From 12 January to 12 February 2020, in partnership with the Jonathon Grant Galleries in Auckland, the Welcome Swallow Gallery is featuring prints from Sir William Russell Flint together with a range of popular New Zealand prints from our established Gallery artists, Rebecca Dowman-Ngapo, Toni Kingstone, Robyn Ninnes, Melissa Sharplin, Celia Allison (Cecily) and Ann Gray.
Sir William Russell Flint RA.
Gossipers at Le Castellet
Limited Edition Collotype
490x670mm
Sir William Russell Flint
‘I have always painted for fun. If it ceased to be fun, I would stop painting.’
Sir William Russell Flint was one of the most famous watercolourists of the twentieth century. He served as President of the Royal Watercolour Society for twenty years from 1936. He became a Royal Academy Artist in 1924 and knighted for services to art in 1947. His knighthood was conferred on the same day and alongside Malcolm Sargent and Laurence Olivier.
Flint (1880-1969) who was Scottish born, began his creative endeavours while apprenticed
as a lithographer draughtsman during the time that he took classes at the Royal Institute of Art, Edinburgh. From 1900 to 1902 he worked as a medical illustrator in London while providing compositions for The Illustrated London News and for publications such as Chaucer's, The Canterbury Tales (1912). He was an active artist until his death in 1969.
The print shown above in the Welcome Swallow Gallery is, Gossipers at Le Castellet, a fortified hill village between Marseilles and Toulon that is situated north of the coastal port of Bandol.