His themes include paintings of landscape and environmental posters to drawings of street life and protest placards. He has written and illustrated many books, mostly about countries and cities. He also designed a number of British commemorative postage stamps.
Biography
Gentleman was born in
London and grew up in
Hertford, the son of Scottish artists
Tom Gentleman and Winifred Gentleman who had met at the
Glasgow School of Art.[1] He attended
Hertford Grammar School and the St Albans School of Art, did
national service as an education sergeant in the
Royal Army Educational Corps in charge of an art room in Cornwall, and then went to the Royal College of Art. He stayed there as a junior tutor for two years before becoming a freelance artist.
He has lived and worked on
Gloucester Crescent in
Camden Town since 1956, and also in Suffolk, travelling only for work. He has four children: a daughter by his first wife Rosalind Dease, a fellow-student at the RCA, and two daughters and a son by his second wife Susan Evans, the daughter of the writer
George Ewart Evans. His and Susan's daughter
Amelia, a Guardian journalist, is married to
Jo Johnson, brother of former British Prime Minister
Boris Johnson.
Gentleman paints and draws landscapes, buildings and people, and uses drawing in his design work. Many of his watercolours have been made in London and
Suffolk and around
Britain, on extended travels in France, Italy and
India, and during briefer spells in
South Carolina, East Africa, the Pacific and
Brazil. He has held many exhibitions of these works. Commissioned series of watercolours have included landscapes for
Shell, several Oxford Almanacks for the
Oxford University Press, and interiors of the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the FCO.
His drawings and watercolours have been reproduced on textiles and wallpapers, dinner plates for
Wedgwood and on a
Covent Garden mug for
David Mellor. His architectural drawings have appeared in House & Garden,
The Sunday Times,
New York Magazine, and on the
RIBA's series of Everyday Architecture wallcharts. His most recently published watercolours were made as illustrations for My Town: An Artist’s Life in London, 2020.
Wood engravings and a mural on the Underground
Gentleman's early wood engravings were for
Penguin paperbacks, greetings cards, wine lists, press ads, and books – Swiss Family Robinson and
John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar. He engraved a series of 32 covers for the
New Penguin Shakespeare series. His wood engravings appear on many of his stamps, and in a 100-metre-long mural, his most widely seen public work.
In 1978,
London Transport commissioned the platform-length
Eleanor Cross murals on the underground at
Charing Cross station. It shows, as in a strip cartoon, how the medieval workforce built the original cross, from quarrying the stone to setting in place the topmost pinnacle. Its wood-engraved images of
stonemasons and
sculptors, enlarged twenty times to life-size, mirror today's passengers going about their day's work.
Books
Between 1982 and 1997, Gentleman wrote and illustrated six travel books: David Gentleman’s Britain, London, Coastline, Paris, India and Italy, and more recently London You’re Beautiful, 2012, In the Country, 2014 and My Town: An Artist’s Life in London, 2020. He also wrote and illustrated four books about a small child on holiday: Fenella in Ireland, Greece, Spain and the South of France.
Illustration
Gentleman has illustrated many books by other people, including drawings for the cookbook Plats du Jour. In 2009 he painted watercolours to illustrate Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay by
George Ewart Evans. For the Limited Editions Club of New York City he illustrated The Swiss Family Robinson, Keats's Poems, The Jungle Book, and The Ballad of Robin Hood, and several books for children, including
Russell Hoban's The Dancing Tigers. For the
Folio Society, he produced illustrations for the Selected Poems of
Edward Thomas.[8] He has designed many paperback covers and jackets: for Penguin Books,
E. M. Forster's novels and the New Penguin Shakespeare wood engravings; for
Faber, many watercolours for
Siegfried Sassoon and
Lawrence Durrell novels; and for
Duckworth, wood engraved or typographical designs for scientific and classical works.
His stamp designs included an album of experimental designs commissioned by
Tony Benn, the then
Postmaster General, to show how stamps could dispense with the large photograph of the Queen then mandatory, or alternatively replace it with a smaller profile silhouette derived initially from
Mary Gillick's coinage head. More than 40 years later, the wider range of subjects, the profile and the simpler designs that it made possible remained a feature of all British special stamps.[10]
In 2022, the Royal Mail issued a set of six stamps commemorating Gentleman's designs.[12][13]
The
Royal Mint have issued two of Gentleman's coin designs. The first (issued jointly with the
Monnaie de Paris in 2004) celebrated the centenary of the
Entente Cordiale, and the second in 2007 commemorated the bicentenary of the
Act for the abolition of the slave trade. Other miniature design commissions have included symbols or logos for the
Bodleian Library, British Steel and a redesign of the
National Trust's familiar symbol of a spray of oak leaves.
