MEDWORTH, FRANK (1892-1947)

**PRICE ON APPLICATION**
 
"Little Wood" (1939)
oil on canvas
50 x 60cm
signed lower right
*Heiser Gallery, Brisbane
*private collection, Brisbane
 
Frank Charles Medworth is an influential and tragic English artist. He studied at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts where his closest associates were David Jones and H. F. W. Hawkins. He exhibited principally with the South London Group, the Royal Society of British Artists, the English Wood Engraving Society and the Royal Academy of Arts. Combining high technical skills with a wide-ranging means of expression—at times humorous and at others mildly Modernist—he was a satirist, illustrator, craftsman, muralist and portraitist. In 1938 Medworth left England with his family to take up the post of lecturer-in-charge of the art department at East Sydney Technical College. He expanded the staff, and brought a dynamism similar to that of its first principal, Lucien Henry. In 1944-45 Medworth was also acting-director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales. Medworth belonged to and exhibited with the Society of Artists, the Contemporary Group, the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, the Australian Academy of Art, the Contemporary Art Society of Australia, and the Australian Water-Colour Institute. One of my favourite artists, he tragically took his own life in Mexico in 1947, leaving behind a talented artist wife, Muriel and a young child!!