Henry Inlander was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1925 and arrived in England as a refugee from Nazism in 1938. He studied in London at St Martin's School of Art, Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, where he won the Prix de Rome which enabled him to study further in Italy from 1952. Returning to London in 1956, he established a successful career as a painter, exhibiting at notable venues, including the Leicester Galleries; Roland, Browse & Delbanco; New Art Centre; Royal Academy of Art; Tate, and as part of the London Group.
Painter Henry Inlander was born in Vienna, Austria on 14 January 1925 into a Jewish family. In 1935, fearing the rise of Nazism, the family moved to Trieste, Italy, subsequently fleeing to England in 1938 when Italy spiralled towards Fascism; they settled at 33 Greencroft Gardens in Swiss Cottage, north-west London, in the heart of the German-speaking émigré community. Inlander studied at Saint Martin's School of Art (1939–41) and Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1945–46), then undergoing a renaissance under painter/printmaker Victor Pasmore (1908–1998) and the co-founders of the artist-led Euston Road School, William Coldstream (1908–1987) and Claude Rogers (1907–1979). At Camberwell Inlander was joined by fellow Austrians, Ernst Eisenmayer (1920–2018), whom he had met through the Austrian Centre in London, and Erich Deutsch (later Doitch, 1923–2000). Inlander became a naturalised British subject in 1947. He subsequently studied at the Slade School of Art (1949–52), winning first prize in the summer competition with The Expulsion from Eden (Paradise Lost Book XII) (1951, UCL Art Museum collection). In 1952 Inlander won the Prix de Rome which provided him with a scholarship to travel to Italy and work at the British School in Rome, where he remained until 1956. He was appointed art adviser to the school in 1955–6 and again in 1971. He also exhibited at Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome in 1953 and purchased a house in Anticoli Corrado, a small village in the hills outside of Rome, where he would regularly return throughout his life to paint the local views; an example is High Above Anticoli in the Torre Abbey Museum collection.
While Inlander's connection to Italy lasted a lifetime, he also spent time in the USA on a Harkness Commonwealth scholarship (1960–61) and in Canada as a visiting artist at the University of Calgary (1969). In 1957, he returned to the Camberwell School of Art as a Visiting Lecturer and, later, as Head of Painting. In the 1960s Inlander shared a studio on Fulham Road in west London with the sculptor and painter Bryan Kneale (b. 1930). In 1956, the 300th anniversary of the readmission of Jews to England under Oliver Cromwell, Inlander featured in Jewish Artists in England, 1656–1956, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in London's East End, as well as in Ben Uri's tercentenary exhibition, and also held his first solo show at London's prestigious Leicester Galleries. He subsequently also showed with Roland, Browse & Delbanco (established by émigrés); the New Art Centre; Royal Academy; as part of the London Group, and regularly at Ben Uri. In 1958, Inlander featured, with a number of fellow émigrés, in Ben Uri's Twelve Contemporary Artists: Archibald Ziegler, Alfred Harris, Claude Rogers, Jacob Bornfriend, Morris Kestelman, Frank Auerbach, John Coplans, Kalman Kemeny, Josef Herman, Alfred Daniels, Henry Inlander, Fred Feigl and, in 1969, he exhibited in a group show with Sandra Blow, Leon Kossoff, Helena Markson and Archibald Ziegler; he also served as a member of the Ben Uri Art Committee in 1972. Inlander is predominantly known for his landscapes existing 'on the boundary between the figurative and the expressionist', in which the 'tension between the real, the seen and the imagined [continuously] plays itself out' (artist's nephew Ron Burnett's blog, 6 September 2014). Equally recurring in Inlander's paintings are depictions of his wife and a mongrel dog which he saved from death, which a newspaper reviewer described in 1981 as ' [...] intimate, domestic images' with an '[…] aura of mystery [hanging] over them, perhaps because of their colour and the subtle way in which they are composed' (Jewish Chronicle, 10 July 1981, p. 24). In 1958 Inlander took part in The Religious Theme exhibition at Tate Gallery with a figure study entitled Moses and the Burning Bush.
Inlander died in London on 15 December 1983 from a heart attack after dancing vigorously at Camberwell's annual Christmas fancy-dress party and is buried in a Jewish cemetery in northwest London. In 1990 his work featured posthumously in Some of the Moderns at the Belgrave Gallery, whose modern British and contemporary programme strongly supported Jewish artists, alongside Terry Frost, Keith Vaughan, John Piper and Alan Reynolds, among others. Other posthumous showings included Henry Inlander 1925–1983: A Selection of Paintings, Redfern Gallery, London (2008); Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933–45, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2010); and Out of Austria: Austrian Artists in Exile in Great Britain, 1933–1945, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2018). Inlander's paintings are represented in multiple public collections, including the Arts Council Collection, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, Government Art Collection and Tate in the UK, and the Yale Center for British Art, in the USA.
Henry Inlander in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Henry Inlander]
Publications related to [Henry Inlander] in the Ben Uri Library