Posters
Gentleman has designed posters for public institutions including
London Transport (Visitors' London and Victorian London), the
Imperial War Museum, and the
Public Record Office. A series in the seventies for the
National Trust, used unconventional designs, photographs and photo-montages; some won design awards. Later, poster-like designs replaced words in his book A Special Relationship (Faber, 1979) on the US/UK alliance.[14] Gentleman regretted that these images were not displayed as actual posters.
On the eve of the
Iraq war in 2003, Gentleman offered the
Stop the War Coalition a poster saying simply 'No', which was carried on the protest march. Other march placards followed, including 'No more lies' and 'Bliar'. His largest design was an installation in 2007 of 100,000 drops of blood, one for each person already killed in that war. The bloodstains were printed on 1,000 sheets of card pegged out in a vast square covering the grass in
Parliament Square.
Lithographs and screenprints
Gentleman's first lithographs were posters for a
Royal College of Art theatre group production of Orphée and a student exhibition, and one of his first commissions was for a large Lyons lithograph. Between 1970 and 2008 he made suites of lithographs of buildings (
Covent Garden,
South Carolina,
Bath) and landscapes (of
Gordale Scar, of the
Seven Sisters, and of
Suffolk subjects). These lithographs were printed in colour and were essentially representational. In 1970 he made six more poster-like screenprints, Fortifications, published in New York City. A number of these are in the collections of
Tate Britain.
Bibliography
Surveys of Gentleman's work
David Gentleman, 'Bridges on the Backs', in Parenthesis; 14 (2008 February), p. 7–9
The wood engravings of David Gentleman. Montgomery: Esslemont, 2000)
ISBN0-907014-17-8
David Gentleman – Design. Brian Webb and Peyton Skipwith. (Antique Collectors' Club, 2009)
ISBN978-1-85149-595-5
Peter Tucker, 'David Gentleman as book illustrator', in The Private Library; 4th series, 1:2 (1988 Summer), p. 50–100
Mel Calman, 'The Gentleman touch', in Penrose Annual; 69 (1976), p. 157–168
A cross for Queen Eleanor: The story of the building of the mediaeval Charing Cross, the subject of the decorations of the Northern Line platforms of the new Charing Cross Underground Station. London: London Transport, 1979.
ISBN0-85329-101-2
Evans, George Ewart. The crooked scythe: Anthology of oral history. London: Faber & Faber, 1993. 1995.
ISBN0-571-17194-X
Evans, George Ewart. The pattern under the plough: Aspects of the folk-life of East Anglia. London: Faber & Faber, 1971.
ISBN0-571-08977-1
Evans, George Ewart. The strength of the hills: An autobiography. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1985.
ISBN0-571-13550-1
Evans, George Ewart. Where beards wag all: The relevance of the oral tradition. London: Faber & Faber, 1970.
ISBN0-571-08411-7
"Francine" (Cosette Vogel de Brunhoff). "Vogue" French cookery. London: Peerage, 1984.
ISBN0-907408-86-9
Gray, Patience, and Primrose Boyd. Plats du jour; or, foreign food. Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1957. London: Prospect, 1990.
ISBN0-907325-45-9 London: Persephone, 2007.
ISBN978-1-903155-60-8
Grigson, Geoffrey. The Shell book of roads. London: Ebury, 1964.
Haggard, F. Rider. King Solomon's mines. Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, 1970.
Hoban, Russell. The dancing tigers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977, 1979. London: Red Fox, 1991.
Hooker, Jeremy, ed. Inwards where all the battle is: A selection of Alun Lewis's writings from India. Newtown, Powys: Gwasg Gregynog, 1997.
ISBN0-948714-77-8ISBN0-948714-73-5
Hornby, John. Gypsies. London: Oliver & Boyd, 1965.
Jonson, Ben. The key keeper: A masque for the opening of Britain's Burse, 19 April 1609. Tunbridge Wells: Foundling Press, 2002.
Kipling, Rudyard. The jungle book. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1968.
Kipling, Rudyard. The jungle books. Easton Press: The 100 Greatest Books Ever written, 1985.
Langstaff, John M. The 'Golden Vanity'. New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich 1972.
ISBN0-15-231500-4 Tadworth: World's Work, 1973.
ISBN0-437-54106-1
Langstaff, John M. St George and the dragon. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
Lees, Jim. The ballads of Robin Hood. Cambridge: Limited Editions Club, 1977.
Moreau, Reginald E. The departed village: Berrick Salome at the turn of the century. Oxford University Press, 1968.
ISBN0-19-211186-8