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15 Anthony Benjamin (1931-2002)Spectators
Oil and Mixed Media on canvas, 71 x 91.5cm (28 x 36”)
Signed, inscribed with title and dated May 28th 1957
€2,000 - €4,000
A colourful character, Anthony Benjamin was born in Hampshire. After serving a prison
term for his objection to the war he began an engineering apprenticeship. However in
1949 he dropped his job to study art at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Fighting as a pro-
fessional boxer to fund his painting, he managed to spend three months studying drawing
in Paris with Fernand Léger.
He graduated in 1954, exhibiting at the Beaux Arts gallery.The following year he moved
to a cottage on the Cornish moors near St Ives, where he came under the influence of
Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon and Terry Frost. Benjamin joined the
Newlyn Society of Artists, where he had his first one-man exhibition in 1958. His time
in Cornwall was punctuated by a scholarship to study printmaking with Stanley Hayter
in Paris.
Fig. 8. Nancy Wynne-Jones and Anthony Benjamin c.1958