Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949)

Wadsworth studied engineering in Munich from 1906 to 1907, and attended evening classes at a Munich art school. On his return to England he studied briefly at Bradford Art School, and then won a scholarship to the Slade School, where he was from 1909 to 1912. His contemporaries there included Gertler and Nevinson. Wadsworth’s work was included in the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in 1913, and in the same year he joined Roger Fry’s newly founded Omega Workshops. In 1914 he was a founder-member of the London Group, exhibited with the Allied Artists’ Association, and was a signatory, with Wyndham Lewis, to the Vorticist Manifesto. He contributed to Blast and exhibited with the Vorticists in 1915.

During the First World War Wadsworth worked on dazzle camouflage for battleships, and in 1919 produced a large painting, Dazzle-Ships in Dry Dock at Liverpool, now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Also in 1919 he had his first one-man exhibition, at the Adelphi Gallery, of drawings and woodcuts. In 1920 he exhibited his Black Country series, which concentrated on industrial subjects, at the Leicester Galleries, and in the same year he exhibited with Group X. In the early 1930s he became a member of Unit One and Abstraction-Création. In his later work he became increasingly preoccupied with maritime themes, which he treated in a Surrealist manner. Wadsworth was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1944. In 1951 a Memorial Exhibition of his work was held at the Tate Gallery.