Fyffe William George Christie (2 February 1918, Bushey, Hertfordshire, England – 6 March 1979) was a British figurative artist and mural painter. He served in the British Army during World War II as a bagpiper and stretcher bearer. He began painting during the war and attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1946 to 1951. After graduating, he began painting murals, including Christ Feeding the People (1950-1951) and various others in Glasgow, including one in the Glasgow University Union. Christie then moved to London, where he taught at various schools and continued painting.

Fyffe Christie was born in the English town of Bushey, Hertfordshire, in 1918. His father was a Scot, George Fyffe Christie, a freelance commercial artist who illustrated children's books and cartoon postcards featuring children and animals. As a commercial artist father George may have been attracted to Bushey by its closeness to London and the town's reputation as an artistic colony as previously established by the artist Hubert Herkomer. It was there that George met and married an English girl, Fyffe's mother Ethel.

Around 1930 Ethel died and at the age of twelve Fyffe moved back to Glasgow with his father and younger brother Andrew to live together with his uncle David and aunt Tiz in Glasgow's Pollokshields district. Fyffe Christie had severe dyslexia and was unable to read until diagnosed at the age of twelve, after which he became a keen scholar and avid reader, including Latin and Greek. He was also fully ambidextrous and struggled as the teachers of that time insisted he write only with his right hand. Two years later tragedy struck again as brother Andrew died. Fyffe showed an early interest in drawing and painting, and developed a lifelong love of music, particularly classical music and opera, while he himself learned to play the bagpipes. Father George Christie had some commercial success with his creation of the cartoon strip Scottikin O' the Bulletin in the popular Glasgow newspaper the Bulletin but he struggled financially through the years of the recession however and so he discouraged Fyffe's artistic ambition. Due to economic hardship Christie had to leave school early, despite his academic abilities and George Christie insisted his son begin a career in the more secure legal profession. After two years working in a lawyers office Fyffe left and began an apprenticeship arranged for him as a lithographic draughtsman but he remained unhappy and frustrated with his life.

At the outset of The Second World War Fyffe Christie joined the British Army as a bagpiper (pipers at that time also served a dual role as stretcher bearers while in the field), attending a course at the Army School of Piping in Edinburgh Castle. He was then posted to the 9th battalion the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles). The battalion was in continuous action after landing at Arromanches following the D-Day landings, 6 June 1944 and suffered heavy casualties as they fought for eleven months from Normandy into Northern Germany. In his article 'Fyffe Christie: Scottish Soldier and Artist' in the regimental magazine 'The Covenanter' friend Dr. Ted Allan CBE described how the battalion received its baptism of fire on its first attack to take the village of Haut Du Bosq when its casualties totalled 120 killed and wounded, followed by bitter fighting in the orchards around Eterville while resisting a German counterattack. Christie witnessed the most horrific scenes as the battalion marched down a road in the Falaise Gap following the virtual annihilation of the retreating German Army.

During rest periods Christie began to sketch and paint the scenes and landscapes around him in ink and watercolours as a refuge and way of coping with what he witnessed in combat, Allan states that Christie maintained that this was "not just art but a defence mechanism". These sketches and watercolours are now held in the Cameronian's Regimental Museum, the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Imperial War Museum, London; while the majority are with the Second World War Experience Centre in Leeds. Many of the young soldiers he served with were illiterate and, having overcome his own childhood dyslexia, Christie often helped his comrades by reading their letters from home and writing their replies for them. Ted Allan described how pipers were popular figures during the liberation of towns as the battalion fought its way towards Germany, the men of the regiment forming a particular and lasting bond with the people of Tilburg in the Netherlands in this way. Shortly afterwards the men of 9th battalion were involved in the battle for Moylands Woods, a particularly brutal fight and prelude to the advance into Germany itself. The battalion had frequently been opposed by elite German parachute units (often of the 7th Division) but as the fighting progressed the men found themselves increasingly facing fanatical Hitler Youth and the old men of the Volksturm. In the advance into Germany there was also the discovery of Concentration Camps, yet Allan also refers to an incident in which humanity took precedence and a surrender was arranged in the middle of a battle on the basis that the Cameronian stretcher bearers entered an uncleared minefield in order to extricate the German wounded".

