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Austin Osman Spare, the son of a policeman, was born London on the 30th December, 1886. He left elementary school at 13 but had some formal tuition at the Lambeth School of Art and the Royal College of Art and before exhibiting at the Royal Academy at the age of sixteen. In July 1914 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Bailie Gallery.

Early in 1918 the government decided that a senior government figure should take over responsibility for propaganda. On 4th March Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Daily Express, was made Minister of Information. Beaverbrook decided to rapidly expand the number of artists in France. Over the next few months the artists sent abroad included Austin Spare. Most of his paintings such as Operating in a Regimental Aid Post and First Field Dressing featured the work of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

From October 1922 to July 1924 Spare edited, jointly with Clifford Bax, the quarterly, Golden Hind for the publishers, Chapman and Hall. It collapsed for lack of support, but during its brief career it reproduced impressive figure drawing and lithographs by Spare and others. In 1925 Spare, Alan Odle, John Austen, and Harry Clarke showed together at the St George's Gallery, and in 1930 at the Godfrey Philips Galleries.

Spare worked from a small flat in Brixton, London. During the Second World War, Spare was seriously injured during a bombing raid. He lost the use of his arms but was able to return to work in 1946. The following year, 163 of the pictures appeared at the Archer Gallery, in Westbourne Grove. Austin Osman Spare died in London on 15th May, 1956.

Austin Spare, Operating in a Regimental Aid Post (1918)

 

 

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(1) The Times (May, 1956)

Austin Spare, an artist of unusual gifts and attainments and of an even more unusual personality, died on May 15th 1956, in hospital in London at the age of 67.

A dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, he had that complete other-worldliness so often depicted in romantic fiction and so rarely found in real life. Money meant nothing to him. With his talents as a figure draughtsman he might easily have commanded a four-figure income in portraiture, but he elected to live quietly and humbly, rarely going out, painting what he wished to paint, and selling his works at three or four guineas each. Even in outward aspect he conformed to type - with his untidy shock of hair, small imperial, and a scarf instead of a collar. But for most of his fife he did not mix in what are called 'artistic circles'. Not Chelsea, Fitzroy Street, Bloomsbury or Hampstead claimed him, but for years a little fiat in the "south suburbs by the Elephant" far removed from the coteries, deep-set in the ordinary life of the people.

He would teach a little from January to June, then up to the end of October, would finish various works, and from the beginning of November to Christmas would hang his products in the living-room, bedroom, and kitchen of his flat in the Borough. There he kept open house; critics and purchasers would go down, ring the bell, he admitted, and inspect the pictures, often in the company of some of the models - working women of the neighbourhood. Spare was convinced that there was a great potential demand for pictures at 2 or 3 guineas each, and condemned the practice of asking L20 for "amateurish stuff'. He worked chiefly in pastel or pencil, drawing rapidly, often taking no mon than two hours over a picture. He was especially interested in delineating the old, and had various models over 70 and one as old as 93.

Spare's alleged 'automatic' and 'psychic' drawings tended to lack discipline, and were on the whole inferior to his 'straight' work. The last chiefly comprised nudes, which combined strength and delicacy of a high order and have a wonderful three-dimensional feeling. His minute draughtmaship may have owed something to the Pre-Raphaelite influence, though general his art was much more human and full blooded than that of the 'brethren'. Of his technical mastery then can be no manner of doubt. The collection of his drawings may yet become a cult.

 

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