number of honours, including election to the Royal Academy Professor of Perspective (2004), appointment as Freeman of the City of London and a Liveryman of the

Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers (2007), election as Senior Royal Academician (2008) and the award of an OBE for his services to Art (2010).

The author of several books, Ken Howard published his autobiography, Light and Dark in 2011.

Ken Howard held an exhibition of Swiss landscapes at the Royal Academy in 2016.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the City of London Corporation and the Imperial War Museums; and Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ken Howard and I go back to days when we showed together at the Young Contemporaries, I always thought that he was marvellous in his use of tone, and have long enjoyed his lovely girls lying on beds. He is a great and humane painter.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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+ G K IL DLI , & B FM MC I H GC< BHDI;LM G GF 6> ?E B NM E 6 One of Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s foremost figurative sculptors, James Butler is well known for both his public commissions, large and small, and his personal compositions. Having gained a thorough grounding in carving early in his career, he then developed equal mastery as a modeller. He has since created many cherished monuments in Britain and abroad that stand securely in a tradition that can be traced from Donatello through Charles Sargeant Jagger to Giacomo ManzĂš.

James Butler was born in New Cross, London, on 25 July 1931, the second of three children of Walter Butler, a stevedore, and his wife, Rosina (nĂŠe Kingman). He enjoyed drawing from an early age, and received encouragement from his parents. In early childhood, he moved with his family to West Malling, in Kent, about six miles west of Maidstone, where his father had built a house.

3.

During the Second World War, his father was conscripted to work on building projects. However, he sadly died of pneumonia when James was 10 years old, leaving his mother to support the family. She turned the house into a roadside cafĂŠ, called The Haven, and eventually remarried. During that time, she would try to persuade James to show his drawings to the customers, but he was reluctant to do so.

While at West Malling, James attended Maidstone Grammar School. He got on particularly well with one teacher, who was both his art master and the careers adviser. When he reached the age of 16, James told him that he wanted to go to art school, and was encouraged to do so.

James Butler went to Maidstone School of Arts and Crafts, with the intention of becoming a painter.

However, the foundation course introduced him to a wide range of artistic techniques and practices, and the opportunity to model clay proved a revelatory experience, soon sparking an obsession with sculpture.

Though Giudiciâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s demonstration did not go well, he became friendly with James and invited him to become an apprentice carver.

Once he had completed his National Diploma at St Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, James Butler left Giudici temporarily in order to undertake two years of National Service. He served in the Army, working on codes with the Royal Signals, mostly in Germany. When on leave, he stayed with his mother, who had settled in West Norwood, South London.

On completing National Service, James Butler worked again with Giudici as a full-time carver. During this period, he was involved in the carving of many architectural sculptures by William McMillan, Charles Wheeler and James Woodford, including the Queenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Beasts at Kew Gardens. At the time that he returned to the employ of Giudici, he followed the advice of colleagues and enrolled in evening classes at the City and Guilds of London Art School. As a former Rome Scholar, his teacher, Bernard Sindall, directed him to the work of the Italian sculptors in the modelling tradition â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Giacomo ManzĂš, Marino Marini and Medardo Rosso â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and they would prove to be most influential in his development.

James Butler was awarded the Beckwith Scholarship, and Sindall arranged for him to stay at the British School in Rome for about a month. While there, he was able to look closely at the work of ManzĂš and Marini, and also at the ancient art that had inspired them, especially that of the Etruscans.

When David McFall took over from Bernard Sindall at the City and Guilds, in 1956, James Butler was offered a job teaching there. At first he refused, and took up a scholarship at the Royal College of Art. However, after being at the RCA for some time, he found that he lacked the freedom that he had had at the City and Guilds.

So, in 1960, he returned and took up the teaching job. In order to focus on this new position, he also left the employ of Giudici.

While at Maidstone, James Butler studied sculpture under Sydney Birnie Stewart, known as Jock. When Stewart moved to St Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School of Art, he encouraged James to join him there, and persuaded his mother to fund his further study. In moving back to London, he stayed with an aunt in Camberwell.

Creating the atmosphere of an atelier, in which he and his students worked together in parity, James Butler particularly enjoyed his early years of teaching. At the same time, he established himself as a sculptor, carving a reclining figure for a position outside the City and Guilds,

At St Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, James Butler studied under Jock Stewart and the Head of Sculpture, Walter Marsden, and had high regard for both of them. During Jamesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last term at St Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Marsden decided that his students had had no practical experience. As a result, he employed the stone carver, Gerald Giudici, to show them how to use a pointing machine to copy a plaster cast into stone.

