Patrick George 1923-2016

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Biography
View works. Patrick George, Large Sycamore, 2000, circa
Large Sycamore, 2000, circa
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Born in Wilmslow, George moved to a small dairy farm in Gloucestershire at the age of 10. Under the tutelage of Maurice Feild George painted from a very young age, first publicly exhibiting his works at only 14. At his next school, Bryanston, George founded the oil painting club with fellow pupil, Lucian Freud. He was at Edinburgh School of Art for only a year before volunteering for the Royal Naval Reserve in 1942. George served with distinction and bravery for four years, first on a destroyer patrolling the Channel, then in landing craft at the D-day landings, and finally on a gun ship in the re-conquest of Burma. He continued to draw whenever he could, mostly on deck in sun or heavy seas. Demobbed, he made use of an ex-serviceman’s grant to renew his painting studies, this time at Camberwell School of Art in 1946, where William Coldstream was teaching.

 

In 1949, he joined the staff of the Slade School of Art, where Coldstream had just been appointed professor. In 1958 he applied for a job in Nigeria, teaching at the College of Art, Science and Technology in Zaria. Although it resulted in some memorable landscape paintings and portraits, this was not a happy interlude, and George came back to the UK at the end of 1959. In 1961 he returned to teach at the Slade and remained there until his retirement in 1988, by which time he was Slade professor and director of the school.

 

He is most frequently associated with the Euston Road school of realist painting founded by Coldstream, but he was also a member of the more international School of London, exhibiting with Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow. Exhibited in group exhibitions such as Eight Figurative Painters, Mellon Center for British Art in Yale and elsewhere in America in 1981. A number of solo shows held at Browse & Darby from 1984. Arts Council Retrospective at Serpentine Gallery was held in 1980. Arts Council, Government Art Colleciton, Tate Gallery and other public collections hold examples of his work (see BBC Your Paintings).