Painter and illustrator, born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, who grew up in Devizes, Wiltshire. He was married to the artist Kate Lynch. After gaining a graphic design diploma at Swindon, 1974–6, he began painting professionally. In 1983 he gained an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation bursary; in 1986 won The Pimm’s Prize Award for watercolour at the RA Summer Exhibition; and in 1993 a Spectator Art Award prize, exhibited in Edinburgh and London. Lynch was well known for his paintings of farm animals, other themes being interiors and latterly visionary landscapes of the West Country. In 1989 he was commissioned by the National Trust Foundation for Art to paint Bonnie, the Longhorn Cow, on permanent exhibition at Wimpole Hall, Cambridge. Pandora, Red Devon Cow at Kingston Lacy, Dorset, was a 1993 National Trust Foundation commission for permanent exhibition at Kingston Lacy.
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The Folio Society commissioned illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, published 1995, followed in 1999 by another National Trust Foundation commission to illustrate Winston Churchill’s animals for Chartwell, Kent. Lynch exhibited at art fairs in London and Bath from the early 1980s; in the 1989 National Trust Foundation Salute to Turner exhibition at Agnew; in The Broad Horizon there and in the Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition, both 1990; Critics’ Choice, New British Art, Christie’s, 1993; and there in the National Trust Foundation Centenary Exhibition, 1995. Among Lynch’s solo shows were Linfield Galleries, Bradford-on-Avon, from 1982; Nevill Gallery, Bath, from 1984; Odette Gilbert Gallery, 1988; Maas Gallery, from 1991; retrospective, National Trust Foundation, Mompesson House, Salisbury, 1998; and Alpha House Gallery, Sherborne, 2000. The Maas Gallery 2006 Lynch exhibition was accompanied by the limited-edition book Skylines. Notable private collections holding his work include Chatsworth and Longleat. Lived in High Ham, Somerset.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
