Artist     Anthony Rossiter
Title      Spring Desk
Date      1960's
object    Painting
Media    oil
Size       101.5 x 94cm
Ref          271

Purchased in the 111th RWA Annual Exhibition in 1963

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Spring Desk
Born in 1926, Anthony Rossiter was educated at Eton and studied painting at Chelsea Art School (1947-1951). In 1955 he moved to Somerset where he taught at Millfield School. In 1960 he took up a lectureship at the West of England College of Art in Bristol until 1983.

Winning an Arts Council bursary in 1962 allowed him to travel to the USA where he was invited to stay with Robert Frost, who encouraged him to write his autobiography “The Pendulum”. The book was published in 1966 by Gollanz and received an Arts council Award for creative prose and was linked to a retrospective exhibition by Reading City Art Gallery in 1967. This exhibition moved to the Bath festival in the summer of 1967. In 1969 a tour of selected works was organised by the Lincolnshire Association. In the 1970’s and 80’s he had various exhibitions in London (Cork street and the West End), and in many leading galleries in Somerset, Bristol, Bath Dorset and the Lake District. In 1988 he was one of the invited Artists in “Artists in National parks” exhibition, which was an important collection of contemporary British Art, sponsored, amongst others, by Conoco, the Council for National Parks and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Rossiter once wrote of his approach to art: “I paint and write because I want, without concession, to share the delight and awe I see and experience everywhere.” This delight is certainly evident in the painting - Spring Desk - that is in the RWA Collection which enlivens a mundane view through a vigorous and animated painterly style.

Influenced by Van Gogh, Soutine, David Bomberg, Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock, Rossiter’s subjects are predominantly landscape, often vivid renditions of stormy skies, gnarled hedgerows, decayed broken gates and stone walls, and frozen puddles. He did also draw and paint portraits, which included, most famously, a series of W.H. Auden, the poet. His works are represented in, amongst others, the following public galleries museums and collections in the UK and USA - The Victoria and Albert museum, The Bristol Art Gallery, The Reading City Art Gallery, London Transport, The Robert Frost collection Amherst USA, The John F.Kennedy centre Smithsonian institute Washington DC, The Ashmolean museum Oxford, St John’s college Oxford, Downside Abbey, The Anna Freud clinic Hampstead, The Government Art collection, Lord Weymouth’s collection Longleat, and many private collections in the UK and USA.

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