John Arthur Malcolm Aldridge (26 July 1905 – 3 May 1983) was a British oil painter, draftsman, wallpaper designer, and art teacher.
Born in 1905 in Woolwich, Aldridge studied as a classics scholar at Oxford University before moving to London in 1928. Despite having drawn and painted since a young age Aldridge received no formal art training. Nevertheless, upon invite by Ben Nicholson Aldridge participated in his first London exhibition the Seven and Five Society in 1931. This was followed two years later by his first one-man show at the Leicester Galleries, this same year moving back to Great Bardfield. In 1934 he exhibited at the prestigious Venice Biennale, after which his international reputation began to rise.
Aldridge's move to Great Bardfield, Essex, in 1938 marked a pivotal moment in his artistic career. He became associated with East Anglian painters such as John Nash, Cedric Morris and Edward Bawden. Indeed, Bawden and Aldridges were neighbours in Essex with a mutual passion for gardening; tthe garden at Place House in Great Bardfield became one Bawden’s greatest achievements and a regular source for his paintings and wallpaper designs, notably the Bardfield Wallpapers of 1938.
In 1941, Aldridge joined the British Intelligence Corps as an officer interpreting aerial photographs. After leaving the army in 1945, Aldridge returned to landscape painting. In 1949 William Coldstream invited him to teach at the Slade School, where he remained until 1970. Contemporaneously, other artists started moving to Great Bardfield, making the village a dynamic centre for the visual arts. Aldridge and his wife Cecelia Lucie Leeds Aldridge frequently opened Place House for summer exhibitions in the village. In 1955, Aldridge told a London Observer reporter that “people seem to prefer this domestic informality to galleries”.
After his 1970 divorce, Aldridge married Gretl Cameron, the widow of his poet friend Norman Cameron. In 1980, on Aldridge's 75th birthday, London's New Grafton Gallery held a retrospective on his work. Aldridge died in 1983, three months after the disease of his wife Gretl.
