Roderic Barrett

Roderic Barrett was a very skilled British man. He was born January 8, 1920, in Colchester, England. Throughout his life, Barrett became known for his paintings and engravings. He lived a long and fulfilled life that lasted until 2000, when he died at the age of 80.

Life
Roderic Barrett was accepted into the Central School of Art and Design in London at age 15. He studied there five years, until 1940, specializing in wood engraving under John Farleigh while William Roberts and Bernard Meninsky helped with his tuition. Over time, Barrett moved from engravings to oil paintings, which was his primary medium later in life.

A lifelong Socialist and pacifist, Barrett objected to military service during the Second World War. After the war, he returned to Colchester. In 1947, Barrett began teaching part-time at the Central School. In 1968, he moved on to tutor at the Royal Academy School, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. Barrett had a long association with the Colchester Art Society. He was a founding member in 1946 with Henry Collins, Lett Haines, John Nash, and Cedric Morris, who he succeeded as President.

Works
From 1939 to 1940, Barrett exhibited with the Society of Wood Engravers. He regularly showed with the Colchester Art Society after 1946, when he helped found it. In 1948, the Hilton Gallery, Cambridge, gave Barrett his first solo show, with many included engravings, drawings, and paintings on a Don Quixote theme.

In the spring of 1961, Motif, an art publication, ran an article on Barrett by Cecil Keeling, an admirer and fellow Colchester Art Society member. Among the illustrations published were Chairs and Men, Family of Chairs, Family Bike Ride, Ass and Man, and Fallen Chair. Some of these engraved images also appeared as oils over the years.

During the remaining 40 years of his life, Barrett’s pictures were included in a number of mixed exhibitions and solo shows. His first retrospective at The Minories, Colchester, in 1973 was one of a series. He also became the long-serving president of the Colchester Art Society in 1982. Barrett’s pictures from 1970 were a frequent feature of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. He had begun to teach part-time in the Academy Schools.

Since showing at the Beaux Arts gallery, London, in 1954, Barrett exhibited regularly, culminating in a show at the European parliament gallery, Strasbourg (1995), important retrospective exhibitions at the Barbican Centre and The Minories, Colchester (1996), and the Bradford Museum (2008). From 1993 to 1998, he was a trustee of the Colchester and District Visual Arts Trust; and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex in 1997.

Barrett was an outspoken defender of what he called ‘“authentic” art. He had strong moral views, and he valued work and honesty. His work is held by the Victoria & Albert Museum and many provincial galleries. Barrett’s work was well summed up by Puttfarken when he wrote, Roderic Barrett“… was a painter of great emotional, as well as formal, power, of rich symbolic suggestiveness and, above all, of deep humanity.”

Family
Barrett’s great-grandfather was a nonconformist radical and Chartist. His grandfather was a Liberal and Congregationalist. His father was a Congregationalist, then a Quaker, a propagandist for the Labour Party, and pacifist, who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War. When Barrett was ten, his mother died, contributing to his later melancholic disposition. He had three children: Jonathan, Kristin, and Mark.

Comments
In the words of his biographer David Buckman, ‘Barrett was one of the most distinctive artists working in Britain in the twentieth century … he is the opposite of the commercial painter of pretty pictures that fill a gap in the sitting room wall and convey their message in a glance’. Or as his friend Thomas Puttfarken wrote ‘[Barrett was] fundamentally resistant to, and suspicious of, the “isms” of modern and post-modern art since the 1960s, Roderic pursued his own way’.

Again, in Puttfarken’s view, ‘when Barrett switched from engravings to oils, he retained the mastery and precision of drawing associated with the former. In Barrett’s work, seemingly normal objects, such as chairs, tables, buckets and candles take on symbolic meanings, suggestions of myths, the subconscious, or of nightmares. What shines through the appearance of a domestic scene are the fears and anxieties, the slender hopes and the melancholia of the human condition’.