In the same Covenanter article Fyffe's wife Eleanor Christie explained that his father George's opposition to an artistic career lessened as he was greatly impressed by the quality of the sketches and watercolours Fyffe was sending home from the front while at the same time Fyffe was also greatly encouraged by his comrades who admired his paintings. Fyffe later told her that it was in the last days of the war, as he stood in a bombed out German railway station gazing out at the landscape that he made the final decision to become an artist". The Imperial War Museum now owns one of Christie's watercolours of Lübeck Station and it might possibly be that Christie reached his decision while painting this watercolour. As Eleanor Christie explains in the article "His lifelong interest in landscape painting was more than just a joy and relaxation from the more serious business of mural painting and teaching; it answered a deep-felt need to re-affirm his belief in the solid reality of the world and its ability to regenerate itself and beauty". The battalion were clearing pockets of SS troops from the Sachsenwald Forest when VE Day arrived. In his youth he had become interested in religion and evangelical movements, after the war he remained religious but was never affiliated to any specific church. Eleanor Christie recalled that some years after the war Christie began painting a huge war mural some 12 foot long at their home depicting the field of battle with dead and dying soldiers painted in grim grey and brown colours. Possibly this may have been the road which the battalion marched through in the Falaise Gap episode, a road which had been literally bulldozed clear of the smashed remnants of the retreating German army to allow the Allied troops to advance. Eleanor Christie states that Fyffe spoke little of the war and this was his only attempt at a direct catharsis. He destroyed the painting shortly after completion.

Christie attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1946 to 1951. He loved the art of the early Italian Renaissance, especially Giotto and Piero della Francesca, and after two years of general studies began to specialise in studying stained glass and mural painting under Walter Pritchard. Christie exhibited a mural stained glass window at the Edinburgh Festival titled The Last Supper in 1951. Biographer Ted Allan was, like Christie, a veteran who enrolled at the school immediately after the war, and in his article in The Covenanter he describes the difficulties of these older men and women returning to study after years of war and the hardship of living on a tight government grant; he describes Christie living on a diet of kippers and getting into trouble with his landlady through his attempts to brew beer in his bedsit and even grow tobacco in his window box. Teacher Walter Pritchard was a respected figure in mural art, and Christie worked with him in the painting of a large mural behind the altar of St. Francis-in-the-East church in Bridgeton, Glasgow. Christie also worked with Pritchard and an unknown artist whose surname was Roy painting a series of murals in the Curler's Tavern in Byres Road in the West End of Glasgow. Christie's contribution was a mural on the English folk song "Widecombe Fair", while Pritchard took the Robert Burns poem Tam O' Shanter for his subject, and Roy created caricatures of historic figures using the bar's regulars, including the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (Pritchard's lodger at the time), as models. Christie had a lifelong love of music, and this would be a recurring theme in his work. In the 1970s these murals were threatened as new owners intended to remove them, but this was successfully opposed by the Glasgow People's Palace Museum curators Elspeth King and Michael Donnelly. Some years later during another refurbishment, and with Elspeth King no longer at the People's Palace Museum, the murals were thrown out. Only Roy's murals survived, being salvaged from a rubbish skip by one of the barmaids, and these now hang on the walls of the Òran Mór Bar, formerly a church and now a bar and arts venue in Glasgow's Byres Road".^{[better source needed]}

In the post-diploma year of 1950-1951 Christie painted the mural of Christ Feeding the People for the Iona Community. The work was commissioned by the dynamic founder and leader of the community the Reverend George MacLeod who had been responsible for the reconstruction of Iona Abbey on the Island of Iona off Scotland's west coast. The 35 foot long mural painted on eight panels covered the walls of the community centre cafe on Clyde Street, Glasgow which was open to the public as a community centre and to provide cheap and nutritious food to visitors and the city's homeless. Christie depicted the huge scene of an interior with ordinary folk, men returning from work and women baking and bathing children, while the figure of Jesus was placed at the centre of the activity and the act of the breaking of bread placed at the heart of community life. As Christine Jardine wrote in an article in the Scottish Herald Newspaper the work was intended to be in accord with the community's declared aim of "rebuilding the common life" and it arguably achieved this by depicting ordinary community life in a contemporary Glasgow setting. Robert Radford wrote "The allegorical references to the labour of men and women and to community and service are, in essence, biblical but also universal, expressing the potential for transcendence of normality which this work shares with Spencer's Memorial Chapel at Burghclere".