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War Artist- Dennis Dring

29/9/2020

3 Comments

 
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On This Day 29th September Dennis Dring died

Dennis William Dring, RA (26 January 1904–29 September 1990), was an English portrait painter.

Dring is reported as being born in Streatham (although the 1911 Census indicates he was born in Brixton but the family lived at 33 Kingscourt Rd in Streatham) and the 1939 census showed he lived with his wife Grace at Windy Ridge in Winchester. He died in Winchester in 1990

He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1922 and 1925, where he won several prizes and scholarships. He taught drawing and painting at the Southampton School of Art until 1942. In the late 1920s Dring was commissoned by the architects Edwin Lutyens and Albert Edward Richardson to paint a number of murals.


Captain Heathcote ©Imperial War Museum

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At the start of the Second World War Dring completed several portrait commissions for the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC. In early 1942 he resigned from Southampton School of Art to work on a full-time contract for the Committee, specialising in Admiralty portraits.
He travelled extensively within Britain at this time, painting subjects in Portsmouth, Scotland and the Western Approaches. In the late summer of 1943 he was given a second full-time contract which included more general subjects.

His final war-time contract with WAAC saw Dring working on portraits for the Air Ministry throughout 1944 and 1945. Sixty-four of Drings war-time portraits, mostly pastels are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, who also hold five oil paintings by him. There are a further forty of his wartime works at the National Maritime Museum, mostly pastel portraits.

Black and white picture ©National Portrait Gallery
Self Portrait - Russell Coates Art Gallery & Museum ©artist's estate / Bridgeman Images. Photo credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum

Captain Heathcote ©Imperial War Museum

3 Comments
Anne
24/5/2022 03:06:53 am

I was taken to this website when I was trying to find out about Dennis Dring as a war artist. Initially, I had been reading a Financial Times article [To Catch A Criminal; what a forensic artist knows about the mind. Will Coldwell 15 April 2022] about his daughter, Melissa Dring. She is a renowned forensic artist based in Northampton.
Her reputation as an accurate forensic artist is world wide and she has been involved with such high profile cases as the abduction of Madeline McCann.
Melissa Dring has drawn portraits of the UK’s most wanted for 35 years, in the hope that they might be recognised. She learned some of her skills from her father by watching him, via a studiously placed mirror, as he painted portraits of her as a child.

Reply
Mark Bery
24/5/2022 03:35:44 pm

Anne,

Many thanks for that information. I had no idea of this and makes fascinating reading

Reply
andi link
28/6/2022 08:37:31 pm

thanks for the useful information

Reply



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    Mark Bery, Secretary Streatham Society

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