15 Facts About Richard Carline

Richard Cotton Carline was a British artist, arts administrator and writer.

Richard Carline held strong anti-fascist beliefs and worked to gain appreciation for African art, naive art, child artists and even promote the artistic merits of postcard images.

Richard Carline was born in Oxford, the youngest of the five children born to the artist George Francis Carline and Anne Smith.

Richard Carline was educated at the Dragon School and at St Edward's School in Oxford before studying art under Percyval Tudor-Hart at the Academie de Peinture in Paris and then in London throughout 1913.

Richard Carline worked on wireless communications before he was tasked with developing camouflage designs for aeroplanes.

Richard Carline was asked to nominate artists to work as official war artists for the RFC.

Richard Carline nominated his own brother, Sydney, who was in the RFC and had already been shot down once.

In several of his aerial paintings, Richard Carline showed the influence of the Cubist artworks he had seen in Paris before the war as he adopted unconventional perspectives to depict the ground below as two-dimensional and abstracted.

Between 1921 and 1924, Richard Carline studied part-time at the Slade School of Art before teaching, on an occasional basis, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University until 1929, where his brother, Sydney, was Master of Drawing.

In 1931 Richard Carline held his first one-man exhibition at the Groupil Gallery.

Richard Carline's 1925 painting Gathering on the Terrace at 47 Downshire Hill, Hampstead depicted several of these and members of his family.

In 1935, with Michael Sadler, Richard Carline wrote a book entitled Arts of West Africa and organized an accompanying exhibition on the subject.

Richard Carline was active in the Artists' International Association and during 1937 and 1938 he spent time in Mexico and the United States on their behalf supporting various arts' projects.

In 1943 Richard Carline established the National Mural Council to promote the commissioning of murals by industry.

In 1950 Richard Carline married Nancy Higgins whom he had known for many years and who was an artist in her own right.