Born 1901, London.  Died 1958

Barnett Freedman's family came to London from Russia at the end of the nineteenth century.  He was ill as a child and largely self-educated.   By 1916 he was working as a draughtsman for a monumental mason and studied part-time at St Martin's School of Art.   William Rothenstein was interested in his work and enabled him to study full-time at the Royal College of Art from 1922-25 with Eric Ravilious.  Like Ravilious, he became a tutor in 1930 and an Official War Artist from 1940.  A pioneer in the revival of colour lithography and an outstanding exponent of autolithography for book illustration and book jackets, his magnum opus was War and Peace published in five volumes by the Limited Editions Club in 1938.  He designed the George V Jubilee postage stamp and many posters for Shell and London Transport.

A memorial exhibition was organised by the Arts Council in 1958.  Manchester Metropolitan University, which holds the Freedman archive, held an exhibition of his work in 1990.

Walter de la Mare: Ghost Stories