Forthcoming
Eric Fraser
(1902 - 1983)
Now my boy Arry, he wants to take up with this’ ere Art,but wot I ses to im is you keep off it!’
Sold
Eric Fraser (1902 - 1983)
Gouache on paper, Diameter: 3 7/8 in. (10 cm. mount opening)
Size:
Height – 0cm
Width – cm
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist’s son
Literature: Sylvia Backmeyer, Eric Fraser, designer and illustrator, Lund Humphries, 1998
Through his work for the Radio Times, Eric Fraser became, and has remained, one of the most recognised twentieth-century illustrators. He has recently been the subject of a monograph by Sylivia Backmeyer. A bequest of several hundred of his designs was made by his family to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The figures depicted in this roundel are stylishly dressed for tennis and golf. Plus fours, worn here by the golfer, were made fashionable in the early 1920s by the Prince of Wales.
Illustrator and painter but especially an outstanding pen and ink draughtsman. Fraser studied at Goldsmiths College School of Art under Frederick Marriott and Edmund J Sullivan. He exhibited at the RA and SSA, but it is on the printed page that he established his reputation. He worked for the Folio Society, Golden Cockerel Press and the Radio Times. He made murals for the Navigators Memorial in Westminster Abbey and Babcock House, and a huge one in connection with the Festival of Britain in 1951. Latterly Fraser said that he preferred commissions that allowed him to use his imagination and did not limit him to representing reality. A wide-ranging exhibition of Fraser’s work, sponsored by British Gas (one of Fraser’s many industrial clients), toured the UK in the early 1990s. In 2000 the V&A organised an exhibition to mark their acquisition, directly from his family, of several hundred works.
Selected Literature: Sylvia Backmeyer, Eric Fraser, Designer and Illustrator, Lund Humphries, 1998