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in Cleaver Square, and beginning to exhibit at the Royal Academy. His success was marked, in 1964, by his election as an Associate of the Royal Academy, making him the youngest Academician at the time.

For a while, James Butler lived alongside other artists, at the Abbey Art Centre, Barnet, and Digswell Arts Trust, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. Then, in 1966, he moved to Greenfield, Bedfordshire, and, for the next 20 years, lived and worked in the Victorian former village schoolhouse.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, James Butler created stage sculptures for productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratfordupon-Avon, including Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, and at English National Opera in London. He also produced waxworks for Madame Tussauds, including one of The Beatles for its London premises and others of Rembrandt and his family for Amsterdam, in association with the designer, Timothy O’Brien.

1

Elected a full Royal Academician in 1972, James Butler began to receive significant international commissions, including one of Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenyan President. The majestic 12 foot seated figure, placed in the centre of Nairobi, proved a turning point in his career. Most immediately, it led to a commission for the Monument to Freedom Fighters of Zambia to stand outside Freedom House in Lusaka.

In 1975, James Butler gave up teaching at City and Guilds to concentrate full time on sculpture. In the same year, he began a lasting marriage to Angie Berry, who would become a journalist and author. In 1986, they settled at Valley Farm, Radway, Warwickshire, and there brought up their four daughters, and James’s daughter by a previous marriage.

James Butler was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1981. Demand for public commissions has continued both in the United Kingdom and abroad, with notable achievements including the following: King Richard III in the Castle Gardens, Leicester, commissioned by the Richard III Society (1977); the Cippico Fountain, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, commissioned by the Constance Fund and awarded the Otto Beit Medal (1982); Field Marshall Earl Alexander of Tunis, at the Wellington Barracks, London, awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Society of British Sculptors for the ‘Best Work Exhibited to the Public’ (1985); Sir John Moore, with attendant figures of Rifleman and Bugler, at the Sir John Moore Barracks, Winchester (1986); the Memorial to the Green Howards, a seated figure of a contemplative soldier, at Crépon, near the Normandy Landings (1996); and the Memorial to the Fleet Air Arm, the winged figure of Daedalus, which stands in the Embankment Gardens in London (2000).

In contrast to the towering figures for which he is so well known, James Butler has made designs for the Royal Mint: the Royal Seal of the Realm (2001); the 50 pence piece, commemorating Roger Bannister’s 4 minute mile (2004); and the £5 coin to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar (2005).

Honours have included election as a Senior Royal Academician (2006) and the award of an MBE (2009). He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy Schools. His recent monumental figurative sculptures include the Rainbow Division Memorial, a pietà placed, on 12 November 2011, at the site of the Battle of the Croix Rouge Farm in Picardy, France. In June 2015, his statue of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in full garter robes was unveiled at Runnymede, Surrey, in celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. On 14 June 2018, his statue of Sir Jack Hayward, the former owner of Wolverhampton Wanderers, will be unveiled at the team’s Molineux Stadium.

James Butler continues to work on commissions with undiminished enthusiasm and, on a much smaller scale, also spends much of his time producing sculptures of children, dancers and female nudes.

Further reading John Meulkens, James Butler. An extended personal view of a collector, Radway: John Meulkens and James Butler, 2013 (third edition) Chris Beetles Gallery exclusively represents James Butler.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;James Butler is one of the best figurative sculptors working in this country, in the same tradition as Charles Sargeant Jagger. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also a very nice man, who was always friendly to me as a younger artist.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

16

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David Tindle is best known for the technical accomplishment of his work in egg tempera, emphasising the stillness and emptiness of interior spaces. However, he is a versatile artist and has made use of various media of painting and printmaking to depict a wide range of subjects.

David Tindle was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, on 29 April 1932. He grew up largely in Coventry and, while still in his early teens, studied art for six months at the Lanchester College of Technology (1945-46). He then took a job at a local commercial art studio. Two years later, at the age of 16, he began to work with the theatrical scene painter, Edward Delaney, initially for a two-week stint at a theatre in Birmingham.

