Percyval Tudor-Hart was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 27 December 1873. He was educated in France and ran an art school there before immigrating to London around 1917. In England, he continued his art teaching career alongside painting, restoring, and designing military camouflage, before returning to Canada.
Painter, teacher, military camouflage designer, and restorer, Percyval Tudor-Hart was born on 27 December 1873 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to the American-born merchant Frederick Levey L’Estrange Hart and Elianora Elizabeth Hart. His first wife was Countess Éléonora Délia Julie Aimée Kleczkowska, and their son, Alexander Tudor-Hart, a British medical doctor and active communist, married the Austrian émigré photographer and Soviet spy Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky). Tudor-Hart initially travelled to France intending to pursue a medical career but redirected his focus to the arts, first enrolling at the Académie Julian and later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Though considered somewhat defiant, he formed a strong professional bond with his mentor, Jean-Léon Gérôme. He also became close friends with Henri Matisse and collaborated with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, sharing a studio in Montmartre. Gaining recognition in France, he exhibited widely and earned gold and silver medals at the Paris Salon. Despite his artistic success, he was primarily known as an educator, often teaching in the Paris suburb of Meudon. During this period, he also ran an art school, Tudor-Hart’s Académie de Peinture, at 69 Rue d’Assas, which he operated until 1917.
In the late 1910s, following the death of his first wife (he would later marry twice more), Tudor-Hart moved to Hampstead, London, where he relocated his art school. He is remembered for his rigorous teaching style, tempered by gentle manners, as documented by one of his students, R. A. Wilson, in the privately published Memoirs of an Individualist. His British students included Theodora Synge, Donald Wood, W.T.H. Haughton, Margaret Beale, Richard Carline, Sydney Carline, and Hilda Carline, alongside Americans, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, John Edward Thompson, George Carlock, and Richard H. Bassett, and the New Zealand-born painter, Owen Merton. As well as teaching, Tudor-Hart was an expert in art restoration, working on pieces by renowned painters such as Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Raeburn, Godfrey Kneller, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and several portraits by Gilbert Stuart. During the First World War, he proposed innovations in military camouflage, suggesting the use of graded geometric patterns of warm and cool colours to create a grey optical effect from a distance, believing their mathematical arrangement would respond to changing light conditions. However, these ideas were ultimately not adopted. He also developed concepts for armoured vehicles and naval vessels and crafted gloves for snipers. While in the UK, Tudor-Hart exhibited at institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts (1914 and 1924, with an address at Melbury Road in Holland Park) and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, focusing particularly in his oeuvre on colour theory and its relationship to musical tones.
Although he spent much of his career in London, Tudor-Hart ultimately returned to Canada, though he spent some time in New York, USA during the 1940s. In Canada, he exhibited with the Art Association of Montreal in 1940 at the 57th Spring Exhibition and held a solo exhibition in 1964 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Percyval Tudor-Hart died in Quebec City, Canada, in 1954. His works are well represented in UK public collections, including Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums, Ashmolean Museum, Birmingham Museums Trust, Ferens Art Gallery, Fitzwilliam Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Walker Art Gallery. The Imperial War Museum also holds objects based on his camouflage designs.