Terence Cuneo was born in London, England in 1907, the son of the Italian-American illustrator Cyrus Cuneo and the British artist Nell Marion Tenison. He trained at Chelsea School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, contributed illustrations to numerous magazines and served as an official war artist during the Second World War. A traditional artist rather than a modernist, he was celebrated for his railway posters, vivid depictions of military forces in action, landscapes and portraiture, including his commission to depict Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953.
Painter and illustrator Terence Cuneo was born in Hammersmith, London, England on 1 November 1907, son of Cyrus Cuneo, an acclaimed illustrator of Italian descent born in the USA, and Nell Marion Tenison, a British artist and regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Arts. The couple met while studying in Paris under the American painter, James Whistler and married in London in 1903. Terence Cuneo studied art at Chelsea School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. During the 1920s and 1930s he made a living contributing illustrations to children's annuals and magazines, such as the World Wide Magazine, Boy's Own Paper, The Magnet and Christian Herald. During the Second World War, he worked as a war artist for the Illustrated London News in France in 1940 and served briefly with the Royal Engineers, portraying underground activities in occupied Europe in 1941 (the subject of a one-man exhibition). After leaving the army, he was employed as an official war artist, producing propaganda paintings for the Ministry of Information and the political intelligence department of the Foreign Office. He also provided illustrations of aircraft factories and wartime events for the War Artists' Advisory Committee. In 1942 he depicted the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust, by a British-trained Czechoslovak team.
Cuneo's first poster design, Giants Refreshed (1947, Doncaster Museum), commissioned by the London and North Eastern Railway, marked the beginning of a railway poster career that lasted for the next half-century. Cuneo would also design the set of stamps to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Western Railway in 1985 and even had a train named after him in 1990. According to Carole Cuneo, the artist's daughter, 'it was not just trains, which fascinated my father. He had a natural affiliation with engineering subjects – it would not be an exaggeration to say he felt a genuine passion for huge, powerful machines of any kind. Cars, jet engines, aircraft, tanks and other military machines – they were all grist to his mill and he loved them all' (Terence Cuneo website). He received many commissions from industry, including the depiction of manufacturing, mineral extraction and road building (the M1 motorway). While more and more of his contemporaries were drawn to modernism, Cuneo remained faithful to a traditional way of painting and the realistic depiction of subjects.
According to The Times, 'he was immensely conservative (…) a prime example of that almost vanished breed, the official portrait painter' (The Times 1996, p. 17). Cuneo was commissioned to paint likenesses of many notables, including Sir Edward Heath (Cuneo produced the first official portrait of him as Prime Minister), Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, King Hussein of Jordan, and Herbert Jones VC OBE. In 1952, Cuneo was commissioned to paint the Queen laying the foundation stone of Lloyd's new building in London. Subsequently, he was visited by the Lord Chamberlain and asked to be an official artist at Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953. The painting, The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey, took a year to complete and one day, as Cuneo was struggling with the canvas, his cat deposited a fieldmouse at his feet. As a distraction, he made a painting of it and, from then on, the mouse became his visual trademark which he would include in every painting. The coronation painting was eventually presented to the Queen by her Lords Lieutenant in 1955. Cuneo received other commissions from the Royal family, including an equestrian oil of Queen Elizabeth. In 1972 he designed the Christmas plate Sleigh Ride for the Imperial Silver Company. Cuneo loved horses and animals and he often painted them in the countryside from the Camargue to America. He also illustrated many books, including some of Percy Westerman's adventure novels and two of his own works, Sheer Nerve(1939) and Tanks and How to Draw Them (1943). His autobiography, entitled The Mouse and his Master, was published in 1977. He held one-man exhibitions in London at the Royal Watercolour Society Galleries, Sladmore Gallery and Mall Galleries, and exhibited twice at the Royal Academy. He was appointed OBE in 1987 and CVO in 1994, was president of the Industrial Painters Group and vice-president the Society of Equestrian Artists, which presents an annual medal (with accompanying exhibition) in his memory.
Terence Cuneo died in Esher, Surrey, England in 1996. A statue to his memory by Philip Jackson at Waterloo Station was unveiled in October 2004 and removed in 2014 to be displayed at an army barracks in Kent. Cuneo's work is represented in UK public collections, including the Royal Collection, National Railway Museum, National Museum of Wales, Guildhall Art Gallery and Royal Airforce Museum. In 2017, the Science Museum Group and National Railway Museum co-curated the exhibition History Makers on Tour: Painting Power – The Art of Terence Cuneo, held at the University of Hull.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Terence Cuneo]
Publications related to [Terence Cuneo] in the Ben Uri Library