This work is so amazing, fascinating and wonderfully evocative!
John Aldridge was my grandmother’s half-brother and has always been known to me as Uncle John. He was a painter, designer and book illustrator, active from the 1930s until his death in 1983. Although not very well-known, he worked for many years alongside Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, two artists who are more or less established in the national consciousness.
My mother and her siblings knew John when he was an older man, by then a semi-establishment figure, a teacher of young artists at The Slade and a member of the Royal Academy.
The family walls are plastered with his work,some paintings and many drawings, most of them rescued from old folders that were discovered after my grandmother’s death.
John was said to have been a kind and gentle soul. Attractive, erudite and very intelligent, he studied the Classics (or ‘The Greats’ as it was then called) at Oxford. Here…
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penwithlit 