Robert Back; marine artist
Hyfler/Rosner
http://www.allposters.com/gallery.asp?aid=538870&item=368402
Robert Back
Seaman, sailor and marine artist
12 July 2004
Robert Trenaman Back, painter: born Adelaide, South
Australia 4 October 1922; married 1958 Denise Edwards (two
daughters); died Seaford, East Sussex 14 February 2004
Robert Back was one of the most distinguished British marine
painters of his time, noted for his depiction of the great
days of sail.
His collectors appreciated his ability to capture the drama
of an historical scene as if witnessed by its
contemporaries. Back abhorred the sterile approach of many
modern marine paintings which purport to depict the past,
"but the general effect is brash, the sails too white and
transparent".
As with other branches of specialist painting, marine
artists know that they are usually painting for
connoisseurs, alert to spot the smallest fault. Back
realised this. "Good reference is most important," he wrote.
"A painter must see the bones that give a particular ship of
the past its recognisable character." The great Dutch and
British marine masters of the past were the standard against
which he measured himself.
So often in marine painting the ship depicted is technically
accurate but exists in a vacuum. Back's ships inhabit a real
time and place. In such pictures as his Georgetown Harbour
with Aqueduct Bridge and University 1894 the viewer
immediately feels that he is there, participating in a scene
that lacks only animation and sound track. He exhibited with
the Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Society of Marine Artists,
David Messum and Omell galleries and his paintings appeared
as limited-edition prints. He later exhibited with the
dealer Donald Henderson in London and Washington.
Back was a seaman and sailor all his life, as well as a
painter. His addiction to being afloat came from both his
father's and mother's families. In 1833 his ancestor Captain
George Back sailed in search of the Northwest Passage; the
adventures of his expedition in the ice-fields are a part of
the history of British exploration and earned him a
knighthood. Back's maternal great-grandfather was first mate
on the Torrens, the wool clipper that held the record of a
64-day passage from London to Adelaide, Australia. His
mother's father was one of the first captains of the Lamport
and Holt lines, and his mother grew up at the captain's
table. Two cousins were admirals in the First World War.
Robert Back was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1922,
where his father, William Edward Back, and his mother, née
Dorothy Treneman, a singer and gold medallist at the
Guildhall School of Music, were then living. His father had
moved from England to Australia after the First World War,
taking a job as an engineer. He had wanted to be painter,
but the family refused and he became an aircraft designer.
For Robert, he was "my influence in art". An exceptional
artistic talent earned William a Bond Street exhibition at
the age of 18 and a friendship with Sir Alfred Munnings,
President of the Royal Academy.
Robert was the youngest of four children who revelled in
"the outdoor life, the space, the freedom and the friendship
of a small outback community". The only time he wore shoes
was on a trip into Adelaide, 10 miles away:
There were no toys. Father dammed the gully running through
our garden, building a 15-foot-high wall to make a
20-foot-deep swimming pool. We made fleets of square-rig
sailing ships and sailed them across the pool into harbours
dug out from the clay banks. We even set fire to them like a
funeral pyre, and we had our own battles on the water.
When Back's father inherited the family estate in Norfolk,
in 1931, the family made a hazardous 1,300-mile trip to
Sydney in their ancient car to leave for England. Their ship
was the Jervis Bay, of Second World War fame, and
excitements of the voyage included
a black P&O vessel with brown boot topping belching smoke as
she sliced her way through the calm of the Red Sea; the
magic of the Suez Canal; the first sight of England and the
four-funnelled Winchester Castle, in her lavender grey and
red and black funnels, steaming off to South Africa.
In 1933, Back gained a place at St George's Chapel,
Windsor - "a cloistered life, Marlborough suits, big
starched Eton collars, and every day two services and a
choir practice". Norfolk Broads holidays were spent on the
14ft clinker-built Ursula that his father had sailed as a
boy:
He just pushed us off the jetty, saying: "You will learn." I
lived through every Arthur Ransome book - Swallows and
Amazons, Winter Holiday, Coote Club and Peter Duck.
Back then went to Felsted public school, which had a new art
building bequeathed by the Courtauld Institute. He won the
school art prize three years running, and Lord Courtauld
bought a dockland watercolour of his for five shillings. The
school ran a seamen's mission at the Royal Docks in London,
and Back would sketch there during school holidays. The
docks were packed with liners with accompanying tugs and
lighters and Thames sailing barges tacking upriver. "All
this, and my sea trip from Australia, fired the inspiration
to be a marine artist."
