About the artist

ALFRED DANIELS RWS RBA (b. 1924)

ALFRED DANIELS was born in the East End of London in 1924..After studying for a year at Woolwich Art School from 1943 to 1944 he did his National Service in the Royal Air Force, resuming his studies at the Royal College of Art from 1947 to 1950. He then toured Florence, Venice and Sienna and was deeply impressed by the painting of the Italian primitives. The award-winning set of murals he completed for Hammersmith Town Hall in 1954, depicting life on the Thames, is regarded as a modern classic. Around the same time the Football Association held a fine art competition whose judges included the directors of the National Gallery and the Tate; the first prize was won jointly by Alfred Daniels and L. S. Lowry.

The spirit of Daniels's work is perhaps conveyed best by some words written by Charles Spencer, which appeared more than half a century ago in The Studio magazine:

....a singleness of vision as well as a poetic concern for the ordinary...there is something Breugelian in the interest in ordinary people doing ordinary things, neither romanticized nor dramatized...a sort of shorthand in creating the flat silhouette of a figure which, despite its puppet-like appearance, has a real humanity of its own.....Daniels has been fashioned by his working-class background and his paintings explore and recreate a world he understands. (The Studio, vol 153-54, July 1957)