Archibald Standish Hartrick

A.S. Hartrick
Born	(1864-08-07)7 August 1864 Bangalore
Died	London
Nationality	British
Education	Slade School of Art Academie Julian Atelier Cormon
Known for	Painting, drawing

Archibald Standish Hartrick RWS OBE (7 August 1864 – 1 February 1950) was a Scottish painter known for the quality of his lithographic work. His works covered urban scenes, landscapes and figure painting and he was a founder member of the Senefelder Club.

Life and work

File:Women railway workers.jpg

Woman's Work:On the Railway - Engine and Carriage Cleaners (c. 1917) (Art.IWM ART 161764)

Hartrick was born in Bangalore, the son of an officer in the British Army. The family moved to Scotland when Hartrick was two years old. His father died shortly afterwards and in due course his mother married Charles Blatherwick, a doctor and keen amateur watercolourist who had been involved in the establishment of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. After attending Fettes College, Hartrick studied medicine at Edinburgh University before studying art at the Slade School of Art in London and then at both the Academie Julian and the Atelier Cormon in Paris. Hartrick spent the summer of 1886 at Pont-Aven with Paul Gauguin. In Paris he had become friends with Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec and exhibited a work at the Paris Salon in 1887.

Hartrick returned to Scotland and for a while settled in Glasgow, where he came to know the Glasgow Boys, before he moved to London. There he began work as a book illustrator and as an illustrator with The Graphic in 1890, then with the Pall Mall Magazine in 1893. He joined the New English Art Club the same year. In 1896 he married the painter Lily Blatherwick, the daughter of Charles Blatherwick from his first marriage. The couple settled in Gloucestershire from where they both pursued their artistic careers; they both had works shown at the Continental Gallery in 1901. Hartrick moved to London, where he taught drawing at the Camberwell School of Art from 1908 to 1914 and later at the Central School of Art, where he taught lithography until 1929. In 1909 Hartrick was among the founding members of the Senefelder Club. In 1910 Hartrick was elected an associate member of the Royal Watercolour Society and became a full member in 1920. Eventually Hartrick had over 200 works shown at the Royal Watercolour Society and he also exhibited at the Venice Biennale on three occasions. A series of his works showing rural characters, entitled Cotswold Types was acquired by the British Museum.

During the First World War, Hartrick contributed works to the British War Memorials collection of artworks. In 1917 Hartrick produced six lithographs on Women's Work for the War Propaganda Bureau's Britain's Efforts and Ideals portfolio of images which were exhibited in Britain and abroad and were also sold as prints to raise money for the war effort. At the start of the Second World War, he was among the first to offer his services to the War Artists' Advisory Committee. In 1940 he was the first artist commissioned to record the work of the Women's Land Army, the same subject he had covered in World War One. Prints of his work were sold in at the National Gallery during the war and featured in the Britain at War exhibition that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 1941.

Bibliography

• 1916: Post-impressionism, with some personal recollections of Vincent Van Gogh & Paul Gauguin
• 1932: Lithography as a Fine Art
• 1939: A Painter's Pilgrimage through Fifty Years

External links

• Paintings by Archibald Standish Hartrick at the Art UK site