10

In August 1951, David Tindle moved to London, finding work with a commercial artist in Wardour Street, Soho, and then again with Edward Delaney, at his scenic studio in Princes Place, Holland Park. He engaged with many aspects of the art world, reading books and attending exhibitions, and began to admire the work of John Minton, in particular. When he held his first solo show, close to his home, at the Archer Gallery, Westbourne Grove, in 1952, he telephoned Minton to invite him to see it. Minton visited the show, and bought a self-portrait, so instigating a friendship. Tindle soon came to know a number of other significant painters working in London at the time, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Craxton. Following a second exhibition at the Archer Gallery in 1953, he joined The Piccadilly Gallery, in Cork Street, and showed there for three decades. He also began to contribute work to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. His first retrospective was held at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, in 1957.

If the post-war aspect of London was the focus of his earliest paintings, Tindle expanded his repertoire during the mid 1950s. He worked in Wantage, Oxfordshire, producing murals for John Betjemanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tearoom, King Alfredâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kitchen, and also in the fishing ports of Hastings, in Sussex, and Arbroath, in Scotland. At the end of the decade, he began to teach at Hornsey College of Art and the Byam Shaw School of Art. By this time, he had moved close to abstraction, in spare, low-toned but thickly painted landscape oils, such as those of Brighton.

When he lived in Suffolk in the mid 1960s, he continued this approach, but heightened the palette. In 1962, reflecting the increasing recognition of his talents, he was awarded the Criticâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Prize by the British section of the International Association of Art Critics.

Even before his move to a converted chapel in East Haddon, Northamptonshire, in 1969, David Tindle had begun to alter his method, by moving â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;gradually towards

a crisper articulation of formâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, which he achieved with â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;a more restrained handlingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Ian Massey, 2016, page 8).

About the time that Northampton Museum and Art Gallery mounted a retrospective, in 1972, he refined this further by turning to the medium of egg tempera. The resulting images epitomised stillness, whether they were portraits or a unique combination of landscape, interior and still life.

From 1972, David Tindle began to teach at the Royal College of Art (and was elected an Associate in 1973, a Fellow in 1981 and an Honorary Fellow in 1984). In 1973, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (becoming a full Royal Academician in 1979). While continuing to exhibit at The Piccadilly Gallery and the RA (winning the Johnson Wax Award for the Best Painting in 1983), he also showed internationally, and especially with Galerie XX, Hamburg (in the years 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1985). Commissions in this period included a set of three mural decorations for the Open University, Milton Keynes (1977-78).

During the 1980s, David Tindle lived in Clipston, Leicestershire, and then, from 1986, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. As with the converted chapel at East Haddon, his homes, and especially their windows, were his regular subjects. In 1985, he became Ruskin Master and a Professional Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford; and also began to be represented by Fischer Fine Art, London. Commissions included a portrait of Sir Dirk Bogarde for the National Portrait Gallery (1986), and the stage design for a production of Tchaikovskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s opera, Iolanta, for the Aldeburgh Festival (1988). He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1988 (though resigned in 1991), and an Honorary Member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1989.

Since 1990, David Tindle has lived mainly abroad, first for eight years in Brittany, and then subsequently in Tuscany. Since 1994, he has been represented by the Redfern Gallery. The latest retrospective of his work was held at Huddersfield Art Gallery from November 2016 to February 2017.

David Tindle has been married three times and has nine children.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Government Art Collection, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate; and Herbert Art Gallery & Museum and the Lakeland Arts Trust.

Further reading Ian Massey, David Tindle, Huddersfield Art Gallery, 2016

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;David Tindle is a very distinguished artist.

The interiors that he produced at the height of his career were consummately well crafted.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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8I C M C - - FM 6 MC I H GC< 5 N L G GF ? ?: B NM E In turning from portraiture to the natural world, Senior Royal Academician Olwyn Bowey found an ideal subject for her approach to painting. In particular, she records the interiors of greenhouses both mimetically and dynamically, so conveying their appeal to all the senses.

5

Olwyn Bowey was born in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, on 10 February 1936, to James Bowey, an industrial chemist, and his wife, Olive (nĂŠe Williams).

She was educated at William Newton School, Stocktonon-Tees, and then, from 1955, attended West Hartlepool School of Art. Moving to London, she studied at the Royal College of Art, where she received a First Class Diploma, a continuation scholarship and a David Murray Landscape Scholarship. Her teachers included Carel Weight, who became a friend and Putney neighbour, and with whom she worked and exhibited. She began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1960, and in the same year held a joint show, with Sonia Lawson, at the Zwemmer Gallery.

