{"title":"Pastel","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"manchester","title":"Manchester","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrancis Dodd R.A. 1874-1949, was an English landscape and portrait painter, draughtsman and etcher. He attended the Glasgow School of Art and travelled throughout Europe, France, Italy and Spain, after which he returned to England and settled in Manchester later moving to Blackheath in South East London where he spent the rest of his life. He was a official War artist and became a full member of the Royal Academy in 1935.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Francis Dodd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57430533996889,"sku":null,"price":1250.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0969\/9957\/1801\/files\/1_cf43d84b-0936-4e1d-bc2a-d4fca27c6470.png?v=1775571744"},{"product_id":"ww11-pilots","title":"WW11 Pilots","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eDenis William Dring R.A. 1904-1990, was an English artist who served in the second World War as an official War Artist recording portraits of serving soldiers. There are 3 portraits in this one lot. Dring trained at the Slade School of Art and taught at the Southampton School of art, and in the 1920's he was commissioned by Edwin Lutyens to paint murals. He travelled extensively throughout the UK painting for the War Artists Committee, painting portraits for the Admiralty. These 3 portraits were drawn between 1944 and 1945 and are Royal Air Force pilots almost certainly Mediterranean serving officers. The 3 portraits are offered here as one lot and it will be noticed they are unsigned as this was standard procedure for artists working under contract for the War Artists Commission. The artists were not allowed to display any identification of the sitter or the location, however it may be noticed that one of the sitters is a Wing Commander, one of the 3 portraits has been exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1957 . I have included a further scholarly biography of the artist for your information. Dennis William Dring (born 26 January 1904, Streatham, London – 29 September 1990, Compton, Hampshire) was a British portrait painter and draughtsman whose work exemplifies the continuity of British academic realism through the mid-20th century. Known professionally as William Dring, he became one of the most respected official war artists of the Second World War and later a leading portraitist of post-war Britain. Early Life and Education Dring was born in Streatham, South London, into a family that would produce several artists, including his younger brother, James Dring. He began his formal artistic education at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1922 to 1925, studying under Henry Tonks, the influential teacher and former surgeon whose rigorous training emphasized draughtsmanship, anatomy, and observational acuity. At the Slade, Dring won multiple scholarships and prizes, distinguishing himself for technical precision and sensitivity of observation. Early Career and Teaching Following his graduation, Dring established himself as a skilled draughtsman and portrait painter. In the late 1920s and 1930s he executed a range of commissions, including murals for architectural projects, and began to exhibit his work publicly. He took up a post as a teacher of drawing and painting at the Southampton School of Art, where he taught until 1942, passing on the Slade’s disciplined methods to a new generation of students. World War II and Official War Artist Dring’s artistic direction was profoundly shaped by the outbreak of the Second World War. Initially undertaking individual portrait commissions for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), his early wartime drawings impressed the Committee, leading to his appointment on a full-time contract in 1942. His first contract focused on the Admiralty, and during this period he traveled extensively throughout Britain recording naval personnel and operations. His primary medium was pastel, which allowed him to work quickly while capturing nuanced expressions and character in often difficult conditions. In 1943 he secured a second full contract that broadened his remit beyond naval subjects, and by 1944–45 he was working under full commission to the Air Ministry, producing portraits of airmen and other service personnel. His war work is notable for its immediacy, psychological insight, and technical prowess. A large body of these works—especially pastel portraits—is held today by major national repositories, including some 60–plus pastels and several oil paintings at the Imperial War Museum, and further works at the National Maritime Museum. Post-War Career and Mature Work Following the war, Dring’s career as a portraitist flourished. He produced portraits of notable public figures—including academics, civic leaders, and members of the British Royal Family—and documented civic ceremonies such as the presentation of the Freedom of the City of London to Princess Elizabeth in 1947. His commissions extended to institutional portraits, including a series for Lincoln’s Inn featuring eminent legal and political figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Lord Hailsham. Dring was a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Academy of Arts. He was elected Associate Member of the RA in 1944 and elevated to full Academician in 1955, reflecting his stature within the British art establishment. His work also encompasses landscapes and domestic subjects, showing a range that extends beyond formal portraiture into more personal and lyrical modes of representation. Artistic Style and Legacy Dring’s artistic style is rooted in the British academic tradition: technically rigorous, figuratively grounded, and committed to a naturalistic representation of the human subject. His draughtsmanship—refined under Henry Tonks—remains a hallmark of his work, and his mastery of pastel and watercolour allowed both psychological depth and formal clarity. While Dring worked during an era increasingly dominated by modernism and abstraction, his sustained dedication to figurative realism positioned him as a principal chronicler of British identity in the mid-20th century. His war portraits, in particular, offer invaluable insight into the lived experience of military service and the social fabric of wartime Britain. Personal Life Dring married Grace Elizabeth Rothwell, a painter whom he met at the Slade; their long partnership underscores the interconnected world of British art education and practice in the interwar period. They lived at Compton near Winchester. Their daughter, Melissa Dring, also became an artist and developed a career in forensic facial reconstruction.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"William Dring","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57430612443481,"sku":null,"price":1820.