(b Epsom, Surrey, 13 Dec. 1903; d Fawley Bottom, Buckinghamshire, nr. Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, 28 June 1992). English painter, printmaker, draughtsman, designer, and writer. He reluctantly became an articled clerk in his father's legal firm, but took up the study of art after his father's death in 1926, first at the Richmond School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art. From 1928 to 1933 he wrote as an art critic for the Listener and the Nation and was among the first to recognize such contemporaries as William Coldstream, Ivon Hitchens, Victor Pasmore, and Ceri Richards. By the mid-1930s he was one of the leading British abstract artists, but by the end of the decade he had become disillusioned with non-representational art and reverted to naturalism.
Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)
