Anthony Rossiter RWA MSIAD
1926 – 2000
“I paint and write because I want, without concessions,
to share the delight and awe I see and experience everywhere.”
– Anthony Rossiter
to share the delight and awe I see and experience everywhere.”
– Anthony Rossiter
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Synopsis
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Full Biography
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Scans & Cuttings
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Anthony Rossiter RWA MSIAD was a British landscape painter who was educated at Eton and studied painting at Chelsea Art School from 1947-51. He was a Romantic visionary, a “poet” whose particular heaven was the Mendip Hills in Somerset. Gnarled hedgerows, tumbling stone walls, broken gates, reflections in water and ploughed fields were all his subject matter. His works also included portraits, most notably that of W.H.Auden.
His painting initially had the lyrical qualities of John Nash and the Realist painters of the 1950’s and 1960’s. As he matured, it became a vigorous expressionist style. His work can be seen in various public collections in the UK and USA, including, amongst others, The Victoria and Albert Museum London, The Ashmolean Oxford, The Government Art Collection, London Transport, The General Post Office, The Robert Frost Collection, and is also held by many private collectors. |
“….a potentially important artist…a very fine painter”.
– Anthony Everett, Financial Times, April 1970 |
Anthony Rossiter was a writer and landscape painter of rare talent, and profound conviction.
His work had a loyal following among many private and national public collections, both in the UK and the USA, including:
His work had a loyal following among many private and national public collections, both in the UK and the USA, including:
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And many other private collections in the UK, Europe, South Africa and USA.
Rossiter was a romantic visionary, a “poet” whose particular heaven was the Mendip Hills in Somerset. In capturing its essence, he made this Somerset landscape his very own. He found the universal and spiritual in every detail; nature was full of signs and symbols which needed to be de-coded by him, from newly cut hedgerows to tumbling stone walls and ploughed fields, very much in the quintessentially English mystical tradition of Samuel Palmer.
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Rossiter and his older twin were born on 29th March 1926 in Chelsea, London. Their father, Leonard, was a lawyer and senior partner at Clifford Turner in London (now Clifford Chance) as well as being a writer of several novels. Their mother, Eliza, was the daughter of Sir Bernard Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the De Beers and Anglo American empire in South Africa.
Rossiter was educated at Eton between 1939 and 1944 and his prodigious artistic talent was encouraged by his house master Oliver Van Oss and by his tutors Wilfred Blunt and Geoffrey Agnew.
School holidays were spent in the family home in Aldworth, Berkshire, where Rossiter was taken under the wing of the writer Rosamand Lehmann (who was then living with Cecil Day Lewis) and became close to her circle of friends including Laurie Lee, and her children Hugo and Sally.
In May 1944 Rossiter joined the Welsh Guards, but in 1946, whilst stationed in Greece, he became critically ill with double pneumonia followed by femoral thrombosis and septicaemia, which led on to him suffering a nervous breakdown:
“The Pendulum swung sharply one sunny morning of all places in the cookhouse…pots, pans, urns, shinning ladles, suddenly became something quite different, divorced from their utilitarian purposes. I sensed a transcendental state of glory in that Greek-cum British cookhouse on that divinely sunny morning with shapes as perfect as Chardin…objects immediately took on human character; the urn seemed to stand guard among more inferior people. A row of white jugs appeared delightfully pompous, spoons, the large ones, inviting and solicitous. A large brown jug looked the proudest person I have ever seen. The objects glowed from within, stood firm and really were my friends. I loved them all.”
– The Pendulum 1966, pages 26-27.
From the age of 21 onwards, Rossiter lived with manic-depression (bi-polar disease). The inspiring ecstatic highs to the lows of numbing despair were exploited creatively and became an integral part of his work.
Although he had won a place at New College, Oxford to read English under David Cecil, Rossiter knew his real vocation was to become an artist, and opted instead for Chelsea Art School (1947-1951). His tutors included Henry Moore, and Robert Medley. He and fellow students, which included Elizabeth Frink, drew Quentin Crisp in life classes.
Rossiter was educated at Eton between 1939 and 1944 and his prodigious artistic talent was encouraged by his house master Oliver Van Oss and by his tutors Wilfred Blunt and Geoffrey Agnew.
School holidays were spent in the family home in Aldworth, Berkshire, where Rossiter was taken under the wing of the writer Rosamand Lehmann (who was then living with Cecil Day Lewis) and became close to her circle of friends including Laurie Lee, and her children Hugo and Sally.
