Jim Bradford British, 1922-2004

Jim Bradford was born on 22 June 1922 in a house in Streatham, south London. His father died when he was three and he grew up with his mother (Gertrude), sister (Joan - eight years his senior) and his grandmother. He went to the local primary school, the famously progressive Furzedown, from the age of six, having recovered from diphtheria. At the age of nine he was awarded a boarding place at the Masonic School at Bushey, his father having been a Freemason. Despite hating every minute of it, he was academically very successful there. On leaving at age eighteen, Jim was given a job as an accounts clerk at the Freemasons' Hall in Holborn. At the same time he served as an air-raid warden, based at Streatham Common.
Just a year later, Jim was conscripted into the war and chose the Navy. He worked as a wireless operator on board the Destroyer, HMS Loyal. During service he secretly tuned in to jazz broadcast from America, being able to control morse code and listen to the new and exciting be-bop at the same time. (He particularly remembered having heard Count Basie's One O'Clock Jump!) Jim had a life-long interest in jazz, and went on to amass an enormous collection of historic recordings. The better to hear them, he also developed a keen interest in sound reproduction and built his own loudspeakers to a French 'labyrinth' design. While in the Navy, Jim kept a detailed diary that provided a dispassionate account of the events that took place but mentioned little of his emotional responses or the trauma that was to remain with him for the rest of his life. He was finally demobilised, after a period of minesweeping that followed VE Day, in 1946.
Jim then worked in various teaching jobs in schools in the Surrey Docks area of east London. He was also taking evening classes in Fine Art and English at Morley College ('for Working Men and Women') under Mrs Hubbock, whom he described as 'enlightened'. Colin MacInnes - whose flat Jim borrowed for a time - taught English there and Rupert Doone, who had been the last solo dancer with Diaghilev, taught theatre. He was a friend of the artist Robert Medley, of Group Theatre, with whom Jim would go on to work as a scene painter and prop maker for productions of Sartre's The Flies and Huis Clos at the New Theatre near Leicester Square. Bernard Meadows made statues and Medley designed the sets. Kathleen Hale also designed sets and costumes. Jim later worked at the Theatre Royal, Barnstaple, with The John Gay Players, soaking 'flats', repainting them, and building scenery, sets and props.
Jim took evening classes at the Chelsea School of Art, where he was encouraged by his tutor, Robert Buhler, to enroll as a full-time mature student. He completed a four-year NDD (National Diploma in Design) in Painting in 1952. Taught by such artists as Ceri Richards and Robert Medley, his contemporaries at Chelsea included John Latham, Christopher Mason, Anthony Whishaw and Elizabeth Frink. While there he knew John Berger, became friends with Peter (Reyner) and Mary Banham, and married Betty Bateman (now 'Elzea' - later a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and biographer of Frederick Sandys). She describes Jim as having been 'an outstandingly talented draughtsman'. The Head of Chelsea, H. S. Williamson, wrote in 1953 that Jim's ability was 'above average and he was notable for his energy and powers of concentration. ... Nor was there any doubt about his having found his right métier, for his enthusiasm for art was well-sustained. ... Mr. Bradford has a self-reliant and somewhat forceful personality ...'
Keen to carry on studying, Jim completed a post-graduate Art Teaching Diploma at Goldsmiths College of Art in 1953, having taught at Owen's School. The department head there, Mr. Davison, wrote in a letter of reference that, 'Over a considerable number of years I have had many art student teachers from various training colleges in London and I can say without the shadow of a doubt that Mr. J. R. Bradford is one of the most
outstanding.' Jim then worked as an art therapist on the tuberculosis ward of Harefield Hospital. In 1955 he became a lecturer at Epsom School of Art and from 1958 lectured in History of Art at the Workers' Educational Association. During this time Jim lodged for periods with his long-time friend, the painter Bert (Albert) Irvin (RA).
