Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
May 2026
ISBN:
978-1-7384878-4-4

• Overview
• The Author

• Michael Andrews (1928–1995) is probably one of the least known but certainly one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. The range and quality of his work has never been in doubt since his days at the Slade School of Art in 1949–53, and his aptitude for painting only masterpieces has been noted on more than one occasion.

  His friendship from early in his career with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff has led to his identification as an artist belonging to what is now termed the ‘School of London’. His interests, however, were far broader and more individual than such a designation might imply. His work demands close attention, not simply because he belonged to the so-called School of London and consorted with other famous artists, but because he addressed fundamental issues that are imbued with a universal relevance.

  His early figurative paintings, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, were directly inspired by the political and social changes associated with post-imperial Britain, but, from the 1970s, Andrews began to pursue a wider range of themes arising from his growing interest in philosophy and psychology, as revealed in his two great series of works, Lights I–VII (1970–74) and School I–IV (1977–8). Inspired also by his home county of Norfolk, he was increasingly engaged with landscape painting, often on a large scale, and made annual excursions to Scotland, extending over two decades, and a memorable trip to Australia in 1983, when he explored Uluru/Ayers Rock and Kata Tjuta/Mount Olga. His comparatively small output concluded with three depictions of the River Thames begun in 1992, just before he was diagnosed with cancer; as such, these works have the profundity of an allegory of life.

• Christopher Lloyd worked in the Department of Western Art of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 1968 to 1988, combining curatorial duties with teaching. During that time, he was appointed by Harvard University to a Fellowship at Villa I Tatti in Florence and was Visiting Research Curator of Early Italian Painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was appointed Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures in the British Royal Collection in 1988 and retired from that post in 2005. His publications include Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels (2014), Paul Cézanne: Drawings and Watercolours (2015), The Drawings of Vincent van Gogh (2023) and, for Modern Art Press, Picasso and the Art of Drawing (2018) and Matisse and the Joy of Drawing (2022).