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FRANCIS GOWER A.R.C.A.                                1905-1995

Francis Gower's talent was apparent at an early age. He studied at the ST.Martin's School of Art and went on to the Royal College of Art after winning a scholarship. He gained a London University Diploma in the History of Art.

During his career he built up extensive teaching experience including a period at The Working Men's College as a visiting teacher of life drawing, painting and composition; as a lecturer in the History of Art at the Harrow and Willesden Art Schools; and for more than thirty years at The Institute, Hampstead Garden Suburb. He was much in demand for demonstrations of painting to art societies, also for book illustration, notably for Faber and Faber and his London drawings for 'The Saturday Book".

Working in psychiatric hospitals during the Second World War was a shattering experience. Francis Gower was deeply moved by the tragic postures and remoteness of the more extreme sufferers and made a series of drawings which he later used as a basis for his powerful oil paintings and gouaches. These pictures, known collectively as 'Private Worlds', are painful and disturbing and reflect Francis Gower's pain in realising them. The stark interiors and tense angular forms depicted in cold blues, greens and purples convey the state of the sufferer's mind as well as the prison-like conditions of the institutions which existed half a century ago. Some of the series were shown on ITV in 1985 in association with the Mental Health Foundation Appeal presented by Martyn Lewis.

Francis Gower exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and at St Agnew's. Much early work was destroyed by bombing during the war.

The other subject matter of his vast body of work was far-ranging. It includes landscape, flower pieces, still life and interiors (in every medium), but portraits were of great importance, whether a swift pastel sketch or the highly finished and detailed oils. Apart from his wife Moira and two sons, David and Anthony, who were frequent models, Francis Gower painted Lord Donald Soper, the late Bishop Peter Mumford and a retiring headmistress, Miss Eileen Downey, commissioned by the Governing Body of Secondary Schools in Willesden.

His one-man exhibitions have been held in Bushey in 1984, in Watford Museum in 1986 and the memorial exhibition arranged by the Curators of Bushey Museum in 1996. Works are in collections in Canada, the United States, Australia and Japan, apart from those owned by collectors locally.