Anthony Gross English, 1905-1984

English painter and printmaker. He trained in London, Paris and Madrid from 1923 to 1925, specialising in etching. In 1926 he settled in France, where he created a number of animated films between 1931 and 1939; in 1936 the first of many books illustrated by him was published, an edition of Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants terribles. His oil paintings of this period are largely affectionate depictions of French and English life and leisure, as in Place du Théâtre, Brive-la-Gaillarde (1929; London, Tate). Gross returned to England in 1939 and from 1941 to 1946 served as an Official War Artist, covering campaigns in El Alamein, India, Burma, Iran and Normandy; among the works produced in this connection are three watercolours depicting episodes in the Liberation and Battle of France (1944; London, Tate). After World War II he divided his time between France and England, where in 1965 he became the first President of the Print Makers Council. From the 1950s he adopted an increasingly emphatic line and densely packed compositions, particularly in his etchings, for which he remained best known, and devoted much of his attention to landscape, as in Wheatfield (etching, 1966; London, Tate).