Back's dockland sketches were published when he won the
Royal Drawing Society's Gold Medal at the age of 15. The
following year he gained a four-year Andrew Grant
Scholarship to the Edinburgh College of Art. He was taught
still-life, life composition and portraiture, painted in
oil. "I soon learned to hide my watercolours and never
mention marine art, because it was considered unimportant to
great art."
After a year's studies, in 1940 Back volunteered for the
Royal Navy, serving as a gunner until 1946. There was no
chance of becoming an Official War Artist and when he did
practise his art it was not appreciated. In 1942, sketching
a ship anchored in the Clyde from the Bay Hotel, he was
frog-marched out by plain-clothes police and charged with
the same offence as possessing a camera. He "got a rocket"
from his destroyer captain and when his sketchbook was
returned, each drawing had been stamped and passed by HM
Censor.
His ship, the 1917 destroyer HMS Venomous, designed for 90
men but with a crew of 140, was deployed for the bitterly
cold Arctic convoys to Murmansk. It was only on the third
trip that Back managed to get two hooks for his hammock. The
forward mess deck was constantly awash and during one enemy
air attack every gun on the ship had frozen.
In August 1942, Back's was one of 14 handpicked ships to
take part in the relief of Malta. The attacks on the convoy
seemed endless. Only three of the 14 arrived, two others,
including the crucial tanker Ohio, being towed in three days
later, which enabled Malta to survive another six months
until the pressure was off. Back's later war service was
spent in a Captain-class frigate, based in Belfast, hunting
U-boats.
Returning to civilian life, Back completed his studies at
Edinburgh, in 1949 gaining his diploma in drawing and
painting. His teachers included the notable artists John
Maxwell, Leonard Rosoman and William Gillies. After a year
"tramping the streets of London with a portfolio trying to
get advertising work", he took a job at Portora Royal School
at Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. He had a fine
testimonial from Gillies, whose criticism he had sought
while on wartime leave.
Since boyhood, Back had longed to race on water. A family
friend bought him one of the first National dinghies,
designed by Uffa Fox, which he called Shrimp. During the war
years there was no racing, so Back and his father stripped
Shrimp to minimum weight and while in the Navy Robert
studied racing manuals. In the first year after the war,
Shrimp had an unbeaten record on the Broads. He was asked to
helm all sorts of class racing boats. In 1950, he was
elected Olympic trialist for the Helsinki Games. In 1965 he
crewed in the Admiral's Cup and Fastnet Race in Bob Watson's
15-ton Cervantes.
By then, Back had experienced life in the Merchant Navy.
After teaching in Northern Ireland for a year, followed by a
short but successful period selling Dexion industrial
shelving and a time as sales manager on a turkey farm, he
was suddenly at the wheel of a 29,000-ton liner sailing out
of the Solent for South Africa. "I had never helmed any ship
that size in my life, but nobody knew." After two trips to
the Cape in the Edinburgh Castle, he moved over to the Royal
Mail ship Alcantara, but, after five years in the Merchant
Navy and having got married, he went back to teaching art
and to painting marine scenes.
He converted the loft of a cottage in Seaford, Sussex, into
a studio. By chance, he met the artist Frank Wootton, like
Robert's own father a protégé of Alfred Munnings. Wootton
introduced him to Malcolm Henderson, who had a gallery in
London. Suddenly his marine paintings started to gain
recognition and to go up in value. When Henderson moved to
America, Back's market moved with him. In 1983, he had his
first major American exhibition at the Atlantic Gallery in
Washington, others following.
He was included in standard books, such as Denys
Brook-Hart's Twentieth Century British Marine Painting
(1981) and the Dictionary of Sea Painters (1980), by E.H.H.
Archibald, Curator of Paintings at the National Maritime
Museum. Campbell College in Belfast, the US Naval Academy in
Annapolis, US Merchant Marine Academy, New York, and US
Constitution Museum, Boston, are among public collections
holding his work.
Back was a likeable mix of the eccentric, unconventional and
conservative, described by one friend a "a Rolls-Royce with
no petrol". Finding it cheaper to charter than to own, he
continued to sail into old age:
I have a fine geriatric crew and have taught them all to
sail. My retired bank manager cooks for me and looks after
the money, my church organist offers up a hymn and a prayer
and my solicitor looks after the legal side should we ever
get bumped.
David Buckman