Through the 1960s, she also showed at the Leicester Galleries and the New Grafton Gallery. She was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1970, and a full Royal Academician in 1975. During the same period, she was a tutor at Waltham Forest School of Art. Bowey initially focussed on portraiture, and numbered L S Lowry, Harold Pinter, Woodrow Wyatt and Carel Weight

among her sitters. Becoming increasingly interested in landscape and still life, she concentrated on these subjects from the mid 1970s, when she took a cottage at Barlavington, south of Petworth, in West Sussex. She subsequently settled in the county at Midhurst, later moving to Petworth. She now always draws and paints on the spot, either outdoors or, most often, in her greenhouse. Working in the tradition of the artist plantsman, she has said that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I still donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think of myself as an artist. I always wanted to be a naturalistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Elected a Senior Royal Academician in 2011, she is also an Honorary Member of both the Royal West of England Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists.

Exhibitions of her work were held in the Friendsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Room of the Royal Academy in 2000 and 2016.

Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Royal Academy.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Olwyn Bowey is a remarkable artist and horticulturalist. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so self-effacing and diffident, yet she paints exquisite works each year, and is both greatly valued by her fellow academicians and has a cult following.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green)

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Ben Levene took a highly independent approach to painting. As a result, he produced many exquisite, intimate still life compositions, interiors and landscapes, and inspired a generation of artists through his teaching.

Known as Ben Levene from his schooldays, Gerald Levene was born in London on 23 December 1938, the son of Mark Levene and his wife, Charlotte (nĂŠe Leapman).

During the Second World War, his father became incapacitated when an ammunition lorry exploded. His mother then became the main breadwinner, managing a tobacco kiosk in Queensway, and later working in the accounts department of Dickens and Jones.

At the age of 11, Ben Levene fell off his bicycle and fractured his ankle; while he was recovering in hospital, his Aunt Ethel brought him paints and a sketchbook, so instigating an interest in art. He was encouraged in this

by Max Flett, his art master at St Clement Danes Grammar School, Hammersmith, and he developed rapidly. Flett also helped him gain a place in Carel Weightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s evening class at Hammersmith School of Art. In 1956, Levene won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied under Claude Rogers and William Coldstream, and began a lifelong friendship with his fellow student, Anthony Green. Even as a student, he exhibited with the Young Contemporaries and the London Group, and at the Beaux Arts Gallery. He won a University of London postgraduateship (1960-61) and the Boise Scholarship (1961), the latter enabling him to spend a year in Spain, which inspired some of his finest early works.

Levene was joined in Spain by his new wife, Jane (nĂŠe Fogarty), and their first daughter, Rachel. A second daughter, Sophie, was born in 1962. Their marriage was dissolved in 1977 and, in the following year, he married the artist, Susan Williams. Their son, Jacob, was born in 1979.

On his return from Spain to London in 1962, Levene initially supported himself by running a jewellery stall in Portobello Road. From 1963 to 1989, he was a visiting lecturer at Camberwell School of Art. Proving to be an inspiring teacher, he also gained a reputation among members of the Euston Road School and protĂŠgĂŠs of David Bomberg. He shared an exhibition with Olwyn Bowey at the New Grafton Gallery in 1969, and between 1973 and 1981 was represented by the Thackeray Gallery.

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Beginning to exhibit at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, regularly and without fail, from 1974, Levene was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1975, and a full Royal Academician in 1986. His engagement with the Royal Academy affected the direction of his work, as when â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Great Japan Exhibitionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of 1981 influenced his use of gold and silver leaf on gessoed grounds. He was a visiting tutor at the Royal Academy Schools, between 1980 and 1995, and then Curator of the RA Schools until 1998. (Between 1990 and 1995, he was also a visiting tutor at the City & Guilds of London Art School.) In 2006, he held a solo show in the Friendsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Room of the Royal Academy.

Having lived at 26 Netherby Road, Forest Hill, London, from the late 1960s, Ben Levene died on 15 September 2010.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, the Government Art Collection and the UCL Art Museum.

Further reading Anthony Green, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ben Leveneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; [obituary], Guardian, 10 November 2010

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;figuration veered to abstraction, a natural control of tone dealt with mood, and colour â&#x20AC;&#x201C; always colour â&#x20AC;&#x201C; became stronger, richer, braver.

Ben took on the visible world, edited it and won.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Anthony Green, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ben Leveneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Guardian, 10 November 2010)

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E B NM E > No visitor to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition can overlook the work of the painter and printmaker, Anthony Green. His large, irregularly shaped oils rehearse the experience of his life, and especially his marriage, with exuberance, humour and passion.

