Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator

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He had his son home schooled from their house ‘Fernlea’, in Cookham, but also sent him for private drawing lessons to local artist Dorothy Bailey. Ardizzone's drawings and lithographs frequently dealt with the maritime themes of harbour scenes and shipmen at work in the docks, and his own series of books on the adventures of the young 'Tim' involved their own troubled voyages at sea. In his work, Tucker eschewed avant-garde experimentation and, like many of the inter-war artists – Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Winifred Knights, Harold Williamson, and James Cowie amongst them – he preferred to stay with realism. By 1939 Ardizzone was regularly holding one-man exhibitions at the Bloomsbury Gallery and, later, the Leger Gallery.

His style was naturalistic but subdued, featuring gentle lines and delicate watercolours, with great attention to particular details. He continued to travel around, reaching Rimini at the time of its fall and going on to visit Forli, Cesena, Riccione, Rome, Florence and Ravenna. He travelled on through Italy with the Eighth Army until April 1944, when he flew to Algiers, from where he sailed back to Britain. This situation changed following the first German air attacks in the autumn of 1940, and Ardizzone was transferred to the War Office at the request of the Ministry of Information’s Director-General to record air raid subjects. Trevelyan was a teacher of etching at the Royal College of Art where his students included David Hockney, Norman Ackroyd and Ron Kitaj.Ardizzone’s intimate, gently humorous drawing style made him able to humanise the events of the war through his work. His drawings show the routines of army life: drills, passing time in mess rooms, eating and drinking, as well as the incongruity of the presence of British troops within the local French culture. In 1951 Trevelyan married Mary Fedden (see artists) and the couple travelled widely, in Europe, Africa, India and the USA, before settling in London, Durham Wharf, on the banks of the River Thames, where he set up his etching studio. Born in 1900, at Haiphong, Tonking, Indo-China, to Italian and Scottish parents, Ardizzone came to England when he was five.

Ardizzone's first major commission was to illustrate an edition of In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu in 1929. In 1960 he retired from his teaching posts and began spending more time at Rodmersham Green in Kent before moving there permanently in 1972. Rupert Shephard Rupert Norman Shephard (1909-1992) was one of the last of the group of gifted artist-teachers to emerge from the Slade in the 1920s; his contemporaries included William Coldstream, Rodrigo Moynihan, Claude Rodgers, Victor Pasmore and Carel Weight. Here he was taught by Sir William Rothenstein, before becoming Rothenstein’s personal studio assistant. Tim All Alone (1956) was awarded the first Kate Greenaway medal - England’s most prestigious award for illustration.After schooling in Edinburgh, and contrary to his father’s wishes, Edward did not take up work at the mill; he wanted instead to study art.