David Gentleman

David William Gentleman (born 11 March 1930) is an English artist.

He studied art and painting at the Royal College of Art under Edward Bawden and John Nash.

He has worked in watercolour, lithography and wood engraving, at scales ranging from platform-length murals for Charing Cross Underground Station in London to postage stamps and logos.

His themes include paintings of landscape and environmental posters to drawings of street life and protest placards.

He has written and illustrated many books, mostly about countries and cities.

He also designed a number of British commemorative postage stamps.

Gentleman was born in London and grew up in Hertford, the son of Scottish artists Tom Gentleman and Winifred Gentleman who had met at the Glasgow School of Art.

He attended Hertford Grammar School and the St Albans School of Art, did national service as an education sergeant in the Royal Army Educational Corps in charge of an art room in Cornwall, and then went to the Royal College of Art.

He stayed there as a junior tutor for two years before becoming a freelance artist.

He has lived and worked on Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town since 1956, and also in Suffolk, travelling only for work.

He has four children: a daughter by his first wife Rosalind Dease, a fellow-student at the RCA, and two daughters and a son by his second wife Susan Evans, the daughter of the writer George Ewart Evans.

His and Susan's daughter Amelia, a Guardian journalist, is married to Jo Johnson, brother of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

His work is represented in Tate Britain, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum the Imperial War Museum, the Postal Museum, London and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Gentleman paints and draws landscapes, buildings and people, and uses drawing in his design work.

Many of his watercolours have been made in London and Suffolk and around Britain, on extended travels in France, Italy and India, and during briefer spells in South Carolina, East Africa, the Pacific and Brazil.

He has held many exhibitions of these works.

Commissioned series of watercolours have included landscapes for Shell, several Oxford Almanacks for the Oxford University Press, and interiors of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the FCO.

His drawings and watercolours have been reproduced on textiles and wallpapers, dinner plates for Wedgwood and on a Covent Garden mug for David Mellor.

His architectural drawings have appeared in House & Garden, The Sunday Times, New York Magazine, and on the RIBA's series of Everyday Architecture wallcharts.

Between 1962 and 2000, Gentleman designed 103 stamps for the Post Office, making him the most prolific stamp designer in Britain at that time.

These include sets commemorating Shakespeare, Churchill, Darwin, British Ships, Concorde, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Hastings, the BBC, Good King Wenceslas, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Social Reformers, Ely Cathedral, Abbotsbury Swannery and the Millennium.

His stamp designs included an album of experimental designs commissioned by Tony Benn, the then Postmaster General, to show how stamps could dispense with the large photograph of the Queen then mandatory, or alternatively replace it with a smaller profile silhouette derived initially from Mary Gillick's coinage head.

More than 40 years later, the wider range of subjects, the profile and the simpler designs that it made possible remained a feature of all British special stamps.

He won the Phillips Gold Medal for postage stamp design in both 1969 and 1979.

In 2022, the Royal Mail issued a set of six stamps commemorating Gentleman's designs.

The Royal Mint have issued two of Gentleman's coin designs.

In 1978, London Transport commissioned the platform-length Eleanor Cross murals on the underground at Charing Cross station.

It shows, as in a strip cartoon, how the medieval workforce built the original cross, from quarrying the stone to setting in place the topmost pinnacle.

Its wood-engraved images of stonemasons and sculptors, enlarged twenty times to life-size, mirror today's passengers going about their day's work.

Between 1982 and 1997, Gentleman wrote and illustrated six travel books: David Gentleman’s Britain, London, Coastline, Paris, India and Italy, and more recently London You’re Beautiful, 2012, In the Country, 2014 and My Town: An Artist’s Life in London, 2020.

He also wrote and illustrated four books about a small child on holiday: Fenella in Ireland, Greece, Spain and the South of France.

Gentleman has illustrated many books by other people, including drawings for the cookbook Plats du Jour.

The first (issued jointly with the Monnaie de Paris in 2004) celebrated the centenary of the Entente Cordiale, and the second in 2007 commemorated the bicentenary of the Act for the abolition of the slave trade.

In 2009 he painted watercolours to illustrate Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay by George Ewart Evans.

For the Limited Editions Club of New York City he illustrated The Swiss Family Robinson, Keats's Poems, The Jungle Book, and The Ballad of Robin Hood, and several books for children, including Russell Hoban's The Dancing Tigers. For the Folio Society, he produced illustrations for the Selected Poems of Edward Thomas.

He has designed many paperback covers and jackets: for Penguin Books, E. M. Forster's novels and the New Penguin Shakespeare wood engravings; for Faber, many watercolours for Siegfried Sassoon and Lawrence Durrell novels; and for Duckworth, wood engraved or typographical designs for scientific and classical works.

His most recently published watercolours were made as illustrations for My Town: An Artist’s Life in London, 2020.

Gentleman's early wood engravings were for Penguin paperbacks, greetings cards, wine lists, press ads, and books – Swiss Family Robinson and John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar.

He engraved a series of 32 covers for the New Penguin Shakespeare series.

His wood engravings appear on many of his stamps, and in a 100-metre-long mural, his most widely seen public work.