In May 1944 Rossiter joined the Welsh Guards, but in 1946, whilst stationed in Greece, he became critically ill with double pneumonia followed by femoral thrombosis and septicaemia, which led on to him suffering a nervous breakdown:
“The Pendulum swung sharply one sunny morning of all places in the cookhouse…pots, pans, urns, shinning ladles, suddenly became something quite different, divorced from their utilitarian purposes. I sensed a transcendental state of glory in that Greek-cum British cookhouse on that divinely sunny morning with shapes as perfect as Chardin…objects immediately took on human character; the urn seemed to stand guard among more inferior people. A row of white jugs appeared delightfully pompous, spoons, the large ones, inviting and solicitous. A large brown jug looked the proudest person I have ever seen. The objects glowed from within, stood firm and really were my friends. I loved them all.”
– The Pendulum 1966, pages 26-27.
From the age of 21 onwards, Rossiter lived with manic-depression (bi-polar disease). The inspiring ecstatic highs to the lows of numbing despair were exploited creatively and became an integral part of his work.
Although he had won a place at New College, Oxford to read English under David Cecil, Rossiter knew his real vocation was to become an artist, and opted instead for Chelsea Art School (1947-1951). His tutors included Henry Moore, and Robert Medley. He and fellow students, which included Elizabeth Frink, drew Quentin Crisp in life classes.
Profoundly influenced by Soutine and Van Gough, he developed a distinctive style, which at first had the soft and lyrical qualities of John Nash, and the Realist painters of the 1950s and 60s. As he matured, his painting became more fierce, or as he called it “pure Rossiter”. It was a vigorous expressionist style much influenced by the artist and teacher David Bomberg who did so much to shape the London School of artists.
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Throughout the period 1950-1955 Rossiter was regularly in hospital, and this period of his life gave him limitless time for meditation and the idea of drawing in microscopic detail what was close to hand: slippers on the floor, bedside flowers, distorted shapes of plastered limbs and figures.
During this period Rossiter took up his first teaching post at St Andrew’s School, Pangbourne (1952-1954). Years later he recalled that even the teachers listened to matron as she told everyone to eat up the fat from their plates. Schools, hospitals, and the army were all institutions in which eccentrics could thrive and they suited Rossiter, who liked idiosyncrasy in an ordered and disciplined context.
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Rossiter’s first home was a cottage at Noakes Hill, Berkshire and it was here that he focused on landscape painting because, for him, nature contained lyrical inspiration as well as forms and moods which reflected his own emotions:
“There is no compromise to hedgerows, fierce summer corn, dark gesticulating winter elms... ...for the first time I realized the full force and resilience of nature, and in its countless faces I saw the reflection of God.”
“There is no compromise to hedgerows, fierce summer corn, dark gesticulating winter elms... ...for the first time I realized the full force and resilience of nature, and in its countless faces I saw the reflection of God.”
In 1954 Gilbert Spencer wrote an endorsing forward to Rossiter’s first one-man show in Oxford. The exhibition was opened by Rosamond Lehmann and included pottery by his friend, David Drumlanrig (The Marquis of Queensbury), who went on to become Professor of ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London.
In 1955 Rossiter took up a teaching post at Millfield School in Somerset. He lived in rooms above the Rose and Portcullis pub in Butleigh. He became friends with the screen-writer, Robert Bolt, who was teaching English at the school. At weekends Rossiter often returned to London, to meet up with Anneka, a beautiful Dutch nurse whom he had met in inauspicious circumstances whilst he was a patient at St Thomas’s London. …“There’s an unshaven and very disgruntled man in room 16. We must give him a bath”, Anneka told the ward sister. Later, as he sang in the bath, she knocked on the door and told him to be quiet because he was disturbing the other patients. As he wrote in the Golden Chain, he was always attracted by the “magic of a nurse”.
In 1955 Rossiter took up a teaching post at Millfield School in Somerset. He lived in rooms above the Rose and Portcullis pub in Butleigh. He became friends with the screen-writer, Robert Bolt, who was teaching English at the school. At weekends Rossiter often returned to London, to meet up with Anneka, a beautiful Dutch nurse whom he had met in inauspicious circumstances whilst he was a patient at St Thomas’s London. …“There’s an unshaven and very disgruntled man in room 16. We must give him a bath”, Anneka told the ward sister. Later, as he sang in the bath, she knocked on the door and told him to be quiet because he was disturbing the other patients. As he wrote in the Golden Chain, he was always attracted by the “magic of a nurse”.