Anthony Green was born in Luton, Bedfordshire, on 30 September 1939, the son of Frederick Sandall Green and his French wife, Marie Madeleine Dupont.

He was educated at Highgate School, where his art teacher, Kyffin Williams, proved to be a positive influence. He then studied at the Slade School of Art,

London, from 1956 to 1960. While there, he exhibited in the Young Contemporaries exhibitions, and met both Ben Levene, who became a lifelong friend and fellow Royal Academician, and Mary Cozens-Walker, who became his fiancĂŠe and muse. A bursary from the French Government enabled him to spend the year 1960-61 in Paris. On his return to London, in 1961, he married Mary, and in the following year established himself with his first solo show, held at his then dealer, the Rowan Gallery.

At the same time, he returned to the Slade as a teacher (1962-63, 1964-66), and became a member of the London Group (1964). His expressionistic early work displayed the influence of ChaĂŻm Soutine and Jean Dubuffet.

50

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On receipt of a Harkness Fellowship in 1967, Green spent two years in the United States, living in Leonia, New Jersey, and Altadena, California. During this time, he began to work from memory, a process that resulted in complex figurative works on a large scale. These soon became a regular feature of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, at which Green first showed in 1966. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1971, and a full Royal Academician in 1977, the year in which he won the Exhibit of the Year Award at the Summer Exhibition.

Then, in 1978, his work became the subject of both a retrospective at the Royal Academy and a touring show that began at Rochdale Art Gallery. Many domestic and international solo exhibitions followed, including a tour of Japan in 1987, and a tour of British cathedrals in 2000.

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A Memory: Our Dear Stan Stanley Joscelyne was the second husband of Anthony Greenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mother, Madeleine. She divorced Greenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s father, Frederick, in 1954, and married Stanley later the same year. He died in 1969.

Elected a member of the New English Art Club in 2002, Green has also become an honorary member of both the RBA and ROI. Other honours include his election as a Fellow of University College (1991) and the award of an honorary doctorate by the University of Buckingham (2011).

A solo show, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Anthony Green RA: The Life and Death of Miss Dupontâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, was mounted in the Tennant Gallery of the Royal Academy between January and June 2017.

He lives in Little Eversden, in Cambridgeshire.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Tate.

Further reading Martin Bailey, A Green Part of the World, London: Thames & Hudson, 1984; Martin Bailey (ed), Anthony Green: Painting Life, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2017 Chris Beetles Gallery exclusively represents Anthony Green.

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+0>D!ACC@D'BA D D%8CD35=8D C99?@/D @@? CA:BA* BNA N KH NF NLJ LNLI NG KNM K N N HJ K L NH L E M = K

8NI M KJ ; FM E @ N HJ K

+3>D!ACC@D'BA D D%8CD C99?@/D B* DBD"C,<A*D M;;MKNL

BNA N KH NF NLJ LNLI NG KNM K N N HJ K II L NH

L NH L E ? E M = K

8NI M KJ ; FM NLJ KD;;M LN A F KK M K : @ E N HJ K

.2

+1>D!ACC@D'BA D D @D A,)7;D<)D B C@9CA BNA N KH NF NLJ LNLI G NDG NG KNM K N N HJ K L 9 M = K

8NI M KJ ; FM EE 3> @ N HJ K

.0

+5>D!ACC@D'BA D D-B8BABD-7@ BNA N KH NF NLJ LNLI G NDG NG KNM K N N HJ K L NH L E M = K

8NI M KJ ; FM EE @ :> 3> N HJ K

+.>D!ACC@D'BA D D-(CC=8CBA=: BNA N KH NF NLJ LNLI G NDG NG KNM K N N HJ K L E ? 9 ? M = K

8NI M KJ ; FM > 3> @ 3> N HJ K

++>D!ACC@D'BA D D B C@9CAD ?:: 0 M ; IK< 6>D BNA N KH NF NLJ LNLI 2 M7 E ; IK9 NG KNM K N N HJ K J AN A N KL DHLNM K L 9 M = K

8NI M KJ ; FM 6 3E @ > N HJ K 4>D BNA N KH NF NLJ LNLI 2E M7 E ; IK9 G NDG NG KNM K N N HJ K J AN A N KL DHLNM K L 9 M = K

8NI M KJ ; FM 6 3E @ > N HJ K

.3

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