Kenneth Rowntree(Click on Picture for a larger image)

Trained originally at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, and subsequently at the Slade School. He spent the war years in Great Bardfield engaged upon the pictorial Recording Britain project. In 1949 he moved to London upon his teaching appointment at the Royal College of Art, and ten years later was appointed Professor of Fine Art at Durham University in  Newcastle.

Dunmow Station at Dusk

Although this work remains figurative there are suggestions of the abstraction that was to come later in the artist's development. The same quality can be seen in Water Butt - Simpkin's, below.

Click on Picture for a larger image

Essex Tractor

One of series of School Prints. The idea behind School Prints Ltd was brilliant and simple. Commission good artists to create original lithographs which would be editioned in very large numbers and sold cheaply to those schools adventurous enough to subscribe to the scheme. Thus, would it be possible for children in school to enjoy a direct and continuous contact with real works of art. In her introductory letter to artists, Brenda Rawnsley, whose idea it was, wrote 'We are producing a series of auto-lithographs, four for each term, for use in schools, as a means of giving school children an understanding of contemporary art'.

Click on Picture for a larger image

Exeter College Barge, Oxford

(Presented by the Art Fund) Rowntree was commissioned by JM Richards of the Architectural Review to paint a record of the decaying Victorian college barges then being replaced by boat houses.

Click on Picture for a larger image

The Artist's Wife

A rare portrait by Rowntree, painted shortly after their marriage in 1939, while they were living at Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, a project in social living shared by a number of artists, writers and politicians.

Click on Picture for a larger image

The Railway Carriage - Blackout

During war-time years, blackout against light showing was a requirement.

Click on Picture for a larger image

Toy Boat at Selsey

Painted while on holiday at Selsey in Sussex this picture contains an unexpected air of menace from the rusty iron bars beyond the wall, which picks up the fact that the cottage wall stood two feet from the crumbling cliff edge. Two years later the wall and the cottage vanished over the cliff.

Click on Picture for a larger image

Water Butt at Simpkins Cottage

In 1941 his friend Eric Ravilious invited Kenneth Rowntree to move his family to live in Great Bardfield.  Later, they moved to Simpkins Cottage at Lindsell, three miles away.  The significance of the water butt is that the cottage was not on mains water supply.

Click on Picture for a larger image