George Warner Allen was born in Paris, France on 30 January 1916. Trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art, he became a painter and teacher committed to Old Master techniques, particularly oil and tempera. Rejecting modernism, he developed literary, pastoral, mythological and religious subjects, later concentrating on Catholic themes after his conversion in 1973. George warner Allen died in Oxford, England, on 31 July 1988.
Painter and art teacher, George Warner Allen was born in Paris, France on 30 January 1916. He was the only son of Herbert Warner Allen, a writer, wine expert and official British war correspondent with the French army, who later worked for the Morning Post. Allen was sent to boarding school in England at Lancing College, an experience later described as unhappy (The Daily Telegraph 1988, p. 19), before entering the Byam Shaw School of Art in London in 1933, on the recommendation of the artist Robert Anning Bell and the art critic James Greig. There he studied under F. Ernest Jackson, widely admired as a drawing teacher, and encountered fellow student Brian Dick Thomas, whose devotion to classical design and the Old Master tradition strongly influenced him.
Allen’s opposition to modernism was already clear by 1945, when he wrote to The Times as ‘a young artist completely out of sympathy with the aims of ‘modernist art’’. Yet his objection was not simply personal hostility towards individual modern artists: he considered arguments about the sincerity of Picasso and Matisse ‘fruitless’, while arguing that modern art had become creatively exhausted and that younger artists should turn to ‘fresh fields’ (The Times 1945, p. 5). Throughout his career, Allen instead looked to the classical European tradition, especially Michelangelo, Titian and the Venetian painters, as a living source for contemporary art. During the Second World War Allen worked in camouflage for the Ministry of Home Security at Leamington Spa. This experience introduced him to forms of scientific and technical analysis which he later applied to painting. After the war he returned to the Byam Shaw School to teach, while undertaking extensive research into Old Master materials and methods. He experimented with pigments and media associated with Renaissance and Venetian painting, including oil and tempera techniques, and ground his own colours. His mature method was slow and exacting: paintings could take a year or more to complete, beginning with monochrome underpainting, followed by successive layers of colour, with long drying periods between stages. His interest in conservation and technique led him to become an associate of the International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and a member of the Art Workers’ Guild.
Allen’s first major public success came in 1952, when Walker’s Galleries, London, held his first one-man exhibition, with an introductory essay by Brian Thomas. Reviews recognised the challenge posed by his deliberate anti-modernism. T. W. Earp in The Daily Telegraph described him as carrying ‘the reaction from modernism farther than any other neo-classic painter of to-day’, praising the ‘glow and solidity’ of works such as In Memoriam and Picnic at Wittenham (Earp 1952, p. 15). The exhibition sold well, with works bought by T. S. Eliot, John Betjeman and Earl Baldwin, among others. A further exhibition followed at Reading Museum the following year. His subjects were literary, pastoral, mythological and religious. Works such as Love in a Valley, inspired by George Meredith’s poem, and The Scholar Gipsy, after Matthew Arnold, show his attraction to English poetry. Picnic at Wittenham (1947–48, Tate) reimagines the classical pastoral in the Oxfordshire landscape.
The success of the early 1950s was followed by a prolonged crisis. Exhausted after his exhibitions, Allen found himself unable to paint for eight and a half years. During this period he continued teaching and cared for his nanny and ageing parents. When he resumed painting in the early 1960s, the artistic climate had changed and his work was difficult to sell. He nevertheless continued to pursue his own path, nourished by wide reading, especially Dante’s Divina Commedia, which he read repeatedly in Italian, and Charles Ricketts’ writings on Titian and the Prado. In 1973 Allen was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Abingdon, after being asked to paint a tribute to Cardinal Newman. From then on he concentrated increasingly on religious subjects, including Stations of the Cross and a polyptych later placed, according to his wishes, in the Roman Catholic church of Our Lady Queen of Peace at Bulford Garrison. His altarpiece combined the Crucifixion with images of British military witnesses and biblical scenes of sacrifice and patriotism. Although often associated with Neo-Romanticism, Allen disliked the label (Olympia Auctions). His later works, including The Return from Cythera (1985–86), set Watteau-like pastoral imagery against the modern presence of Didcot power station (now demolished), reveal a painter caught between Arcadian longing and the industrial world he distrusted (Tate Gallery). In the last years of his life, collectors and younger scholars began to reassess his work.
George Warner Allen died in Oxford, England, on 31 July 1988. In 1989 two paintings were included in the exhibition, Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art, Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. In the Uk public doamin his work is represented in the collections of the Tate, British Museum, and Museum & Art Swindon, among others.
Irene Iacono