In 1960 Jim began working as a gilder. He trained with the picture framer Robert Savage in South Kensington, went on to work for Robert Sielle in the Mission Hall, Kensington Square, and, later, became master gilder for Alfred Hecht, whose premises were on the King's Road, Chelsea. By this time Jim was recognised as the best gilder in the country and worked on frames for the most important painters of the day, including Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Ceri Richards, William Scott, Max Ernst, Ivon Hitchens, Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Clients included top galleries such as the Marlborough Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as the Royal Collection. At Hecht's, Jim met characters as varied as the painters René Magritte and Oskar Kokoschka; Francis Bacon, John and Myfanwy Piper and Sonia Orwell (wife of the writer, George). Despite devoting considerable time and resources to a passion for classic cars (owning a Lancia, an Alvis, a Lagonda and a Rolls Royce), he also kept his own art going alongside the framing, painting still lives in oil and landscapes in watercolour on trips to France.
Jim went back to teaching in 1966 and lectured in Graphics and Life Drawing at the Central School of Art and Design until 1972. His students included Posy Simmonds and Peter Brookes. Having divorced Betty and living in a mews flat in Notting Hill with his girlfriend, Elisabeth Armstrong, Jim continued freelance picture framing and gilding as well as working on his own painting when possible. He sold his work privately and also exhibited pieces in mixed shows at the New Grafton Gallery on Bond Street. Elisabeth was an artist and designer, exhibiting and selling her work at the General Trading Company in Sloane Square. She had also trained at Chelsea School of Art and the two had met while working on the Gethsemane Chapel for their friend Steven Sykes in the new Coventry Cathedral. This was designed by Sykes' war-time friend, Sir Basil Spence, the two having conducted camouflage exercises together in northern France during the war. Jim gilded the background to the bas-relief (designed by Steven and made in ciment-fondu) in 23 1/4 carat gold.
Married in 1971, Jim and Elisabeth moved to Barnes, a quieter part of London, in 1974 to start a family. Their daughter, Sophie, was born in 1975. Jim worked from home as a freelance picture framer until 1981 when he chose to concentrate full-time on his painting. Elisabeth opened an art and crafts gift shop on Barnes High Street, which she ran successfully for twenty-seven years. To support it in its earliest days, Jim made items to sell in the shop. These included carved and gilded fruit and children's push-along horses and pull-along quacking ducks. Working in a studio at home, this period marked Jim's most prolific as an artist. His style developed dramatically but he never shifted his focus far from the still life as motif. Occasional 'views from the window' and 'landscapes' on holiday in the south of France are the exceptions. Indeed, Jim spent a working holiday with his best friend, the antique dealer, John Hewett, in Aix-en-Provence. There, they traced the routes of Cézanne through the Bibemus quarry and to Le Tholonet, in the shadow of the Mont Ste. Victoire. Keen collectors of antiques themselves, Jim and Elisabeth amassed a huge variety of pots, jugs, vases and unusual fabrics, many African, which Jim would arrange to create the necessary combination of pattern and colour which marked his 'flattened' canvases. Elisabeth was also an expert gardener and her flowers and plants often featured in the paintings. 'Red Tulips' and 'Rose Fantin-Latour' are examples.
Jim occasionally sold his early watercolours in Elisabeth's shop (Margaret Thatcher's sister-in-law was an admirer) before he moved exclusively to oil. He also exhibited paintings in various mixed exhibitions, including at the New Grafton Gallery (which had also moved to Barnes), the Chelsea Art Society, The Guardian's 'Art for Sale', and 'Contemporary Art' at Christies, as well as selling many privately.
His health rapidly failed following a fall in 1998 while installing a picture light above one of his paintings at home. By 2003 he was very frail but was nonetheless able to attend the private view of his solo show, held at Collins and Hastie gallery in Chelsea. The catalogue was written by his great friend, the art writer Mel Gooding. He wrote: '... with these glorious anarchic late paintings Bradford has come at last into his own. He gives full rein to a freedom of stylistic device that derives from his study of those who followed Cézanne, most notably the great Parisians, Picasso, Braque and Matisse. I invoke these names in particular simply to indicate the certain sources of the distinctive language that Bradford has developed.' Buyers at the show included the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir David Calvert-Smith and the architect Will Alsop, whose painting then featured in an Observer magazine piece. The exhibition was a resounding success and many further paintings were sold at this time. Jim died in June 2004, just four days before his eighty- second birthday.