‘Self Portrait at the Age of Sixteen’. Image: Ferens Art Gallery, Hull
1881-1953.
Albert Rutherston, painter, stage and costume designer, book illustrator and poster designer, was born in Bradford, the younger brother of Sir William Rothenstein.
Albert (left) and William around 1886
He was educated at Bradford Grammar School then studied art at the Slade School, 1898-1902 under the tutelage of Henry Tonks and Fred Brown. He won the Slade Competition Prize in 1902 and around the same time began exhibiting with the New English Art Club, becoming a member in 1905.
A sociable and extrovert man, Albert enjoyed the company of other artists and was part of a trio at this time known as the ‘Three Musketeers’: Albert, and the artists, Augustus John and William Orpen, and the three men worked, socialised, and holidayed together.
In 1910 he held his first solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery, London and with his brother, William, was an early member of the short-lived Fitzroy Street Group, a forerunner of the Camden Town Group of artists.
Albert Rutherston circa 1912
In 1914 Albert changed his name to Rutherston, to avoid anti-German feeling and during the First World War he enlisted in the army and served as a Lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Regiment in Egypt and Palestine, 1916-19.
In 1919 he resumed his artistic career and married the actress, Marjory Holman. Albert was a Gold Medallist at the Paris Exhibition in 1926 and in 1929 was appointed Ruskin Master of Drawing at Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford, a position he held until the late 1940s. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours (RWS) in 1934 and a Member of the RWS in 1942, and was also a regular exhibitor at the Cheltenham Group.
Although less artistically eminent than his brother, his success as a painter was because of versatility and light decorative style. In addition to his portraiture, Albert’s love of the theatre had drawn him into this realm of creative work; he was particularly adept at fan, costume and theatre design (see details of the Fleece Press book, below).
Costume design by Albert Rutherston for ‘The Winter’s Tale’, 1912. Image: from the Fleece Press book, see below.
He also illustrated books, designed bookplates for the Curwen Press, and designed posters and tickets for the London Underground.
Examples of his work are in the collections of the Tate Gallery, V&A, British Museum, Arts Council Collection, The Ashmolean, and St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, UCL Art Collection, Bradford Art Galleries, Manchester City Art Gallery and Brighton & Hove Art Gallery.
‘Song of the Shirt’. BBC ‘Your Paintings’/Bradford Museums & Galleries
A limited edition book, published in 2015, by the Yorkshire Fleece Press, presents an attractive overview of the stage and costume design work of Albert Rutherston: ‘Pen, Paper & a Box of Paints: Albert Rutherston, illustrator and designer for the stage’. ISBN: 978-0-9927410-9-9 Fleece Press
Books and articles written by Albert Rutherston:
‘Decoration in the Art of the Theatre’ (1919). A Lecture by Albert Rutherston, Leeds University 1915. The Poetry Bookshop, Monthly Chapbook, no. 2, vol. 1.
‘Sixteen Designs for the Theatre’ (1928), Oxford University Press/Humphrey Milford.
‘From Orpen and Gore to the Camden Town Group’, Burlington Magazine, vol.83, no.485, August 1943, pp.201–5.