Over the next 15 years Rossiter’s nurse paintings became a theme, often using deep encrusted oil to create a palpable sense of flesh set off against sensuous, starched uniforms. He married Anneka in 1957, and Robert Bolt gave the bride away. Rossiter, in a typical spirit of largesse, told his new bride that she could use his various accounts at Harrods and The General Trading Company. Anneka spent her savings paying off his outstanding accounts!
Rossiter’s first solo exhibition in London was held at Galerie De Seine on Belgrave Square, in June 1959. Wilfred Blunt opened the exhibition and wrote a positive review about Rossiter’s works. |
Rossiter rarely accepted commissions. This wasn’t out of principle but more in recognition of the fact that he couldn’t paint to order. London Transport and the General Post Office however, successfully commissioned him as the subjects at Kew Gardens and the Lake District coincided with subjects that inspired him.
Momentous events as well as the turns of the seasons could trigger the pendulum swing of Rossiter’s mind. The birth of his daughter, Annalisa, in 1959, aroused thoughts of a holy trinity, which soon escalated into one of his most severe attacks of manic-depression. |
“A pendulum mind works too fast. It responds not only in ecstasy which in itself is a power and flight of such swiftness and upsurge that it cannot even be considered in relation to the accepted meaning of movement; it is part of the momentum force of life, more powerful than a sudden swirl of wind, more flighty than a thousand skylarks soaring in the sky; it has not the spectral force of a gale and yet knows its intensity and is no more able to stem its flow than the sun can frost its rays.”
In 1960 Rossiter and his family moved to Dalesford House in the Somerset village of Litton. For over 40 years, he adopted the Mendips as his artistic and spiritual home. Storm laden skies, hedgerows assuming the form of pre-historic creatures, broken gates, disintegrating stone walls and frozen puddles provided powerful metaphors for his sacramental vision of nature. Working from his studio, these were subjects he returned to in all seasons.
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Electric pylons and sentinel like telegraph poles all had a place as utilitarian sculpture in his landscapes. He was also aware of their symbolic meaning, particularly the gate which appeared in the majority of his pictures. There are two sides to a gate, one in your own part of the world and then there is the other, beyond it. To him the five bar gate was a patriotic sign, resembling the pattern of the Union Jack and the broken gate recalled the agony of the crucifixion. Roads winding through the landscape were an optimistic vision of the way through into the light; in the passing seasons he found inspiration, he witnessed life and death and he heralded the rise and fall of civilisations. Like the great Romantics, he found inspiration in nature because in it he found strong echoes of the human condition:
“Inspiration is an unpopular word these days. I think in its denial is a reflection of modern man’s inability to recognize anything more important than himself. I now understand some part of it, as being the magic link, which marries cause and effect, subconscious and conscious though, so that there are not two separate entities but one binding whole.”
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For the following 25 years Rossiter lectured at Bristol Art School in Queens Road Bristol (now a part of the University of West of England). His gift as a teacher was to draw out what was so special in every student. He was able to share his vision and many students subsequently adopted his style and subjects.
After meeting Dom Father Aelred Watkin, the Headmaster of Downside School near Bath, in 1960, he became increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church. He adored the poetry of Gregorian ritual and in his own search for truth, was attracted by the combination of moral values and mysticism that the Benedictines taught. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1962, the beginning of a life long attachment to Downside Abbey and to its monastic community. This led to his being asked to paint the portrait of Dom Father Aelred Watkin upon his retirement as Headmaster of the school. The painting hangs, with the other portraits of former headmasters, in the school dining room.
In 1962 Rossiter made his first trip to the USA after winning an Arts Council Bursary. He had been invited to stay with the poet Robert Frost in New Hampshire and they became friends. On his return from the USA, Rossiter began work on The Pendulum, which was published by Gollanz in 1966. His prose possesses an intuitive sense of rhythm and he had the rare talent to articulate feeling both in paint and words. From the ecstasy of the creative high to the agonising despair of depression, The Pendulum was the creative artist’s riposte to the cult success of Doors of Perception. Where Huxley induced heightened perception by carefully controlled experiments with mescaline, Rossiter’s swings came naturally and without warning. The book was comprehensively linked to a Retrospective exhibition by Reading Art Gallery in 1967. The exhibition then moved to the Bath Festival in summer, 1969. The Lincolnshire association in 1969 organised a tour of selected work.
