15 Facts About Henry Tonks

Henry Tonks, FRCS was a British surgeon and later draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist.

Henry Tonks was one of the first British artists to be influenced by the French Impressionists; he exhibited with the New English Art Club, and was an associate of many of the more progressive artists of late Victorian Britain, including James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent and George Clausen.

Henry Tonks was educated briefly at Bloxham School, followed by Clifton College in Bristol, and then studied medicine at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton and the London Hospital in Whitechapel.

Henry Tonks became a house surgeon at the London Hospital in 1886, under Sir Frederick Treves.

Henry Tonks was elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1888 and moved to the Royal Free Hospital in London.

Henry Tonks taught anatomy at the London Hospital medical school from 1892.

Henry Tonks exhibited paintings with the New English Art Club from 1891 and became a member of the Club in 1895.

Brown became Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College, London, in 1892, and Tonks started to teach at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Henry Tonks became "the most renowned and formidable teacher of his generation".

Henry Tonks resumed his medical career in 1914, first at a prisoner of war camp in Dorchester, and then at Hill Hall in Essex.

Henry Tonks served as a medical orderly at a British Red Cross hospital near the Marne in France in 1915, and joined an ambulance unit in Italy.

Henry Tonks became an official war artist in 1918, and he accompanied John Singer Sargent on tours of the Western Front.

Henry Tonks went to Archangel in Russia in 1919 as a war artist with a British expeditionary force.

Henry Tonks succeeded Frederick Brown as Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1918 to 1930, although he initially turned down the appointment in favour of Walter Sickert, only taking it up when Sickert declined the position.

Henry Tonks retired in 1930, and declined the offer of a knighthood.