Meredith Frampton

Meredith Frampton
Born	(1894-03-17)17 March 1894 St John's Wood, London
Died	Mere, Wiltshire
Nationality	British
Education	St John's Wood School of Art Royal Academy Schools
Known for	Portrait painting

George Vernon Meredith Frampton RA (17 March 1894 – 16 September 1984) was a British painter and etcher, successful as a portraitist in the 1920s. His artistic career was short and his output limited because his eyesight began to fail in the 1950s, but his work is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Gallery and Imperial War Museum.

Life and work

Sir Ernest Gowers, KCB, KBE, Senior Regional Commissioner for London, Lt Col AJ Child, OBE, MC, Director of Operations and Intelligence, and KAL Parker Deputy Chief Administrative Officer in the London Regional Civil Defence Control Room (1943) (Art.IWM ART LD2905)

Frampton was born in the St John's Wood area of London and was the only child of the sculptor George Frampton and his wife, the painter Christabel Cockerell. Frampton was educated at Westminster School and after some months learning to speak French in Geneva he enrolled ar the St John's Wood School of Art. He went on to attend the Royal Academy Schools between 1912 and 1915, where he won both a first prize and a silver medal. During the First World War, Frampton served in the British Army on the Western Front with a field survey unit and also worked on the interpretation of aerial photographs.

After the war Frampton resumed his artistic career and established himself as among the most highly regarded of British painters during the period. Between 1920 and 1945 he exhibited at the Royal Academy nearly every year, showing a total of thirty-two paintings there. In 1925 he was elected a member of the Art Workers Guild. In 1934 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy and in 1942 was elected a full member of the Academy. Frampton's portrait subjects included the Duke of York, who was to become King George VI, academics and scientists and a series of full length portraits of women from fashionable society. Frampton would often spend an entire year working on a single painting. Most of his paintings were commissions but a notable exception was Portrait of A Young Women which Frampton showed at the Royal Academy in 1935 and which was purchased for the Tate. Frampton had several of the objects in the painting, and the model's dress, made specially for the painting. Frampton's technique utilised smooth surfaces of colour without visible brushstrokes that resulted in an effect of almost photographic realism.

During World War Two, Frampton received two commissions from the War Artists' Advisory Committee. One was intended for the Admiralty but a suitable subject was not found and the painting was not realized. Frampton's other WAAC commission was for a portrait of Sir Ernest Gowers which became a triple portrait of Gowers and his colleagues in their underground control room in Kensington.

In 1953 Frampton requested that the Royal Academy place him on the their list of retired members. A slight deterioration in his eyesight had convinced Frampton that he could no longer paint to his previous high standard and meticulous detail. With his wife he moved to a hilltop house in Monkton Deverill in Wiltshire. Frampton had designed the property in the 1930s and for the rest of his life he worked on designing and maintaining this house, which included his own furniture and clock designs. For many years Frampton's art was rarely shown in public and he was largely forgotten but he did live to see his retrospective, which was also his first one-man show, at the Tate in 1982, which greatly restored his standing.

External links

• Paintings by Meredith Frampton at the Art UK site
• May 2011 Entry on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Blogspot Page
• March 2010 Entry on Art Inconnu
• National Portrait Gallery Collection