David Carr

David Carr

(British 1915 – 1968)

Worker

Oil on Board

Provenance: Louise Kosman & Sothebys Studio Sale

£2,850

Painter and collector, born in London into wealthy family. Attended Uppingham School and left to join the family biscuit-making business, but left because he hated it and went to read history at Oxford University. On holiday in Italy he determined to become an artist against his father’s wishes, studied briefly at Byam Shaw School in the late 1930s, then for several years at Cedric

Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing where his future wife, Barbara Gilligan was also a student. Bought Starston Hall, Harleston, Norfolk, and began to paint there and in London, where he became a discerning collector and the friend of painters such as the Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde and other Soho-based artists. Although Carr was prominent in the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society and was included by Bryan Robertson in a survey of British painting at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1953 and in a show at Southampton City Art Gallery a few years later, it was not until the Mayor Gallery show of 1987 that his true stature was appreciated in London (he had died just before a show at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York).

Carr completed a remarkable series of oils in a post-Cubist style on the theme of man and the machine and a series of inventive late watercolours described by Robertson as “of special importance in British art of this period”. In 1997, his work was shown alongside that of his friend Prunella Clough at Austin/Desmond Fine Art.

Works by the Artist

Worker

David Carr

Lucy Harwood