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Roland Penrose
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose CBE (14 October 1900 – 23 April 1984) was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
Penrose married the poet Valentine Boué and then the photographer Lee Miller.
Penrose was the son of James Doyle Penrose (1862–1932), a successful portrait painter, and Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, the daughter of Lord Peckover, a wealthy Quaker banker. He was the third of four brothers; his older brother was the medical geneticist Lionel Penrose.
Roland grew up in a strict Quaker family in Watford and attended The Downs School, Colwall, Herefordshire, and then Leighton Park School, Reading, Berkshire. In August 1918, as a conscientious objector, he joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, serving from September 1918 with the British Red Cross in Italy. After studying architecture at Queens' College, Cambridge, Penrose switched to painting and moved to France, where he lived from 1922 and where in 1925 he married his first wife the poet Valentine Boué.
During this period he became friends with the artists Pablo Picasso, Wolfgang Paalen and Max Ernst, who would have the strongest influence on his work and most of the leading Surrealists.
Penrose returned to London in 1936 and was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition, which led to the establishment of the English surrealist movement. Penrose settled in Hampstead, north London, where he was the centre of the community of avant-garde British artists and emigres who had settled there. With the Belgian surrealist E. L. T. Mesens, he opened the London Gallery on Cork Street, where he promoted the Surrealists as well as the sculptor Henry Moore, to whom he was first introduced by his close friend Wolfgang Paalen, as well as the painter Ben Nicholson, and the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo.
Busy with other duties, he made a small number of paintings such as the 1938 Le Grand Jour, which he described as "a collage painting although nothing but paint has been applied to the canvas. The images are unrelated to each other but by coming together like images in dreams they produce new associations which can be interpreted in whatever way the spectator may feel inclined." The image, he wrote "seemed to indicate an atmosphere of excitement and exhilaration centred round the distillation of a dance hall and a sunset in an alembic".
Penrose commissioned a sculpture from Moore for his Hampstead house; the work became the focus of a press campaign against abstract art. Penrose and Boué's marriage had broken down in 1934, and they divorced in 1937. Penrose came to Cornwall in June 1937, staying in his brother's home at Lambe Creek on the Truro River. He was accompanied by a group of surrealist artists; his new lover Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Eileen Agar, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Edouard Mesens, Paul Eluard, and Joseph Bard. Photographs of their stay can be seen at Falmouth Art Gallery.
Roland Penrose
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose CBE (14 October 1900 – 23 April 1984) was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
Penrose married the poet Valentine Boué and then the photographer Lee Miller.
Penrose was the son of James Doyle Penrose (1862–1932), a successful portrait painter, and Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, the daughter of Lord Peckover, a wealthy Quaker banker. He was the third of four brothers; his older brother was the medical geneticist Lionel Penrose.
Roland grew up in a strict Quaker family in Watford and attended The Downs School, Colwall, Herefordshire, and then Leighton Park School, Reading, Berkshire. In August 1918, as a conscientious objector, he joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, serving from September 1918 with the British Red Cross in Italy. After studying architecture at Queens' College, Cambridge, Penrose switched to painting and moved to France, where he lived from 1922 and where in 1925 he married his first wife the poet Valentine Boué.
During this period he became friends with the artists Pablo Picasso, Wolfgang Paalen and Max Ernst, who would have the strongest influence on his work and most of the leading Surrealists.
Penrose returned to London in 1936 and was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition, which led to the establishment of the English surrealist movement. Penrose settled in Hampstead, north London, where he was the centre of the community of avant-garde British artists and emigres who had settled there. With the Belgian surrealist E. L. T. Mesens, he opened the London Gallery on Cork Street, where he promoted the Surrealists as well as the sculptor Henry Moore, to whom he was first introduced by his close friend Wolfgang Paalen, as well as the painter Ben Nicholson, and the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo.
Busy with other duties, he made a small number of paintings such as the 1938 Le Grand Jour, which he described as "a collage painting although nothing but paint has been applied to the canvas. The images are unrelated to each other but by coming together like images in dreams they produce new associations which can be interpreted in whatever way the spectator may feel inclined." The image, he wrote "seemed to indicate an atmosphere of excitement and exhilaration centred round the distillation of a dance hall and a sunset in an alembic".
Penrose commissioned a sculpture from Moore for his Hampstead house; the work became the focus of a press campaign against abstract art. Penrose and Boué's marriage had broken down in 1934, and they divorced in 1937. Penrose came to Cornwall in June 1937, staying in his brother's home at Lambe Creek on the Truro River. He was accompanied by a group of surrealist artists; his new lover Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Eileen Agar, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Edouard Mesens, Paul Eluard, and Joseph Bard. Photographs of their stay can be seen at Falmouth Art Gallery.