Among the 400 or so instructional letters sent by Lord Chesterfield to his illegitimate son in an attempt to school the young man in “the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman” there is one, dated 1747, that touches on the importance of art. “I find that you are a tolerably good landscape painter, and can present the several views of Switzerland to the curious,” he wrote, “I am very glad of it, as it is a proof of some attention.” Attention, the nobleman thought, was the key attribute not just of art but of life itself, since “the world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description”.
Attention is also one of the elements stressed by the artist-designer David Gentleman in his own book of instruction, Lessons for Young Artists. Gentleman’s is a more humble endeavour than Chesterfield’s and is notable for its simplicity, but he too believes that to understand the world you need to be in it. He is now 95 and this charming, illustrated volume presents a distillation of some the wisdom gained during a near 80-year career.
That span has seen him become one of Britain’s most ubiquitous though least-known practitioners. On leaving the Royal College of Art in 1953 he set himself against teaching as a way of subsiding being an artist, as many of his peers did, and relied instead on commissions, for whatever was needed and wherever they came from. His first was for a set of wood engravings for a book called What About Wine? and, thanks to his versatility and inventiveness, they have kept coming.
He hasn’t always warmed to them, and one brief for an American company was, he later learned, for pesticides that had turned out to be poisonous for the farmers who used them. “I realised that besides finding interesting and well-paid work, it ought to be responsible, too,” he notes. But, as he says in one of the short commentaries that explains each of his artistic nuggets, jobs are a necessity and, faced with a workaday task, “I just had to get it done.” The reward, he says, was slow accumulation that eventually led to recognition and a reputation. Nevertheless, it was 20 years before he held an exhibition of his work.
It helped that Gentleman was not just the son of two painters but was taught at the RCA by John Nash and Edward Bawden. It is a bloodline that links him directly to a group of figures who transformed British art in the first half of the 20th century, Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious among them. In the 1920s and 1930s the RCA was committed to the idea of allying art and design. Its principal, William Rothenstein, was determined to steer the students away from producing “dreary imitations of Morris designs” and towards work that had a “more alert spirit”. It was an ethos still prevalent when Gentleman studied there, and this heritage – and spirit – has long been apparent in his work.
Indeed, Gentleman confesses that Bawden’s influence in particular was in danger of becoming a little too insistent. When he noticed that there were echoes of his teacher cropping up in his own work, he “consciously tried to avoid them”. This was not to denigrate Bawden but to make sure his own pictures were original rather than an imitation, however reverential.
What makes Gentleman a significant figure is both the range and the quality of his work. He has found a form of artistic demotic that, certainly to Britons of a certain age, has a comfortable familiarity that nevertheless sparkles with imagination. Between 1962 and 2000, he created 103 stamps for the Post Office. His designs ranged from British trees, birds and building types to stamps commemorating the Battle of Britain, 50 years of the BBC, and the launch of Concorde. He has designed posters for London Transport and the National Trust and is responsible for a redesign of the Trust’s oakleaf and acorn logo. He has created dustjackets for Faber & Faber and the New Penguin Shakespeare series – a staple for innumerable schoolchildren. He is responsible too for the platform murals at Charing Cross Tube Station showing the building of the Eleanor Cross, a 13th century stone monument; the commission came in 1975 with no brief from London Transport other than “it had to explain how Charing Cross got its name”. He responded with a bande dessinée of “medieval” wood engravings that were then expanded to life size.
Perhaps his most untypical work was with the placards he designed for the Stop the War Coalition following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Using a typographical “No” spattered with blood, he took advice from Tony Benn, whom he had first met when the latter served as postmaster general and Gentleman started designing stamps. For good measure, Gentleman was responsible for coming up with the “Bliar” slogan too.
So the guidance here comes from a long-lived and engaged mind. What Gentleman offers is the antidote to swathes of contemporary art-think and -speak. There is no talk in his book about “meaning” or “profundity”, much less the wilful obfuscation and vapidity of much contemporary and conceptual art. Instead he proffers modest advice that in less authentic hands would be mere cracker-barrel slogans. Start with a pencil, he counsels, and draw quickly and then you’ll get the essentials without being distracted by detail; sketch whatever is to hand; embrace the accidents of watercolour; return to motifs in different weathers and times of day; choose unlikely angles; look up. Attention, attention, attention.
His pensées may not be worthy of Montesquieu but they are straightforward and have a validity that is applicable beyond the mere making of images: “Keep your expectations slight”; “Just get on with it”; “You don’t have to like, or be good at, everything”. And he accompanies these crisp strictures with a generous helping of his own pictures – drawings in pencil, pen and ink, wood engravings and lithographs, commercial designs and fully fledged watercolours, many from his travels. Some are from his patch of Camden Town in London (as in the view of Euston and King’s Cross from the Regent’s Canal, pictured above) and others are of the unshowy Suffolk countryside around the cottage he has owned for more than 40 years in a village ten miles from the coast.
These pictures are invariably endearing, both observant and skilled, and, in his more considered watercolours, full of detail too. Part of their appeal is that they show a man in tune with the craft tradition; his are indisputably hand-eye works. And while David Gentleman must have looked into his soul many times over the years, he is far too good natured and well mannered to bother the viewer with what he has found there. Art, for him, is not knotted self-expression, revelation or provocation: “We make art because it is interesting,” he says. It is not highfalutin, but it is a better definition than many.
Lessons for Young Artists
David Gentleman
Particular Books, 192pp, £20
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This article appears in the 23 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Kemi Isn’t Working