Archibald Standish Hartrick was born in Bangalore, British India, on 7 August 1864, the eldest son of an army captain. When he was two years old, the family moved to Scotland in 1866. Working as a draughtsman, illustrator and printmaker, lithography was his main medium. His subjects included rural life and portraits, as well as women's industrial and agricultural war work. Archibald Standish Hartrick was appointed OBE in 1948 and died in London, England in 1950.
Painter, illustrator and lithographer Archibald Standish Hartrick was born in Bangalore, then part of British India, on 7 August 1864, the eldest son of Captain William Hartrick of the 7th Fusiliers (The Times, 1950). Of Scots, Welsh and Irish heritage (O'Donnell, 2014), he was brought to Scotland by his mother in 1866 (British Council). His mother remarried, and through his stepfather, Dr Blatherwick, he came into contact with the young artists later known as the Glasgow School (The Times, 1950). Hartrick attended Fettes College and then studied medicine at Edinburgh University, before turning to art (Modernist Journals Project). He studied under Alphonse Legros at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1884-85, then at the Académie Julian and the Atelier Cormon in Paris in 1886-87 (National Galleries of Scotland). In Paris he met Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in the summer of 1886 he met Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven in Brittany (Scholes). He exhibited his first picture at the Paris Salon in 1887.
Hartrick worked mainly as a draughtsman, illustrator and lithographer - known best for the latter medium - and he also painted in oil and watercolour. At the Slade he was impressed by Rodin's The Age of Bronze, and later expressed little sympathy for Cubism and Futurism (O'Donnell, 2014). After a period in Scotland he joined the staff of The Graphic in London in 1889 and The Pall Mall Budget in 1893, illustrating fiction by authors including Rudyard Kipling, Maurice Hewlett and Thomas Hardy. Around 1895 he settled in Gloucestershire with his artist wife, Lily Blatherwick, whom he married in 1896, first at Acton Turville and then at Tresham. His drawings of Cotswold country life were later acquired for the British Museum through the Contemporary Art Society.
Hartrick exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition between 1892 and 1949 and became a member of the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1893. In 1901 he showed work with his wife in Life in the West Country at the Continental Gallery, London. He joined the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in 1906 and in 1907 became a visiting teacher at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, moving to Fulham. In 1908 he helped found the Senefelder Club to promote lithography and later served as its president. His work was shown at the prestigious Leicester Galleries, London, in 1909, alongside that of Mrs Allingham, Birket Foster and Arthur Rackham. He became an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS) in 1908 and a full member in 1920. From 1914 he taught lithography at the Central School of Arts and Crafts until 1931 and in 1914 he exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (RSA). During the First World War he produced the Women's Work lithographs of 1917 for the series The Great War: Britain's Efforts and Ideals, and in 1918 a portfolio of 12 lithographs for the Central London Railway (Tate). His war work was also shown in the Royal Academy's War Relief Exhibition in 1915 and in the Imperial War Museum's Nation's War Paintings exhibition of 1919-1920. In 1936 Fulham Central Library staged An Artist's Pilgrimage: Fifty Years of Painting and in 1939 he published his memoir A Painter's Pilgrimage through Fifty Years, which has often been cited for its accounts of Gauguin and Van Gogh, formed before either was famous (The Times, 1950). In 1940, under the direction of Kenneth Clark, he was commissioned to record the Women's Land Army as an official contributing artist for the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC). Postwar, in 1948 he was appointed OBE.
Archibald Hartrick died in a nursing home in London, England on 1 February 1950. The Arts Council held a memorial exhibition the following year, which was followed many years later by a show at the Robin Garton Gallery, London, in 1979 and Drawn from Nature, with Thomas Hennell and Vincent Lines, at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne. Hartrick's works are held in public collections in the UK including the British Museum, Tate, National Galleries of Scotland, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Ashmolean Museum, Government Art Collection, British Council Collection, Aberystwyth University and Kirkcudbright Galleries. Prints and drawings that Lines rescued from the Fulham studio after Hartrick's death are now held at Aberystwyth University (Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries). Hartrick's oil The Kirking of the Incorporated Trades of Kirkcudbright was included in More from Our Own Collection at Castle Douglas Art Gallery in Scotland in 1992. Tate archives hold correspondence between Hartrick and Lord Clark from 1948-50.
Michal Mel