After meeting Dom Father Aelred Watkin, the Headmaster of Downside School near Bath, in 1960, he became increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church. He adored the poetry of Gregorian ritual and in his own search for truth, was attracted by the combination of moral values and mysticism that the Benedictines taught. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1962, the beginning of a life long attachment to Downside Abbey and to its monastic community. This led to his being asked to paint the portrait of Dom Father Aelred Watkin upon his retirement as Headmaster of the school. The painting hangs, with the other portraits of former headmasters, in the school dining room.
In 1962 Rossiter made his first trip to the USA after winning an Arts Council Bursary. He had been invited to stay with the poet Robert Frost in New Hampshire and they became friends. On his return from the USA, Rossiter began work on The Pendulum, which was published by Gollanz in 1966. His prose possesses an intuitive sense of rhythm and he had the rare talent to articulate feeling both in paint and words. From the ecstasy of the creative high to the agonising despair of depression, The Pendulum was the creative artist’s riposte to the cult success of Doors of Perception. Where Huxley induced heightened perception by carefully controlled experiments with mescaline, Rossiter’s swings came naturally and without warning. The book was comprehensively linked to a Retrospective exhibition by Reading Art Gallery in 1967. The exhibition then moved to the Bath Festival in summer, 1969. The Lincolnshire association in 1969 organised a tour of selected work.
Rossiter’s second autobiographical book, The Golden Chain, was published in 1970. Like The Pendulum, it met with considerable critical acclaim and numerous awards. The poet W.H.Auden wrote:
“I am enormously impressed. I don’t know of anyone, except possibly Virginia Woolf, who has such a sense of the poetry in objects, of the visible as a world of sacramental signs.” After Auden reviewed The Golden Chain, he and Rossiter became good friends. They met several times during the poet’s last 5 years, with Stephen Spender and James Stern. At the poets’ request, Auden's visit to Dalesford House gave Rossiter the opportunity to paint a series of rare portraits. Endless reworking of thick layers of oil in flesh tones, ochre, green and blue went into capturing the encrusted and weathered creases of Auden’s iconic features. |
Shortly afterwards, Rossiter’s life and work was made into a documentary for BBC 2 Arts programme Review, produced and directed by the Bafta and Emmy award winning film maker, Leslie Megahey.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s Rossiter held various successful exhibitions at Cork Street, in London’s West End, and in many leading provincial galleries in Reading, Clifton, Bruton and in the Cotswolds and the Lake District. In 1988 he was one of the selected Artists for “Artists in National Parks” an exhibition which was an important collection of contemporary British Art jointly sponsored by the Department of the Environment and Conoco, in association with the Countryside commission, the Council for National Parks and the Victoria and Albert Museum London.
Rossiter set up his own art school, Dalesford Studio, in 1983, after taking early retirement. He not only possessed prodigious artistic skills but had an infectious creative vision, which inspired many collectors and pupils. He continued drawing and painting until near the end of his life. His last sketch was of his three year old grand daughter, Pandora, her face half hidden by a comfort blanket caught in that twilight moment of waking from a morning sleep. It was that eye for the unique and poignant detail that was Rossiter’s very special form of genius.
In tune with the rhythms of nature in death, as in life, the first yellow leaves of Autumn had begun to appear when Rossiter died on Saturday 26th August 2000. It was a merciful release but for those of us lucky enough to have been touched by his love and inspiration, a light went out.
Nick Rossiter, 4th September 2000 (edited by Annalisa Rossiter, 4th May 2016)
In the 1970’s and 1980’s Rossiter held various successful exhibitions at Cork Street, in London’s West End, and in many leading provincial galleries in Reading, Clifton, Bruton and in the Cotswolds and the Lake District. In 1988 he was one of the selected Artists for “Artists in National Parks” an exhibition which was an important collection of contemporary British Art jointly sponsored by the Department of the Environment and Conoco, in association with the Countryside commission, the Council for National Parks and the Victoria and Albert Museum London.
Rossiter set up his own art school, Dalesford Studio, in 1983, after taking early retirement. He not only possessed prodigious artistic skills but had an infectious creative vision, which inspired many collectors and pupils. He continued drawing and painting until near the end of his life. His last sketch was of his three year old grand daughter, Pandora, her face half hidden by a comfort blanket caught in that twilight moment of waking from a morning sleep. It was that eye for the unique and poignant detail that was Rossiter’s very special form of genius.
In tune with the rhythms of nature in death, as in life, the first yellow leaves of Autumn had begun to appear when Rossiter died on Saturday 26th August 2000. It was a merciful release but for those of us lucky enough to have been touched by his love and inspiration, a light went out.
Nick Rossiter, 4th September 2000 (edited by Annalisa Rossiter, 4th May 2016)