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John Aldridge RA (1905-1983)
Christmas Roses
Oil on board, 38 x 35cm (15 x 13.75”)
Signed
Born in Woolwich, London in 1905 John
Aldridge was a self-taught artist who began
exhibiting with the ‘Seven and Five Society’ at
the Leicester Galleries from 1931 to 1933, pre-
senting his first one-man show there in 1933.
The following year he exhibited at the Venice
Biennale art exhibition in Italy. A friend of the
poet Robert Graves, he associated with the
poets and artists whom Graves gathered to-
gether in Deià, Mallorca. He later went on to
gather a commune of artists around his own
home in the Essex village of Great Bardfield,
where he held an annual summer exhibition.
Although self-taught, from 1949 he taught art
at the Slade School for Fine Arts of University
College London, under the realist painter Sir
William Coldstream. In 1980, on Aldridge’s
75th birthday, London’s New Grafton Gallery
held a retrospective on his work.
€800 - 1,000
16
Fred Cuming RA, ARCA, NEAC,
HON. ROI (b.1930)
Thistle & Dandelion
Oil on board, 29.8 x 29.5cm
(11.75 x 11.6”)
Signed
Fred Cuming is a Senior Royal Academi-
cian and, when elected RA in 1974, was
the youngest member to be elected to the
Royal Academy of Arts. The tonal and
pictorial values in his oil studies are true
to nature and are achieved by his distinc-
tive technique of quickly layered colour
resulting in a sensitive and unique ren-
dering of light and mood. His trademark
palette, indicative of the Camden School
Group, is refreshingly limited, making his
paintings definitively ‘Cuming’.
€800 - 1,200