WEBSTER, Harry

1921 - 2011

Harry Alfred James Webster was born at Little Aston, Litchfield, Staffordshire on 16 May 1921, posthumous son of Harry Webster (1895-1921) and his wife Emma Annie née Haddon (1893-), who married at Little Aston in 1918. Harry attended Bishop Vesey's Grammar School in Sutton Coldfield on a maths scholarship and subsequently became a statistician. In 1941 he joined the RAF, firstly as a Navigator and then working on RADAR, including a posting to Dunwich, Suffolk. On demobilisation in 1946, he took up a place at Birmingham School of Art 1947-1952, where his contemporaries included Patrick Venton (1925-1987), and studied under Bernard Fleetwood-Walker (1893-1965), teaching part-time at Birmingham and at Wolverhampton College of Art and Lichfield School of Art. Harry taught in Somerset 1960-1974, gaining a Goldsmiths' Scholarship to Greece in 1962. He married firstly at Litchfield in 1942, Contance J. Smith and went on and have two further wives. From 1976 he was based in Suffolk, living at The Old Rectory, Somerleyton and with several further moves to Aldeburgh, Shadingfield and finally Saxmundham from where he taught summer school and private pupils, also giving seminars in early painting techniques at the University of East Anglia history of art department. He contributed illustrations for the 1992 Aldeburgh Festival Handbook to the music of Erik Satie (1866-1925). His group shows include John Moore's Liverpool Exhibition; Piccadilly, Lousie Hallett, Grabowski and many other galleries with solo shows at Halesworth Gallery 1982-1992; Brentwood Art Centre 1990 and Snape Maltings Galleries in 1991 and there was a retrospective at the Peter Pears Gallery, Aldeburgh in 1999. Harry Alfred James Webster died on 14 January 2011.

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Works by This Artist