Thomas Lowinsky was born in India on 2 March 1892 of Hungarian descent. He immigrated to England around 1904 to study at Eton College and Trinity College, University of Oxford, before training at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1912–14). An illustrator and painter of portraits, landscapes, and surrealist imagery, often inspired by the Bible or classical mythology, Lowinsky held his first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1926 and exhibited frequently in the UK. He was also a notable collector of British drawings and a founder member of the Double Crown Club, a London-based society of printers, publishers, book designers and illustrators.
Painter, illustrator and designer, Thomas Lowinsky was born in India to a Jewish family of Hungarian descent on 2 March 1892; his father was general manager of the Hyderabad–Deccan mines. He immigrated to England to attend senior school at Eton College, followed by studies at Trinity College, Oxford, before training at the Slade School of Fine Art in London under renowned teacher Henry Tonks (1912–14). At the Slade he met his wife-to-be, the painter Ruth J. Emily Hirsch (1893-1958). During the First World War he served in France with the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment and the Scots Guards, afterwards settling with Ruth at Garsington Manor near Oxford and later at The Old Rectory, Aldbourne, in Wiltshire, where they enjoyed entertaining friends from a wide cultural milieu. Variously described as a ‘proto-post-modernist’ for his constant shifts in style (Jeffrey 1990, p. 106), and a ‘poetic illustrator with a remarkable […] individual idiom strangely poised between Pre-Raphaelite and surrealist imagery’ (Times 1949, p. 2), Lowinsky produced portraits, landscapes, and surrealist paintings inspired by the Bible or classical mythology, such as the Dawn of Venus (1922, Tate Gallery) and Sappho (1923, Ferens Art Gallery), characterised by an ‘odd, androgynous ambivalence’ (Auty 1990, p. 42). Lowinsky did not paint commissioned portraits, but worked from his friends or professional models. His sitters included elegant women in sympathetic surroundings, depicted using a range of muted low-key colours, as exemplified by Mrs James Mackie (1939), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1940 and subsequently presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest to the Tate Gallery. Jan Jefrrey wrote in the London Magazine that Lowinsky’s portraits were reminiscent of the German realist painters of the 1920s, such as Christian Schad, Karl Hubbuch and Rudolf Schlichter, adding that Lowinsky’s picture of the authoress Miss Cicely Hamilton (1926, Museums Sheffield) ‘looks like an exceptionally convincing exercise in the manner of Lucian Freud, except that the date is 1926’ (Jeffrey 1990, p. 105). Lowinsky held his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Leicester Galleries in 1926, featuring paintings, drawings and stage designs. Osbert Sitwell, who wrote the foreword to the catalogue, compared him with the pre-Raphaelites, Gustave Moreau and Ferdinand Leger. In late 1939 his portrait Miss Despard was included in an exhibition of young painters at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, organised to support young artists who were suffering from wartime conditions and which featured, among others, Bernard Meninsky and Ivon Hitchens. Lowinsky’s work was singled out alongside that of L. S. Lowry, Claude Rogers and other contributors by Jan Gordon in The Observer (12 November 1939, p. 14).
In 1924 Lowinsky was a founder member of the Double Crown Club, a London-based society of printers, publishers, book designers and illustrators, meeting regularly with sculptor Eric Gill, among others to discuss book production and typography. Lowinsky was a close friend of Gill, who in 1929 produced a wood engraving portrait of him published by Douglas Cleverdon (Tate Collection). As an illustrator, Lowinsky worked mainly for the Nonesuch Press, for which he illustrated Voltaire’s The Princess of Babylone in 1928. In the same year he produced decorative pattern papers for the renowned Curwen Press. In 1933 he contributed nine ‘dazzling illustrations’ to James Laver's Ladies' Mistakes (Platzer 2021). He also created fanciful illustrations for two culinary books written by his wife (Nonesuch Press, 1931 and 1935) containing discursive menus for different social situations with brief recipes. Each was accompanied by one of a series of surrealist designs for table decorations invented and drawn by Lowinsky, including such fantasies as ‘two dead branches, one painted red, the other white to resemble coral, in an accumulator jar’ and ‘a bouquet of ostrich feathers in a trumpet shaped sheath of paper sunk into a painted cube of cardboard or wood’ (p. 159). Other books included Edith Sitwell's Elegy on Dead Fashion (Duckworth, 1926) and a new edition of the 18th century comedy of manners, The School for Scandal (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1930). Lowinsky was a member of the New English Art Club (NEAC) between 1926–42, participating regularly in its exhibitions. He also showed in group exhibitions at the Imperial Gallery of Art (1931), Beaux Art Gallery (1934) and the Contemporary Art Society (1941).
Thomas Lowinsky died in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, England on 24 April 1947. In 1949 a memorial exhibition was held at London's Wildenstein Gallery. Posthumous retrospective exhibitions included the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (1981) and Tate Gallery (1990), the latter curated by Monica Bohm-Duchen. Lowinsky's work is represented in UK public collections including Tate; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. His oil entitled The Belgian Emigrants (1914) is held by National Museum Wales. A passionate collector of British drawings, Lowinsky often lent works to exhibitions during his lifetime; a posthumous exhibition of drawings by Charles Keene from his collection was held at the Leicester Galleries in 1952.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Thomas Lowinsky]
Publications related to [Thomas Lowinsky] in the Ben Uri Library