Francis John Minton was an English painter, illustrator, stage designer and teacher.
Minton was born in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, the second of three sons of Francis Minton, a solicitor, and his wife, Kate, née Webb. From 1925 to 1932, he was educated at Northcliff House, Bognor Regis, Sussex, and then from 1932 to 1935 at Reading School. He studied art at St John's Wood School of Art from 1935 to 1938 and was greatly influenced by his fellow student Michael Ayrton, who enthused him with the work of French neo-romantic painters. He spent eight months studying in France, frequently accompanied by Ayrton, and returned from Paris when the Second World War began.
At the start of the war, Minton was a conscientious objector, but changed his views and joined the Pioneer Corps in 1941. He was commissioned in 1943 but was discharged on medical grounds in the same year. While still in the army, Minton, with Ayrton, designed the costumes and scenery for John Gielgud's 1942 production of Macbeth.
From 1943 to 1946 Minton taught illustration at the Camberwell College of Arts, and from 1946 to 1948 he was in charge of drawing and illustration at the Central School of Art and Design. At the same time, he continued to draw and paint, sharing a studio for some years with Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and later with Keith Vaughan. A particularly defining moment for Minton's imagery was a trip to Cornwall, including Marazion and Mounts Bay, where the painter was living in a gypsy caravan belonging to his friend, the poet W.S. Graham.
Between 1945 and 1956 he had seven solo exhibitions at the Lefevre Gallery, notwithstanding his work as a tutor to the painting school of the Royal College of Art in 1949, a post that he held until the year before his death. Minton's appearance in this period is shown in a 1952 portrait by Lucian Freud, as well as in self-portraits. In addition to landscapes, portraits and other paintings, some of them on an unusually large scale, he built up a reputation as an illustrator of books.
Minton's posthumous fame was initially as an illustrator. Many of his commissions for illustrations came from the publisher John Lehmann. For Lehmann, Minton illustrated A Book of Mediterranean Food and French Country Cooking (the first two books by the food writer Elizabeth David), travel books such as Time was Away - A Notebook in Corsica, by Alan Ross, and fiction, including The Commander, Comes to Dine by Mario Soldati. Other publishers for whom he illustrated books included Michael Joseph, Secker and Warburg and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Although Minton was respected both by the conservative Royal Academy and the modernist London Group, he was out of sympathy with the abstract painting that began to prevail during the 1950s, and he felt increasingly out of touch with current fashion. He suffered extreme mood swings and became dependent on alcohol. He took his own life in 1957 at his London home, taking an overdose of sleeping tablets.
The work of John Minton is included in many public collections, such as the Yale Center for British Art and David Bowie owned a number of his works.
