User:Eustachiusz/Charles E Flower

Charles Edwin Flower, best known from his signature as Charles E. Flower (1871dash1951) was an English painter, graphic designer and illustrator.

Life
Flower was born in Merton, Surrey. He studied painting at the Royal College of Art in London. After his marriage in Croydon with the sculptress Alice Berta D. Perry, ten years his senior, the couple lived at first in Balham, then in Anerley, where their son Edwin was born.

From 1890 to 1894 he worked as assistant to the ethnologist and anthropologist Augustus Pitt Rivers on his Rushmore estate in Wiltshire for £72 a year and illustrated the first catalogue of Pitt Rivers' collection. In September 1895 Flower showed his painting "Gold Hill, Shaftesbury" at an exhibition in General Pitt Rivers' Larmer Tree Gardens.

In 1899 Flower exhibited some of his works at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1902 he undertook a study trip of several years' duration throughout the Americas, visiting New York City, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Québec, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. From 1906 he travelled through Europe, particularly in Germany. This trip was the source of many later postcard images.

Together with Henry B. Wimbush (1858–1943) he worked for almost 40 years for the London-based postcard publisher Raphael Tuck & Sons. The images from his travels were mostly reproduced, from 1903 onwards, in Tuck's "Oilette" series, the cards in which were intended to look like little oil paintings, and were enormously popular.

In 1907 Flower moved with his family to Wallingford, where he lived until his death in 1951.

Some of his paintings are now in the British Museum.

Illustrations

 * Picturesque Thames from Richmond to Oxford. From Original Water Colours. Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1907
 * George Frederick Edwards: Old Time Paris, A. Doubleday, London 1908
 * Charles Eyre Pascoe: No 10, Downing Street. Duckworth & Co., London 1908
 * Heinrich Heine: Gedenktage, Erinnerungen und Geburtstags-Buch. Raphael Tuck & Sons, London 1913