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David Gentleman

Born 1930, London.

David Gentleman studied at St Albans School of Art in the late 1940s and at the Royal College of Art in London from 1950 to 1953. He subsequently taught there for two years. His father was the artist Tom Gentleman.

For more than sixty decades David Gentleman has been a prolific designer, painter, printmaker and author of over twenty books. As a book illustrator between 1964 and 2010 he undertook commissions for nearly forty publications. His work is very much in the tradition of English topography. He has produced identity designs for several organisations and companies, including Shell, the British Steel Corporation and the National Trust and produced stamp designs for the Royal Mail, coins for the Royal Mint as well as a celebrated mural for London Transport at Charing Cross tube station (1968).

His left-wing political leanings led him to publish in 1987 A Special Relationship, a fierce polemic against the use by the American military of British airfields and in 2003 designed posters and placards for the Stop the War Coalition’s campaign against Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to join the war on Iraq. (One of these was the powerful, blood-spattered ‘Bliar’ placard.)

Constant drawing has been part of Gentleman's art practice and daily life and in 2020, at the age of ninety, he published 'My Town: an Artist's Life in London', which charts the relentlessly changing face of the city during his seventy-year career.

David Gentleman was elected to the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry in 1970 and was Master of the Faculty from 1989-91. Since 1972 he has been a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. Examples of his work can be found in many public and private collections, including Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Charleston Market