Having visited Leonard Rosoman’s studio yesterday and since the weather has been so foul today, I have been trying to find out more about him. I feel I should have met him as he was a long-standing RA, but he was already in his nineties when I arrived and I don’t remember him coming in to meetings. At the NPG, I was very familiar with his delightful and angular portrait of John Summerson, which used to hang on the ground floor, and his group portrait of all the RAs in the early days of Casson’s Presidency. But I hadn’t realised that he had been a student of the Royal Academy Schools in the 1930s, nor the quality of his war work for the Auxiliary Fire Service, nor the fact that he had been such a long-standing teacher at the RCA with Peter Blake and David Hockney amongst his pupils.
Hi Charles I recall him, he was my external examiner at Edinburgh college of art. He also taught my mother mural painting at the same institution in the 1940s. She worshipped him because he was an inspirational teacher and incredibly energetic. A wonderful and versatile artist.
Dear Fiona, Very nice to hear from you and about Leonard Rosoman. Charles