Bernard Dunstan
Veteran Royal Academician whose subtle paintings of domestic scenes won many admirers
BERNARD DUNSTAN, who has died aged 97, was a successful figurative painter in the tradition of Degas, Walter Sickert and Vuillard; with his wife and fellow Royal Academician Diana Armfield he formed a devoted artistic household for nearly 70 years.
Dunstan and his wife, who met at art school during the Second World War, became a kind of institution of traditional post-impressionist painting in the British art world, described by the critic Brian Sewell as “true painters both, content with ancestral tradition, content to be what they have always been, affectionate in their seeing, tender in its translation into paint”.
Dunstan would begin every morning doing a quick nude drawing of his wife. He called these “two-minuters”, and they were a morning exercise, to keep his mind active. Some of these drawings would form the basis of works in oil or pastel, showing Diana dressing, brushing hair in front of a mirror or lounging on a bed, and rendered with subtlety and restraint.
One such work, the result of a painting trip to Italy, was Bathroom, Spoleto (1983). It depicted a bedroom in a little hotel, with Diana swathed in a towel and the artist glimpsed reflected in the mirror over the sink. Peter Fuller, another admirer, praised its authentic feeling: “Through the impressionist play of light, Dunstan’s love of world, flesh and woman is self-evident.”
The figure was always paramount for Dunstan, but his other characteristic subjects included musical scenes (string quartets particularly), continental landscapes, Italian townscapes and, early on, portraits. Diana, who had started out as a designer but switched to painting in the early 1960s, concentrated on landscapes and still lifes. They worked separately but influenced each other: for example, he alerted her to the importance of tone and she showed him the enjoyment of colour.
Dunstan also relished the craft side of the work, and prepared his own panels, priming them with rabbit skin size mixed with chalk, and his own frames, gilding them with red gesso. He favoured hog brushes, and portable boards, which suited him because when working out of doors he could prop them in the paint box on his knees.
He would rarely stick at painting for more than 40 minutes, as Diana recalled: “He worked in spurts. You never knew which activity he might be pursuing at any particular time. I might hear the sound of sawing coming from the cellar and that would mean he was making a frame. And he never minded my interrupting to ask if he’d got a spare yellow ochre.”
Explaining his traditional approach, which was enormously popular with the art-buying public, particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dunstan said: “I have always liked the French-english tradition of the 19th/20th century (pre-cubist) … and have never felt a need to do anything different. The combination of everyday charm and solid painting – finding the colour and the pattern by observation – seems to me inexhaustible.”
Dunstan was tickled that the villain in Jeffrey Archer’s first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976), was apparently an admirer of his work: “Harvey made a special point of looking at the Bernard Dunstans in the [RA Summer] Exhibition. Of course, they were all sold. Dunstan was one of the artists whose pictures always sold in the first minutes of the opening day.”
Andrew Harold Bernard Dunstan was born at Teddington on January 19 1920, the younger of two siblings. His father, Albert Dunstan, was chief chemist at the Anglopersian Oil Company, which became BP; his mother was the former Louisa Cleaverley. As a child Bernard’s eye was caught by the drawings of draughtsmen like EH Shepard and Frank Reynolds in his parents’ copies of Punch, which he would read in bed while eating oval rich tea biscuits.
He went from Colet Court to St Paul’s where he was fortunate to be taught by Erik Sthyr, an enterprising young graduate of the Slade, whom he remembered with great affection: “There was no escaping his vigorous assumption that nothing was too difficult if we only got down to it.”
In his final year of school he would stay out all day painting on the Hammersmith towpath and in the evenings he took classes at Chelsea Art School; he also spent a lot of time in galleries, all of which preparation helped him to win a scholarship to the Slade. This pleased his parents, who had by now accepted that he was not going to follow his father into the scientific field.
Before starting at the Slade he spent two terms at the Byam School of Painting and Drawing in Notting Hill, where he learnt the vital importance of drawing the human body. At the Slade (1939-41), in Oxford at that time, he “acquired likings which have remained with me ever since … Rembrandt and Turner, Renoir and Sickert, Steer, Bonnard and Vuillard. Common to all these is a richness and beauty in the matière, or the quality of the paint surface”.
He was rejected for wartime military service on health grounds – chiefly poor eyesight and bronchitis – so he joined the Royal Observer Corps and was involved in plotting enemy aircraft.
He had first met Diana Armfield at the Slade, but they would not see each other again until 1947, when Diana sent a congratulatory postcard to Bernard after seeing a painting of his in the Summer Exhibition. He was now teaching at the West of England School of Art in Bristol and she was working in textile design. They were married in 1949 and they settled in Kew in the mid-1950s, where they remained, both working in studios at home.
Dunstan taught at Camberwell School of Art (1950-64), Byam Shaw School of Art (1953-74), Ravensbourne Art College (1959-64) and City and Guilds of London Art School (1964-69). There were also residencies in Perth, Australia, and in Wyoming.
All the while he was exhibiting with the respected London art dealers Roland, Browse & Delbanco, who took him on in 1952. He experimented with producing large paintings, but Heinz Roland thought he was a master of intimisme, telling him: “We do not want your grandiose efforts, we want your Vuillard-like efforts, your small gems.” In 1972 Dunstan moved to the even more renowned dealer Agnew’s and in the US from the early 1980s he was represented by the Stremmel Gallery, Reno, Nevada.
For some years he juggled portrait commissions with his other work. His informal portraits of children were much in demand, but the sittings could present challenges. On one occasion a child’s mother was reading stories to keep her lad still. Somehow the boy managed to adopt a serene expression on the side of his face visible to his mother, while the aspect he presented to Dunstan was full of smirking, winks and contortions. “He was a very naughty boy,” Dunstan concluded.
Dunstan wrote several excellent practical books on painting, notably Learning to Paint (1970) and Painting Methods of the Impressionists (1976) as well as editing an illustrated edition of Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing (1991). The Paintings of Bernard Dunstan (1993, revised 2006) included works from the 1940s to 1991 together with his own amusing reflections.
The Dunstans enjoyed spending time in the mountains and valleys of North Wales and he became a virulent opponent of wind farms.
He was elected RA in 1968 and as well as the Summer Exhibition he exhibited annually at the New English Art Club. He was a director of the New Academy Gallery (1987-2005). His work is held in many public collections including the National Portrait Gallery and Museum of London.
Bernard Dunstan is survived by his wife and two sons; another son predeceased him.
Bernard Dunstan, born January 19 1920, died August 20 2017