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0969\/9957\/1801\/files\/1_4099b43c-aa4d-443b-aa08-8fbd80267016.png?v=1776090261"},{"product_id":"paris-1936","title":"Paris 1936","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrederick Gore C.B.E. R.A. 1913-2009, was an English painter born into a family where his father was a successful and famous painter, Spencer Gore 1878-1914. Frederick Gore was studying to be a Philosopher whilst at Oxford but found a real passion for painting and drawing at the Ruskin School of Art. He then moved to London and attended the Slade School of Art and the Westminster School of Art. He travelled to Greece and Paris where he exhibited before the second World War . During the War he was a camouflage officer and helped prepare troops for the D-Day invasion. In his later years he visited the United States and was exhilarated by the light and ambience, he continued to visit and made a significant contribution to realistic figurative painting where many American artists were turning to abstraction. Gore went on to display color and composition showing the different painterly possibilities.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Frederick John Pym Gore","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57431358734681,"sku":null,"price":1500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0969\/9957\/1801\/files\/KA139-Frederic_Gore_1_139_master.jpg?v=1776098467"},{"product_id":"pastel-drawing-of-a-lying-down-nude","title":"Pastel Drawing of a Lying Down Nude","description":"\u003cp\u003eAristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol (8 December 1861 – 27 September 1944) was a seminal French Catalan sculptor, painter, and printmaker whose serene, balanced approach to the human form radically redirected the course of early 20th-century European sculpture. By rejecting the raw emotionalism and textured surfaces of his contemporary Auguste Rodin, Maillol pioneered a modernist return to classical Greek and Roman structural ideals, celebrated for their geometric harmony, smooth modeling, and monumental mass.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMaillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer, a small Catalan port town nestled at the foot of the Pyrenees near the Spanish border. The son of a vineyard owner and cloth merchant, he grew up with little artistic background but possessed an unwavering drive to create.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1881, backed by financial support from his aunt, he moved to Paris to pursue painting. He gained admission to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in 1885, where he studied under academic masters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. Despite this traditional schooling, Maillol found his true inspiration elsewhere. He was deeply moved by the flat, symbolic work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Gauguin, which led him to align with Les Nabis, a post-impressionist group of artists focused on decorative patterning and flat planes of colour.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDuring the 1890s, Maillol shifted his primary focus from canvas to decorative arts. In 1893, he established a textile and tapestry-weaving workshop back in his native Banyuls-sur-Mer. He hired local women to work the looms, including Clotilde Narcis, whom he married in 1896. Clotilde became his first major muse, the mother of his only son, Lucien, and the model for many of his early figures.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHowever, around the age of 40, Maillol began suffering from a severe, degenerative eye disease brought on by the intense strain of weaving. Forced to abandon textile arts entirely, he turned his full attention to a less visually microscopic, more tactile medium: sculpture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMaillol’s transition to sculpture was immediate and monumental. He began working primarily with clay and terracotta before transitioning to bronze and marble. While his peers were imitating Rodin's dramatic, deeply fractured surfaces, Maillol pursued a philosophy of pure form, stability, and absolute simplification.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Female Nude: Maillol restricted almost his entire sculptural oeuvre to the female nude, using it not for eroticism, but as a universal landscape to explore proportion, volume, and calm geometry.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLa Méditerranée (1902–1905): His breakthrough came with this seated female figure. Exhibited at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, its smooth contours and absolute lack of dramatic narrative or excess detail won him widespread critical acclaim and established him as a master.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eInternational Patronage: In 1905, Auguste Rodin introduced Maillol to the influential German diplomat and collector Count Harry Kessler. Kessler became a critical patron, funding Maillol's career and taking him on a transformative trip to Greece in 1908 to study classical antiquity firsthand. Other prominent global collectors, such as Russia's Ivan Morozov, soon commissioned major sets of his work (including Summer and Flora).\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1934, at the age of 73, Maillol met Dina Vierny, a 15-year-old girl who bore a striking resemblance to the robust, classical figures Maillol had been sculpting for decades. Vierny became his ultimate muse, model, and close friend for the final decade of his life. She posed for his final masterpiece, The River (1938–1943), a dynamic yet inherently stable bronze depiction of a tumbling female form.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDuring World War II, Maillol retreated to the relative isolation of Banyuls-sur-Mer to continue working. On 27 September 1944, while returning home from a visit to his close friend, the painter Raoul Dufy, Maillol was involved in a severe car accident. He died from his injuries at the age of 82 in the very town where he was born.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFollowing his death, Dina Vierny dedicated her life to preserving his memory. She established the Musée Maillol in Paris (opened in 1995), as well as a museum at his former farm in Banyuls-sur-Mer. Today, Maillol's monumental bronzes stand as anchors of modern art history, permanently installed in open-air spaces like Paris's Tuileries Garden, and housed within top-tier institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis pastel drawing is signed by way of Monogram which is the method Maillol used throughout his career, there are very few exceptions where he signed his name in full, this monogram was used in his sculpture and stamped by his founders into the wax before the bronze was poured. this drawing is very similar to the two sculptures at the entrance steps to the Getty Museum in California. The exact date of this pastel is currently unknown, however should we be able to give a date to this work we shall amend this brief biography at some point.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Aristide Maillol","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":60249016992089,"sku":null,"price":18000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0969\/9957\/1801\/files\/2_8785a190-b331-43b6-bc0a-377aa0c38d77.png?v=1793206582"}],"url":"https:\/\/vaughanfineart.im\/collections\/pastel.oembed","provider":"Vaughan Fine Art","version":"1.0","type":"link"}