Willi Rondas was born in Brussels, Belgium to a Belgian father and English mother in 1907. After working initially as an architect, he studied at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Living and working in London and Belfast during the 1950s, he exhibited regularly, producing both realist and Surrealist works, painting architectural views across London, Irish landscapes and subjects inspired by theatre and ballet, among others.
Painter, architect and art teacher, Willi Rondas was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1907 to a Belgian father and English mother. He trained as an architect and practised in the Belgian Congo, but returned to Paris in 1931, where he took up painting. He studied at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. In Paris he worked with the celebrated painter, Raoul Dufy, also studying restoration at the Louvre museum and assisting the stage designer Christian Berard. Rondas served in the Belgian army in the Second World War before being evacuated at Dunkirk and then serving in the British Army.
By the mid-1950s he was living and working in Belfast, northern Ireland, where in 1955 he held a solo exhibition in an art gallery on Donegall Place, showing 40 works in oil, gouache, watercolour and pastel. The Irish Times art critic J.H. wrote a detailed review of the exhibition, praising the tactile qualities of the paintings and describing Rondas’ elaborate views of Hampstead and Chelsea inn London as ‘impressive and assured in their cool colour and carefully developed surfaces’ (J.H. 1955, p. 5). The show also featured swift, vigorous studies alongside finished paintings of Irish landscapes, which demonstrated the ‘bold formalization and constructive discipline of hand and mind which go to make a finished work by this richly equipped painter’. Other works were inspired by theatrical and ballet themes, among them Les Etrangers, depicting a group of performers, and Prologue, showing a crowd of pierrot-like figures waiting for the curtain to rise. The art critic concluded that ‘Willi Rondas […] should make an important contribution to the practice of painting in the North, not only by the broad culture of his subject matter but also by the scholarship and resource of his techniques (J.H. 1955, p. 5). Rondas also taught in art schools in England at Croydon and Nottingham, designed for the textile firm Jacqmar, and painted a mural in the Post Office Tower restaurant in Johannesburg, South Africa. He worked in both a realist and Surrealist style (the latter particularly inspired by the work of Belgian surrealist, René Magritte), exhibiting in both Europe and the USA. His work was bought by notable collectors including Edward James, an important patron of surrealism in the UK.
Willi Rondas died in Brussels, Belgium in 1975. In 2018 his work featured posthumously in Exodus: Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection held at the Bushey Museum in north London and the following year in Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. In the public domain in the UK, Ben Uri Collection holds two paintings depicting Hampstead views.
Willi Rondas in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Willi Rondas]
Publications related to [Willi Rondas] in the Ben Uri Library