'Portrait of a Debutante' by Bernard Fleetwood-Walker RA RWS PPRBSA (1893-1965)

Object Description

Original Oil on canvas by Modern British figurative painter Bernard Fleetwood-Walker RA.
One of the great British figurative painters of the twentieth century, Fleetwood-Walker was a fiercely proud Midlander. He took great pleasure in remaining the only Birmingham based Royal Academician to live and work in his home City after his election. His major works are the visual embodiment of 1930s style. Family groups and formal portraits were given a cool crisp edge, a brittle but brilliant modelling of form that took the work to the brink Art Deco’s semi-abstraction. Sadly those works can run in to six figures so I visit them in museums. This rather contemplative young woman however is a later work, a serious commission for one of the leading surgeons of the day. The shy young teenager is the medic’s daughter, sitting demurely in a beautiful silk gown it must surely be a coming out or at least a coming of age portrait. Picked up for a song in a country saleroom this has been the buy of my year to date. It must be trading two doors down to Philip Mould.
Available at Panter and Hall.

Object History

Exhibited at Panter and Hall ‘A Dealer’s Eye II’ 2021.
E-Catalogue available here: https://ebooks.panterandhall.com/other/a-dealers-eye-2021

Object Literature

A painter and a draughtsman known for figures and portraits, Bernard Fleetwood-Walker RA was born in Birmingham in 1893. His father William Walker was the co-inventor of the Walker-Wilkins battery, and his mother Electra Amelia (née) Varley, the granddaughter of the 19th century watercolourist Cornelius Varley. Beginning his career as a silver and goldsmith, he went on to study painting at the Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts, then in London and Paris.

During World War I, Fleetwood-Walker continued to make work, despite being wounded and gassed whilst serving in France as a sniper in the Artists Rifles.

Postwar, he taught art in Aston and left in 1929 to teach at Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1925, had a major solo show at the Ruskin Gallery, Birmingham, and won a silver medal at the Paris Salon. During the 1950s he taught at the Royal Academy schools, becoming Assistant Keeper under Henry Rushbury and being elected both an Associate of the Royal Academy and then a full member in 1956. Fleetwood-Walker died in 1965.

The majority of Fleetwood Walker’s paintings now reside in private collections, however, many portraits can be seen in public collections including, Royal Academy of Arts, London, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, The Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, Leeds City Art Gallery, Museums Sheffield and The Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry.

Object Details