Sir David Muirhead Bone RA, RE

1876 - 1953

Muirhead Bone was born in Partick, Glasgow, studying at the city's Art School, where he made friends with the artist Francis Dodd, and his sister Gertrude, whom he went on to marry. They moved to London in 1901, and Bone became a member of the New English Art Club. In 1916, on the recommendation of William Rothenstein, he was famously the first person to be appointed an Official War Artist, and he played an important part in the founding of the Imperial War Museum in 1920. Bone's lithographs of shipyards and warships were important propaganda for Britain's war effort. He was an Official War Artist again in World War II. Although he was a painter, Bone's skills as an artist were best expressed on paper, whether in pen, pencil, watercolour, lithography or etching. Bone was one of the great masters of early 20th-century British art, and he had an extraordinary ability to capture complex scenes on medium to small sheets of paper, which suited the task of depicting the battlefield, complex infrastructure and urban destruction, in equal measure. Muirhead and Gertrude made six visits to Spain between 1924 and 1928, immersing themselves in the history of the country and of Spanish Catholic art and architecture, and collaborating on Gertrude's substantial publication, "Old Spain", illustrated with 154 of Muirhead's drawings. While Muihead made many rich monochrome drawings, many of the Spanish works had the addition of colour.